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 [...]
Published on May 20, 2009
Tags: book, Review, webdesign
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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 [...]
Published on March 27, 2009
Tags: ajax, book, jquery, Review, webdesign
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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 [...]
Published on March 19, 2009
Tags: book, Books, javascript, jquery, Review, Web design, webdesign
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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) [...]
Published on November 5, 2008
Tags: Books, Review
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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 [...]
Published on February 27, 2006
Tags: Life, Music, Review
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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 [...]
Published on February 13, 2006
Tags: Personal, Review
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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 [...]
Published on January 3, 2006
Tags: Food, Review
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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 [...]
Published on September 21, 2005
Tags: Music, Review
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The Guardian newspaper revealed a new look, new format today. It’s a smaller size, following the lead of the Independent and Times. However, it’s not quite tabloid size. It’s somewhere between broadsheet and tabloid. I’m not sure of the exact reasoning behind this but I guess it is better than the awkward size in which [...]
Published on September 12, 2005
Tags: Review
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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 [...]
Published on April 4, 2005
Tags: Review, TV
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