My Journal

Recently I received an email asking how I achieved one of the effects I have used on my website, so rather than be evil and keep it to myself, or just reply to the one person I thought I’d make use of this blog I have and use it to publish the answer. The crux of the question was:

I was wondering if you would be willing to share your techniques for getting the LastFM list to display INSIDE the CD frame.

I actually use the effect a few times though the website, as well as the last.fm feed on my about page it is also used for the Flickr feed, email avatar previews and recently for the portfolio list items.

Continue reading “Listener question – PNG Overlays”

The current design of this website has been live for about a month and I’m already changing some elements of it. In my defence I did start this design back in March 09 so some bits aren’t as new to me as they are to everyone else.

But I like this site?

Don’t worry I’m not changing anything drastic. Given the response I had for the design I’m hoping this design will hang around for a while, mainly because I can’t afford to get straight back into designing another version. But there are elements here and there I want to improve; the first is something that would probably go unnoticed if I didn’t decide to write a blog post about it.

Continue reading “Changing stuff already”

A couple of weeks back I posted about how I managed to cock up the comments on my site at a time when I had more traffic than the site has probably ever had in it’s whole existance.

The problem seems to be that I changed the folder name my javascript is stored but not change the link to the necessary document in the head of my site. As always the smallest oversite can have the biggest consequences. While I worked to find this tiny error I have done some clean up work on the code that should have been used to submit the comment form.

I’ve tested the comments fairly comprehensively this time round but given my track record and my uneasy sense of if forms are actually working I just wanted to ask that if you have any problems with the comments then to please let me know via the contact page or twitter.

Thanks

Google have gone all minimalist this December and rolled out an update to its homepage. On coming to the Google homepage now you are simply met with the core elements of the logo, search box and the two buttons, everything else has vanished. It’s only when you move your mouse over the site that the other elements, which are primarily all links, fade in.

From what I’ve been told over twitter and a bit of Google research it seems this is something they’ve been quietly working away on for the past couple of months, but unusually for some of Google’s playtoy’s this has actually gone live.

Continue reading “New Google Homepage”

At the time of writing this post I have just finished browser testing the new site (I wrote it a while back) and it went rather smoothly. The reason for this is because I now use the rule:

If I can’t see it, I don’t care

In the past I would spend hours over the smallest details when it came to browser testing, ensuring a site was identical to the original design. Of course this was a little crazy, so now I get a site built and working in Firefox and then browser test to remove an obvious or critical functionality or positioning problems. The reason for the careless approach is that many users will not notice the small differences or notice that anything is broken as they probably don’t compare sites in various browsers like Web Developers.

Continue reading “Leaving IE6 behind”