Our insights

There are times when I’ve caught myself working on a problem only to find that I’m repeating myself, circling back round and attempting things I’ve already tried. Without taking a methodical approach to my work, my focus can become blinkered. To avoid this, I use a combo attack: To put it another way, I try...

Everyone’s talking about ChatGPT, a language model optimised for conversations. In a shameless attempt to ride the gravy train, I asked ChatGPT for some help in writing a blog post. Me: I need to write a blog post ASAP. Can you help? ChatGPT: Sure, I’d be happy to help! What would you like the blog...

Just interested in the code? Cut to the chase. GitHub and GitLab are competing services providing source control products based on Git. Source control enables us to keep track of all of the code changes we make to a project so that we can roll them back in the event of a problem. Seeing the...

As part of our drive to double-down on software and provide a great experience for our customers, we’ve been reviewing our hosting infrastructure. We recently talked about how our WordPress clients enjoy security and redundancy, and we want to continue to provide that same great experience for the various web apps that we host. In...

We recently posted about the font loading solution we use on our websites. Further to implementing this technique we noticed that, on this very site, some of the fonts weren’t quite rendering correctly. Look at the examples below. The font rendering issues were slight but there was a definite problem with uneven character weighting in the Google...

As developers, we have a seemingly endless supply of tools at our disposal thanks to the hard work and generosity of the wider development community who, by and large, share their hard work in the hope of making their peers’ lives that little bit easier. At Go Tripod we’re always on the lookout for new...

We’re in the early days of planning out a web design-and-build project with a new client. A key part of this process is the creation of a site map. The Site Map In its simplest form, a site map is a pictorial representation of the pages required of a website. With smaller websites this list...

Back in February I wrote about a font-loading technique I’d implemented on a new project, but there was a problem with it – the script ran on every page load meaning the browser cache was never used to serve the fonts. There are many variations on the same theme with some using session cookies to...

At Go Tripod, there are many ways in which we improve our working efficiency. We pick the best technologies, such as WordPress, React or Ruby on Rails. We pick the best services, such as Teamwork, Slack or Xero. But we spend our days sat in front of a computer and the way we interface with...

In a previous article I talked about adding the defer attribute to script tags to avoid blocking page render. However, if you’re developing a WordPress theme, chances are you won’t simply be able to amend this HTML. Instead you’ll need to make use of the wp_enqueue_script function from within your theme’s functions.php file. This function...

Timber has loads of useful filters built in which can make all kinds of jobs much easier. One of those jobs is resizing and cropping images, for which we can use the resize filter. The syntax is simple, as with all things Twig – we simply add the filter to our image source, passing through...

One of the first things I decided to tackle as part of my recent work on website response times, assuming it’d be a simple process, was render blocking web fonts. Little did I know I was opening up a right can of words (sorry)… Numerous techniques have been developed over the past few years with...

When working on improving the response time of your site, one of the simplest optimisations to make is the deferring of scripts. In most cases, this can be done with the simple addition of the defer attribute to the script tags within your HTML: When a browser gets to a script tag...

This post was originally published on our Technical Director’s personal blog. Amazon’s cloud offering, AWS, provides a wealth of resources for developers and infrastructure engineers. In this article, I’ll show how Amazon Cognito can be used to record user preferences and data without having to set up a server or database. I’ll build a small...

Colin’s started playing around with the new React Native from Facebook, a way of building native-speed applications for iOS using JavaScript. It’s a completely new approach and we’re really excited about it – follow Colin’s experiments over at his personal blog.

Development Gems (Geek Alert) During our Ruby On Rails development process at Go Tripod we’re always trying to streamline our workflow. We’ve tested plenty of gems supporting our everyday programming work. Some of them were interesting – but unfortunately not handy in real work, but we found a few to be really useful. For those...

Change is good, or so they say. In our case, we wanted to do some spring cleaning and strip back our website into something a bit more us. A bit more 2014. So here it is. We took a variety of new approaches when compared to our old site, and in this post I’m going...

As you can see, we’ve given the website a bit of a spruce up over the past few months. Hopefully, we’ve improved the usability of the site, and the updates will assure our customers (and prospective ones), as well as Google, that we are moving with the times and our content is fresh. Our updates...