Venn diagram of database types

Julia Sets with HTML Canvas

I’ve been reminding myself about Julia Sets recently, so I thought I’d build on using HTML Canvas. There are a bunch of Java applets out there but I’ve not seen one in canvas. Seems to work quickly and can be saved as an image; if you want you can change the canvas size or the […]

Steve Krug’s Ironic Law of Usability

Get rid of half of the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left – Steve Krug’s Third Law of Usability So that’s “Remove three quarters of the words”, then?

Factmint Charts WordPress plugin

We, at Factmint, have just released a WordPress plugin to create data visualizations in a WordPress blog. So, I thought I’s give it a go: Top ten countries by GDP source wikipedia The plugin is here, if people are interested.

Nice numbers part 2: scales

In part 1 I talked about a problem when developing scales built algorithmically. For example choosing numbers on an axis: If you want five ticks on the side of bar chart, and the range is 0 – 8, you could do 0, 2, 4, 6, 8. But what about 0 – 5? That would be […]

Nice numbers part 1

Rendering “nice numbers” has been the subject of a few debates at Factmint over the last few weeks, as we expand our collection of data visualizations, so I thought I’d put some thoughts down… What’s a “nice number”? Well, that’s a difficult question; 1729 is a nice number but I am specifically talking about aesthetically […]

Tinting or lightening with CSS

The problem Consider the requirement that, on hover, an element’s background becomes lighter. The background could be an image or a colour. The ideal solution should allow a .tint-lighter (or .tint-darker, .tint-red, etc) class to be applied to any element. Possible solutions There are a number of use-cases for tinting with CSS and a number of ways […]

Shadow DOM: encapsulation for semantic markup

This article talks about Shadow DOM which (at the time of writing) is a W3C working draft and is only supported by Google Chrome and Firefox 30. There was a post on CSS-Tricks recently about SVG icons vs font icons. One of the criteria for judgement was semantics (is an or tag better than a […]

JSON LD vs RDF/JSON (Alternative serialization)

I’d like to say that I am rarely opinionated about technology but that would be a barefaced lie. It is true, however, that I am rarely so opinionated that I motivate myself to write about it. This, unfortunately, is one of those occasions. On January the 16th the JSON-LD specification became a W3C recommendation. There was an […]

3D Rendering to SVG

I was on holiday last week, in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Andalusia, Spain. Some people like to read books on holiday, I undertake projects. So, as I was sitting by the pool, I developed a 3D rendering engine in Javascript. Each to their own, hey? I’d been thinking about this for a little while. […]