I’m pleased to announce the completion of a new website for Nicholas Merchant’s company: www.aspectevents.co.uk

“Taking you to fascinating places for enjoyable short breaks in congenial company.”

Check out Brian Gallagher’s new blog which I’ve created in Wordpress:

www.bdgart.com/blog

Some great illustrations and worth subscribing to.

In cooperation with the Conrad Davies Company I’m pleased to announce the launch of the Harrogate International Festivals new website.

HIF, who had previously being using Adobe Contribute, wanted an easier admin system and we decided Wordpress was the way forward. Based on Conrad’s branding the site spans three areas – the HIF main portal, the Summer Music Festival and the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.

Just go to Google maps and zoom in – then zoom in a bit more. Or test it out below.

Thought I’d take a trip down memory lane and check out my time in London.

The bustling hive of activity that was Battersea’s student halls of residence doesn’t look much different from when I was there. Only it’s now certified as derelict. What a waste – it overlooked Battersea Park. Though the locals are kicking up a fuss.

Of course Street View is not without it’s detractors – the main concern being privacy.

The cities covered by Street View UK are: London, Edinburgh, Leeds, Bradford, Cambridge, Cardiff, Belfast, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby, Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Swansea, York, Newcastle, Dundee, Southampton, Norwich and Scunthorpe.

Why developers hate IE…

When a designer builds a website he or she expects it to look the same no matter which browser it is viewed in. To this end there is a set of browser compliance standards. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera make fine efforts to pass the test. Microsoft, however has arrogantly ignored these standards. Hence the designer must fiddle around with tedious bits of additional code to make it look and work properly. Do not underestimate how aggravating this can be.

Random quotes:

‘As someone who writes web apps IE has wasted thousands of hours of my time, hate is not even a strong enough word to express how I feel about IE.’

‘I like to say I don’t hate anyone or anything in this world, because hate is a powerful word, but I absolutely hate Internet Explorer.’

‘Look, I hate IE. I hate it.’

Happy days?

Good news everybody – IE 8 is the first version of Microsoft’s browser to be compliant with some key industry standards: HTML and CSS.

Problem solved?

I’m afraid not. There are people out there still using IE6, never mind IE7. It’s early days but so far the take up of IE8 has been slow and we have yet to see the inevitable set of new problems that this release brings with it.

Should you upgrade to IE8?

I’d wait a while but you can always try it and then remove it later. Maybe a better idea all together is to use one of the following browsers instead:

Firefox

Chrome

Safari

Opera

In fact there’s no reason why you shouldn’t install and test all of them.

Too overpowering therefore we are sampling ‘fspring’. Cleaner.

Although the sites are fairly dull here they are:

• Drupal Showdown Site
• Joomla! Showdown Site
• WordPress Showdown Site

Seems that they agreed to call it a draw. The winner being Open Source software.

It’s based on a great theme by FTL Wordpress Themes which I discovered at Smashing Magazine called ‘Color paper’. I’ve oxidised it into the present scrap yard you see before you. Reading FTL’s website I’m left somewhat confused. They offer a great selection of top themes all which are free, yet something is puzzling me – their website states: ‘If you would like to purchase a theme for complete rights, please contact us. Themes are priced at $4,000 each.’  Eh? What’s all that aboot? >emails FTL to discover the truth<…

More to the point – how many people want to understand it?

There are in fact millions of people who understand it (hmm, actually my code cells understand a tidgy bit of it) and they have created millions of Wordpress themes all waiting to be used and abused. Do a search for ‘free wordpress themes’ and you’ll understand. So what was my next step? It was to find the most easily manipulatable theme out there. So far the prize goes to Atahualpa. This theme has so many options you can transform it into a cart load of mexican chihuahuas.

The result is the work in progress – a website for ShavenRaspberry.com – and the underlying theme is unrecognisable. But since the original theme is open source and free to use I will leave the creator Flynn’s credit at the bottom. Clever chap that Flynn.

But more important than that – it didn’t handle static pages (i.e. pages not part of a blog). So as a full CMS solution it really didn’t hit the naughty buttons.

So how come nobody told me about Version 1.5

WordPress 1.5 was released on 17 February 2005. It added a range of new vital features. One such is being able to manage static pages. This allows content pages to be created and managed outside the normal blog chronology and has been the first step away from being simple blog management software to becoming a full content management system. Another is the new template/theme system, which allows users to easily activate and deactivate “skins” for their sites.

And so what you are witnessing here is a burst of enthusiasm not experienced since the day my Apple Classic II was delivered.

Hang on I hear you say  – what the hell are you talking about? Fear not, I understand. It’s quite simple – Wordpress is this.