Year Review 2015
Thats right 2015 was a Binary Palindrome (11111011111).
My year went along much the same lines, an intense start, a pause in the middle and a hectic end!
2015 Highlights
- My 404 was featured on TAXI as part of a post about 404sites a Tumblog collection of 404 pages, which it was also featured. Noupe also included it in ‘46 of the Web’s Most Creative 404 Error Pages (2015 Edition),’ much to to my delight!
- CodePen Kirbytext extension was included on getkirby-plugins.com, the semi-official source of plugins for Kirby CMS.
- Revealed ‘Embriage Ipsum’ a silly side project emulating a segment from BBC Top Gear, based on the poor translation of a very old French car manual. Chosen for CodePen editors ‘Picks’ section on homepage.
- Action Button Animation - With the release of Googles Material Design Lite framework, I was reminded of my use of animation in Hop Over Navigation and felt it would lend itself well to highlighting an applications Primary Action Button.
- Launched Colordinates, a web app which gives a colour value based on your geographic location. It featured on CodePen Picks and is now available on GitHub as an installable app for offline use.
- Hop Over Notification was featured in, A Collection of Pure CSS Animation Snippets & Demos, on the Envato blog.
- Volunteered to sit a session of user testing the local council web site to see the process in action and offer my opinions.
- Lightened the Load of my own site and gave it a final performance tune up.
Web in 2015
The web really felt like it was starting to creak at the seams this last 12 months. So many competing best practices, build methods, upcoming JS frameworks and platforms that mid-year it was even suggested that we Stop Pushing the Web Forwards to take a pause to catch our breath. Which to be honest, sounds nice.
Web design continued to look more and more like itself and the hangovers of the hefty parallax sites weighed down the web to the point where regular folk seem content to give up the web all together and live within apps. I can sympathise, it bothers me that React JS needed to reinvent the DOM, but I despair more that my news sites crash my browser all the time. Sigh.
Syndication, another issue, has made it difficult to know which platform to even post this to best effect. The web seems to have been well an truly siloed this year with Fb Instant Articles, LinkedIn Posts, Googles AMP Project Accelerated Pages and increasingly, obligatory cross-posting to Medium.
Ahead to 2016
In 2016 I think we shall see more disagreements about the web, the pragmatic side maintaining the web content should be syndicated and if that happens within silos then so be it. Others (like me) who will continue to try and speed up the web and lighten page loads for web browsers, keeping visitors happy. The browser features to make sites feel faster and more app-like, are only going to improve and hopefully tempt people out from a collection of icon tiles and back into the browser.
Plus, Apple reminded everyone(the media) that ad blocking exists and it shall be interesting/painful to see how that issue is overcome, sites need money to stay running but people don’t want to pay for them.
On a personal level, I think I did ok project and blog post wise. I shall keep posting, and endeavour to post about more topical discussion points more quickly. I have some side projects on the way that should emerge in the new year.
Thanks for reading, come back in 2016 for more!
Follow me on CodePen for my latest demos.
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