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24 ways to impress your friends

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan is a developer and content management consultant from Bristol, England. He’s the lead developer for the popular Perch and Perch Runway content management systems, and public speaking portfolio site Notist. Drew was formerly Group Lead at the Web Standards Project, and a Search Innovation engineer at Yahoo!. When not publishing 24 ways, he keeps a personal site about web development, takes photos, tweets a lot and tries to stay upright on his bicycle.

  1. The Accidental Side Project

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan puts the chairs up on the tables, sweeps the floor, and closes off our season, and indeed the entire 24 ways project with a look back at what it’s meant to run this site as a site project, and what impact side projects can have on the work we do. Will the last one out turn off Christmas the lights?

  2. Dynamic Social Sharing Images

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan draws this, our fourteenth season to a gentle close by getting a little Inside Snowball and gives an account of how we put the robots to work in generating custom dynamic social media sharing images for each of the articles here on the site. Christmas is a time to share what you have, even if it’s just a grid of pixels.

  3. All That Glisters

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan wraps up our 2017 series with a gentle reminder that in a rapidly moving industry, the best technology for the job isn’t always the newest. And while Christmas tradition tells us we should follow the bright star, sometimes the answer lies closer to home. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

  4. Taking Device Orientation for a Spin

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan wraps up our 2016 season with a look at the HTML5 Device Orientation API and how an annoying physical interaction can become an annoying virtual one. Like the silver sixpence in your figgy pudding, there’s treasure to be found in our browsers, so dig in.

  5. Solve the Hard Problems

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan brings our 2015 calendar to a motivational close with some encouragement for the year ahead. Year’s end is a time for reflection and finding new purpose and enthusiasm for what we do. By tackling the thorniest design and development problems, we can make the greatest impact – and have the most fun. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

  6. What It Takes to Build a Website

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan releases the eager huskies of 2014’s 24 ways into the glittering snowy landscape of the web, asking you and other experienced professionals what should be the basis of building websites now. Ten Christmases is a long time, and not just on the web.

  7. URL Rewriting for the Fearful

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan opens 24 ways’ ninth annual advent calendar with a primer on the sometimes arcane lore of rewriting URLs. But while Drew may ably match URL patterns using regular expressions, that shirt with the snowflake pattern clashes hideously with his holly and ivy tie…

  8. HTML5 Video Bumpers

    Drew McLellan

    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.

  9. Finding Your Way with Static Maps

    Drew McLellan

    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?

  10. Working With RGBA Colour

    Drew McLellan

    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.

  11. Performance On A Shoe String

    Drew McLellan

    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!

  12. Writing Responsible JavaScript

    Drew McLellan

    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.

  13. Tasty Text Trimmer

    Drew McLellan

    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.

  14. Edit-in-Place with Ajax

    Drew McLellan

    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!

  15. Auto-Selecting Navigation

    Drew McLellan

    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.