O’NEILL:DESIGN

Have you checked out Google’s big brother view?  Damn scary stuff – hope you weren’t undressing when their camera car was passing. They’ve got street views of 25 major towns so far, including Leeds.

Just go to Google maps and zoom in – then zoom in a bit more. Or test it out below.

Thought I’d take a trip down memory lane and check out my time in London.

The bustling hive of activity that was Battersea’s student halls of residence doesn’t look much different from when I was there. Only it’s now certified as derelict. What a waste – it overlooked Battersea Park. Though the locals are kicking up a fuss.

Of course Street View is not without it’s detractors – the main concern being privacy.

The cities covered by Street View UK are: London, Edinburgh, Leeds, Bradford, Cambridge, Cardiff, Belfast, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby, Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Swansea, York, Newcastle, Dundee, Southampton, Norwich and Scunthorpe.

You may not be aware of this but web developers hate Internet Explorer 1/2/3/4/5/6/7. No, hate is too weak a word. Despise, revile and abominate would be more appropriate.

Why developers hate IE…

When a designer builds a website he or she expects it to look the same no matter which browser it is viewed in. To this end there is a set of browser compliance standards. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera make fine efforts to pass the test. Microsoft, however has arrogantly ignored these standards. Hence the designer must fiddle around with tedious bits of additional code to make it look and work properly. Do not underestimate how aggravating this can be.

Random quotes:

‘As someone who writes web apps IE has wasted thousands of hours of my time, hate is not even a strong enough word to express how I feel about IE.’

‘I like to say I don’t hate anyone or anything in this world, because hate is a powerful word, but I absolutely hate Internet Explorer.’

‘Look, I hate IE. I hate it.’

Happy days?

Good news everybody – IE 8 is the first version of Microsoft’s browser to be compliant with some key industry standards: HTML and CSS.

Problem solved?

I’m afraid not. There are people out there still using IE6, never mind IE7. It’s early days but so far the take up of IE8 has been slow and we have yet to see the inevitable set of new problems that this release brings with it.

Should you upgrade to IE8?

I’d wait a while but you can always try it and then remove it later. Maybe a better idea all together is to use one of the following browsers instead:

Firefox

Chrome

Safari

Opera

In fact there’s no reason why you shouldn’t install and test all of them.

Too overpowering therefore we are sampling ‘fspring’. Cleaner.

Interesting story at CMSwire.com. In an Iron Chef-like match-up, a team of developers from Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress had 100 hours to build a website based on a specific list of specifications and design.pdf. Then representatives of each team got to meet face to face to show off their hard work during the South by Southwest Interactive festival in a session called “The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny.” Read on…

Now this brings me to the monstrosity that is my new website. Let’s be honest it’s a tadge overpowering ;-)

It’s based on a great theme by FTL Wordpress Themes which I discovered at Smashing Magazine called ‘Color paper’. I’ve oxidised it into the present scrap yard you see before you. Reading FTL’s website I’m left somewhat confused. They offer a great selection of top themes all which are free, yet something is puzzling me – their website states: ‘If you would like to purchase a theme for complete rights, please contact us. Themes are priced at $4,000 each.’  Eh? What’s all that aboot? >emails FTL to discover the truth<…

I’m not a code-head. Maybe there are a certain proportion of my brain cells dedicated to code but I try to ignore them. I mean come on, how many people understand this:

More to the point – how many people want to understand it? Read on…

Hello people. Recently a client asked me if I did Wordpress sites. Now here’s the rub – it’s been a long time since I’d ventured into the crazy world of blogging. The last time I looked at Wordpress I opted for Blogger. Back then the interface looked daunting – and I wouldn’t want to daunt my clients. OK I confess – I was daunted too.

But more important than that – it didn’t handle static pages (i.e. pages not part of a blog). So as a full CMS solution it really didn’t hit the naughty buttons.

So how come nobody told me about Version 1.5 Read on…