Technology and Civics by Morgan on Morgan Murrah - morganwebdev.org

Morgan Murrah links and CV-relevant Info 2026

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Undergraduate Degrees

LLB – Bachelor of Laws 2013

Major: Law – Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand. Newspaper Article of 2013 LLB Ceremony in Otago Daily Times

BA – Bachelor of Arts 2013

Major: Classics, Minor: English – Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand. Newspaper Article of 2013 BA Ceremony in Otago Daily Times

Professional Remote Worker Technology Career 2017-2025+

CG Life, 2025-2026+ current Delivered high quality responsive websites in a multi skilled role requiring attention to detail. Tools used include JavaScript, CSS, HTML, .YML, Puppeteer, Adobe Experience Manager. Prepared and Quality Assured many important updates and launches for brands in the heavily regulated medical product space. Took on the title of Operations Specialist in July 2025.

Celebrating Three year work anniversary

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0800

Ive been employed for three years at one agency, CG Life. It has and continues to be incredible good experience and a great place to work.

I make websites. I problem solve. I get a lot done.

Playdate Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0800

I ordered my Playdate in 2024 and its still going incredibly strong in my inventory!

Premise, Promise, Motivation

The ads for Playdate show it just lying on a table, calm and resting, independent and curated, pick up and play. No online chaos, at least not yet… that feature is coming for those who want it!

For now, mostly an offline experience. A dose of something different.

Loved the first season

Whitewater Wipeout. Casual Birder. Echoic Memory. All of them engaged my attention!

Sources of Inspiration for Spring 2026

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0800

Local Goodness - Bellingham Food Bank

The Bellingham Food Bank is a major source of inspiration. They have been around a while and are very organized. During the tough times like cuts to SNAP recently they had to turn down applications for new volunteers and put in a staggered onboarding schedule because they were so popular and well supported. That is how much goodwill they have in the community they had to manage new applications for help!

Benefits of static or mostly static web pages

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0800

In this post Ill attempt to use three example static websites I have made… and highlight one thing I like about them and maybe a drawback.

I have a lot of potential projects to keep maintained and do at least partly for fun. These projects are meant to be a impementation of some static or client sided experience that is helpful but done with minimal footprint.

WSG-o-matic example. You can do a lot with URL Params on a static website

Basically you can load in some param information from the URL to load from static content. For this example website, https://wsg-o-matic.com/, WSG-o-matic allows you to revisit the specific guideline of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSGs) from a URL Param contained inside a data format loadable on the client side such as potentially JSON as in this example:

Causes I like in March 2026

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0800

Today I thought about that adage, “Think globally, act locally”. Sometimes I get a chance to act a little global too- in narrow volunteer technical work, as an Invited Expert at the W3C.

Right now there are three organizations which give me a lot of life:

Global: The World Wide Web Consortium
State-wide: Whole Washington
Local: Community First Whatcom

W3C - The World Wide Web consortium

Ive been engaged at the W3C for a few years as a volunteer. Recently I wrote this and got a great response:

Update on Whatcom Public Hospital Education: What about the board?

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0800

The website WhatcomPublicHospital.org continues to grow.

Now to start adding sections about candidates processes…

Some things for a start:

Teamwork - long terms, long term projects, need someone who is going to stick around and do the work!
Leadership - Politics do matter. The whole point of electing someone is that they need to best represent the people as much as possible.
Accountability - Someone who can see if they have a gap or need to defer. This skill is often associated with humility.

Pixel 7 Battery Eruption: 2.75 years old phone lifespan

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0800

It started gradually. The battery level seemed to be changing sometimes I checked the phone. I sensed something seemed weird.

Then it started switching off randomly… I knew its life might be short…

I started to react immediately. I plugged it in and ensured android backups were being updated and taken with my google account I connected it to my computer and made extra backups of photos and downloads and data that I could with Android File Transfer.

Unbundling my phone, Taking photos with my eyes

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0800

It is sometimes said that in the beginning, online was a place you went to and then left when you were finished. In most representations this was the usage of a desktop computer on a 56k connection, which basically meant when the internet connection was turned off it was off for everyone in the house.

Now, most of us realize that the online can follow us everywhere in our pockets. Data streamed to us everywhere, on the pocket computer.

Tangata Tiriti and what it means for me

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0800

Check out TangataTiriti.org

It is a work in progress but the content is a faithful reproduction of the documents of the treaty in different languages with commentary.

The Treaty of Waitangi established the basis for all people in New Zealand to be. It is a foundation for my family having lived there and become citizens.

The basic thing we can do is acknowledge it, honor it, and consider our continuing goals of partnership into the present.

Caw-fe ☕

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Caw page under caw-nstruction!

CSS Compositor Resources: Performance Observer Talk (Updated)

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0800

Video recording of Performance Observer presentation Jan 2026, 21 minutes (YouTube)

PDF Slides:

Background Shortlist of Links:

A companion resource to the talk which will be posted afterwards - thank you!

Web Almanac 2025 section about Non-Composited Animations:

https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/performance#non-composited-animations

Accessibility: MDN Prefers-reduced-motion

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/At-rules/@media/prefers-reduced-motion

Animation from interactions Understanding document example

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/animation-from-interactions.html

Docs: Chromium Code Commit listing Compositable Properties:

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/a7e2d2ec825e873347e5582e6bcb6f69f409a705:third_party/blink/renderer/core/animation/compositor_animations.cc;dlc=35a480f16aeed0dbc86341ddf2a19e2e1782f3c5

GPU Accelerated Compositing in Chrome

https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/gpu-accelerated-compositing-in-chrome/

Stuff to consider: Web Sustainability

https://www.w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-guidelines/#ensure-animation-is-proportionate-and-easy-to-control

Samples of Dub/Reggae

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -1000

Samples 20s duration

I made these with the sounds that came with the EP-40 factory. I selected the drums, rhythm, melody and some special effects to make the samples. This is meant to illustrate the ease of making some nice sounding starter loops.

Sample 1 "Bouncy"

Download audio

Sample 2 "Dub"

Download audio

Sample 3 "Reggae"

Download audio

Sample 4 "Riddim"

Download audio

Sample 5 "Sample"

Download audio

Sample 6 "Style"

Download audio

About Morgan Murrah

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

👋 Hey there! My name is Beau Morgan Murrah.

I reside in Washington State, USA. I like reading, learning and working on interesting projects with teams of people. I like to be engaged in civics and education.

I am always learning about web sustainability and some other areas like web performance and accessibility. I have given some talks and produced some materials relating to these focus areas. If you think you might have a good idea in mind for a blog post or research, let me know.

An Original Layering Machine: Part 1

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -1000

Unboxing an exciting piece of Reggae inspired music gear

Known as a EP-40, this arrived in the mail today:

It is a interesting music sampler with a lot of features. Check it out! The artwork is amazing to me…

This is the microphone called the Ting- it is comparably lo-fi to the main board.

The Ting accepts a USB-C input and can be configured with JSON of all things! Im learning more about this.

9 years a developer

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0800

I had an educational background, as depicted in my About page. I decided to make a change. I took a course. After a little while, I got some contract work.

In May 2017 I went full time remote. With a few breaks, Ive worked full-time remotely since then on the web.

This is the beginning of a journal about those 9 years.

Nearly 10 years of a career…

And still learning all the time! Nothing stands still.

Coffee Crawl 2026

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I am so excited to have a coffee with you…

Welcome to the 5th Annual Bellingham Coffee Crawl (Morgan-inspired edition)

May 16th 2026 - Saturday - 11am-4pm - Bellingham, WA

Four locations, Fun on a Saturday!

Avellino’s
- Where we will start for breakfast food- and coffee!
Camber
- A classic
Ashuri
- Another classic, a staple, get a strong wonderful turkish coffee I’d say!
Cafe Velo
- The atmosphere and beer make this a good end of the event location!

Making An Updated TheProject.html

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0800

Visit this hyperlink: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

It is, to my knowledge, a strongly faithful source code reproduction of the original world wide website.

And it works

In 2025, on a modern browser, it just works. When inspected with the verbose mode enabled on the W3C Validator, in 2025, it comes up with several errors, warnings and information items. But it works. It works either served on CERN’s website, or as a local HTML file opened in a browser, or served locally with a server. It. Works.

My holiday wishlist (updated): learning Sign, and more

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0800

Update: Ive made a little bit of progress on this goal

I havent yet found a good time for tutoring, but my local community college seems to run classes and I am investigating them!

Original post:

I was concerned about gifting and consumerism related to the holiday. I was thinking of something for a “wishlist” of a reasonable kind to share with family who might give me gift. I joked with friends about making some silly arbitrary demands or something. Just having fun.

About Skip Links

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 08:00:00 -0800

The first thing I notice

When I attempt to operate a website with a keyboard, which I do regularly, if a website has a skip link is one of the very first things I notice.

I notice particularly:

Does one exist? Should it exist?
Does it work as predicted by its accessible name (i.e skip to a main content, or skip navigation)?

We save ourselves from clutter all the time, skip links are a way of extending it to more people

If you are sighted, when you go to a mobile website you may be accustomed to the menu being hidden away in a collapsed menu. This is sometimes called a hamburger menu due to its common appearance in icons. This is to save the clutter of the menu away from taking up much of the screen. Take this principle, and expand it, and you have the same thing as a skip link.

All is water

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0800

As I write this tens of thousands are evacuated from areas of my surrounding area of Whatcom and Skagit Counties due to historic flooding. The sun came out today, but the rain is apparently due to return, and I do not know how many have been able to return to their homes.

If you want to see coverage, you can find it in a local newspaper the Cascadia Daily News that has made their coverage of the flooding free. Ron Judd has a particularly good capturing writing of the waters.

Happy Open Source: My first contribution to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0800

I raised an issue in the WCAG Repository. It was accepted as valid in two days and then fixed in the code base within a week. This is pretty darn good considering the scale and consensus nature of many of the topics within the repository which are years long strategy issues for the roadmap kind of thing.

Basically, I found the low-hanging fruit and I grabbed it!

I had something to offer

In the course of working on Guideline-journey.com I had traversed and inspected a great deal of the JSON published by WCAG of the guidelines. I am still working through issues in my own app. I was sure others have taken a look at the JSON but it is relatively recently published so possibly I was the first to consider raising an issue I found.

Guideline-journey.com: an interactive experiment with WCAG JSON

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0800

Guideline-journey.com

Guideline-journey.com is an experiment I made in making the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) interactive in a slightly bespoke way. It is a small HTML/CSS/JS application using JSON formatted data from the guidelines.

The new stuff

Several versions of WCAG were recently released in JSON format. This project aimed to make use of this format into a small application, and giving proper credit back and linking back to the “mother project” of WAI and WCAG.

WSG-o-matic: Small Sustainability Wins

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0800

WSG-o-matic

Re-launched this website with an update on its own domain and on green hosting!

This website now gets 100’s on Ecograder, Lighthouse, Excellent WebPageTest results also.

The concept was simple and hopefully fun…

I would take the wonderful draft Web Sustainability Guidelines and provide a bite sized sample of the guidelines to hopefully spark further interest in the reader. Throw in a little randomness and whimsy with it as well to make it stick with people!

Simple Accessibility Tooling

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0800

Simplicity: “Worse is Better”

My approach to software acceptance has a history: “worse is better”, a term from a 1989 essay by Richard P. Gabriel (designer of Common Lisp). In essence, a simpler tool may be more readily adopted and improved upon than a complex tool being adopted and learned out of the gate.

In the influential essay it was argued that “worse” solutions could have better survival characteristics than the more complete solution that may be more complex for users to accept initially. The “worse” solution may in fact be better eventually because it could be improved upon until it was nearly as complete as the more “ideal” solution to start with.

From Spotify top 0.5% listener to exploring mixed media in 2025: Vinyl, CDs, MP3s and more

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0800

This article introduces an approach to enjoying music intended for an avid streaming service user who is questioning their reliance on any given streaming platform. It proposes a “mixed media diet” of physical media, digital media and streaming as needed but being intentional and realistic about it all.

I have listened to a lot of music in my life and likely you have too.

However, were you ever in the “top 0.5%” of Spotify listeners multiple years in a row? As a remote worker who loves my headphones and music, I earned this distinction several years in a row. The number of hours I clocked up was staggering. Then something changed… But things have always been changing.

Responsive Images: Pōhutukawa tree example

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0800

A beautiful tree

I recently re-learned some about responsive images, and have a practical demonstration to see the difference in action. If you visit this awesome website on a mobile phone in portrait mode, it will serve you a smaller and a different cropped resource than if you view it on landscape. This is done using the srcset attribute on an img tag as well as the picture element for greater control.

My inventory of websites

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Domains currently deployed by me:

1. This website, Morganwebdev.org

My personal website, my presence and tech and civics information. Static website, minimal, has an accessibility statement.

2. WSG-o-matic, wsg-o-matic.com

An educational project in support of the W3C, thinking globally in favor of sustainability. Detailed here

3. Guideline-journey, guideline-journey.com

A journey through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with JSON from the official project. An entry level attempt at making web accessibility interactive to explore on the client side.

4. Treaty of Waitangi Texts, tangatatiriti.org

A historical dedication to the Treaty of Waitangi, aspiring to be Tangata Tiriti - good faith, partnership promoting - in its representation. Uses semantic HTML practices, lang tags and details and summary elements intended to be more accessible.

5. Whatcom Public Hospital, whatcompublichospital.org

An important local policy explainer website I made. Extremely simple HTML CSS website.

+ Many Netlify and also some Cloudflare hosted projects.

Defining Optimism for the web

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0800

First, some 1989 web history

It is possible to take a very short tour of the history of the web from CERN. It is an excellent micro-history and summary of key facts and dates:

The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

However, the narrative of the world wide web as something like hypertext had its origins in the scientific world before this.

Recent work and a look into Accessibility (A11y)

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0800

I strongly believe the concept that accessibility is for everyone; beneficial for everyone in practice and necessary for some. Indeed, it will be very relevant to all of us at some stage of our lives.

I would consider myself a journeyman web developer including for accessibility. I am above novice – but not yet a subject matter expert – but able to wield tools and make progress. I am humble to the experts that exist around me and before me and teach me.

Accessibility Statement

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

for Morganwebdev.org

This is an accessibility statement from Morgan Murrah.

Measures to support accessibility

morganwebdev.org takes the following measures to ensure accessibility of Morganwebdev.org:

Include accessibility as part of our mission statement.
Assign clear accessibility goals and responsibilities.
Align as much as possible to meet WCAG Standards.

Conformance status

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Morganwebdev.org is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 level AA. Partially conformant and aiming for full conformance in future means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard in that they haven't been strongly tested.

July 2025: What I am up-to

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0800

What I am studying

Generally a lot more about Accessibility, Web Performance and other principles.

Wizard Zines
Complete CSS by Andy Bell, Set Studio
About Composited vs. Non Composited web animations.

What I am reading and enjoying

JSTOR articles
Hypermedia Systems, the book
Laphams Quarterly
2600 magazine
Building Stories, by Chris Ware

How I am writing

Obsidian Notes + Obsidian Sync
- Best writing setup Ive had for notes perhaps ever!
Moleskine… am a fan

What I am listening to/How I am listening

An app called Swinsian, which cost me $25, to listen to music locally.
Bandcamp purchases, MP3 and FLAC downloads
Imported CD’s

In 2025 I have goals for my digital life:

Reduce the complexity of my digital sphere of life basically reducing my screen time.
Read long form works more often- Reading print again!

I wish you a productive and happy mid-year into 2025! I am planning on making the best of it.

RUM for a small race-car website: Trying out SpeedCurve, RUMvision, mPulse

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 13:00:00 -0800

This Real User Monitoring (RUM) journey all started because this website is not likely to ever make it to the CrUX report. The logic for excluding small websites from the CrUX report makes sense: it must be publicly discoverable and there must be a large enough number of visitors in order to create a statistically significant dataset. Not every website can be included.

Still, I felt like I was missing out so I went looking for RUM solutions for the ’little guy’ i.e Morganwebdev.org who was not sufficiently popular. This led me trying three different services as a trial user and this post is my informal recap of my experience.

Web Sustainability Guidelines Facts

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0800

The following website is little project I cranked out in a short time to show my appreciation for the ongoing work going into sustainability at the W3C:

WSG Facts

Just listing some facts here as well, current as of July 11 2025-

92 Guidelines covering UX, Web Development, DevOps, & Business / Product Strategy.
254 Success Criteria to meet the guidelines on various aspects of sustainability.
160 advisory Techniques provided to meet Success Criteria.
2,500+ Resources (URLs) to assist with implementation of guidelines.
150+ contributors from over 20 nations around the world.
Iterated upon on by 48 participants (including 27 Invited Experts) representing 15 organizations in the Sustainable Web Interest Group.
Discussed in over 47 meetings. 24 + 12 Committee Meetings of the Community Group and 11+ Meetings of the Interest Group (ongoing).
The draft Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) are under development.

An introduction to Custom Elements.

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0800

Web components are an interesting set of technologies with broad browser support… with a few constraints. In this lecture I talk about one of the fundamental building blocks of web components: custom elements.

The talk will hopefully present you with a useful perspective for any continued learning in the area. “Keep Calm and Use the Platform” as is sometimes said in the Web Component world!

YouTube Link: Video 37 Minutes

Thank you to the wonderful organizers of LFNW and the people who inspired this talk!

The Web's core power is the hyperlink

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

I retired this links page! no longer a static page, but rather, to be referenced in posts with tags, rather than a static list of links.

This is partially due to maintenance and wanting to reduce.

Find more on the site Thank you!

Hyperlink: an art project, exploring links

Sun, 11 May 2025 12:00:00 -0800

Prior Art: A bunch of hyperlinks – Recent inspiration

Art project: Hyperlink’s as subject, in historical context

Started with a repository…

Now it is deployed here:

Hyperlink deployment – a project linking out to others

Thinking of what browsers enable is truly astonishing. As Hypermedia Systems the book says: Hypermedia is a universal technology today, almost as common as electricity.

Bellingham Codes Accessibility Talk by yours truly

Fri, 02 May 2025 12:00:00 -0800

CSS Media Features and some of their uses for accessibility May 1 2025

A talk about some CSS Media features and accessibility. Mainly the theme is: I don’t know everything and that is OK!

12:47 Minute video.

Download the MP4 video.

See The PDF Slides

Invited Expert at the W3C: My role

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0800

On January 2 of this year I became an Invited Expert volunteer at an interest group of the W3C:

There is a formal and important process to ensure you are a good candidate to be invited to join and each group has its own policies and you can view the Sustainable Web Interest Group Policy that I joined under. I passed the test and committed to following the agreement when I was invited. It is no small thing!

Celebrating Two Years at CG Life

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0800

Two years ago I was hired at Toolhouse Inc. It has been amazing. Then Toolhouse was acquired by CG Life and work continues to be great. I am learning and applying a lot of skill.

As my about page says, one summary of my job role is:

Delivered high quality responsive websites in a multi skilled role requiring attention to detail. Tools used include JavaScript, CSS, HTML, .YML, Puppeteer, Adobe Experience Manager. Prepared and Quality Assured many important updates and launches for brands in the heavily regulated medical product space.

Celebrating Loomio, 11 years on from social investment

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0800

See a great open source project: Loomio.

See The Crowd Funding Celebration page, 2014.

In March 2014 I was living in New Zealand and passionate about Democracy and how Loomio was a supportive open source project. I volunteered for an Otago University chapter of an organization called Law For Change which I strongly convinced to make a $1,000+ donation. My parents donated $250+, I donated $100+.

11 years on and I am happy I donated. And that organisations I volunteered for donated.

Today I heard someone ask about running an instance of Loomio and it gave me enormous joy. It is used by a variety of organizations and I believe helps make better decisions, to fulfill its mission.

Some Highlights of the Web Almanac 2024

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0800

Appreciating the good work, people doing the effort

The community led organization of contributors behind the web almanac is something to behold and admire. Just look at their organization – the enormous effort put in – it is truly impressive. Lets just list some of the virtues of this project made of:

Values led, data driven

Look at the chapter on sustainability, particularly What’s New. See the effort put in to the research and the science basically, it is so good.

My General Thoughts On Web Performance

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0000

👋 Hello!

I love web performance. It is a mixture of the kinds of challenges I love. My first blog on this site describes my initial enthusiasm in 2023 that got me started. This website is statically generated with Hugo for performance and uses a provider called Netlify for hosting. It works pretty fast! It is also pretty spartan because I like it that way sometimes.

My article in Web Performance Calendar: Simple Web Performance Mentoring in 2024. A good marker of how far I have come.

News: Web Sustainability Guidelines Drafts (WSG)

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0800

Check out the recently released Draft Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)

Also, see the homepage for the group

As of recently I am now a participant in the W3C community group and if things go well I will be able to contribute something to an important set of guidelines!

Link to my volunteer Github issues and contributions

See release notes for D2, D6 for examples of @airbr being credited for contributions. That is me!

Why Test Website Performance?

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 08:00:00 -0800

Enjoyment. I get excited and intrigued from reading website performance tests of various kinds.
Civic duty. The performance of the web is generally a public interest issue.
Someday… work will call for it. The skills involved in understanding web performance issues are transferrable and important skills

WebPageTest offers a premium web service on top of OSS. It is possible to setup a private instance and I am working towards that goal. I am a big fan of WebPageTest, so much so that I ran out of my 1000 runs well before my plan renewal:

Zines

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 09:00:00 -0800

What is a Zine?

A zine is sometimes hard to define but you can pretty easily know one when you see one. Its about the spirit of the publication.

There are whole festivals and events around them, making them, sharing them often called zinefests. Typically a zine is a small run publication made in a DIY fashion. Zines evoke themes of independence, creativity and sometimes ephemerality. They can be free or sold.