Things will be quiet here for the next few months. I'm taking a break from tech writing for a while to see if I can write something else.

You might remember the last time I did this when I wrote Explanating and tried the (admittedly, not very successful) read-then-buy experiment.

I'll update again when I've got something to show for myself.

Thanks to some great work by Daniel Wabyick and his team, Hardy has had a bunch of improvements over the last few weeks.

The biggest change in this version is that, if you have GraphicsMagick installed on your machine, Hardy will use it for native image diffs but fall back to the built-in method if you don't. The current image diff technique involves creating an HTML page with a canvas, opening that with PhantomJS, loading the image into the canvas and using imagediff.js to calculate the diffs. It works everywhere PhantomJS works but it's slow. Daniel benchmarked the difference and it's a huge performance gain if you rely on image diff tests.

There's also some minor improvement around logging and the cucumber report format but I'll write about them later once I've had a chance to update the Hardy website.

Well, kinda. Before giving my Automated CSS Testing talk at CSS Summit in July, I recorded a video of it as a backup. If everything fell apart during my presentation, Ari could seamlessly switch over the One I Made Earlier. Fortunately, the Internet did what it does best and just worked fine.

That means I have an Automated CSS Testing video all ready and waiting that nobody's seen!

Yes, it does get progressively darker as you watch. That's not your eyes playing tricks on you, that's me sitting on my balcony recording as the sun went down.

Due to what are probably very good evolutionary reasons, doodling helps some people concentrate. I'm one of those people.

On Friday I went to CSS Conf EU and, true to form, doodled my notes. I find it also helps if I draw a little cartoon of the speaker. Although they may be of no help to anyone, here are my notes from the conference. I don't claim they are complete or accurate but I can say I had quite good fun drawing them.

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