Unintentionally Blank

It has been a busy couple of weeks! I have been finishing my first full project at work, finishing a side project for work in my spare time, polishing off a couple of sites that I had ideas about a while ago and generally ignoring this blog! The web development world keeps spinning though so I have thrown together a few important stories that have happened since my last post, just in case you missed them.

WCAG 2.0 Last Working Draft In Call For Review

The once slated WCAG 2.0 working draft came up for public review again yesterday. It has been through review once and is ready for more scrutinizing from the public. See the call for review for all the details.

The Next Version Of IE Gets A Name

It might have seemed obvious to most, but the next version of everybody’s favourite browser, Internet Explorer, will be called IE8. It took Bill Gates to break it, but it is official now, IE.Next is IE8.

The Bizarre And Oh So Far Away HTML 5

Lachlan Hunt previewed HTML5 over at A List Apart. There is a lot to HTML5, new elements, new ways of thinking, semantics, structure and I admit that, even after reading the article there is still a lot to think about. Is this the right path to take? What about XHTML? Will the expected 10 - 15 years it is likely to take to come into play going to kill it before it even makes it to a recommendation? At the moment, I don’t know what to think.

A Race?

So, December has seen steps taken for HTML5, WCAG2.0 and IE8, but which will we see in use first? HTML5 looks out of the running, IE6 is still the world’s most used browser over IE7 and WCAG 2.0 took a beating last year, has it improved enough to get a more pleasant reception now? 2008 should be an interesting year for web development.

100 posts: a milestone, a turning point, a celebration.

It has taken a while though hasn’t it!

This blog, though only just reaching the century has been with me on quite a journey. I finished university at the start of last summer and started this blog in July 2006. Since then I got a job, moved to London, went without the internet for a number of weeks, returned with a site redesign, joined a blog network and got another job.

A Busy Year

So yes, it has been a busy year, full of sporadic posting and new things in the real world. So 100 posts, a long term job and some stability seem to combine now and make it time to re-evaluate.

This Sounds Serious

It is serious, but not in a bad way. In fact, I am quite excited! Unintentionally Blank has a lot of go in it, I have plans for posts (not something that happens every day), and I am gaining experience in my job every day. However, I also don’t want to spend all my time writing about the web, however much I enjoy it. There have been times in the last year where I have gone off on tangents and I want more of it!

So, I have decided that Unintentionally Blank will remain my web development blog, and only web development. I will post a, hopefully, steady stream of articles and opinions on developing for the web. But what about the tangents and the off topic stuff? For that, I have a new blog, Everything Must Go, a place that I can talk about anything, and I hope you’ll join me.

Thank you for sticking with me this far, now it’s time for me to step it up a gear!

Hans at Blogosquare is running a competition that allows you to show off your own themes or templates that you have designed and, if you top the voting at the end of the competition, a great prize. The prizes avaliable are:

1. 1 year hosting and a .com domain name as well as a review by TechZonline
2. Flickr Pro account allowing you all the unlimited goodies like unlimited storage on your Flickr account.
3. Mint Stats to track your visitors on your site

If you want to enter, visit the competition page to find out how.

If you don’t want to enter, visit anyway and rate the designs that have been entered. I put in the design for this blog, so if you like it I would really appreciate a few extra votes in the competition.

Good luck to everyone else that has added their designs for the competition too.

You may have noticed that I’ve spent a bit of time over the last couple of days tweaking my design a bit. Some of this tweaking was to make the design a bit more readable, some of it was to help out the search engines in deciding what each page on this site was about and finally I made a change to make it easier to submit my articles to any social bookmarking or social media sites. Some changes you will have noticed, others might slip by you and some you will only have got if you regularly view the source of the different pages on this site.

Continue reading “Tweaks For Readers, For Search, For Social Media” »

Gack Ink the new, bring your own blog network recently had their first round of submissions. I had a go and entered this blog and am pleased to say that I was accepted, along with the following other blogs:

• Brainfizzle
• Writing Thoughts
• Hamelife
• Mother Earthbeats
• Simply Sassy
• Amanita Muscaria

Continue reading “Joining Forces For A Better Blogging Experience” »