Unintentionally Blank

Wow! I haven’t written here for ages! It’s not like I don’t have anything to say either, I have some views and thoughts on reset style sheets, accessibility for the hearing impaired, microformats and the length of time it takes to load a site, but I just haven’t had the time to update!

What have I been doing then? Well, my job has been keeping me busy and recently we have launched two new sites, River Island’s Style Insider and Big Brother’s Big Ears. Both were hard work and took a lot of effort from the whole team, but also include some of my first bits of Ruby on Rails. I’m quite proud of being part of the team that has set both these sites up.

I almost lost my iMac the other week too, ended up re-installing OS X and crossing my fingers hoping that I didn’t lose all my data. Thankfully, it’s all still here, but that was a heart attack I didn’t need.

So what now? Well, I’m going to start posting again, starting with an update to my style sheet switcher. Why? Firstly, it’s very old code, back from when I knew hardly anything about javascript (though it works, can’t take that away)! Also, Smashing Magazine are having a style sheet switcher competition and I fancy entering that too, who wouldn’t want the prize on offer? There’s two weeks to enter, so I better get cracking.

In the meantime, if you do fancy keeping up with me off of the blog, I am on Twitter, so follow me!

Bye for now.

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, all this sitting about with my feet up has sort of put me off the computer for a while. I did upgrade my version of WordPress this evening to 2.5 (that’s right, check the number at the bottom of the page!), just so I could use the new light and airy admin interface designed by certain people I highly respect at Happy Cog Studios. Thankfully nothing went wrong, that I can see, but if you do happen to spot anything, do let me know.

Have you upgraded yet? If so, do you like the new interior? My favourite part is automatically upgrading plugins, but the design and usability is beautiful too.

It has finally happened, I got over myself and upgraded my old, so very old, version 2.2 WordPress. The longer it got, the more I didn’t want to do it, but as the days ticked over on my dashboard since the last release and talk of the upcoming version 2.5 started, I decided that I had to bite the bullet and just do it.

So I started myself a test server on my home desktop, installed WordPress 2.2, imported my blog and my theme and did a test run. This seemed to go well. Then I backed everything up, twice. Finally, after waiting and biting my nails for a couple of days, I went for it and now you can see the result. My theme works, I imported tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior and they seem to have worked, I upgraded a bunch of plugins and they seemed to work. Everything was happy.

Then I went to write a post and panicked! I knew that in the database some tables had changed, but when I got a message telling me, “[Table 'wordpress.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]” I scared myself and started thinking about all those backups I made. Thankfully this support thread helped me out straight away, since it turns out I hadn’t upgraded enough plugins.

If you do see any strange behaviour from this blog, do please let me know so that I can sort it as soon as possible. In the meantime you can carry on looking forward to an upcoming redesign to go with the new version, including tags and everything available with my new WordPress 2.3.3.

Come on, everyone has done it, putting your own name into Google to see what appears in the results or whether your blog is first. OK, so maybe I have had a slow Sunday as I come to write this, but I am pleased with my current results in the world’s biggest search engine. For a start I have had the top results for searches for Phil Nash for quite a while now, however there is a greater prize at stake. Taking the top spot for just a first name is quite a challenge and something I (quite excitingly!) find myself moving closer to every time I check.

So, I am even more pleased to say that I am one of the top 100 Phils in the world according to Google, appearing at 69 on Google.com, 32 on Google.co.uk and number 8 on Google.co.uk when searching for “pages from the UK”. To make it to the top will be tough, I will have to beat Phil Collins, the UK number 1, and Dr Phil for the coveted spot on Google.com, but I reckon I have time on my side and the patience!

Of course, the real aim is to to achieve something that amounts to high levels of geek cool like Matt Mullenweg’s business card (which reads “1. Go to google.com 2. Type in “Matt” 3. Press “I’m feeling lucky”).

One day I will have that! One day!

Have you googled yourself lately?

It may be belated, but happy new year to all my readers. Even more belated, merry Christmas! I hope you all had a nice holiday season, enjoyed whatever time off you could, got all the presents you wanted, saw all the family you hoped to (or could stand).

I spent the time visiting friends and family, which was lovely. My girlfriend also got me an Xbox 360, which she is probably regretting by now and added to the distractions which have kept me from this blog in the last couple of weeks.

I enjoyed myself, especially taking a bit of time off from the Internet (but for checking my emails and spam comments from my mobile, which turned out to be invaluable as Akismet missed a couple, obviously taking some time off too). It was quite nice to have some time away from a computer, but it is nice to be back too. I return to routine this week, as I am back to work, so I thought I would couple that with a return to the blog too.

Year In Review - 2007

2007 was my first full year blogging so it seems right to take a look back over what was popular, how the blog has grown and then have a look forward to the coming year to see where I am going.

I have seen a lot of growth in traffic and subscribers this year. Looking over my stats from January compared to December shows that traffic has increased nearly 250% and subscribers have gone from around 20 to around 120. Over the year I have managed to bring in more than 35,000 page views from more than 23,000 visits, figures that I am very happy with and pleased to say continue to grow.

But enough about my ego, how about the content? The most visited pages this year reflect some of my best posts, which I am happy about. The top 5 is as follows:

1. Cross Browser Background Transparency With CSS
2. How To Use Conditional Comments In Internet Explorer
3. My Style Sheet Switcher
4. My Opinions On Using Conditional Comments
5. My Original Font Sizing Script

4 out of those 5 are actually posts from 2006 (I suppose established posts tend to get more results from search engines) so if you are relatively new to the blog, please check them out!

The Year Ahead - 2008

Having been pleased with the growth above, all I want is more in 2008! This means I will be continuing my series on accessibility issues that you may not have thought about and web developer tools as well as more CSS techniques, accessibility issues, scripts and anything else that comes to mind. You may also see a new design soon and I might even upgrade from WordPress 2.2 (yes, I am lazy and haven’t upgraded at all recently). As always, if there is something you would like to hear my opinion about or need help with a technique that I have written about (or even those that I haven’t, if you want to test me), just drop me an email or leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading and being a part of this blog as we start in 2008. I hope to provide loads of useful stuff, so stick around, but I also hope to make more contacts online, so please say hi whenever you want. Happy new year!