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I saw some of the talk about the Express article on the BBC’s Twitter presence, but never bothered to go in search and read it. After seeing Rowan taking it apart, I had to see the original.

Oh. The Express site reports that:

The article you are looking for does not exist. It may have been deleted.

Pffft. They’ve already lost my respect, but they could have perhaps clawed a tiny part back by leaving a proper apology in its place.

So, now I wanted to see the original even more. It’s fantastic; here you go:

If you’re a brand strategy/web development/whatever we’re calling it today company and your homepage (and therefore, my first impression of your company) looks like this, please change it. Like, right now.

(I use the very excellent and very open source ClickToFlash by Jonathan Rentzsch.)

After writing about spending time online, something obvious to everybody else quickly became obvious to me. I spend far too much time on the computer. An unhealthy amount of time? Probably, actually. (Dear me, I sound like my mum.)

So that’s what I’m going to do less of this year. And, because anything that doesn’t include nice big numbers makes me feel queasy, I’m going to use a computer to show me that I’m spending less time on the computer. I’m sure there’s something wrong with that.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with all that free time. Might possibly… read a book? That’s very last decade, I’m sure. If I manage to finish one this month, it’ll be Chris Frith’s Making Up the Mind, as recommended by David far too long ago. Might even do some work. Crazy, I know.

I’ll let you know how things unfold, partly to keep me motivated. And I’ll see you in the flesh sometime? It’d be a nice change to your Twitter profile picture popping up now and then. Have a great year.

I got bored this evening and decided to create a graphic showing where I spend most of my time in the browser – the data is pulled from my Wakoopa account. I’ll probably get round to publishing the source sometime.

On the ‘social’ web.

Giggle.

I just don’t get the Digital Economy Bill. I don’t understand how it’s got to this point.

Cory wrote that article which we’ve all read by now.

Tim linked to Francis Davey’s take on part of it.

And then I started clicking, and reading, and clicking more. And I took a look on TheyWorkForYou.com to see if anybody cares about it. And I found out that Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer cares. And she asked one of the best questions I’ve ever read:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have sought the advice of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the adviser to the Minister for the Cabinet Office on public information delivery, on clauses 4 to 20 of the Digital Economy Bill and on any impact on access to the internet; and, if so, what was his advice. [HL441]

To which Lord Young of Norwood Green, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, replied:

While we are always interested in the views of acknowledged experts, we have not directly sought the advice of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in relation to Clauses 4 to 20 of the Digital Economy Bill.

Her Majesty’s Government did not consult the inventor of the World Wide Web – who already works with the Office of the Prime Minister – on the Digital Economy Bill. Can you tell where the stupid is yet?

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block make a good point on the gdgt podcast, one that made me stop and think:

• I think the tell will be a year from now, how many people at Google are running Chrome OS as their primary, or say sole, operating system at work. And I think that that number will actually be relatively low. I think that most people will still be running a more fully functioning install of Linux.
• I don’t think you could develop code in Chrome OS.
• There isn’t really a good, at least that I’ve heard of, a good web-based IDE, web-based code developing. You can’t substitute a terminal in the browser.

I’ve seen nothing so far that makes me want to get rid of TextMate (my text editor of choice on the Mac). But like I’ve said (somewhere, possibly on Twitter?) before, there’s nothing to stop this from being a secondary machine.

Listen to it »

Just in case you nonbelievers don’t think Google Chrome OS is going to change anything, take a look at this:

As a second computer (laptop), there’s no reason this can’t take over the world.

After looking at it more accurately (my 80 most used pieces of software), 63% of what I do today could happen on Google Chrome OS with no change to my habits whatsoever.

St Paul’s School updated the installation of their Content Management System, Firefly.NET, a couple of weeks ago. Along with this update they included a new template that I built, changing the layout of the Intranet which had been there since, I believe, 2001. Here’s a few screenshots to compare the two:

This redesign made use of Firefly.NET’s template architecture, so the template files were built with XSLT and various stylesheets. While the old template was built using tables (back in 2001, I imagine this was fairly common), the update changes to use <div>s and more common stylesheet positioning instead. It’s technically HTML5, in that the first line of every document is <!doctype html>, though this doesn’t really mean anything for the time being. My favourite part of the redesign? The name of the school now has a proper apostrophe (St Paul’s vs. St Paul's). Apparently I can be a little picky.

Firefly.NET is the system St Paul’s has been using to manage content on its website and Intranet for quite a while now. It was developed by two former pupils of the school, Joe Mathewson and Simon Hay. You can read more about their work and their clients on the Firefly Solutions site.

I’ve spent the last couple of months working on a site for a new company, Bedouin® – it was great experience, and really good fun. The site isn’t particularly extensive, so it’s based on flat files rather than any kind of content management system or database; though as it grows, that’s definitely something to consider. The artwork was done by Zeke Wade, the design and layout by Silas Grant, and the coding (PHP, HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript) by me. The site works in IE6 with surprisingly little work – my favourite part is it serves a not-as-pretty GIF background if you’re using Internet Explorer 6 or older instead of any other browser. And as any web developer knows, if it works in IE6 it’ll work in just about anything else. Except IE5.

Feel free to check out the live site now, and make sure to admire the beautiful illustrations: Bedouin®.