A miscellany of opinions, thoughts, rants and comments
I’ve been working on a new website recently called They Blog For You, an aggregator of blogs by MPs. Part of the work involved in setting it up has been to try to track down all the blogs by sitting MPS.
As it happens, there aren’t all that many MPs with a blog – I could only [...]
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/geopostcode/
Many of you will probably remember the news story a while ago about the forced closure of ernestmarples.com, a website which provided a free postcode geolocation API that was, in turn, used by several other organisations running public service websites.
The reason it was shut down was because postcode geolocation data is the property of Royal [...]
In the course of a discussion about fixed v fluid width layouts for web pages, I dared to make the comment that fixed width design can actually be a usability bonus in some cases – something which is close to heresy among web design purists. As I pointed out, most web users are non-technical, and [...]
Hot on the heels of an EU regulation that could, if actually implemented and enforced, destroy the advertising-supported economy of websites based in Europe, the British government comes up with a proposal of its own that is equally ludicrous.
For those that may have missed it, the EU recently published a set of regulations that will [...]
n. Opposition to the state acknowledgement of Jedi as a recognised religion.
FaceTwitR
n. Generic name for the style of website design which attempts to mimic popular social networking sites.
Having recently started to use Twitter, I’ve noticed that a lot of posts use a URL-shortening system because of Twitter’s 140 character tweet limit. I’m already familiar with TinyURL.com as it’s useful for Usenet and email (and offline use, such as in print) when you need to shorten unfeasibly large URLs. TinyURL is fine for [...]
This has been doing the rounds of Facebook and mailing lists recently:
1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to “Random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is [...]
My photo gallery runs on Gallery2, which I like as a storage and display system but it’s not one of the most flexible photo gallery systems out there. Other than changing the themes and templates, it’s hard to customise the key functionality of it without using plugins – and if there isn’t one to do what [...]
A bit of shameless self-promotion: I was made redundant from my previous job late last year, so I’m in the market for something new. I’m happy to consider either freelance, contract or permanent work, provided that it’s the right job at the right price, so if you’re looking for an Internet and web geek to [...]