I’m finding it increasingly difficult at the moment to find a balance between the amount of time spent contributing to work, the amount of time I spend attempting to be social and the amount of time that is spent on personal projects such as getting my own blog off it’s feet and into a prettier outfit.

Tonight for instance, I wanted to work on the bugs with the theme I was working on for WordPress for my own blog (where you happen to be reading); by the time I’d finished deploying various new features for a client site live and then enjoyed (fallen asleep during) a tube journey home, it was already edging towards 9pm.

Sure, I don’t need to spend time in front of a computer geeking away when that’s what I’ve been doing all day, but it is something that I wanted to do tonight and there are only so many hours in the day before you’re required to get into bed and recharge the batteries before the commercial world comes to get you again.

It’s been suggested that we’ll be moving offices in six to nine months, and the locations that the company have been looking at would probably cut my journey in the mornings and on the way home down from over an hour each way, to half an hour each way. It might not sound like a huge difference for those that have the luxury of a short walk or drive to work, but over here that means less time in the stuffy underground transport system, and an entire hour of the day reclaimed!

Until then I’ll have to make do and remember to get some of that sleep stuff that everyone keeps telling me about… I seem to have been trying to substitute it recently with large amounts of caffiene.

Mark Wubben over at NovemberBorn has recently announced the release of the long awaited sIFR 3 alpha. When I first found the time at work to play with sIFR 2.x and had the opportunity to include it on a UK government site I had been working on I was absolutely convinced that it was the new alternative to accessible text headings.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) brought the promise of gorgeous looking headings in any font you choose whilst preserving valid structural mark-up and also a saving on the time of having to generate images for each of your graphically styled headings.

In practice after including sIFR on a few client projects I began to stumble across bugs and difficulties, transparent backgrounds, font sizing and font wrapping just to name a few. I became rather resistant to using sIFR 2.x on client sites due to the unpredictable nature of any text that got close to a line in length, that may now change with the sIFR 3 alterations to those features.

I’ve started playing with sIFR 3 alpha today in the new design I’m developing for this blog and I’m already seeing a fair improvement in the features… the font sizing issues appear to have been resolved, transparent backgrounds are supported in full for the browsers that support transparent Flash movies, yes, there are a few bugs remaining but it’s only an alpha release.

Keep your eyes peeled over at the sIFR 3.0 alpha pages for future developments and bugs that fellow developers may have already experienced.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written any material that has been publicly available on the web, be it personal or professional. Since then my career has taken many paths from back-end developer through to front-end engineer and accessibility expert, and now to a role as senior developer at a full service digital agency based in London that sits somewhere inbetween the two with a much broader set of skills that need to be dusted off just as frequently.

On Thursday and Friday of this week I had one such opportunity to dust off with my colleagues Will Howat and Helen O’Doherty by attending @media 2006 with speakers such as Eric Meyer (CSS overlord), Molly E. Holzschlag (mother nature of the Web), Jeremy Keith (good turtle), Tantek Çelik and many others. Read the rest of this entry »