New Website

Since you are here, you have probably noticed that there’s a new design which I have been working on for some time now. I wanted to focus on the content and make something much more simple. I also wanted my site to work with various devices from smartphones to TV’s. That’s why I used the so called “Mobile First” technique and made the whole site responsive from about 240px and up.

Designing mobile first forces you to think more about the content. It’s also easier to get the site working on large number of devices, even on those that don’t support Media Queries.

As a starting point for the work I used the 320 and up boilerplate, but I ended up changing almost everything to suit my own way of working (if you don’t know, the 320 and up is a boilerplate that prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop assets by using a tiny screen’s stylesheet as its starting point). I’m still using small parts of it like the folder structure, print styles and JavaScript helpers for iPhone, but that’s about it.

When you are using tiny screen’s stylesheet as the starting point you have to design the mobile version first and build up from there progressively. The best thing in that approach is that it’s relatively easy to get the site working with large number of devices, even on devices that don’t support Media Queries. This “reversed” approach also forces you to think more about the content.

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Responsive jQuery Slideshow Revisited

I wrote a blog post about making responsive jQuery slideshow on 18 May 2011 (You can read it on Kisko Labs’ blog). Since then much has happened and there’s now quite a lot of options where you could choose from. I did a short summary for this blog post about the options out there right now.

I’m myself using Dynamic carousel plugin by Mat Marquis on the home page, but I made slight changes to how it handles the touch events and dragging. If you want to try it out, head to the home page with either iPhone or iPad and try dragging the text caption under the big headline. Update: I removed the slider from the home page. Mainly because it didn't make so much sense in that context.

I also created a tiny script while developing my own site and despite it being really simple I decided to release it as a plugin. If all you need is fading (with pagination), then it might be what you want to use.

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