Unintentionally Blank

I’m busy at the moment, what with getting to and from work (admittedly taking up most of my time), playing rugby and keeping up with friends, family and eventually sleep. This is my attempt at an explanation for the poor quality of this blog at the moment.

But, I’m not just going to disappear because I run out of hours in the day to do all the stuff I want to. That’s one reason why I am posting now, you always have to make time to do things for yourself. I also fixed my stereo earlier, which was of great importance having bought a number of CDs recently and being unable to play them, but that is beside the point.

Continue reading “Theme Tweaking Hints” »

The waiting is over for those poor users of Internet Explorer 6 as yesterday Microsoft announced that IE7 is now available. Go, go and download it now and experience a safer and better way of surfing the web (with a Microsoft product). Then start up Firefox again, because you know better.

Big Changes?

IE7 means a few different things; a lot of bug fixes, removal of security holes, tabbed browsing, simpler interface, the list is probably longer than I’m willing to go on for, I’m not advertising it! But more importantly, this could affect any website already on the internet.

Your site may have looked great in IE6 after tweaking, and possibly hacking at it, but I urge you to try it in IE7 now (if you weren’t already looking with the beta versions). The problem is, the rendering has been improved, but it still isn’t of the capability of proper standards compliant browsers. Add to that the fact that all of the famous CSS hacks have been removed and any site could look wrong in IE7. My advice has always been to use conditional comments to keep your site looking good in IE, but I thought I’d warn you anyway.

Continue reading “Internet Explorer 7 Released” »

Hammer VS The Snake, the band I am very proud to be a part of, are back on the radio again tonight! As if featuring on Steve Lamacq wasn’t enough, HVTS will be on Xfm tonight, as part of the Music:Response show.

DJ Sarah Darling will be playing our track Blame in the Xfm Unsigned section of the show. You can listen to Blame on the Xfm Unsigned site, as well as this week’s other unsigned acts, or listen all week at 9:45pm. If you like any of them, you can vote for your favourite which will get played on Friday too.

However impartial I would love to be, this is my begging section. I hope that you like my band’s music, but please vote for them to be played again! It will help us no end to reach more music lovers and get our music out there. You can listen to more of our music at myspace too. I hope you like it.

Oh, and if you vote for us, I will also love you forever. Thanks

Update: Hammer VS The Snake were meant to be played last night on Xfm, however it seemed the DJ changed her mind and played the unsigned band that were scheduled for Wednesday. Keep listening to Xfm all this week to hear HVTS come up and in the meantime, you can still vote for us to be played on Friday too.

There is something soul destroying about the daily routine of a commuter; waking up at 6:15am every morning, getting on a train at 7:16, arriving in London at 8:30, squeezing onto an underground train and clocking in at work by just after 9. Nearly 3 hours to get from bed to desk, but the worst is yet to come. Leaving work at 5, squeezing back onto the tube, catching the 17:58 train (which you have to board 20 minutes before it’s departure time, just in order to get a seat) and arriving home around 20 past 7. 4 hours of travel a day, for 7 hours of work. I always believed that commuting would be hell and wasn’t the way I was going to spend my free time during my working life. I was right, but at least I know the truth from my own experience now.

Continue reading “Commuting - Not A Way Of Life” »

The Mobile Data Association has recently shown the steady rise in the usage of mobile phones to access the internet. Opera have celebrated more than 5 million active users of Opera Mini and over 1 billion page views by the mobile phone based browser (Source).

What Does This Mean For You?

This isn’t a problem for you if your website is validly and semantically marked up to the standards of our friends the W3C. In fact, it is a bonus, the use of mobile phones to browse the internet means people have more opportunity to find your site and become regular readers. However, if your site is hiding dodgy code, it may not be displaying well at all on these miniature screens. And if your page isn’t marked up and laid out well then you could be turning off your potential mobile viewers.

Continue reading “The Mobile Web Users Cometh, Are You Ready?” »