It seems like Facebook has become something of a platform for activists and campaigners in the UK looking to spread their message and makes changes. We’ve already seen how it can be used to influence the outcome of something trivial like the Christmas music charts, but how about something more serious, like fuel prices?
New Facebook Group Aims to Lower UK Fuel Prices by Boycotting Tesco
February 3rd, 2010Time to Say Goodbye to the Pagefold? Nope!
December 18th, 2009My friend and colleague Jon Frost sent me an interesting link this morning, to ThereIsNoPageFold which got me thinking about the page fold and whether it’s still relevant in modern web design.
My conclusion was simple; of course it bloody is!
Please turn off real time search Google!
December 9th, 2009Anyone else finding that thing bloody annoying? Could they at least make it opt-in?
I type in a query and expect to see a nice list of relevant results, but now instead I see not only a couple of adverts (which I’ve gotten used to ignoring, unless a company is stupid enough to bid on their own name, in which case I click it) but now 2 massive twitter quotes too, which pushed the search results to almost below the pagefold on my 15″ laptop screen!
What has become of Mr. X?
December 6th, 2009I few weeks ago I read the post on Dustin Curtis’ blog about how rubbish American Airlines’ website is, and the subsequent response from one of their employees, Mr. X. And then, a few days later I was shocked to read that AA had fired Mr. X!
I stumbled upon the post again and was reminded that Andrew Daniel, who leads the UX team at Sears asked Mr. X to send his resume and portfolio so they could discuss the possibility of a job. So now I’d like to know how that turned out!
Did Mr. X send his portfolio? Did he get a job with Sears? And if not, what’s the poor bugger up to? He’s become something of a celebrity in the web design world so should make the most of it!
So, anyone know where we can find out?
Good lord there are some sick web developers out there
December 5th, 2009I’m not prone to angry outbursts, but I’ve just seen something that’s really pissed me off.
A Refreshing Variation on the old “List of # <insert anything>” blog post
December 5th, 2009Just when I was losing faith this shows up.
Josh Sears’ post, “25 Examples of Web 2.0 and Traditional Design Rules Coming Together” doesn’t just list the websites, but each one is also accompanied by a good chunk of content which talks you through the site and how elements of its design apply to the topic at hand.
Google Analytics goes Asynchronous
December 2nd, 2009Google have just announced an amazing new feature / change to the way we implement Google Analytics tracking code. It’s called Asynchronous Tracking and basically it means that the GA javascript can be downloaded separately from the rest of the page’s content, resulting in faster load times.
Another nice effect of this is that we can now put GA code at the top of the page, meaning accuracy will increase!
I won’t go into the technical details, you can read those over at the Google Code Blog, and you should check out the migration examples too.
Now is the time of @font-face
November 30th, 2009Up until a few days ago I didn’t give the @font-face part of CSS a second thought, but I think I may be about to give it another look. For anyone who doesn’t know, it allows you to use fonts stored on the web server in your web pages rather than having to rely on the visitor having the font installed on their machine.
How to prolong Laptop (Li-ion) battery life
November 28th, 2009Laptops batteries are a pain. After a couple of years we’ve all found that or battery life has dropped from the 4 hours we got originally down to 30 minutes if we’re lucky.
I’ve decided therefore to try and come up with some simple rules for making sure my laptop batteries last much longer than this, hopefully for many years.
Part 2 of my Real Review of the ASUS X5DIJ Laptop
November 28th, 2009Ok, it’s been a week, and so far the laptop is performing well. I’ve installed Office 2007 Enterprise, which is running well and programming websites in PHP has been easy peasy. I think the wireless card has to be the best one I’ve experience yet, although I’ve never had anything that you would call premium hardware on that front. But still, it seems faster than my PC’s connection which goes via 100Mbps Ethernet!