Redesigning this site has taken a lot longer than I thought it would, but then I have been a lot busier than I expected. Relaunch date is August 1 2010.

Somewhere yesterday I found a link to the web site of Andy Rutledge. So should you.

Aviary is a set of online editing tools that allow you to edit images, vector graphics, and sounds. The tools include a Firefox plugin that allows you to screen-grab directly into your Aviary library. And it is now all free.

Someone somewhere has created a button generator, to make png files that you can use as buttons. It contains nothing that you could not do yourself in Photoshop in ten minutes, but since it consists entirely of sliders and fields then (in some circumstances) it might prove easier.

A couple of weeks ago, in one of my periodic trawls through the lists of available plug-ins, I came across a mention of SRG Clean Archives which had recently been taken over by the Geek With Laptop. I looked at it and it seemed to answer some of the problems I was trying to think through.

I followed my own advice and decided that Clipmarks would be most useful to me at the moment as a way of grabbing short facts (statistics, quotes, predictions, announcements) that I might want to remember later.

A link to two sites that allow you to specify a base colour, and then suggest a range of colours to use with it.

I spent two or three hours this morning turning my comments into pop-ups. This is not the first time I have tried. It is the first time that I have succeeded.

BoingBoing have published a link to a WP theme that Cory Doctorow has called “endlessly fascinating and deliciously pointless”.

I have now got a framework for this site up and running. The logic traps appear to be sorted out. Wikkawiki is working well.

Some sources of images that can be licensed under a Creative Commons agreement, which sometimes (but not always) means that they are free to use!

All this site is is a page of text about the benefits of properly applied css, with a set of different stylesheets that you can apply yourself. But it is wonderful (and wonderfully useful).

Today I rediscovered the CSSplay site by Stu Nicholls, a man who seems to have spent every waking hour for most of the last decade solving the most arcane cross-browser problems imaginable in css menus. A look at the front page of his site, though, reveals that this is only the tip of a very interesting iceberg.

Custom scroll bars work in IE but not Firefox. However, it is possible to use javascript to overrule Firefox and force scrollbar changes.

There are many different css-based menu systems available. Here are some I have found useful.

Cascading style sheets come in version 1 and version 2. All modern browsers should work with CSS 1.0, but there is still not widespread support for CSS 2.0.

It is almost impossible to design web pages properly without an understanding of the basis of CSS. Here are a collection of useful links, including a link to the box model; a link to a list of al the css keywords; and a list of 53 key techniques with examples and explanations.

I have had a problem with my menus suddenly disappearing behind a new div that I created. It took longer than it should to fix the problem which is to do with a bug in the way that IE6/IE7 deal with the cumulative effects of declaring a z-pos for elements.

Notes about the various design elements, which I will otherwise lose.

Here are the titles of the modules for the digital multimedia course at Arcada (a university of applied science).

When I first looked at e-books several years ago there was a format war going on to no very great effect. Today, as e-readers seem poised to finally go mainstream, it looks as though there are two formats that are becoming standard: pdf and epub. This article begins looking at the epub format.

There is an additional navigational need for this site. It concerns the question of how a set of linked pages can be seen to form a larger piece.

I have got the feeds to work at last, and have placed them in the sidebar where they should logically be. Here is a brief description of what I did, and a few code snippets to help remind me later.

Some ready made examples, hints and tutorials.

Today I found links to two posts by Vitaly Friedman, containing a total of forty four free, professional quality fonts.

There are a lot of places on the web where you can find free fonts. Here are three places that I have used.

When asked, students, almost without exception, reported that there was something wrong with the virtual worlds they had seen. We asked them to be precise about what they meant. Eventually we got two enlightening answers. One: there is something hollow at the heart of the worlds. Two: it feels like you are wandering around amateur stage sets. The consensus seemed to be that the worlds felt like cardboard boxes painted in one way or another. As one student said, “When I went to the Venice world there was no Venice-ness about it”.

Developing the idea of the memi involves juggling several concepts at once. One of these is data mining. The usual mechanisms for searching blogs are not necessarily sufficient to retrieve something that you stored years ago, and now only vaguely remember.

This concept map addresses this question. It shows the logical components of a dynamic website and looks at the way in which they can be put together.

In May 2007 I changed the formatting for images to fit in with what I am calling version five of the site. More accurately, I finally standardised the formatting and made it fit the new, improved design logic. I also added a couple of styles that can be added to graphics, including a style for captions.

In today’s online version of The Independent Ian Burrell interviewed Jamie Oliver. Most of the discussion was about his television plans but there was a small snippet about his website.

A list of all the files that were altered in the default WikkaWiki to make the wiki version of this site.

A list of all the files that were altered in the default WordPress installation to make the current version of this site. This page will be updated as necessary, which will hopefully not be very often.

The Signalnoise site has published a wonderful collection of twelve logos by Saul Bass for companies ranging from Bell Telephones, Kleenex to Quaker Oats.

A reminder of the various changes made to the default wikkawiki installation in order to achieve the effect you can see here, although this is now rendered in WordPress.

This morning I attempted to put this site online at a GoDaddy address. It all worked perfectly, except for the parts that didn’t.

A regularly updated list of assignments and deadlines for the Managing Information course at Arcada.

I am looking for the tools that I need to make the next upgrade to this site.

I just finished my first working WP plug-in, as a result of thinking through a bunch of problems while helping Sean, the Geek With Laptop, with a very minor issue concerning the Clean Archives plug-in, that I have discussed here. I am calling the plug-in Front Page News, because that describes its intended purpose.

Broadly speaking there are two approaches to navigating through a large store of information. I have deliberately used both strategies on this site.

A tool for screengrabbing your Second Life avatar so that it can be stored and used locally.

Today, the logo and “branding” for the 2012 Olympic Games in London were officially launched. Apparently the logo has already been the source of much derision.

For the second time in about two weeks I accidentally found a link to a one-page web site called Polaroize. This time I explored it, and (although I am not sure how useful it actually is) it seems like an interesting one-trick pony.

A session by session guide to the Rich Media Technology course at Arcada.

A regularly updated list of assignments and deadlines for the Rich Media Technology course at Arcada.

One of the problems with exploring areas like RSS feeds or WP plug-ins is that, quite often, you can only do it through randomly. You google a general query and then follow the links until you find something close enough to what you were looking for.

I came across a nice site today that showed (amoing other things) that it is still possible for one person to do something interesting and useful on the web. This one is concerned with desktop wallpaper that is simple to the point of starkness.

Here, from the Virtual Jungle blog is a list of alternate open and closed source Second Life clients, compiled by Danton Sideways.

Jutta found a clip on YouTube that documents (or more likely recreates) the creation of the acoustic guitar that Suzanne Vega used when she gave a concert somewhere in Second Life.

Yesterday the recent instability inside Second Life (rule of thumb: anything not crashing will crash in the next two minutes) led me to look around at its possible competitors. I looked at Croquet, a heavy-duty open source 3D platform being written by Alan Kay, among others.

Sometime after the sauna last night I found myself thinking about the navigation system that I had cheerfully announced yesterday as finished. And suddenly it seemed obvious that it was very, very wrong. Working out why it was wrong, though, was not easy.

Will Wright is the man who invented Sim City and then went onto make numerous variations and elaborations of that, culminating in Sims, Sims 2 and Sims Online. He has given a lengthy and detailed interview to the Popular Science web site about his new game Spore, which he describes as a “massively single player online game”.

Somebody somewhere has created a stripe generator for you to use.

Here are links to three sites that provide textures and patterns licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

has finally upgraded this site to WP 2.5.1 – and now it all works again

I think that the new version of the memi theme is now complete. The look and feel of the site is now almost completely as I intended it. The layout has a consistency that is based on the concept of doubling doubles that I may have mentioned earlier, and will certainly write up in a few days. I am ahead of my self-imposed schedule.

Until about fifteen minutes ago the interface contained a category under Blogging called entries by keyword. I have just removed it, and replaced it with entries by title.

This site is intended, in part, as an experiment in what can…

Tim O’Reilly talks to Wired magazine, just before the Web 2.0 Expo.

Michael Krigsman has written an interesting article on ZD.Net about Twitter’s problems. He uses a very useful diagram taken from a Forrester research report about rescuing software trainwrecks.

The menus on this site are currently in a state of flux. Not all of them work, and not all of the entries here are currently available through any sensible method of navigation. This is because I am currently working on the next stage of developing the memi, and I am testing ideas live here.

As of today the site is running on WP 2.3.3, using the native tagging system. The menu bar shows version 4 of what is intended as a universal topic list for a personal lifelong dataspace. The entries on the site will soon be reclassified and hooked into the new structure.

Today the students in the Managing Information course told me that this site was completely invisible to Internet Explorer 7.

I have been trying to develop the structure of this site into a robust version that is complete enough to no longer require my explanations about its purpose to begin with an apology. I am now close to ready to bring out the sparkling wine. My current deadline for a version that will need no more designing and programming is Wednesday May 21 2008.

The process of constructing this bliki, or knowledge-base, or whatever I am calling it this week, is both frustrating and illuminating. As I have explained elsewhere this is deliberate, and I was reminded of why I am doing it this way when I reread an old article about Jeff Hawkins that talks about his famous wooden blocks.

It has taken me a lot longer than I planned to get a version of my personal infohub thingy online in a version powered by WordPress. This is not because WordPress is difficult to work with, but rather the opposite. There are so many plug-ins and options that I have been some time deciding what paths would be best to walk down.

The pupose of an online portfolio is to enable you to point future employers or clients to one single site on the web where they can make a preliminary assessment of you.

You will need to find (or create) a Wordpress theme that allows you to display yourself as clearly and stylishly as possible. The look and feel of the site will be as important as the actual content in determining the first impression that users get. If the site looks messy, or is difficult to naviagte, potential clients or employers may not even bother to dig into the site to find the content that you know is fantastic.

What follows is the opening of an article in Smashing Magazine that is extremely useful, whether you already know the information it contains or not.

I spent the morning up to my knees in php, because I had realised that the navigation inside this site was nowhere near flexible enough to demonstrate what I am talking about…

XHTML is a version of HTML that is designed to be a valid version of xml. This makes it useful for dynamic web sites and other database-driven uses.

If a browser accepts an xml document without complaining then the document is said to be well-formed. If the xml document meets your requirements, when it is checked with a DTD or schema then is is a valid xml document.