My Journal

Yesterday was the Boagworld 200th episode and I managed to tune into some of it but missed parts here and there due to work. For those unaware of Boadworld it’s a weekly podcast for webbies and on their 200th episode they made it a big occasion by holding a live, visual, 12 hour marathon.

Due to work I had the video screen right in the bottom corner of my screen with the chat channel hidden which I’m glad of as it seems that when any female members of our community appeared the chat channel regressed to a forum of sexist and offensive comments about the females in question. As Rachel Andrew mentions some comments went as far as to say that these women’s appearance on the show was due to their good looks alone.

Continue reading “What not to do when meeting a pretty female web designer”

JavaScript was and still is one of those coding languages that always seemed a little too difficult to get your head around and do anything truly useful with it. Times have changed and with the availability of numerous JavaScript frameworks the one time chore of adding interactivity to your website has been made easier, even exciting.

After skirting around a few frameworks in the early days I eventually made the conscious decision to stick with JQuery. Rather than use the first framework that came up when searching for a specific technique I decided to stick with one and hope to learn this. Usually I’d prefer to learn JavaScript itself but other than learning some of the basics it was just too much to cope with.

Continue reading “JavaScript = JQuery”

Often I come across those articles that tell me how I should use Twitter effectively in order to gain and retain followers and how to better engage the community. There are also the people that tell me what I should and shouldn’t be tweeting. To be honest it’s a load of bollocks.

Continue reading “How to actually use Twitter effectively”

If there was ever a battle for the Internet then Google has won, even if you don’t use any of the various apps and tools they have you more than likely use the Google search. For over 10 years now Google has grown from research project to Internet superpower and has no plans giving up any of the stranglehold it now holds on your online lives. Surely now something needs to be done to ensure the things Google does is in the best interests of the population and individual users, not the bottom line.

Don’t be Evil

Supposedly the motto on which Google was founded, yet it seems on the way to becoming the multi-billion dollar company it is today they seem to have lost their way. If you leave aside all the apps and tool’s that Google produce you are left with their core business, the Google search. It’s become so ingrained in our daily lives that we now use Google as a verb to search online. Amazingly this seems to be something they disapprove of, yet I’m sure secretly love it.

Continue reading “Google Wins”

Last week Brendan Dawes posted about the UK design scene and caused a rather heated debate. I was in total agreement with what he had written, but certain comments about positive noise rang true. Is it simply the way we communicate doesn’t allow us to feel as if we can give negative comments, or is it our own view of ‘if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all’.

This week a website was launched, it was mentioned on twitter and gained a few congratulations. Personally I didn’t get it, the design seemed too simplistic, certain elements of cross browser compatibility didn’t seem well considered and I thought the redesign was no great improvement on the previous iteration. In my opinion the site also looked as if it was designed in the browser, something that is gaining a lot of positive promotion on the web. In my opinion it’s since web designers have been working this way I’ve seen a lack of creativity in some instances, but this is a completely different argument.

Continue reading “Damn my Britishness”