Pentagram, source Wikipedia. Towards the end of the year I'll indulge in the dark arts, join the goblins and leave my white architect hat under the Christmas tree where it belongs. I'm helping a friend (a technically minded, non-programmer) write his first mobile app . We wanted to keep everything simple: use technologies which can … Continue reading Book of dark arts: storing data in the view
Category: web
HTTP compression and incremental rendering
TL;DR: HTTP compression can delay rendering of web resources HTTP permits content to be served with different encodings, some of which can be used to compress [1] the data volume transferred over the network, which has become a frequent suggestion [2] towards optimising websites for performance. It turns out that the deflation phase of the … Continue reading HTTP compression and incremental rendering
Secure messaging in the browser
By observing news and public discussions I feel that there is a growing awareness of data privacy and an increasing demand for secure person-to-person communication. In order to address my communication needs, I plugged together a few Javascript libraries and started the Webencryption [1] project on Github. What is Webencryption? Webencryption is a rather crude … Continue reading Secure messaging in the browser
Phantomjs not showing text
TL;DR if Phantomjs doesn't show any text/fonts, give it a Truetype web font. Despite Phantomjs' [1] development slowing down [2] it still brings most of the features I need for regression testing web applications. And, thanks to Docker, it should be possible to operate it for a long time to come. Installing and operating Phantomjs … Continue reading Phantomjs not showing text
Unjam CSS
Abstract: Unjam CSS is a technique for removing render-blocking CSS from pages over which we have only partial control, such as CMS or portals. The problem: a portal generates HTML pages based on a template. Custom HTML can be inserted at specific place holders, but we can't modify the rest of the page HTML. The … Continue reading Unjam CSS



