1 Comment
Tags: adobe, development, flash, online, web
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.)
2 CommentsTags: broadband, history, technology, uk, web
Our broadband speed has looked like this for the last ten years. Here’s hoping we get to 50Mbps within the next year or two – and who knows where we’ll be in another ten years.
Here’s where we’re going at the moment:
CommentTags: life, online, wakoopa, web
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.
2 CommentsTags: online, social, wakoopa, web
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.
1 CommentTags: foursquare, gps, location, social, web
This is how foursquare displays the map for CJ’s Cafe in London. They got “The Vale” part right, but it’s totally in the wrong part of the city. If you take the address including the postcode and put it in Google Maps, you’ll see that it’s actually in Acton. This is a huge problem for their site, affecting many venues (in London at least). And this makes checking in much more difficult, possibly leading to duplicate venues, and bigger problems.
For some reason, foursquare only looks up the first line of the address to map it. Not the business name, or the cross streets, or the postcode.
Guys, you have to fix this soon. For the time being, Gowalla wins.
(All these new location-based games and sites are fantastic, by the way. You should check them all out and decide which you like best. Mashable wrote a nice comparison of these two, if that’s your thing.)
4 CommentsTags: code, design, online, portfolio, programming, web
St Paul’s School updated the installation of their Content Management System, Firefly.NET, . 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.
3 CommentsTags: twitter, web
If I had more willpower, this would be enough to get me off Twitter forever. I wish I could leave.
Is this really what’s happened to the social network that used to have so much promise?
2 CommentsTags: code, online, portfolio, programming, web
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®.
1 CommentTags: online, web
When your ‘title’ field affects so many parts of your site and you fail to spell correctly, I laugh at you. This is made even funnier when you’re trying so hard to be taken seriously.
CommentTags: dropbox, snowleopard, storage, web
I’ve installed these great Dropbox Snow Leopard Services on my 10.6 MacBook. If you haven’t seen what the services improvements in Snow Leopard can do for you, check out some videos from the PixelCorps.
My single favorite improvement in Snow Leopard is the overhaul to system-wide Services.
— John Gruber, Daring Fireball
My name’s Alex Muller.
