dConstruct 2009 Sep 05. 090
dConstruct is a 1 day conference run by Clearleft in Brighton. I’ve never had the chance to go before and hadn’t intended to this year. I’ve never really been convinced of the value of attending the numerous industry conferences and events but when my good friend Drew offered me a free ticket it seemed like a bit of a no brainer.
I had always (perhaps incorrectly) figured that dConstruct was mainly focused on web design/development (echoed by the attendee demographic; guys in their 30’s, wearing geek t-shirts, carrying iPhones and/or MacBooks) but the breadth of topics covered by the speakers was much wider. On reflection I think this was a good thing as it encourages us to think a little more outside the box, looking at the world and the technology that inhabits it from a slightly different perspective can lead to some interesting ideas.
Highlights for me were the ‘Learning from SciFi Interfaces’ by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel and the excellent presentation delivered by Russell Davies on ‘Dematerialising a Web of Data’. The presentation slide that I will remember forever is his message to the newspaper industry – “We have broken your business, now we want your machines” (haha!).
Aside from the talks dConstruct was clearly a great opportunity to actually meet the people I converse with online, finally put faces to names and make some new contacts. If you’ve never been and have the opportunity to do so next year I’d thoroughly recommend it.
Automating an availability statement in PHP Jul 16. 080
We have a small statement on the Nine Four website which advises new clients as to our current availability.
In general we need between 3 and 4 weeks notice to fit any significant new work in, so rather than continually update the availability statement or explain that we need 3 or 4 weeks lead time, I just used the PHP date function.
<p class="availability">Were available to work on new projects from the 21st of March 2009.</p>
Simple really but I just thought I’d share.
Why choose ExpressionEngine? Jul 03. 081
The guys over at EllisLab are asking why choose ExpressionEngine? Right off the top of my head, here’s my response…
Developing for tomorrows web Jun 25. 088
More often than not I find myself building websites with the outlook of developing for ‘the here and now’, taking into account the browsers that we are using today and also those which we were using yesterday (Please stand up IE6)!
So my question is this; Should we be actively developing for tomorrow, not today, using new technology wherever possible and providing only those with bleeding edge browsers (Safari 3 & Firefox 3) with the perfect experience? Is it now acceptable to present users of yesterdays, and even today’s web browsers with a degraded experience?
Consider that most websites might have a shelf life of 2 – 3 years, and you soon realise that the website you are developing might only be viewed using today’s web browsers for 6 months of it’s life, with the majority then migrating to Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (or whatever it may be) and dilapidated browsers like Internet Explorer 6 fading into the dark and distant background.
SiteVista to become Litmus Aug 01. 073
I’m rather excited about the news that the SiteVista team have been hard at work on a big shiny update to their website and email testing tools which will be relaunched as ‘Litmus’.
I use SiteVista on a regular basis, in the most part as a tool to help me refine and bug fix HTML email templates. With Outlook 2007 well and truly out there it’s great to have a platform to hand that you can quickly and easily test on, even if in most cases you end up weeping at the result of Microsoft’s dabbling with the Outlook rendering engine.
The news of a revised interface and lightning-fast testing makes me feel all wobbly at the knees! Don’t keep us waiting too long guys! :)