Web Development

Stories and Experience at TEDx Newcastle

On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of speaking at TEDx Newcastle, kindly organised by the good folk at Codeworks. I promised references to the various and assorted sources and here they are.

QIF Converter

I’ve been using Wesabe for a while now and I love it. Unfortunately only one of my banks offers transaction export. To patch that I’ve written a little converter…

Learning Ruby

A friend of mine wants to learn to program so I asked Lazyweb. Here are the links I got back.

Frankenstory

As a kid, did you ever play that game where you write a few lines of a story, fold the paper over and then pass it on?

Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map

Over on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s website they have a nice long list of places you should and shouldn’t go, which I decided to plot on a map.

@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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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…

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

Accesskeys are Dead, Long Live Access Points

The Future of Accesskeys from Derek Featherstone of WATS.ca makes for some interesting reading…

The Barriers to Web Standards Adoption

There’s been a really good discussion of web standards and their uptake going on over at asterisk over the past few days. Keith called on beginners and pros alike to say what they thought the barriers

Postage Paid Zen Garden Submission

Woohoo! My Zen Garden submission made it… I’m dead chuffed about that and more than a little bit relieved. I was trying to do something a little bit different to the other hi-design submissions

Amazon in XML/CSS

If this is what I think it is, it’s pretty damned clever… The Amazon site in pure XML using XSLT and CSS for styling. It’s a demonstration of what web services can do and the power of XML.