PinnedI hope you enjoy your visit to 216.24.57.1! Perhaps you'd consider me for some freelance web or database work? I've done everything from resolving bugs to building department-wide projects. Read more about me then get in touch.
Last few daysI've been visiting art-works from the 2020 London Mural Festival. Having gone up so long ago, some are now missing or been painted over. Nevertheless, I've found a suprising number. What's really cool is not the art itself, but my interactive progress tracker. Check it out now!
Last weekI've just added some CSS transition effects (what I'm calling a CRT power-surge) to the homepage load. I was inspired by the 1983 movie "Life Pod": it features loads of analogue technology and cool ideas. I'm really pleased with the effect - scroll up and reload the page to take another look.
Last weekI've been interested in pulling data into the website from an API. I just wrote a useful little app that does just that! It was a lot of fun to create and test - try it now: api.freshco.la It's intended for mobiles but works pretty well on all the screens I've tested it on.
A while agoAs the pace
of life gets ever more frantic, there is a growing need
to take time out to stop and reflect upon the inner
self. Take five to relax with
A while agoRecently, a client asked me to cherry pick the best bits from a competitor's site. I thought it loaded slowly, so ran a performance test to confirm. They scored 31% while mine scored 100% (naturally) in the same lab-test. Leeward Designs, you need to SMARTEN UP.
A while agoYou know what I'm good at? Writing applications people want to use, that's what. When I was at a large surveyor's partnership they'd implemented a major IT system without really thinking how it would work. I wrote a search app that would provide answers to the most frequently asked question: what's happened with this payment? Read the full article here.
A while agoSo it turns out I watched 81 movies last year. Most of them at the cinema too. Somehow that number seems quite low, I was expecting 2 or 3 a week - but I kept careful records. Attack of the Crab Monster was a highlight!
A while agoHey gang,
what's trending? I'll tell you what's trending:
Treseissyllt Farm Campsite and B&B. That's what. When top brass
wanted more "hits",
"clicks" and "likes" they called in the professionals at
A while agoJoin London's
top house and techno DJs for a night of
Ibiza sessions
on Fri 05-Sept-2025. See Lucy Lazerz in an acktual
discotheque.
This is a one-off event, don't miss out!
Advance tickets from £15 - get yours now!
*Party will stop
A while agoToday marks
the one year anniversary of
13-Jul-2025I've just done the Dunwich Dynamo! It's a 112 mile over-night ride from Hackney, London to Dunwich, Suffolk. The ride was awesome and I made so many great new friends too! What more could you ask for? Now I need to sleep...
10-Jul-2025I've been working my way around all 76 murals in the 2024 festival. Right now I've only got seven four one NO more to do! It's been great fun getting out to find and record them on my Bianchi Super-Sprint. I've made a tracker so you can follow my progress: LMCPDB. Check it out!
29-May-2025I've always wanted some kind of online way to present my collection of Casio watches. Well, now I've got one... head over to Casio watches and check it out. Next step is to add some functionality to let users search to find the perfect watch for the day's activities.
13-May-2025Today I solved the page load issues! I worked my way through the html & css tightening things up here and there. The font files get preloaded on index.html - which helps significantly. The cherry on the top is loading the html element with it's visibility set to hidden. Once the page has completed loading, a bit of JavaScript sets it to visible. Bish. Bash. Bosh.
27-Apr-2025So yeah, I just did the overnight *London Marathon*. I'd never considered doing it before, but once I heard about the midnight run, I was in. Runners & walkers set off at midnight from Birdcage walk and complete the marathon using the official route (just backwards). Now time for some hard sleeping.
20-Apr-2025For a while now I've noticed the page load process is not fast or smooth. I get a flash of unstyled content (FOUC), flash of invisible text (FOIT) along with a burst of layout shift jank. Once you've noticed it, it's hard to ignore. My hunch is the fonts are taking too long to load.
20-Apr-2025Although I've been happy with my new laptop, it doesn't take much for it to crash. I traced it to the lack of swap file. What should have been a quick fix took a dramatic turn - I filled the remaining space on the root drive with the swapfile. Whoopise. Fortunately I still had the bootable rescue USB I could use to fix it.
09-Apr-2025I took the
plunge and did some work on responsive web design.
04-Apr-2025Early mornings and Sunday nights in the metropolis work well for me. I'm looking for quietness in a busy city. A time that makes the city feel mine. Being one with the bike I accelerate harder, stop more often and notice more. Entering the zone, neon lights reflecting and fluorescent towers above, I'm a part of the city.
28-Feb-2025ImprovMX is a free service that lets me set up email addresses. Setting things up was simple: just add a few DNS records to my provider. Once done, I can publish my new email address @freshco.la and ImprovMX will forward them to my usual (private) address. Awesome!
03-Feb-2025I've just
written a little maths game in JavaScript. I'm really
pleased with the end result... I've flexed menu driven
functionality and thrown in some other cool features.
It's exactly the kind of game (along with a text
adventure, perhaps?) that really *BELONGS* on
18-Jan-2025So I was getting fed up with my Acer laptop (looong story) and got a very nice new one from Argos - it was a January bargain! First things first: get rid of Windows 11 & replace it with Linux! The specs look just right for me: 11.6" screen, good battery life and reasonable performance.
15-Jan-2025Please welcome back the beeeyoootifal ASCII art splash screen! The homepage was definitely missing something fun during the upgrade. *I* missed it, anyway :D Make your own using patorjk.com's TAAG. Get that satisfied feeling - like drinking a fresh cola on a hot day!
10-Jan-2025I've always
wanted to have a smooth user experience on this site. So
visitors to this site won't be presented with an
intrusive cookie consent dialog. I have no need for your
data or a desire to track you! Enjoy your visit to
04-Jan-2025Here's a little stopwatch for ya'll. I was messing around with a timer and realised I could make a little app-let. I think it's neat and hope you like using it: Stopwatch. Props to keshikan.net for the awesome seven segment font. Can you find the hidden Easter Egg?
01-Dec-2024Oh hang on a minute, yeah I know this. It's erm... well yesterday was , wasn't it? and I'm pretty sure tomorrow is going to be . I know it isn't , or because I know what's what. So it's probably . Pretty smart, huh?
10-Sep-2024I'm pleased to announce a gear calculator for fixed gear and single speed bikes. I created it in preparation for my urban hill climb at Swains Lane. The app uses JavaScript and was a good coding challenge for me. Verify your assumptions now! RatioCalc.
16-Aug-2024Please note
13-Aug-2024This is a small (16px x 16px) image that appears next to the page title in the browser tab bar. I used the online favicon-generator.org. Small touches like this take my simple, homespun little website to a super de-luxe level. Enjoy!
16-Aug-2024Today I
spotted
23-Sep-2024As part of the rigorous testing programme this site has undergone, a small group of individuals has been approached to provide feedback. Sometimes it's necessary to check they've even been here. This is a example of what they had to put up with: page removed I'm SORRY Heidi.
20-Sep-2024This was something I'd been thinking of doing for a while now. The approach in IIS I had used previously was clumsy, but render.com makes the process easy. Sadly, if I include a link to a page that doesn't exist, it will hurt my (pathetic) search ranking. So edit the URL with some mumbo-jumbo instead.
19-Sep-2024Thanks for joining me here. This website showcases my skills and love of cycling. I hope you find something you like. New articles added daily! Check back today, tomorrow or next year.
18-Sep-2024Big shout-out to Regent's convenience - your one-stop shop for *News, *Bus pass, *Confectionary, *Frozen Food, *Groceries, *Lottery, *Wines and Beer. Visit today: 15 Kilburn Lane, London W10 4AE
17-Sep-2024Yes that's
right, all systems are go at
15-Aug-2024This service provides hosting and content delivery network (CDN) for static sites. I am using the free tier and it does the basics! =) Right on render.com! It was easy to set up the connection to Github.
14-Aug-2024This free service provides a repository and version control for the website code... sounds like exactly what I need to get started! I am also hoping that it will provide file hosting - eliminating any additional services. Go github.com!
11-Aug-2024Big News: