Matthew Somerville

This means I need fewer certificates, and works around the IP blocks

How do I stop a chunk of artificial bad traffic to my sites

As we were travelling on Easter Monday and so listened to some of the Classic FM Hall of Fame, I wondered how pieces had changed position over the years.

Details on how to buy the any bus/tram/train West Midlands day tickets

A personal summary of the past year, after reading a couple of others from friends

or How I almost ended up deleting all my files

If you have (or know) a kid in year 6 in Birmingham, you may find my HTML version of their 415-page PDF easier to read

How to get an old text adventure game playing at its full resolution

I OTT harmonized the tune some years ago when I was watching it a lot

The strange fake Chrome bot visiting my new website

Making a website to help with our trip round Scotland

Writing a proxy to turn a desktop-only website into something readable

It is more complicated than you might hope it would be

I have been keeping up with Advent of Code so far this year, and thought after a week it might be nice to have a more detailed look at one of the entries, with commentary

I have just come back from a short break in Alnmouth, and where we were staying had a “4D Sudoku” puzzle.

Is it possible to use an inline svg referring to an external svg and have the stylesheet apply?

My experiment at adding the new multi-page view transitions to my train site

A personal summary of the past year, after reading a couple of others from friends

Details about my site that a copy of the official Post Office Inquiry transcripts and makes them available for display and searching, with a look at the technical behind-the-scenes

Someone asked if it was possible to show a question in a form I was making only if the answer to the previous question had been yes.

The list is smaller than you might think

Suggestions for local new station names and the borders involved

How I set up my 7-colour eInk screen with weather and public transport

A look at the various solutions we have found to our A-puzzle-a-day calendar

Brief history of my Local lockdown lookup tool

Working with split postcodes, including across the England/Scotland border

How to get the results of GitHub Actions in Catlight

I bought a Wondermark book at the end of May.

Exploring how much data the official coronavirus data website uses, compared to a version I made last weekend

Some notes on my submission to the 56th Perl weekly challenge

Details of planning a trip to Prague by train with choir this coming April

A personal summary of the past year, after reading a couple of others from friends

I spent a lot of time looking at ethical investment at the start of 2018, and finally got around to writing up a potted summary of what I did.

My trusty 2011 Macbook Air had started to show its age – a couple of missing keys, the fan being on pretty much all the time – so I looked for a replacement.

I run tests on Travis a lot, so would like notification of when they have finished running.

It seems quite common for a web page to have at its end a footer in a different colour from the main page background.

Viagogo are in the news again, so I took a quick look at their site.

I followed a link to one of those Guardian end-of-year quizzes on my phone (probably this one), and had answered a few questions before realising that it was working entirely without JavaScript (I have JavaScript disabled on my phone because a) it cuts out

On Twitter last week, Bruce Lawson asked people to write up their performance optimisations.

The JavaScript on FixMyStreet has gradually evolved over many years (we launched in 2007, remember!)

FixMyStreet has been around for nearly nine years, letting people report things and optionally include a photo; the upshot of which is we currently have a 143GB collection of photographs of potholes, graffiti, dog poo, and much more. 🙂 For almost all that…

[There is also a video of this post.]

Is it possible Scotland took two Bank Holidays that didn’t exist?

This post explains how various aspects of the new FixMyStreet maps work, including how we supply our own OS StreetView tile server and how the maps work without JavaScript.

Dunder sat, glumly staring at the computer screen.

Something that annoys me no end, and I realise there are probably more important things to get annoyed about, but do bear with me, are urban legends, specifically those concerning old laws of the UK.

Mostly historical now, as Mars label their products appropriately, but they didn’t use to.