After attending the Future of Web Design (FOWD) conference earlier this year, I have been keeping up to date on some of the other events Carsonified host. Last week it was the turn of Future of Web Apps (FOWA) in London. In the case of FOWA I could not suitably justify the costs of attending the conference as some of the subjects covered would have been little or no benefit to me. This year however Carsonified had expanded the two day conference to include an expo floor, which was accessible for a small cost.
Continue reading “FOWA and Diggnation” »

It’s now been a month since I moved house, and am still without a broadband connection due to BT taking it’s time installing a working phone line. So with access to a working Internet connection it seemed like a good time to catch up a little.
Continue reading “August Update” »

As it’s now been a month since I last posted I thought it was best that I wrote a quick note explaining myself. I’ve always been of the opinion that to run a respected blog you must update frequently, and once a month doesn’t cut it. Unfortunately for the blog I have recently moved house and am without an Internet connection. I’m currently waiting for BT and BT Openreach to get all the necessary stuff done to the phone line and then I can get the broadband setup. This is taking some time.

Hopefully when everything is working I should be able to start posting again, I also have some additions to the portfolio and some photos to add to flickr.

Be Back Soon

So Cuil, another new search engine has entered the market, claiming to be a Google killer with more advanced indexing algorithms. With the search engines founders coming from within the Google and IBM ranks you’d expect they would have a better chance that most, it’s a pity that with the current system it’s little more than a pipe dream.

Sure I’m basing this solely on my own opinion but I do have some reasons to back up my claim:
Continue reading “Hot or Cuil” »

Currently I run Firefox 2.0.0.16 as my primary browser at work. The reason for this is that it provides me with a balance of all the things I need as a web developer. These include code inspectors such as Firebug, add-on’s such as twitterfox and the web developer toolbar, as well as being a fairly standards compliant browser and occupying suitable share of the browser market.

Recently I have started to do more extensive browser testing, beyond just Internet Explorer and Firefox. Today this led me to a positioning problem in Safari, where by floated elements within a floated containing div would not appear on one single line, the containing div would not widen to accommodate all the child elements. This error only existed in Safari and after a few attempts at fixing it I gave up on the problem as it only occurred in Safari and did not destroy the usability of the website overall.

Upon viewing the website at home, where I use Firefox 3, the same positioning problem has occurred. Unfortunately making this a more significant issue and one I now need to fix. However more worrying is that my coding must be against the standards to break in both Safari and the new version of Firefox. A simple solution is to specify the width of the containing div, however that is not an option in this case. I’m usually an advocate of standards compliant coding, but this is one time where I really cannot understand why what I’ve coded is against the standards.

So now a day on Last.fm’s new design is up and running and more stable than it was 24 hrs ago at on launch day. Having had a bit of time to look around the design I’m a little concerned about what’s changed.
Continue reading “Last.fm new design review” »

After blogging about the last.fm redesign over a month ago I thought I would follow it up now that the new design is live. However either my Internet connection at both work and home is playing up a little or the guys at Last.fm have been having some teething problems going live. Hopefully when I can have a good look around the site I’ll blog about the new design and probably lace the review with a bit helping of my own opinion.

What I will say for the new design is that i’m glad the pinks still there.

Over the past couple of years as a full time web designer I feel I’ve constantly improved my knowledge and skills, but there’s always been one area I look at and feel disappointed, and that is forms. I’ve come to hate web forms as I find them a bit messy and difficult to design especially when you introduce a variety of form elements. However this should all be changing.
Continue reading “Book Review - Web Form Design : Filling in the Blanks” »

Today I came across a rather unusual WordPress problem that either resulted in an ‘unresponsive script’ error or crashed my browser when attempting to write a new post.

The problem

When navigating through the WordPress admin to add a new post an ‘unresponsive script’ error appears allowing options to stop, debug or continue. None of these allow the page to continue loading correctly with the text formatting options still nowhere to be seen. Initially I considered the problem to be related to these options or an incompatible plugin.
Continue reading “WordPress unresponsive script error” »

It’s probably the case of me missing the boat a bit (and the boat having sailed half way around the world), but I’ve finally created my own Twitter account.

As a web developer you might expect that I would create an account on all sorts of new web apps to try them out, however I hate the idea of having accounts to rarely used applications floating around in the ether. Instead I tend to wait until I find a suitable use of benefit in using an application. In the case of Flickr I recently created an account as I thought it would help enhance the features and design of my blog.

In Twitters case I saw that not only could it be integrated into my blog but that also I could use a Firefox add-on to better handle updates and notifications. To integrate my Twitter account into the blog I used the Twiiter for WordPress plugin. As yet I’ve made little use of Twitter other than to update my status and modify the design of my page to mirror that of the blog, so I have yet to experience some of the benefits of Twitter, but hopefully that will change in the future.