Anthony Dillon

Last week the developers in the web team swapped the office for the lobby of the hotel across the street. The day was geared up to allow us to leave our daily tasks in the office and think of ideas that we would like to work on. The morning started with coffee and sitting in

We’re using NPM as Vanilla’s package manager. Which gives us a number of advantages such as, an easy way to install and update the CSS framework. This all worked fine until we hit an issue with Github Pages. They do not supporting install scripts therefore it is not possible in npm install. Highlighted in this

Why we needed a new framework Some time ago the web team at Canonical developed a CSS framework we called ‘Guidelines’. Guidelines helped us to maintain our online visual language across all our sites and comprised of a number of base and component Sass files which were combined and served as a monolithic CSS file

This post is part of the series ‘Making ubuntu.com responsive‘. The JavaScript used on ubuntu.com is very light. We limit its use to small functional elements of the web style guide, which act to enhance the user experience but are never required to deliver the content the user is there to consume. At Canonical we

This post is part of the series ‘Making ubuntu.com responsive‘. Performance has always been one of the top priorities when it came to building the responsive ubuntu.com. We started with a list of performance snags and worked to improve each one as much as possible in the time we had. Here is a quick run

This post is part of the series ‘Making ubuntu.com responsive‘. When working to make the current web style guide responsive, we made some large updates to the core Sass. We decided to update the file and folder structure of our styles. I love reading about other people or organisations Sass architectures, so I thought it

I was recently asked to attend a cloud sprint in San Francisco as a front-end developer for the new Juju GUI product. I had the pleasure of finally meeting the guys that I have collaboratively worked with and ultimately been helped by on the project. Here is a collection of things I learnt during my

I wondered if I could make an easily updateable, prototype site in order to test a number of different IA’s using an XML file to represent the sitemap. This post is about what I did and how to get some sample code if you want to use or extend it for yourself. The XML The

We realise that changing Operating System (OS) is a big thing for anyone thinking of testing something out. That becomes a huge barrier for people trying out Ubuntu for the first time and seeing if they like it. As a member of the web team I decided to take on the challenge as a cool