Erik Runyon

My presentation for HighEdWeb 2016 in Memphis was about how to use Service Workers to build offline websites and progressive web apps.

This month on #startYourShift, we’re talking about Tech Adoption. I find this topic fascinating personally, since during my career I’ve been accused of both adopting technology too quickly, and of being a wet blanket by blocking the implementation of the new and shiny. Let’s take a look back at some of them, as well as my personal viewpoint on tech adoption.

Progressive Enhancement can mean different things to different developers. To me, it means building in a way that doesn’t lock out devices or browsers from consuming the primary content of a site. Let’s get into some specifics.

My last report on Higher Ed homepage performance was January 2015. According to the HTTP Archive report for January 2015 through June 2016, page weight increased from 1.94 MB to 2.5 MB, and the average number of requests went from 94 to 116. So how is Higher Ed stacking up to the rest of the industry? Let’s find out.

Our industry has been embroiled in a battle of ideals. On one side you have the native app advocates, and on the other, those pushing the web forward as an alternative (or supplement) to native apps. I don’t know if the folks that run #startYourShift had this debate in mind when they selected this months topic, but it’s the lens I’m going to use. This months topic: “What do you think is the most powerful characteristic of the web?”.

I’ve been pretty terrible at keeping up with the #startYourShift challenge, and this month is barely an improvement. This months topic: “Web Education”.

I had the privilege to present at ConvergeSE this year. Below are the description and relevant links from the presentation.

I’ve been diving deep into Service Workers lately. There are a lot of great resources, and others sharing their stories and work such as Jeremy Keith and Lyza Danger Gardner have proved invaluable. One issue that has continually bothered me is the manual updating of the cache version every time I modify my site. So after a little digging, I’ve found a very simple way to update my Service Worker version number whenever I update this site.

It’s been quite a while since I originally listed my podcast listening lineup, and a lot has changed since then.

This is the first in a series prompted by a Sparkbox initiative called “The Shift”. The idea being the first Monday of each month a topic will be announced, and then on the last Friday, everyone taking part in the topic post a link to their article with the hashtag #startYourShift. This months topic: “How to Make the Web Better”.