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Weblog category: weblog

05/09/07 @media Ajax 2007

I have the honour and terror of presenting at @media Ajax on home turf this November. It's a privilege to be speaking alongside the likes of Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Douglas Crockford...

04/04/07 Etech is over

Etech is over and a great time was had by all. Our presentation was dogged by technical difficulties that meant I ended up using old slides but everyone seemed to enjoy it regardless. With hindsight I...

21/03/07 Speaking at eTech

On Sunday I'm packing my bags and heading for San Diego for eTech. I've always wanted to go to eTech - it seems to be one of the most interesting events on the circuit - and this year I'm incredibly...

07/03/07 Leaving freelancing

After 5 good years I'm hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I'm becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up...

03/03/07 MySpace vs Facebook

I've been on MySpace for a while now, basically because loads of my friends are, but I've barely used it in the last 2 months, apart from checking on a few bands. It's just too much hassle. It's hard...

12/02/07 Music, London and MySpace

The London music scene seems to be on fire at the moment! I can't remember a time when there were more gigs to go to... In the last 10 days I've seen: Crystal Castles Danny Rapscallion of The...

10/12/06 Building Modern Webapps at The Spring Experience

I've just done my Building Better Webapps presentation at the Spring Experience in Miami. I it went pretty well, as far as I can tell, but I realised that there were a whole bunch of links I wanted to...

24/10/06 The Enron Explorer

This honestly wasn't planned but you know Jeff Skilling was just sentenced to 24 years this morning for his part in the Enron collapse? Well it just so happens that while developing the SONAR...

19/10/06 Internet Explorer 7 Graces us with her Presence

So IE7 has finally been released and the inevitable security exploits have already started surfacing. I'm very glad to see it, to be honest. The new CSS support is very welcome, even if it is playing...

06/10/06 Why I won't music shop on the high street: a Long Tail case study

The Netflix $1 million competition to improve their recommendation engine has reminded me of something I said to my brother in Virgin Megastore the other night... I'd wandered in to kill some time...

30/08/06 The BBC popularising Podcasting

I thought that podcasting would take a while to take off... And by a while, I mean years. How many people have iPods? Yes lots, but how many people even have MP3 players? Still not a majority. Of...

10/08/06 Think Blogging

I know I've not been posting here too regularly but I've not been completely out of the blogging loop... I'm using Donotremove as a place for my more general articles on things like the emerging web...

04/08/06 The Spring Experience

Who's this bloke then? Yep, I recognise him too... So, I'm off to Miami in December to speak at The Spring Experience! I'm excited and a little nervous. The sessions are super-long, weighing in at 90...

22/07/06 The Rojo Newsletter

I've been using Rojo as my RSS reader for about a year now and I love it. I use a tiny fraction of its functionality, to be honest, but it does exactly what I want. I particularly like its...

29/05/06 Podcasting vs Singles for small labels

I was listening to my favourite podcast (Radio SubPop) today and it got me thinking... It's a series of tracks given away by a record label. Why? Aren't they reducing their artists' saleability by...

26/05/06 London Web Community

On my busride home from the London Javascript Night I had time to think. The organised speakers were interesting but the beers afterwards were even better. It was an opportunity to get a little drunk...

12/05/06 Blogging for credibility

I've just been reading about Squidoo and its aim to provide a place for people to mark out their ground as experts and make money from what they write about. Mike Rundle and Michael Arrington were...

05/05/06 Pimping my brother

My brother, Ewen, is taking part in his first exhibition, up now at Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes in Shoreditch, London. The show features the likes of Jon Burgerman, Paris Hair, Kabe 243, Mr Pinks and Ron...

27/04/06 Recognition Primed Decision-making and Web Behaviour

After seeing Sources of Power referenced by two of my favourite books, Don't Make Me Think and Blink, and having it recommended to me by a chap at work I finally got around to reading it. In the book...

19/04/06 Fixing Donotremove for IE7

We got an email sent to Content with Style from one of the IE7 development guys last week warning us that the site was broken in the forthcoming browser. From what I'd heard I was under the impression...

13/04/06 Zooming content

In my redesign post I mentioned this 'zooming content' idea I've adopted. I don't think the concept is new but I've not seen anyone write about it so I'm jumping in... Each page is based on what I'm...

01/04/06 A New Donotremove

This redesign has been 18 months coming. I did the original design over Christmas 2004 but I just couldn't find the time to follow it through. Since then the design has been through several revisions,...

16/03/06 MySpace and Idea Based Webapps

MySpace has become incredibly popular in the last year. It now boasts somewhere over 55 million members with another 150,000 people signing up every day. That's simply incredible. It's approaching the...

31/01/06 Xian, Datong and Pingyao photos

I've had a bit of time on my hands recently so I've taken the opportunity to finish up my China photos... FINALLY. The complete collection is up on Flickr titled Shaanxi and Shanxi Provinces, China...

20/01/06 Training and Conferences: the Good and the Bad

Before last year I had never been to a conference or workshop to do with the web. Thinking back, that's really quite bizarre but I've learned everything I now do for a living for myself. The community...

30/12/05 Predictions for 2006

.Net magazine asked me (amongst dozens of others) to give them my predictions for next year. The article's now out and I feel a little bit mis-represented - they seem to have missed my point entirely....

11/12/05 Travel troubles and Impressions of Xian

Missed travel connections seems to be becomming a theme for my holiday. Emma and I were supposed to be flying to Shanghai last Sunday but we were told at check-in that her visa wasn't valid. Hong Kong...

06/12/05 Hong Kong Pro-democracy March

After an last minute abort of our Shanghai ticket (I made it all the way to boarding before bailing after Emma's visa was found to be expired) we found ourselves with an extra few days in Hong Kong....

28/11/05 Flickring Hong Kong Photos

In case anyone's intrested, I am posting my Hong Kong photos to Flickr as I go. I'm loving how easy Flickr is to use and how quickly I can get my images up... My site's photo gallery's days are...

23/11/05 Holiday time

I'm currently in Hong Kong! I'll be here for a couple of weeks before heading over to Shanghai for a few days and Xian after that to take a look around. Things could have started more smoothly......

03/11/05 Thought Leaders and Centers of Influence

I released a new article on Monday called Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids. As always, I've been watching its progress around the internet community very closely. Having done this a few times now...

20/10/05 Nizlopi, that video and the power of online

When the JCB song video did the rounds a few weeks ago I was completely charmed. I watched it through several times, ordered the album and then spent a while browsing the Monkeehub website. That's...

07/10/05 A9 Do Mapping

Not to be outdone by the likes of Google, A9 have launched their own maps site. Why would you use this one instead of Google? Well, check over on the right hand side... For several major cities...

06/10/05 The new face of Flash

Many thanks to Sermad for the tip here... Check out the video effects on the Absolut Metropolis site! Apparently video effects are the big new addition to Flash 8 so there's going to be some really...

20/09/05 Yahoo Mindset

From a user experience point of view this is a magical development... The good folk at Yahoo have identified that people search with different tasks in mind and come up with Yahoo Mindset. It's only a...

19/09/05 Google vs Microsoft

So, Google vs Microsoft then? It sounds like this is going to be more interesting than I was expecting... The leader in findability and online advertising vs the leader in consumer platforms. While...

15/09/05 Jason Fried on Basecamp

The 37 Signals guys are travelling the world at the moment talking about how they made Basecamp but at least some of that knowledge is now available online from IT Conversations. I've not had a chance...

08/09/05 The Internet in China

It's a bit of a co-incidence but there appears to be a chap blogging the progress of the internet in China! Interesting reading... ChinaWhite....

08/09/05 Yahoo in China

I've not really been following this, to be honest but this story just doesn't feel right to me: Yahoo helped jail China writer. The 'China writer' has been sentenced to 10 years because 'he was found...

05/09/05 Joe Clark at Carson Workshops

Firstly, I'd like to say a big 'well done' to Ryan and Gill Carson for organising the workshop. Everything went swimmingly! I did have a little too much coffee though and remained skittishly...

25/08/05 Will Barras Blog

It's been a long time coming but willbarras.com has finally gone live! It started out as a proper portfolio site but we've ended up with an illustration blog. Will's work is AMAZING and I've not seen...

22/08/05 Eastnor Big Chill 2005

It's been a few weeks since this year's Big Chill at Eastnor Castle and I've had some time to reflect. I've been to every Big Chill they've had at Eastnor and they're always good fun... This year's...

22/08/05 Google Moon and Mapping

I seem to have turned into a Google fan-boy recently but the good folk at the big G justify my impression of them again and again... And again: Google Moon. They went to all the trouble of writing a...

16/08/05 Joe Clark in London

Carson Workshops have a few good things coming up... The first I heard about was Malarkey's CSS for Designers course with Molly Holzschlag on the 17th Nov, here in London. Then I got an email this...

11/08/05 Modern Keyword Research

SEO has earned itself a very bad name in recent years for so called 'black-hat' techniques: cramming, cloaking, etc. There are a lot of people out there doing it properly though, and even more taking...

28/07/05 Urban Art?

The likes of Banksy and co. have been making statements on our walls for some time now but klisterpete and akay have really outdone themselves with this one. Painting's one thing but how about...

28/07/05 Testing Javascript in Screenreaders

A few weeks back I emailed Bob Easton of Access Matters to suggest that he post a quiz about javascript support in screenreaders. Bob got back to me quick-as-a-flash to say that James Brothercake had...

26/07/05 Invoicing

I've been muddling through the invoicing process for a few years now but I'd not found a program that really felt right to me. They all seemed to be too complicated... When I heard about Blinksale...

22/07/05 Accessible Flash - a Touch of Magic

I had a slightly drunken conversation with a really really good Flash chap a few months back,who told me that Flash could be made extremely accessible... If you get right down into the bowels of the...

08/07/05 W3C Sites

Now how's this for a screen grab confab?! More sites than you can shake a stick at....

05/07/05 Accessibility Testing

Bob Easton over at Access Matters has written up the results of another of his fantastic quizzes, testing whether screen readers really do benefit from good semantic markup and CSS for layout. As test...

05/07/05 Reuters Move

To celebrate a move of offices, from Fleet Street down to Canary Wharf, Reuters has put on on open air exhibition of some of their best recent photos. They've also kindly put the gallery online for...

27/06/05 Little Brother

My little bro has made it into the Computer Arts Graduate Showcase for the second year in a row. Despite only graduating once. I don't really know how he qualified last year, only being a second year,...

24/06/05 Eine Letters

Anyone been to Old Street lately? If you have you'll have spotted giant letters springing up all over the place... The work of Eine, who's been writing in the area for years now. I've been trying to...

24/06/05 Abbey National Rebranding

I was a little confused when I started seeing what looks like a technology company logo popping up on bank up and down the country. Especially since said bank had only recently rebranded with a...

23/06/05 Javascript and Accessibility Devices

Unobtrusive Javascript is the old big thing. AJAX is the new big thing. Both are BIG right now. But a rather crucial question seems to have been missed... How do the various accessibility devices...

15/06/05 AJAX Navigation Fixes

I know I've been quiet for a while but this is why: Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps. It's been a couple of weeks in the writing and researching but I'm hoping it's going...

11/06/05 Keeping up with the Joneses

This service has probably been around for a while but I've only just discovered it... PubSub. I popped in "web standards", css, accessibility and "user experience" and subscribed to the resulting...

10/06/05 Housing Maps

It's going to be short posts round here for a little while because I'm concentrating on my Content with Style articles. Sorry about that... Anyway, I just stumbled on this: Housing Maps. It's the...

08/06/05 Mozilla Deer Park

Crikey, they're not hanging about are they? Mozilla have released an alpha version of their next generation browser. The new features don't really grab me but it's early days yet......

26/05/05 I've Been Made

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I now have a screenshot on Malarkey's Destinations page, which can mean only one thing... I've been made an official member of the Brit Pack! It's an honour to be in...

25/05/05 Content with Style is Almost a Week Old

Wow, the first days in the life of Content with Style have been quite something. We'd been working on it on and off for almost 6 months and we didn't really know what to expect. We figured we might...

23/05/05 Have I Joined a Cult?

I'm contracting at Wordtracker at the moment. Their product is facinating but just as interesing is their working philosophy. Management is based on Peopleware by Tom Demarco and Tim Lister, and...

19/05/05 Content with Style

I've been very quiet of late and here's the reason. I'm pleased to announce the launch of Content with Style, finally. It's been an awful long time coming but we're finally decided that it's more...

16/05/05 The BBC Launches Backstage

The BBC has just launched a new service under the title Backstage. Basically, they're starting up a whole series of APIs to let developers get at their content directly. So far things are quite...

11/05/05 Ryan Sims on Artwork Handover

Over at the Big Noob Ryan Sims of JustWatchTheSky has offered us a look at the life of a professinal designer. Ever had your work change between handing it over and seeing live? Yep, me...

06/05/05 RSS Broken

Damn it, I've just realised that I've managed to break my RSS generation script. I have no idea what happened - it's not been touched in months, but I'll try and get it fixed over the weekend. I'm...

06/05/05 The Boys at Holler

I meant to post about this when Holler launched their new site but I completely forgot... The site's super-slick but more importantly, it's the first attempt I've seen to make Flash liquid. Resize...

06/05/05 Election Time

Being neglected in my Labour safe-seat while the parties campaigned hard in the marginals didn't stop me from staying up late to watch the election coverage on TV. Sadly I missed the Jeremy Paxman...

29/04/05 Google Taking Over the World?

With everything that's going on with Google at the moment it's worth revisiting EPIC: "It's the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened...

28/04/05 Alternative Art, Design and Graffiti from ni9e

It's been a while since I last posted a graf link but I'm back with a good one. ni9e. It's not exactly graffiti-based but there's plenty in there, and it's damned clever too. Highlights for me include...

26/04/05 Another Post about AJAX

I first saw Bitflux's LiveSearch last year when Colly implemented it on CollyLogic. I thought it was very cool but didn't think much more about it. When Google Suggest came out I was impressed again -...

18/04/05 Customisable Select List

Damn it, I was planning on doing this myself! Aaron Gustafson has written a nice little DOM script to dynamically replace your tired and inconsistently implemented (try z-indexing them) select boxes...

15/04/05 European Web Events

With all the fuss about SXSW it's nice to see the Europeans representing: Reboot7. Everyone's said that the most valuable part of SXSW was the conversations in the corridors between presentations and...

15/04/05 Typography Hints and Tips

I'm a rubbish typographer. It takes me ages to choose fonts and about half the time I'll come back a few days later with a clear head and have to start all over again. After following some links from...

11/04/05 Consuming Web Services

I'm late to the party but after my recent laptop misery I've finally decided to get into the whole web services thing, namely Bloglines and del.icio.us. EVERYONE else seems to have been into these for...

07/04/05 Proper SEO

SEO's back in the blogs with Keith Robinson's 7 Simple Techniques (pdf) article for Marketing News, and while it's hot I thought I'd share another link. I'm working at Wordtracker at the moment and to...

06/04/05 McAfee Startup Errors and Support

I've not had a lot of luck with technology of late. First my laptop melted, leaving me with a 1700 quid doorstop after Toshiba told me that they could only sell me an international warranty in the...

29/03/05 Banksy Across the Pond

We've quite used to Banksy's escapades over here in the UK. He's been active in Bristol, Shoreditch and Hackney, amongst others, for quite some time now so I guess the next logical step had to be the...

29/03/05 Zoomquilt

I picked up Zoomquilt from Jon Hicks' Sidenotes and had to share it. Hit the Flash version and hold on tight to something fixed solidly to the ground... It's genius!...

29/03/05 Access Matters: Seeking Best Practice

Bob Easton has launched a new blog called Access Matters, devoted to discussing best practice in accessibility. He's kicked things off with a subject close to my heart: ALT text for custom list...

22/03/05 Symphony from 21degrees

I've had 'convert website to blogging tool' on my to-do list for bloody ages now... Well over a year. Right above 'redesign website', which has been there for 2 years now. So far I've been most...

21/03/05 The Escape Committee

Rebranding is always a mission but it looks like WebProjects have come out on top... The Escape Committee is officially the best brand name on the web and they've managed to wangle a logo from the...

15/03/05 WordNet: A Lexical Database for the English Language

This is a little off my usual topics but I've just started a contract with a really interesting company called Wordtracker out in Kentish Town and my orientation has led me off in some unexpected...

08/03/05 Damned technology

I've been pretty quiet for the last week... thanks to Toshiba. Last Monday my laptop turned itself off and wouldn't come back on, no matter how piteously I pleaded. Tuesday morning the Toshiba...

28/02/05 Poster Design Inspiration

While browsing for inspiration I stumbled across Cedomir Kostovic's site. Take a look through the 'Social Posters' section - every one is great......

28/02/05 Clearing floats with overflow:auto

I've been using the Position is Everything Float Clearing method in production for a while now. Getting the clearing divs out of my markup was very satisfying, in a geeky sort of way. The method is...

24/02/05 Taming your Multiple IE Standalones

Manfred Staudinger has put the final piece in the multiple-IEs puzzle together over at Position is Everything by finally finding a way to fix the conditional comments problem and pop version numbers...

23/02/05 123 Klan

I've not got time to look around 123 Klan's site properly but the little I've seen looks awesome! Top notch graf from France, with some hot design work to boot....

20/02/05 Tignes Photos 2005

I meant to post this last week but I forgot... I've added another set of photos to my photos section: Tignes 2005. I was out there for a 8 days skiing, week before last, and it's the first outing for...

18/02/05 SXSW Finalists

Aart from anything else, the SXSW finalists page is a great set of links. I've just been looking through the Personal Portfolio section and the work in there is just incredible!...

16/02/05 PPK on Javascript Triggers

I stopped reading ALA regularly when the content became simple how-to's aimed at people beginning in the business... With PPK's JavaScript Triggers article they're back on top. It's a look at a method...

16/02/05 456 Berea Street on SEO

Roger Johannson has written a great article on his experiences with SEO. It's all common sense and good practice really but it helps to have this stuff written down in a structured way so you can...

16/02/05 Microsoft to Ship IE7 in 2005

Rather unexpectedly Microsoft have just announced that they WILL be releasing IE7 separately from Longhorn. That's a turnup for the books! It looks like Firefox is having it's desired effect... I'm a...

15/02/05 Accessible Flash Chess Game

I've not played this properly yet but ICS' UA-Chess game looks like it could be pretty interesting. It's been designed to work with Microsoft's IE Speech Add-on along with a host of other...

14/02/05 Britten-Pears site on CSS Beauty

The Britten-Pears Foundation site I worked on with The Escape Committee/WebProjects has been listed by CSS Beauty! It's been a long time in the making but it's a far bigger site than I imagined when I...

14/02/05 Back from holiday

I'm back from Tignes! 8 days on the slopes has left me feeling like I've been beaten up but I'll want to be back out there after a couple of days rest... On a side-note, take a look at Holler's resort...

03/02/05 The Memory Project for Inspiration

Struggling to find sources of inspiration? How about browsing the American Library of Congress Memory Project? I came across it while reading an article on Typographica and went for a wander round....

01/02/05 Blind people and the World Wide Web

I use Webbie when I need to test pages in a text browser but I'd never bothered to read it's website before. After an overzealous cleanup of my computer I had to go and redownload it last night and in...

28/01/05 Web Information Architecture and Findability

Last week Keith Robinson published a great article on the concept of site maps and how best to serve users' needs. He questions the use of the home page and the inevitable arguments that follow amonst...

24/01/05 Preloaded do Evil Nine

I've just been shown Preloaded's video for Evil Nine's track "Crooked" and thought it'd be worth sharing. It's done in Flash - no big deal - but check the hand movements. They're actually animated...

24/01/05 ECMAScript Menu System

Juicy Studio's ECMAScript Menu System looks to be one of the nicest write-ups of non-intrusive javascript that I've seen in a while. Keep the behaviour separate from the content and use the DOM to...

20/01/05 RSS Beta Feed

I spent a little while patching together an RSS2 feed. I've been meaning to do it for ages but I just hadn't had the time. I've been subscribed to the feed for the last few days and it seems to be...

20/01/05 The Wooster Collective

I'm having a little trouble finding my way around the Wooster Collective site but that doesn't seem to matter. Every page is packed with lovely pictures by the likes of Mysterious Al, TLP, D*Face,...

19/01/05 Serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml

Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street has just published a fantastic article on the pitfalls of serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml, which is what it should be. I knew about a few of them - things...

17/01/05 Getting lost in Cyberspace

Roger Hudson goes back to fundamentals for his Web Essentials 04 talk on web navigation. Everyone needs to be reminded of this stuff....

12/01/05 BIMA Surprise

Christ, business.gov.uk got a commendation at the BIMA 2004 awards in the Best usability or accessibility category and I had no idea! Great stuff. That's to add to the IVCA gold in the Websites...

10/01/05 How do People Use the Web?

This is an absolutely fundamental question, and one I thought I had a pretty good answer to, but an interesting post Miss Manners Guide to Opening Links in New Windows on Subtraction (my new favourite...

09/01/05 Mike in Print Goes Digital

The .Net magazine article I was in has been published on the interweb and syndicated, apparently. So there's Ditch the Day Job on the .Net Mag site and Ditch the Day Job on the MaxPC site....

09/01/05 XSL Comes to DNR

I'm back from an unplugged Christmas and New Year, which was much needed after a ridiculous week of work leading up to Christmas Eve. I've hardly read any blogs and the number of emails I've answered...

31/12/04 BlogAid

As the devastating scale of the Boxing Day tsunami becomes clear I have been glued to my television. I was brought up in Asia and many of my family holidays were to the beautiful countries on the...

22/12/04 Carole Guevin of Netdiver on What She Looks For

I've been noticing a certain degree of homogeny across the websites I visit of late. It's probably always been there and combined with my relatively limited selection of subject I shouldn't be...

21/12/04 Santa's Ghetto and Banksy's Birds

I went down to Santa's Ghetto at the weekend to check out some pieces of work by the likes of Liam Howlett, Banksy, Shok1 and Insect. It's another great exhibition - in a more fitting venue than last...

20/12/04 Molly on WDW2004

Molly Holzschlag has written up her impressions of the recent Web Design World conference and what it means for the industry and web standards. I've noticed a few of these things myself but without...

17/12/04 New Session for Every Page Refresh on IIS

Well, that's another 4 hours of my life that I'll never get back... Hours of Googling finally turned up a solution to my session being dumped on every page refresh, promptly disposing of my session...

14/12/04 Resizing and scaling slideshow

Many thanks to Couloir for putting this slideshow demo public. It's incredibly slick... Their original fading effect inspired me to get back into DHTML and this new one's really got me excited!...

13/12/04 Minigraff

Not much to say about this one except that minigraff is great! Street art with a cute twist......

10/12/04 Web Access and Inclusion for Disabled People

I've just spotted the DRC's The Web Access and Inclusion for Disabled People article, which makes for some pretty interesting reading. I've only had time to scan it but a couple of things jumped out...

10/12/04 TheyWorkForYou

I spent a while last night chatting to Roland at Nykris about the guys behind mySociety, a collection of volunteers who are cornering the market in innovative and USEFUL government websites. Off the...

07/12/04 Firing a Client

Client frustrations are a part of life as a freelancer, having to be your own account manager, so I've had my fair share. I've come close to the point where my time becomes more important to me than...

06/12/04 The True Story of Audion

This is an unusual one for me but it piqued my interest: the true story of audion (via Zeldman). I don't own a Mac, have never used Audion and don't remember the Faces War of 2001 but I still found...

29/11/04 Accessible Forms and Sample Code

It's the example source code bit that makes this Accessible and usable forms article stand out for me. How many times have I re-written search form html? Many many many times. Yes, I recycle some of...

26/11/04 Thinking with type

The Thinking with Type website has a wealth of information on typography, with plenty of nice examples surrounded by some highly entertaining writing. Thanks to 456 Berea Street for this one....

22/11/04 Dunstan Proves that he's a Sharp Mutha

It's been a while since Dunstan made any technical posts but this Solving CSS Problems for Mozilla Europe serves to remind us of why he's one of the most respected CSS folk in the business. Demo 2...

17/11/04 JavaScript Turned Off

I've been using Feedreader to manage my RSS feeds and I've noticed myself using the built-in browsing capability more and more. It's convenient - no extra windows or irritating replacements of my...

17/11/04 Flash Sync Speed

It started out with a little bit of idle curiosity on my part: why do I give a monkey's about sync speed? And turned into a bit of a mission. Apparently sync speed is very important! I recently...

15/11/04 If only we were allowed to use CSS3...

WebGraphics have done a clever little experiment with some lesser-known CSS3 - target: and the substring matching selector. Basically, they've figured out a way to show extra information to people who...

15/11/04 Resources for Web Designers from Plain Simple

I have quite randomly stumbled across a great-looking list of resources for the whole web development process. I think I'm all design-processed out but the 'design', 'user research' and ia sections...

14/11/04 Shok1

On a little aside... Anyone ever wondered what the radioactive pink sticker characters were doing on bus stops across East London? How about the posters out Shoreditch way? Well, turns out that's be...

10/11/04 Working with screen readers

This is an absolutely brilliant article: Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users who Work with Screen Readers. It provides some fantastic insights into how people actually use...

08/11/04 Full CSS Property Compatibility Chart

Does exactly what it says on the tin: it's a big chart of all the CSS 1 and 2 properties and suppport for them by the various browsers... Handy....

05/11/04 Miniml

I hadn't realised how prolific Craig Kroeger was on the fonts front! He appears to have designed dozens of pixel fonts while I wasn't looking. It's amazing how much variation you can squeeze out of 10...

05/11/04 Colour for Accessibilty

I haven't had a chance to read through too much of this yet but the BTexact Safe Colours site appears to contain a wealth of information on the use of colour on the web and it's relationship to...

05/11/04 Couloir image fading effect

Richard Rutter over at Clagnut has spotted a fantastic little bit of javascript on the Couloir site. I'd seen the site before but I'd just assumed that it was another Flash photo switcher... Turns out...

01/11/04 Marking up data tables

456 Berea Street have written up what appears to be the definitive guide to marking up data tables. Luckily for me I've never been lumbered with the dubious honour of coding massive tables but I...

27/10/04 Firefox in Ascendancy

Both Signal vs Noise and What Do I Know have posted articles in the last couple of days about Firefox's apparent surge in use... 30%+! That's an incredible leap. However, at the moment it's only tech...

26/10/04 MIT on Accessibility

I came across MIT's Web Accessibility Guidelines while I was looking for information on colour contrast earlier on and I was struck by one of their 'Audience for Accessibility' entries: 'Technology or...

19/10/04 Display: table-cell for IE5/Mac

A couple of interesting finds turned up on CSS-D today, bith of which could prove very useful. The first was a solution to Big John's How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup effort... Mark...

19/10/04 The Ramada and Priceline Settlements

I was quite excited about the $80,000 of fines that were issued by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to Ramada and Priceline for the inaccessibility of their websites. It seemed like things were...

19/10/04 Accesskeys are Dead, Long Live Access Points

The Future of Accesskeys from Derek Featherstone of WATS.ca makes for some interesting reading... I decided a while ago that accesskeys were poorly implemented - I approve of the UK government's...

18/10/04 Is XSL the Way Forward?

I had my first real brush with XML and XSLT transormations last week and I am very very impressed. The CMS I'm working with generates XML transformed with XSLT to spit out the navigation elements so I...

15/10/04 Building a Web Application

Developing and working with CMSs is a subject close to my heart at the moment for a couple of reasons, neither of which I think I can talk about, and two articles have helped me along no end. The...

11/10/04 Mike Davidson on the ABC News Redesign

Mike's article on the ABC News Redesign has been discussed elsewhere already but I thought it might be worth drawing attention to his second-to-last paragraph 'Another business case for web...

11/10/04 Clearing Floats without a Clearing Div? Yep.

It's been a while since I've been really surprised about a new hack but this one has amazed me... How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup, documented on Holly and John's Position Is Everything,...

07/10/04 HTML 4 Transitional Doctype and Cross-browser Compatibility

I've never had to monkey with HTML 4 Transitional doctypes before but the project I've just finished required it and it's brought home exactly WHY I've never done it before. Having the HTML 4...

01/10/04 DiveIntoMark Accessibility Statement

On the day the DDA ammends come into full effect here in the UK it seems fitting to post an accessibility link... This one's a little obtuse but yesterday I was asked if I knew of any good website...

01/10/04 Standard forms from Style:phreak

I think I'm a bit late on this one but style:phreak has put up a nice little demo of an XHTML form. Now that's hardly groundbreaking but the code is very nicely structured and I particularly like his...

30/09/04 Jeffrey Veen on CMSs

I've just been reading the UI9 Interview with Jeffrey Veen on Content Management systems... It's a great article and brings back a lot of memories of writing a CMS for the company I used to work for....

27/09/04 Photoblogs go to Print

The launch of JPG Magazine has been announced by Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek. As the site says: "JPG Magazine is for people who love imagemaking without attitude. It's about the kind of...

26/09/04 Ramblers Association and Locus Design sites Go Live

It's been a ridiculously busy few weeks but I have a couple of site launches to show for it. First up is a small one: Locus Design. I built this one with Draught Associates, who designed it. It's...

16/09/04 Min-height Solved

This has been a while coming but it looks like Dave Shea has finally solved the min-height issue for all the current browsers. It's an ugly solution, requiring more hacks than your average issue of...

15/09/04 sFIR 2.0b

Just a quick update... Mike Davidson has released version 2.0b of sFIR, which adds improved performance, better flexibility and even accessibility to the mighty script. I used sFIR for the first...

14/09/04 Mike in .net Magazine

Well, this is my first appearance in the press. Gary Marshall interviewed me for his article 'Freelancing: Ditch the Day Job' in this month's .net magazine... and it's a good article too: well...

09/09/04 Eyetrack III User Behaviour Results

The Eyetrack III appears to be a device that follows people's eyes as they look at things... What's this used for? Helicopters? Fighter pilots? Observing people as they look at websites? Yeah, the...

09/09/04 Zeldman on Amnesty Internation