As 2005 draws a close, a blogger’s thoughts inevitably turn to analysing, cataloging, listing and rating all the analysis, catalogues, lists and ratings from the preceding twelve months.
‘Tis indeed the season of goodwill. Yea, verily even amongst competing browser manufacturers.
I’m in Arizona at the end of a well-travelled year. This is my fifth time visiting the States this year (after Austin, Alaska, Florida, and Seattle). It’s the third time that I’ve flown the Gatwick to Dallas route.
It’s good to talk about typography. The last few weeks have been particularly good.
I’m off to spend Christmas in Arizona with Jessica and her family. A long day’s travelling awaits.
First, a picture emerged of me using the Force to choke some minion at Yahoo a few days back.
I was asked a while back if I would speak at an internal developers’ conference being held at Yahoo’s London offices. I was more than happy to. It was only later I found out that I was going to be the only non-Yahoo employee speaking… he
On the flight back from Barcelona, iPod earbuds bouncing the warm sounds of My Morning Jacket against my eardrums, I attempted to relax and read The Player Of Games. Ironically, two people sitting in front of me were real-life players of a game. Specifica
Hold my calls - I’ll be incommunicado for the next few days. I’m planning to spend the weekend in Barcelona.
I tend to avoid reading Jakob Nielsen. This time, I made the mistake of following a link from somebody else, started reading through Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time) and, before I was half-way through, I was fuming at the inaccuracies and sweeping genera
After I wrote my slightly offensive little rant, I was assailed by niggling twinges of doubt. Could it be, I wondered, that I came across as being… a nit-picker? (gasp!)
There’s a wonderful article over on Digital Web called "Resurrect Your Writing, Redeem Your Soul". It’s all about how to write well, especially on the Web, and it’s the very antithesis of Nielsen’s checklist approach.
I’m telling you this now so you’ve got plenty of time to start saving your money and you can’t say I didn’t give you fair warning…
Molly has landed on the shores of this scepter’d isle. Having delivered a workshop with Andy ‘Malarkey’ Clarke, what finer way to unwind than to spend a day with some Britpackers?
Thanks to the good folks at Vivabit, I’ve had the opportunity to take the DOM Scripting show on the road.
I’m back in my native time zone. The flight home went smoothly and after a day of napping, I’m feeling mostly human again.
I’m having a grand old time in Seattle. The weather, as to be expected, isn’t exactly glorious but that’s okay. I’m experiencing authentic Northwest overcast skies.
I’m back in Brighton for less than 24 hours.
I’m going to be incommunicado for the next few days. I’m heading back to my hometown in Ireland.
Back in July, a Flickr member posted a photoset of a commercial he was working on. The spot involved the release of 250,000 superballs down a hill in San Francisco. Other Flickrites also documented the release.
While we were in Brussels, Jessica and I paid a visit to the city’s museums. I’m more of a fan of art that isn’t prefixed with the word "modern", but I was pretty excited about seeing the Magritte collection in the Museum of Mo
I’ve been doing a lot of talking lately. It’s mostly all about that DOM Scripting stuff.
I spent the weekend in Brussels attending the Euro IA summit… well, kind of.
Internet entrepreneurship isn’t dead. After you’ve registered for d.Construct, I suggest you use your remaining PayPal balance over at OddzBallz.
If you’re anywhere within travelling distance of the south coast of England, be sure to keep your diary free for November 11th. On that date, Brighton will play host to Europe’s first Web 2.0 conference: d.Construct 2005.
Some things just don’t go together: toothpaste and orange juice, fox news and objective journalism, creationists and reality. Here’s another pair that aren’t compatible: blogging and non-disclosure agreements.
This is very neat: Flickrball is a Web 2.0 game. It combines the Flickr API, some nice DOM Scripting and six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
All’s well that ends well. You can ignore my earlier rant about the editorial cruelties that had been visited upon my article in Treehouse magazine. The PDF has been updated and you can now read A Brief History Of JavaScript as it was intended.
There’s a new PDF magazine on the block. Treehouse, from the folks at Particletree, should help fill the void left by the demise of the PDF magazine from Design In Flight.
The podcasts and the photos have started coming in from Web Essentials in Syndey. Oh, how I wish I could be there!
Whilst trawling through my regular RSS feeds last month, I came across this plea from Min Jung Kim:
While I was away in Florida, an opportunity arose for a Salter Cane concert. We were offered the support slot for Holly Golightly.
Hurricane Rita has swept past Florida as it heads out across the Gulf of Mexico towards Texas.
Monday, as I mentioned, was Talk Like A Pirate day. It most gratifying to see so many people using my pirate-speak page converter.
Most of you probably know this already, but I’ve joined forces with Andy and Richard. Collectively, we are known as Clearleft.
Don’t forget, ye scurvy dogs: September 19th is "Talk Like A Pirate" day. I suggest sailing the seas of the internet in the hold of my trusty ol’ piratifier, arrr…
I first met Cindy Li in Austin at South by Southwest. When she later visited England, she stayed over at Chez J&J in Brighton.
I’ll be travelling to Gatwick airport tomorrow morning to board a plane bound for Florida. Now that the state seems to be relatively hurricane-free, it’s as good a time as any to take a break and hang out at the beach house.
My brief foray to Londinium is at an end. On a balmy Wednesday evening, Jessica, Joe and I went to Leicester Square to watch a captioned film: the wonderfully entertaining Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Afterwards, Jessica and I (sans Joe) enjoyed a w
Southern England is experiencing some glorious weather right now. I don’t just mean that in a relativistic way, like it isn’t constantly pouring rain, I mean it’s genuinely hot, hot, hot.
On the off-chance that you’ve spent the last few days living under a rock, let me be the first to tell you that A List Apart has been redesigned.
The countdown begins. I’ve finished writing my book. It’s being hammered into shape at the print foundries as we speak. It should hit the shelves by the middle of September.
Ryan Carson, one of the minds behind BD4D, has started putting on some pretty darn excellent one-day workshops in London. He’s already had Eric Meyer over for CSS training. Next week, Cal Henderson will be talking about the building of Flickr.
In April 2004, Tim Bray wrote:
Everybody’s talking about the new meme on the block: Web 2.0. But what exactly does it mean?
When I first started reading this National Geographic article about ligers, a creature named in Napoleon Dynamite (it’s probably his favourite animal), I thought it was a parody. When the article began quoting actress Tippi Hedren about ligers and t
If you’re in Brighton and you’re wondering what to do with yourself on a Tuesday night, why night come along to the Hanbury Ballroom to watch my band Salter Cane raise the very ornate roof.
Andy "Malarky" Clarke penned an editorial a while back entitled Look out Johnny Foreigner in which he talked about web design and national identity.
I just heard that Robin Cook died today. I have to say I’m somewhat shocked.
Hot on the heels of the updated iBooks and Mac minis, Apple have announced an all-singing, all-clicking mighty mouse.
Microsoft have launched Virtual Earth, their new web-based, Ajax-fuelled mapping application.
I spent the weekend in Oxfordshire in the company of my fellow geeks and Brit packers. A photo pool has been set up on Flickr so you can see exactly who was there and what merry japes we got up to.
I’ve been working together with Message on a couple of different projects recently. Some of the more exciting work has involved building a new back end for the award-winning Rapha website.
It is with great pleasure that I direct your attention to the latest press release from the Web Standards Project:
I’m going to spend Wednesday, July 20th delivering some hands-on training in DOM Scripting. If you’ve got the time and the means, please do come along to The Leathermarket in London.
Following the attacks in London this morning, I’ve had messages from friends abroad asking if I’m alright. Thank you all for your concern. I’m fine.
I have just one or two things I need to get off my chest and then I’ll stop banging on about Live 8.
I couldn’t take any more punishment. The cumulative effect of Joss Stone, The Scissor Sisters and Velvet Revolver drove me out of Hyde Park. If I had stuck around to endure the pain of Robbie Williams and Mariah Carey, I fear that my exploding head
I’m at the Live8 concert in Hyde Park in London. Andy had a spare ticket and kindly invited me along. I bet he’s regretting it now: he has to listen to my curmudgeony whining all day.
I wrote a little while back about an extremely frustrating problem I was having with Mac OS 10.4, Tiger. I know I wasn’t the only one having suffering from infuriation: Dave was in a similar pickle.
In his presentation at @media, Joe Clark set CSS designers a homework challenge, the same one detailed in his article on A List Apart: offer a high-contrast, large text version of your site.
I came across this blog entry in Spanish, El año de Malcolm Gladwell.
As Jeremy Keith awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Thanks to an invite from Dunstan, I’ve been playing around with Odeo for the past few days. I like it. I like it a lot.
Jessica has just finished reading the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System Of The World.
I’ve been making some tweaks to the stylesheets ‘round here. If things look a little screwy, I’ll echo Jason Kottke’s advice:
The @media whirlwind is over. Here’s the short version: it was great.
Bujumbura
London seems to be geek capital this week.
If, like me, you’ve spent most of your waking hours for the past few months living, eating and breathing JavaScript, you might welcome the opportunity to talk with some like-minded folks. Even if you’re not quite that sad, you still might like
I upgraded to Tiger a little while back. Frankly, I’m a little underwhelmed.
I went to see Revenge Of The Sith again, this time with Andy in tow. As I suspected, I was able to concentrate on the film in its own right as opposed to the experience of viewing "the last new Star Wars film".
There are certain things that figure heavily in the psyche of any self-respecting geek: a history of role-playing games, the ability to channel Monty Python, an encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien and, of course, Star Wars.
I made a brief foray into town yesterday to pick up a few items.
I got back from the States yesterday to find that I’ve been handed musical batons by Andy, Richard and Andrea. If I could juggle, I’d put on a show. Instead, I’m going to pass them on like hot memetic potatoes. Here goes…
I’ve had an absolutely great time in Alaska…
My cruise around Alaska’s Inside Passage has come to an end. The Spirit Of Endeavour docked in Juneau and we disembarked this morning.
The Spirit Of Endeavour has docked in the lovely town of Sitka. I’ve tracked down an internet cafe and I finally managed to upload some pictures to Flickr. I’ve also updated the gallery right here.
I’m on the Spirit Of Endeavour, four days out from Seattle.
Seattle is my kind of town. Whenever I’m here visiting, I always find myself thinking about what it would be like to live here. I think I could get used to the lifestyle.
Jessica and I are flying to Seattle tomorrow. We’ll spend the weekend with her brother, Jeb, taking in the sights and sounds.
It looks like I’ve been chosen as a guinea pig for a design that Amazon is considering. Changes like these are usually served up on a small subset of Amazon’s servers. It’s then delivered to a correspondingly small subset of visitors.
I mentioned a little while back that there seems to be more and more bits of me scattered around the internet. My photos are on Flickr, my wishlist is on Amazon, my links are on Del.icio.us and my events are on Upcoming.
Warning: this is going to be meta-writing. I’m going to blog about blogging.
There are a lot of ways of tracking up-to-the-minute memes on the Web right now. You can check out what’s hot on Technorati. You can find out what’s popular with Del.icio.us.
A little while back, Derek Featherstone started a discussion about what he called browser elitism. There were some interesting and very revealing comments.
I took some time out yesterday to attend a little literary event. The authors Rupert Thomson and Andrew Miller were speaking and reading at The Old Market, which is right at the end of my street.
I’d like to just clear up a few small points just in case there is some misunderstanding.
Good design doesn’t draw attention to itself. Really good design is invisible.
Aaron Gustafson is one smart cookie.
Slap your PayPal payment down for the latest issue of Design In Flight, the PDF magazine for design professionals and web developers.
Even before the election was announced, the Tories had been actively peddling their particular breed of populism.
If only this were a server response instead of a message count…
Molly’s been busy lately. Not only has she been interviewing the father of CSS, she’s also found time to put together a table of syndication link locations.
Mark Cuban believes the countdown to the extinction of CDs is about to begin. He bases this on personal experience:
iChat is a nice little application, one that I find myself using more and more each day.
Following on from my low-tech solution for displaying Del.icio.us links here on my journal, I thought I’d apply the same technique to another RSS feed.
Jeff Veen hits the nail on the head with this straightforward observation:
I’ve made a couple of small tweaks to my humble journal.
I really like the design of Absenter. It’s a photography site where the photographs take centre-stage.
It was Andy’s idea.
My latest submission to the Mirror Project does quite a job at capturing the spirit of South by SouthWest.
Plenty of people have been writing about the contents of individual panels and presentations from South by SouthWest. I thought it might be interesting to give a broader overview and take a look at some recurring themes.
I realised something while I was at South by SouthWest: I’m an online introvert.
I’m back in Brighton. At least, my body is back in Brighton. I would appear to have left a good proportion of my heart in Austin, Texas.
I’m having an absolute ball here at SXSW. By day, I’m filling up my brain with incredibly useful information and ideas. By night, I’m meeting great people and generally having a fun time.
‘Tis done. Andy and I delivered our banter to a room full of unsuspecting South by SouthWest attendees yesterday. You can look through the slides if you like.
I’ve arrived in Austin. The South by SouthWest festival hasn’t started yet and I’m already having a great time meeting some wonderful people.
Just in time for South by SouthWest, the Washington post has published an article called “Texas Eat ‘Em” about barbecue in the Lone Star State:
The RSS-o-sphere is fairly humming with postings from bloggers announcing their imminent departure for Austin, Texas. Who am I to buck the trend?
The other day, Jessica said:
The excitement over Ajax shows no signs of dying down anytime soon. The Man In Blue has weighed in with his thoughts on the matter:
Speaking of cool JavaScript applications…
Finally, I no longer have to use the tongue-twisting phrase XMLHttpRequest every time I want to talk about a web app that uses JavaScript to make calls to a web server. Jesse James Garrett has coined the term Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
That Richard Rutter is a jolly good egg. He found himself with a spare ticket for a Wedding Present concert and kindly offered it me.
Jason Kottke has given up his day job. He is now attempting to make a living from personal publishing.
Oh, mighty LazyWeb, I beseech thee. How about integrating Address Book with Skype so that I can dial telephone numbers without cutting and pasting?
London was the setting for another geekend get-together on Saturday.
About a week ago, I was having a chat with Andy about all things web related. It seems that Andy and I use the web in very different ways.
Google Maps is in Beta. Normally, a Beta phase doesn’t last all that long. It’s a time to test, tweak and get things ship-shape before a final release.
I’m jealous of Jessica.
I’ve released my latest little DOM Scripting experiment into the wild here at adactio. It’s a simple little animation that responds to mouseovers in a list of links.
Last year, the New York Times ran a story about the iPod’s shuffle feature. "Is it really random?", they wondered.
This is pretty cool: Panic Software, makers of fine mac apps, have opened up a little store called PanicGoods. It sports a very nifty drag’n’drop interface.
When Apple released the G5 iMac, I professed my hope that we would soon see some third-party armatures:
In his seminal 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell outlined some simple guidelines for writing. These include:
Paul Haine got in touch with me and asked:
Hello Wired News people,
When I was back in Ireland for Christmas, I helped a friend to clean his parent’s PC of spyware. There were about 30 separate pieces of malware lurking inside the computer. His cousin’s computer had over 100.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that Jamie, head-honcho at Message, has a brother who is a famous act-ohr.
It is no coincidence that industrial manufacturing plants aggregate close to sources of raw material. The North of England and the Ruhrgebiet in Germany were both rich sources of coal and centres of industry.
I’ve been tinkering with my portfolio. I decided that rather than having a long list of all the work I’ve done, it would be better to highlight just a few pieces that I’m particularly proud of.
Just in case I haven’t completely hammered the point home lately, I have a feeling that 2005 is going to see a big surge in the use of the Document Object Model with JavaScript.
Waterloo: Napoleon did surrender. What better way to commemorate that event of 1815 than naming a train station after it?
I’ve been spending most of my time over at Message lately working on a big intranet project. It’s not just a website behind a firewall. It’s more like a desktop application on the web that happens to reside in a walled garden.
A few weeks ago I spent a most pleasant Sunday evening in a Dublin bar called Solas. Myself and my friends were enjoying the free WiFi and the excellent range of cocktails and beers on offer.
While I was relaxing in Ireland over Christmas, I was blissfully cut off from my usual diet of a constant stream of RSS feeds. I didn’t mind missing the latest news stories, magazine articles and blog entries but I did feel a twinge of guilt when I
As one year wanes and another waxes, it’s traditional for newspapers, television programmes and websites to post lists. Usually those lists offer a backwards-over-the-shoulder look at the year gone by as they posit the best movies and music of the l
Belated Happy New Year