24 ways to impress your friends

Drew McLellan is lead developer on your favourite small CMS, Perch. He is Director and Senior Developer at UK-based web development agency edgeofmyseat.com, and formerly Group Lead at the Web Standards Project. When not publishing 24 ways, Drew keeps a personal site covering web development issues and themes, takes photos and tweets a lot.

Articles by Drew McLellan

• 1 12/2012 HTML5 Video Bumpers

  Drew McLellan invites you to pull up to the 2012 24 ways bumper, baby, with an neat JavaScript solution to an HTML5 <video> branding problem. And that was “24 ways bumper” not “Christmas jumper”. He has enough of those already.

• 1 12/2011 Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range

  Drew McLellan dazzles us with the creative typographic possibilities of unicode-range, a little-used property of @font-face declarations. More than just a unloved bauble on the CSS Christmas tree, unicode-range can extend a site’s typography in useful and eye-catching ways.

• 1 12/2010 Finding Your Way with Static Maps

  Drew McLellan opens our 2010 season by revisiting the way we implement maps to cater for all types of visitors. Should we be building all-or-nothing solutions when it comes to mapping, or can progressive enhancement play its part here, too?

• 1 12/2009 Working With RGBA Colour

  Drew McLellan kicks off our 2009 season with a look at some of the tools CSS3 provides for applying levels of transparency to colour values, enabling you to avoid weighing down a site design with heavy PNG images.

• 1 12/2008 Easing The Path from Design to Development

  Drew McLellan sets our 2008 series rolling with some practical tips for helping a project smoothly transition from the design to the development phase. Consider it a designer’s preflight check list to ease you into the festive season.

• 24 12/2007 Performance On A Shoe String

  Drew McLellan rounds off our series with a look at the challenges facing a site that needs to cope with occasional peaks in traffic without spending out on high-performance hosting that’s not needed for the majority of the time. Come behind the scenes at 24 ways and see how we keep the site online through the month of December each year. Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!

• 1 12/2007 Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6

  Drew McLellan kicks off our 2007 festive season by revisiting the thorny issue of support for alpha channel PNGs in Internet Explorer 6. Why not be charitable and lend a helping hand to those poor IE6 users? They could use some Christmas cheer.

• 10 12/2006 Writing Responsible JavaScript

  Drew McLellan investigates some of the ways JavaScript can be written to help it co-exist responsibly within your pages, and other pages too. We could all do with a little bit more peaceful co-existance over the holidays, couldn’t we auntie. Pass the gravy.

• 1 12/2006 Tasty Text Trimmer

  Drew McLellan examines a method of enabling users to control their interface with a dynamic text trimmer, similar to that found in Safari RSS. Feeling bloated? Lose some weight at the touch of a button.

• 23 12/2005 Edit-in-Place with Ajax

  Drew McLellan follows on from Day 1’s simple Ajax tutorial by taking the next steps and building a Flickr-style text edit-in-place system. Crank your Ajax dial up to 11 and get stuck in. Ding dong!

• 10 12/2005 Auto-Selecting Navigation

  Drew McLellan takes a quick look at a simple method of styling navigation so that the correct item shows selected on each page. It’s a really simple idea, but extremely effective, and quite a time-saver to boot.

• 6 12/2005 Practical Microformats with hCard

  Drew McLellan takes a practical look at the hCard microformat and how easily it can be added to existing markup. He then stops talking about himself in the third person to convince the crowd that it’s not just all hype. Baby.

• 1 12/2005 Easy Ajax with Prototype

  Drew McLellan talks us through how to get going with some quick and easy Ajax using the freely available Prototype JavaScript library.