28 Oct 2025
Introducing a "Work" section
A home for evidence-led impact stories documenting measurable outcomes from my work on platforms, performance, and design systems.
The blog
18 Oct 2025
Impact story: Visual storytelling for GAR 2025
Transformed abstract disaster economics into compelling narrative with interactive timelines, global maps, and choice-based futures — without sacrificing performance.
23 Sep 2025
The power of the pause: How planning beats prompt tuning
Traditional project planning techniques helps ensure maximal benefits from AI tools.
19 Sep 2025
A stop-gap Drupal module to kill Word Junk in CKEditor 5
A tiny CKEditor 5 plugin for Drupal that strips inline Word-like junk in one click.
14 Sep 2025
Individualism is the flavor AI chatbots can't stomach
The AI experience has drained traffic from reference content, but leaves a path forward of human-centric experiences, interactivity, and better on-site value.
12 Sep 2025
Sacrificing knowledge in the name of data
The goal is not more data, but data to facilitate the story of what we're trying to achieve.
7 Sep 2025
Predictable, token-based filenames with Eleventy Image
How I swapped Eleventy Image’s hashed outputs for readable, stable names — and the trade‑offs.
6 Sep 2025
| Note post
Exposing HTML: The No-JS nudist CSS toggle
A tiny footer checkbox to turns your site styles off with no JavaScript required.
5 Sep 2025
| Note post
Go-go-go … I missed EmbedPDF
It seems a robust, embeddable PDF viewer for on‑page reading already exists.
4 Sep 2025
| Note post
Recursion: it’s fonts all the way down
I’ve moved from Now Alt to Recursive, an open‑source variable font that unifies UI text and code with one flexible file.
31 Aug 2025
A simpler, faster site: moving to pure Eleventy v3
I upgraded the site to Eleventy v3, removed Gulp and the Visual Framework, and simplified everything.
17 Aug 2025
Impact story: Saving editors weeks of time
How we reclaimed weeks of human effort by addressing the unglamorous friction editors faced daily.
11 Aug 2025
Making PDFs more viewable
Because ‘Just give them the PDF’ isn’t good enough.
10 Jul 2025
Drupal delayed by Azure MySQL
Managed Azure Database for MySQL cost us 50%–80% slow down. After six months of pain, we moved our Drupal 10 site back to a classic VM and halved our page‑load times.
1 Jul 2025
Impact story: From performance failures to trusted delivery
Performance regressions after cloud migration prompted comprehensive overhaul: infrastructure fixes, caching strategy, editorial efficiency, and governance — coordinated through evidence-based delivery.
8 May 2025
It’s been 3.5 years
A long-overdue update.
23 Dec 2021
Something new for 2022
This month, I’m saying goodbye to my projects at EMBL but my career in web work continues.
21 Dec 2021
Enabling a more dynamic EMBL online
From contentHub to VF 2.0: foundations for faster, more flexible journeys across One EMBL.
30 Aug 2021
EMBL.org: Empowering users to navigate a large scientific organization
We tamed the ‘footmap’ by introducing a more effective directory pattern.
30 Aug 2021
Impact story: Improving user journeys spanning 80 web properties
Blending contemporary navigation structures with tried and tested sitemaps.
21 Dec 2020
Impact story: Ending platform lock-in to share corporate content freely
Separated where content is written from where it's displayed, enabling 80+ properties to share content and structure regardless of tech stack.
12 Dec 2020
Using Nunjucks templates with React
A lightweight React wrapper with precompiled Nunjucks
11 Nov 2020
Lerna monorepos with fewer tags
Getting the perks of monorepo publishing while curating our git tags and release notes.
13 Jul 2020
Moving from Panini to Eleventy
Back in February 2018, I wrote about updating this site to use a static-site generator by Zurb (makers of the Foundation Framework) called Panini.
8 Feb 2020
Publishing since the 2000s
In a career of 20 years, the more things change the more they stay the same.
18 Nov 2019
Building your first page with the Visual Framework 2.0
A quick start on how to work with Visual Framework 2.0 CSS, JS and structure your HTML — and lots of links to learn more.
12 Nov 2019
Fractal and Eleventy: Getting static sites closer to the design system
For the Visual Framework 2.0 component system we recommend Eleventy for static sites: Eleventy sites get direct access to component templates with associated metadata and a focused component library.
12 Nov 2019
Impact story: Enabling coherent content, UX and design at scale with the Visual Framework
Architected and led a component library adopted across 50+ scientific properties, accelerating delivery and standardizing UX.
21 Oct 2019
Integrating Eleventy with gulp, upstream JS
Eleventy notes that it, "works great with data — use both front matter and external data files" but the static site generator stops short of working well with upstream in-memory data objects for local development.
27 Jun 2019
EMBL-EBI Day: Visual Framework 2.0 outreach
Sharing VF 2.0 with developers: flexible, backwards‑compatible components and docs for faster adoption.
12 Sep 2018
Faster scientific websites through reusability
Growing an EMBL‑EBI solution into a Visual Framework for the life sciences.
29 Mar 2018
Inside the Content-Action Model
An ontology to document, plan, define and implement CAM magic.
19 Mar 2018
What if: A web font for data
Alphanumeric data works well for programmatic query, but less so for direct human consumption. What if a font was designed specifically with life sciences data in mind?
10 Feb 2018
Migrating to Zurb Panini 2.0
Not yet stable yet, but has some compelling features.
7 Feb 2018
UX, discovery, analysis + the CAM
What does it mean to 'do UX' with our Content Action Model? Beyond the buzz.
22 Jan 2018
The Content-Action Model origin story
Beyond the Core Content Model and into organisations, actions.
22 Jan 2018
Introducing the Content-Action Model for Web Systems
Wiring ‘ugly truth’ UX diagnostics for better web strategy & IA.
12 Nov 2017
Comparing IBM Plex and Fira Sans
Here's a quick comparison between, Plex, Helvetica, Fira and a couple of other stand-ins.
27 Oct 2017
8 Video conferencing tips, dos, don’ts
While most any video platform and kit can work great for one-to-one video calls, I'll share lessons learnt in my previous roles and during my time in EMBL-EBI's Web Development team.
6 Oct 2017
Five highlights from EuroIA 2017
I'll tragically ignore Stockholm and highlight inclusion, embracing and enabling.
13 Sep 2017
Fluid IA to enable user discovery, prepare for change
Subtitled: Resisting entropy and preparing for change by binding content to mission.
25 Jul 2017
A new site for little reason
As is apt for us web types, on 25 July 2017 I gave a reboot to this website.
23 Jul 2017
Better corporate design through information architecture
Using 'brand archetecture' at the heart of identitity design.
30 Jun 2014
Impact story: Scaling Drupal for 150,000 satellite connected customers
Scaled e-commerce platform to 150k+ users with edge-first architecture optimized for satellite connections.
7 Apr 2014
UX success story: Doubling conversion rates, sales
The results were immediate: the site launched in the fall shopping season and saw a doubling of conversion rates from visitors — compared to both the previous months and previous fall sales — and that pace has held strong.
8 Dec 2013
A model for better content, better readers, better journalism
Six years ago my then roommate and I founded TheDigitel on the idea that the future of news was changing and that the service was in curating and linking content, and that curation was going to be bigger than the massive link mills then in existence.
12 Jun 2013
Muliple IPs on an Ubuntu EC2 VPC? Yes, please!
How to configure a second ethernet adapter on an Ubuntu EC2 VPC instance.
21 Mar 2013
Cutting down on Postfix spam relaying
Postfix, it's used with many a LAMP stack to send out messages from a site, unfortunately it's prone to relaying many spam messages out of the box.