Since the great Dot Com crash, there’s been a huge rationalization of ‘free web services’ and a corresponding commercialization of many others, covering themselves with a pile of adverts. Every now and then, however, I come across a site that has managed to maintain a functional clean design, free of advertizing, with a really useful service. Three that spring to mind are:
- The Lomographic Society – the worldwide community built up around the Lomo Kompakt Automat camera, offering free photographic hosting for all their members.
- Beer in the Evening – the ultimate A-Z of pubs in London, and the UK at large. If you’re looking to meet up with a bunch of friends, then don’t send around the Streetmap URL, go for the Beer in the Evening link instead.
- Move Flat – Loot clearly hasn’t taken advantage of the opportunities offered by the web for enhancing its advertising services. Still restricting you to next to no lines of text for description, and crude search services. They’re probably afraid of impacting the sales of the dead tree version. Move Flat, however, has no such qualms, allowing incredibly detailed information about your flat to be entered, combined with fantastic search service. What’s more its all completely free!
It was many months ago now (back in November of last year no less), that I decided it was about time I re-designed this site to use purely semantic HTML and CSS for all the styling. After much experimentation with CSS, and several throw away designs, I came up with what we see now. Traditionally such a layout would require complex HTML tables, but after alot of reading around I gained a new level of understanding of CSS positioning, and managed to transform the very simple HTML into a layout which displays remarkably consistently across Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Opera and Konquerer. The beauty is that now I’ve got the HTML sussed, I can play around with the CSS at will specifying multiple Alternate Stylesheets for testing until deciding upon a new ‘live’ style. While I’ve not quite reached my original goal of working on a Next Cube with the original web browser, I’m orders of magnitude closer that I was this time a year ago.
A few months ago Tom, Jeremy & I paid a visit to a basement bar ‘The Comedy’ off Leicester Sq, where amongst others we heard Tribryd play. Fast forward a few months & I finally manage to get hold of a copy of their demo CD Jeremy picked up at the Gig. Its been the top player this past week, with an interesting sound reminiscent of JJ72, with the lead singer Ally sounding quite like Courtney Love at times. I think I might just have to swing by their next Gig in early December
After a lot more work documenting the configuration parameters for the builder, Test-AutoBuild 1.0.2 release is now available. As well as the documentation improvements, there are two new HTML status page features. First is simply the ability to create arbitrary hyperlinks, second is a facility for copying build artifacts to the website, for example test results.
I’m in the process of switching over to using the PHP Gallery software for managing my photos. Pictures from the BVI, New York & Philadelphia are now online in the new gallery. Many more will be uploaded when I finally get around to buying a Nikon Coolscan and processing the several thousand photos I’ve accumulated over past year.