Archive for the 'web' Category
Save the Children! (and your feet)
Friday, July 7th, 2006
Bit of a plug for the charity work we’ve been doing back at the office; none of that web design lark, one of our very own creative team has been responsible for the design of a pair of flip flops for Save the Children in the UK. We’ve also been responsible for some promotional design and also the email marketing (which I had to code today, with like… tables and everything, a sin to web standards!).
If your feet are aching to break out of those stinky trainers over summer and have their chance to breathe, then the funky red flip flops are for you.
Priced at only £9.99 the proceeds will help in the fight against poverty, disease, injustice and violence against children both in the UK and globally.
Last.fm launches new beta packed with features
Sunday, June 25th, 2006
For those that aren’t already part of the revolution in discovering music that is Last.fm, it’s the flagship product from the same team in the UK that first brought us the AudioScrobbler music engine.
AudioScrobbler builds a music profile based on the artists and tracks that you listen to using either the Last.fm Player or via a plug-in for your favorite audio player.
Last.fm uses the data collected by AudioScrobbler and adds features such as social networking, tagging, forums and also journals to the mix, offering many ways for you to share your musical tastes with friends, view similar artists to the ones built up in your music profile, listen to samples of your recommended artists and much more.
Some of the most interesting features that I use most often are the ability to read about an artist that I am passionate about, and then view similar artists and explore their musical offerings.
Tag based exploration is also a favorite feature of mine, along with tag based radio allowing users to listen to randomized tracks belonging to a particular genre.
The new offering from Last.fm now includes a shiny new dashboard element that breaks down into the following sections:
- My friends online - a summary of which of your linked friends are currently listening with Last.fm and the most recent songs that they’ve been rocking their feet to.
- Last.fm Recommended Artists - a short list of artists that you might be interested in based on your previous listening habits, and also a collection of free songs that you can listen to in full.
- My Weekly Neighbours Online - other Last.fm users who have similar music profiles, and the last track that they listened to.
- Recommended Recent Journal Entries - journals written by other Last.fm users that have been linked to artists that match your music profile, or from groups that you have joined in the forums.
Overall the new features provide even faster access to exploring new music that is matched to your listening habits, and the new design which is still being tweaked with shows a lot of promise of being more appealing to less technically minded users.
sIFR 3 Alpha
Sunday, June 18th, 2006Mark 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.
Fired up after @media 2006
Saturday, June 17th, 2006It’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. (more…)