Blog

Yes folks, it's time for another redesign. Sorry to keep confusing you like this.

The previous incarnation of this site was one of my favourites, when it was sitting in my graphics editor. Once it had been painfully transferred over to HTML and CSS though, it lost whatever it had that made me like it. It also refused to work in Internet Explorer, and as far as I can tell, that is down to a combination of bugs in the browser and my code.

Regardless, I've had enough of V4 of the site, so have put together V5, which hopefully you are now seeing. It's warmer than previous incarnations, and I think better laid out. There's more whitespace, which is always a good thing. There's an updated logo (not vastly different, but a bit closer to the idea I originally had), and there's even a tagline, which is at the bottom of the page because I couldn't make it look good anywhere else. See, this is why I'm not a designer.

Here's a brief rundown of what's new and what's changed:

• Comment Feeds
  Comment feeds are now available for all posts in case you want to keep up to date, in both Atom and RSS formats.
• Recent Posts
  Recent Posts are now listed at the bottom of each article. Plenty of people were arriving at the site from direct links to articles, and from the testing I have done it seems clear that those few that want to keep reading would like to know where the newer stuff is.
• Front Page
  The front page of the site has had probably the most significant overhaul. It's now usable, which may come as a shock to some.
• Topic Navigation
  The topics list in the right hand navbar has been altered too. It's been broken down into sections, and smaller categories have been removed. They're still accessible through the "Articles" page, but these are the categories rarely viewed by browsers.

That's more or less it, though I'm bound to have forgotten to mention something important. All criticism, constructive or otherwise, is much appreciated!

During a particularly geeky conversation recently, the topic got around to Web Design Commandments. If I were to come up with them, they might be a little something like this. I'm sure not everyone will agree with these though, so please feel free to add to the list!

1. Thou Shalt Be Damn Careful If Thou Must Use Embedded Audio Or Video.
2. Thow Shalt ensure Designers, Developers And Marketers Work With, Not Against, Each Other.
3. Thou Shalt Not Covet <blink>, <marquee>, JavaScript Slide-Ins, Images Following The Mouse Around Or Other Foul Tags and Effects.
4. Thou Shalt Not Waste The Users' Time Demanding Unnecessary Information.
5. Thou Shalt Not Use Flash For Everything.
6. Thou Shalt Code Using Specifications And Standards.
7. Thou Shalt Structure Thy Site In A Meaningful Way.
8. Thou Shalt Not Confuse The User With Unclear Navigation.
9. Thou Shalt Test Thy Site Extensively.
10. Thou Shalt Give The User What The User Wants.

Earlier this week, this site was linked to from digg.com. Apologies to the couple of hundred thousand people who tried to visit after my host decided to take the site offline. I have signed up to a new hosting package that should be a bit more robust, and will be switching everything over throughout the next few days. Apologies for any problems - there are bound to be a few!

Update: All should be more or less sorted now - DNS is almost finished switching, and comments for most people should be working. That was a relatively painless move, as they go!

Another Update: It looks like the site has completely moved, and I'm happy to report no loss of data. Email is working, as are all the automated bits and bobs. I now have much more bandwidth to play with, too.

Now, at last, I can get back to working on the new design.

On Saturday 22nd April, Mrs Dave and I, were married at Barnsgate Manor Vineyard in Sussex. I have thousands of photos to sort through but here are the best we have so far (click to see the complete set).

For now, I'll leave you with the briefest of recaps: the day went perfectly, we were lucky with the weather, and Mrs ILJD looked stunning.

Top 10 lists appear to be going through something of a resurgence. Here are the 10 best Top 10 lists I've seen.

Sorry.

1. Top 10 Reasons Why Sex at the Speed of Light is not an Advisable Form of Procreation
2. Top 10 Reasons Why Nobody Reads Your Blog (they seem to be missing one reason ... 11. You keep posting Top 10 lists.)
3. Top 10 Strangest iPod Accessories
4. Top 10 Worst Movies of the 90s
5. Top 10 Celebrity Mistakes
6. Top 10 April Fool's Gadgets
7. Top 10 Worst Album Covers
8. Top 10 Urban Legends of 2004
9. Top 10 Bizarre Names Celebrities Gave Their Kids (it's missing Moses, sadly, but I think we can safely assume that would have made the list)
10. Top 10 Signs you Drank Too Much (missing: 11. You own an alcohol-related domain name.)

It occurred to me while chatting to a couple of other developers this week that an awful lot of PHP developers work on Windows. While this may not be a startling revelation, it did make me wonder how much trouble someone who's never dabbled in Linux would have getting a standard LAMP setup going by themselves (for a development environment). Personally, I found Linux software installation to be quite tricky, when I started using Linux more, and were I just using it to get LAMP going I might have given up on it. Which in turn made me wonder - is there a Linux distro that is nice and easy to install, and comes with LAMP all set up?

I've been having a bit of a play recently with Sudoku (generators, solvers and puzzles). It's all the rage, after all. While I was at it I came up with what I believe is a new type of Sudoku puzzle - colour sudoku. There's an example below, I'll be releasing a Colour Sudoku site in the near future (once I get hosting figured out) I've released a Colour Sudoku site! Feedback is very welcome - enjoy!

To play, you must fill all columns and rows with the digits 1-9. Each digit can only appear once in each column and row. Additionally, you must fill each set of nine identically-coloured squares with the digits 1-9. Good luck!

John Scott, infamous courter of controversy, has decided to put a fairly hefty sum of his own money on the line to see if we can't address a little of the imbalance in the blogosphere (oh, how I hate that word). He's offering $10,000 to be split between bloggers who link out to the lesser known blogs out there - those outside the various Top 100 lists and those who never seem to be named in one of those meme things that go around from time to time.

With that in mind, I find myself in the position of being sorely tempted to join in. Not so much for the money (though I wouldn't mind a few extra dollars), but more because I often finding myself coming across blogs that just don't get the credit they deserve. I can't count the number of times I have seen someone post an intelligent thought, or a new technique for achieving something, that has gone largely unnoticed - and then a few weeks later something similar is linked to by everyone under the sun because it has appeared on a Top 100 blog. I'm not accusing anyone of plagiarism, of course. A little known site can post something spectacular and be passed by, while one of the "A list" can post a picture of their breakfast and have it seen by half the known World within minutes.

Maybe it's all down to rampant ass-kissing. The little guys want to be noticed and so they go name dropping and linking to big sites. You only have to read the fawning comments on some of the posts by the technorati elite to see just how desperate people are to be noticed by these big fish. And for good reason - a link from one of the top sites can bring in tens of thousands of visitors overnight.

Sites like Digg and del.icio.us are helping address the balance. By focussing on individual posts and articles, they are helping filter quality. Of course, a site needs to be noticed by lots of Digg or del.icio.us users to be ranked well - which means they need to be widely read in the first place.

Enough ranting - one thing the average blogger can do to help these smaller sites is to link to them. Not just add them to an anonymous, overlooked list on the side of your site, mind - write about what you have found. Tell people, properly, why they should take time out of their day to follow your recommendation and visit somewhere new.

My thanks go out to Binny for naming one of my posts in his Best of 2005 roundup. I'm honoured!

The comments area has been improved (hopefully!) today. The form has been moved to below the comments (people have emailed me to mention it is inconvenient to move back to the top of a page in order to reply), and a live preview feature has been added, including live previewing of favatars.

I don't know why, yet, but the site appears to be flaking out a little in Firefox. I am working on ironing out these glitches though, so don't worry, normal service (such as it is) will resume soon. (Update - Firefox bug fixed).

You may or may not have noticed a new design here. It's a "live" redesign, which is to say that I've had it in the works for a while and putting it live with a few bugs will motivate me to get it finished properly a bit quicker! I know the comment posting form is a little funky looking, and IE has a problem with the rounded corners, but if you spot anything else wrong, please let me know.

A proper write-up of the redesign is on the way, but wanted to let you know of a small new feature added in this redesign - the favatars. Have a look at a comments section, and you will see them next to each post. Once the live comment preview is added, there will be live favatar previewing as well.

Just a quick note - the "Remember Me" option for comments was broken temporarily. One of the fixes I added to prevent comment spam (and it's getting silly now - 3000 spam comments in the last 10 days) caused the problem, but that's now fixed.