Mark Boulton’s Five Simple Steps: A practical guide to designing for the web has to be my favourite web design book of the year. One of the many things I really love about it is the personalised anecdotal style applied throughout. It’s the kind of book that will age gracefully as it doesn’t dwell too [...]

Dan Wellman’s book jQuery UI 1.6 (ISBN 978-1-847195-12-8) from Packt Publishing is the kind of book I wish I had when I first started tinkering with jQuery.
Firstly, I’m a web designer, not a developer. Scripting scares me. I’m really out of my comfort zone when I need to bring a web page to life with [...]

A lot of web designers, myself included, are mostly concerned with the way things look when people visit the web sites we create. We’re all about the design — layout, typography, colour, graphics and how they enhance the user experience. We start with some sketches, do some wire-frames and rapidly move into software like Photoshop [...]

MediaWiki Skins Design — Designing attractive skins and templates for your MediaWiki site is the first book by UK based web designer Richard Carter. The book covers practical tips from the very basics to integrating MediaWiki with popular social networking services such as YouTube, Twitter and Delicious. It is published by PACKT publishing (ISBN 978-1-847195-20-3) [...]

The Life Pursuit is Belle and Sebastian’s eighth album (counting the faux-soundtrack, Storytelling and last year’s single’s and b-sides collection). It’s amazing to note how prolific they’ve been yet they’re still fairly underrated by the mainstreem. You’re more likely to hear their singles on Radio 2 than 1 and they do make some fairly odd [...]

Having spent a weekend dry-slope skiing in Southampton recently, it seemed only appropriate that we should make use of the relatively local Milton Keynes ’snowdome’, Xscape. This huge indoor ski slope contains real snow that is created using some sort of magic blowers. I don’t fully understand exactly how it works but skiing on it [...]

Helen and I had a nice lunch at the Hind’s Head Hotel in Bray, near Maidenhead, this afternoon. Owned by the same people who run the no.1 restaurant in the world, The Fat Duck (just over the road), the food was no less extravagant. I had a rabbit and bacon terrine to start followed by [...]

We took the long treck to Perth, Scotland to see one of my favourite bands, Belle and Sebastian, play the new Perth Concert Hall and it was well worth it.
As well as being treated to a couple of new numbers, the band did an on-the-fly cover of Elvis Costello’s Oliver’s Army. They played their second [...]

Is it just me or are the storylines on Sky One’s “Nip/Tuck” getting weirder and weirder as series (season) 2 progresses? Last nights episode was particularly odd as Sean McNamara discovered that his best mate and co-surgeon Christian Troy was actually the father of his son Matt. To pay him back for sleeping with his [...]