PR Award Winner 2008

Deep Blue Sky were tasked with producing a website which targeted a specific customer base and made good use of photography to showcase Pure Buildings' recent work.

Working with only recently defined brand guidelines, Deep Blue Sky created a concept which not only looked appealing to visitors but addressed the client's key objectives of being easy to navigate and providing a platform for displaying recent work.

Old graphics cards don't tend to have support for the now common screen mode 1366x768.  ( As far as I know old modes were in factors of 8 ( roughly base 2 increments ) ).

So if you're like me and you're firing up a nice new little screen on an old, second slot, PCI graphics card then you'll end up with horribly blurred text on your Acer X193HQ.

Check the clock ( not the focus ).

Before you start rummaging around for drivers or running down to the shops for a new card make sure you've had a play around with the clock timing on your Acer screen because the chances are you can get the focus back.

I've personally found that a clock at around 36 is pixel perfect running 1360x768 @ 60hz but I'm guessing it's different for different graphics cards.

Trick is to hold your finger down and run the clock from end to end.  You'll see a sweet-spot in the middle where the moire phases out and back in... you're aiming for the centre of the interference pattern... where every pixel is smooth and sharp.

If you've found findmebyip.com at all useful over the past few months we'd be over the moon if you could nominate us for the 2010 .net awards.

Nominations only take a second to complete and, since fmbip.com is a spare-time project for us, it would mean a lot to be nominated.

Nominate FMBIP.com for the .net awards

Thanks!

OK - so my apologies for the rant but iOS4 seems like the worst thing I've ever installed on my iPhone in the year or two that I've had it.  It's not just frustrating but has actually lost me hours of work.

iPod

So we'll start with the iPod - the one thing Apple should be good at.  Two problems have appeared with iOS4; first is a little thing but the iPod now skips a beat when you lock/unlock your phone or enter/leave the iPod app.  The second, even more annoying, is that it simply fades to a stop of its own accord - as if the phone was about to ring - but then it doesn't.  Either they've shagged the "Phone" app aswell and I'm not getting calls or there's something wrong with the iPod.

Mulitasking

Next is multitasking.  Plenty of apps are not multitasking ready, which would seem like nobodies fault, except I have to include some of the core Apple apps in that list.

• Notes
  We'll come to this in a moment...
   
• Safari ( +Quicktime )
  When watching a QuickTime movie in Safari ( read: Question Time on iPlayer ) all is well.  However if you leave Safari and re-enter at a later date QuickTime fails.  Usually audio but no video.  You have to actively destroy Safari and start it again to get the video back.

So the question is: why is it mandatory?  I can understand the principal of state-saving to make task switching more smooth but why do they force the behaviour?  I don't want an app I've opened for ten seconds to stay in state and the fact they all do just makes the whole thing pointless because you can never find your common apps from the task list because there's a calculator and weather and 10 other things you don't really care about in the way. 

Why, oh why, isn't this optional?  I have already learned which apps don't hold state or have multitasking bugs ( hipstamatic, tweetdeck )... and which apps I occasionally use but don't want to keep in state ( calculator, phone!? ) why can't you switch the behaviour off for some apps?

Folders

Ok - this is a tiny thing but folders get in the way more than they save space.  The icons are too small and there's no option to pick an icon to represent the group.  On a 3GS screen you have to Eskimo kiss your phone to see which folder you want.  Then, having exited the app you're using the folder's there.. staring at you... all open and completely in your way.  Surely the 80:20 rule dictates you're unlikely to be back in the same folder?  Go away.

To open a foldered app is therefore:  search for the folder ( +a few swipes, +3 seconds ), open the folder ( +1 Click, +0.5 seconds ), re-assess what you were doing ( +1 second, +1 head-scratch ), click the icon ( +1 Click, +seconds )... and then, to rub it in, you can add ( +1second of confusion, +1 more click ) to the end of your task to close it again.

Clock? Surely not?

I also set the clock to French time on landing only to be woken up an hour late the following day to almost miss my flight home. I am convinced I didn't do anything silly but somehow I just can't bring myself to think that a phone could foul up a setting like that.  

Can you believe that after all this I'm questioning my own sanity before believing there could be a bug so simple in the clock..

Genuine Bugs: Notes

Finally there's the fun I had with notes.  On Friday, on a flight to see a client, I wrote some really quite inspirational ( no - really ) notes about a fabulous new and exciting project we're working on here at DBS.  An hour and a half of considered opinion on a project that's going to change our lives and yours.

When I got back onto the flight home where were my notes?  Where oh where?  Could they be under the multitasking toolbar? No.  Could they be behind one of my handy folders? No.  

Surely - saving your work, properly, is one of the most important criteria for the app?  Good grief I'm cross.

In conclusion.  iOS4 is Beta

OK - so people who build glass websites shouldn't throw bloggy stones - I realise that. Nobody's perfect.  But I find it extremely frustrating that Apple, a large and supposedly reputable company, would release something which is effectively beta onto an unsuspecting public who has paid a great deal for a product ( my iPhone 3GS ) which is now full of bugs.  Had they labelled it as a beta, clearly, I might have thought twice about it or might have used a pen to make notes - if I can remember how to write...

I won't go into the fact that it looks like the hardware to go with iOS4 was just about as beta!

PS

During the course of scribbling this rant my iPod has iPhaded the music out and iPhaded back in four times.  (*6 times including corrections) I've checked with my wife and she's not trying to phone me so it must be a bug in the iPod!

It's been a couple of weeks now since Modernizr 1.5 was released and we've been inundated with requests to update our Litmus test page which shows browser "support" for CSS3 and the HTML5 family of technologies.

Well now it's finally here and we're pleased to re-launch the Web Designers Browser Support Checklist with tests for:

• HTML5 Web Applications
• HTML5 Embedded Content
• HTML5 Audio & Video
• HTML5 Web Forms & Attributes
• CSS3 Properties
• CSS3 Selectors

New tests for SVG, Web Sockets and much more

Thanks to the guys over at Modernizr, we can now provide test results for a wide variety of new features including the long awaited SVG tests (I'm sure Bruce Lawson will be happy at that!).

The full list includes:

• SVG (including SVG Clipping Paths and SMIL)
• Web SQL Database
• IndexedDB
• Web Sockets
• hashchange event
• History and Session Management
• HTML5 Drag and Drop
• Cross-document Messaging

Even Better Accuracy

Know how import it is that our results are accurate and so we're really pleased that the Modernizr library we rely on to produce our results is becoming increasingly bug free.

The issues with Font Face in WebKit have now gone and we're now seeing more accurate results for basic CSS3 properties such as border-radius which is fantastic.

On top of this our developers have spent a lot of time rewriting the site code in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of false results being returned from our end so hopefully our results should be more accurate than ever.

What we don't offer

We'd like to make it clear that the results we provide as only a summary of browser support for HTML5 and CSS3. We strongly recommend you test you code fully to ensure that you get the expected results.

We also don't test for every last feature or browser idiosyncrasy. Beware! Browser manufacturers implement the spec in different and occasionally buggy ways. Again, we strongly recommend testing - there really is no substitute.

Provide us with feedback....please!

We really need your help to make FindMeByIP 100% accurate. If you notice a bug just let us know. You can reach us either by:

• Commenting on this post (preferred)
• Twitter - @deepbluetweets

Just let us know the error, where it's appearing and which browser and we'll make a temporary fix immediately.

Then as soon as we have a spare moment on Friday our developers will fix the root cause to avoid the issue creeping back in.

We really hope you find these tables useful.

We're very pleased to announce that the FindMeByIP litmus results are now available in JSON format for anyone who wants to access the results in code.

JSON Results: CSS3 & HTML5

http://fmbip.com/json/export?callback=myCallback

Using the Data

If you decide to use the data for anything we'd love to hear about it.  Likewise if you would like the data organised in a different hierarchy, if you need the 'average update' results or any other changes you can think of please do let us know.

I think it's fair to say that IE9 looks to be about the most exciting and positive thing Microsoft have done with a browser for a long, long time.  

Microsoft's browser market share is in what looks like terminal decline so releasing a browser that gets the support of the web development community should surely boost, or at least stabilise, their share.  And what is it that makes the web development community deride IE? ... well partly its the legacy of IE6 - a browser that still makes up nearly 10% of the market - and partly it's IE7 and 8's total lack of support for any of the new technologies that are driving web innovation... 

Is that all about to change?!

Looks like it.  Certainly moving in the right direction anyway.  Today we're very proud to be adding IE9 to our list of browsers on our Web Designer's Browser Support Checklist.  

What's remarkable is that those big columns of crosses we've all been sniggering about for months are finally starting to disperse.. there are a few chinks of green-tick emerging from the IE columns after all.

What does IE9 support? Are these real results?

Well, largely, the new IE9 results are real results.  They were recorded with the help of one of the IE9 developers who was kind enough to guide me through a couple of details as to what IE9 will and won't support - because my IE9 preview is having some script gremlins...   Most of the results were recorded with the IE9 Preview #2.  We've had to patch the target-selector result ( because of a bug with the way fmbip redirects to the hash-tag ) and a couple of the codecs but that's all.

The good news

The good news therefore is IE9 will bring full support for CSS3 selectors and HTML5 embedded content to the third of the world who use IE.  There'll also be limited support for CSS3 properties and HTML5 web applications, the latter available since IE8.

The bad news

From what I understand IE9 will still miss a lot of the newer, designer's CSS3 properties that Safari and Chrome (and FF to an extent ) provide; Border Image, Gradients, Reflections, Animations & Transitions etc.

There's also no sign of any of the new form elements or attributes either... but then, as you can see from our scores these are still so poorly supported by other browsers that they're not really usable yet.

A thank you

A big thank you to Eric in the IE9 team for his help and support getting this column together.  I was struggling to get my IE9 preview to behave so I'm very grateful for all his help.  Here's to a great new browser to up the game a little for all the manufacturers involved!

As web designers we want to know when we can start to roll out HTML5 and CSS3 functionality on our client's sites and we want to share that knowledge.  So last Autumn we built findmebyip.com; a free testing tool that sends you a live, detailed report of what your client's browser supports.

Since the 23rd of October 2009 findmebyip.com has collected some 56,000 detailed, real-world results of HTML5 and CSS3 browser capabilities. Today we've added those results to our massively popular litmus test summary page. 

View: HTML5 & CSS3 Browser Support Scores

And the winner is...  CSS3 Selectors

The most promising areas seem to be CSS3 Selectors.  Some selectors which have picked up support in IE7 are now nearly ubiquitous.  Post prominent are are the three attribute match selectors - begins, ends, matches - and the general siblings selecto.  The other CSS3 Selectors enjoy good support across the other browsers with only the earlier FF3s missing a few things.  The lack of earlier FF3 support for things like n-th child accounts for a 2% drop off for those features. 

/** Available in all but IE6(!) **/
.foo[ attr ^= "string" ] { }
.foo[ attr $= "string" ] { }
.foo[ attr *= "string" ] { }
.foo ~ bar { }

CSS3 Properties - Font Face is here!

Most widely available of the CSS3 Properties is of course Font Face which has been available in IE for decades.  With Google's recent release of their font API the deregulation of typefaces looks like a real possibility. 

A few other notable properties are the use of RGBA and HSLA and Opacity.  Guess what, yes, IE doesn't support them yet so you'll still have to hack about with proprietary filters if you want your sites to look the same in IE.

Web Applications Coming of Age

IE8 support for HTML5s storage architecture and Google's shift to supporting HTML5 over Gears is all looking very promising for the future of faster, less bandwidth intensive web application development.  Chrome 5 has in fact, just recently become the first browser to tick all of our HTML5 Web Application boxes.

Geo Location is still trailing behind according to our test although good mobile support for Geo Location isn't really illustrated in these results.  There's a mobile version of our litmuse results page coming soon incidentally... just waiting for the amazing guys behind litmusapp to launch their mobile browser tests. ( I think they're a bit too excited about their email analytics to care right now! )

What's not ready?  HTML5 Forms

HTML5 form input types and form attributes are quite a long way behind the rest of the class. This is down to little or no support from Firefox or IE.  Chrome 5 again gets a big gold star for having the most comprehensive HTML5 Form support.

War of the Codecs

I'm going to be honest here and say that I'm not massively familiar with all the different HTML5 Audio and Video Codecs.  From our results it would seem that both the ogg/vorbis audio and video codecs have the widest support.  I am slightly concious that there were some recording bugs when we first added A/V codecs though. This is partly why we've excluded all the earlier results, calculating our scores from just the last 20,000 (2 months of) results.  I' d be very grateful if someone more knowledgeable about HTML5 Audio & Video codecs would take a look and give an opinion.

A word about Internet Explorer and IE9

Yes, I'm sorry, it has to be said...  the world is waiting for IE to get its act together on this one.  

Firefox and Apple are providing pretty wide support for CSS3 and HTML5 already.  The litmus charts show the leap that Firefox made with FF3.6.  

Google seem to have just stormed ahead of the field taking Chrome 5 to almost universal support for all of our tests save for two form attributes - autocomplete and list - and two audio codecs.

What about IE9??  Well, lots of people have been asking for us to add IE9 results to our table.  Unfortunately at the moment the javascript used to record the results doesn't seem too happy in IE9.  We use a combination of prototype.js, modernizr.js and a little jimbo.js to test and record and we haven't had a chance to diagnose where the problems lie.  If anyone is familiar with IE9's javascript capabilities please, please get in touch and we'll add IE9 to the results.  Everyone's waiting to find out how it fares!

At The Royal Crescent Hotel this morning Spot the Lion was introduced to his peers and to the media in event organised to launch the Lions of Bath public art exibition in Bath.

The Lions of Bath event has attracted sponsors and artists from across the country who have been working tirelessly all year to decorate one of a hundred identical lifesize lion sculptures.

Deep Blue Sky's lion Spot has drawn a great deal of attention today as he looks to be the only interactive sculpture this year.  Spot has been decorated with QR Codes, small 2-dimensional barcodes that can be snapped with a modern camera-phone.  The codes contain information that tells your phone to navigate to Spot's website spotthelion.com where you can learn about and discover all of the other lions in the pride.

Stay up to date - Follow Spot Today

If you would like to know where to find the lions as they go out into the wild you can follow Spot on Twitter or befreind him on Facebook making you the first to know about new lions released to their new habitats.

So you've found a YouTube on your computer but you want to step away from your desk and take the video with you.... what a hassle?  Nope - here's a quick-as-a-flash solution...

Drag to your bookmarks bar: QRify!

Now, visit any page, click the bookmarklet and snap the resulting QR code with your phone!

What is this?

QR Codes are a form of two-dimensional barcode that the Deep Blue Sky team has been using to decorate our lion, Spot, with over the past couple of weeks for the Lions of Bath public art event.

Most smartphones support QR Codes either natively or through a reader app.  You'll need to browse your own App Store for a reader but there are plenty of good cheap or free ones available.

Basically a QR code can store a whole lot of information - geo-locations, web links, contact data - and when your phone's camera sees the information it interprets it and acts upon it... opening your map app at the right location, browser on the right web page or adding the contact.

How does the bookmark work?

Well, it uses Google's URL shortener to create a short link. ( The shorter the link, the less information for the barcode. The simpler the barcode, the easier for your phone to scan... ).  Google's URL shortener has a cute extra feature that means you can have the URL as a QR code instead of redirecting you to the site.. 

All you do is add .qr to the end of your short link:

• http://goo.gl/y0vX -> Deep Blue Sky
• http://goo.gl/y0vX.qr -> The QR Code pictured above.

Now the bookmarklet itself uses a server side script by a chap called Matthew Flaschen who has provided a simplified API for creating the links.  I've basically lifted his example script, added the .qr concatenation and stuck it in a link to be bookmarked.  Standing on the shoulders and all that!

It's only a small variation to Matthew's original but serves a slightly different purpose. 

There's also a very good Google Chrome extension for doing much the same. 

On Tuesday Google released the new, faster Google Chrome 5 in beta.

Better support for HTML5

This new Chrome release, as well as being much faster than its predecessors, now has even fuller support for HTML5 Web Applications and HTML5 Forms

To help people better understand what features are available across the major browsers and platforms we've added Chrome 5 to our Web Design Checklist, here.

Almost Perfect Support

It's really great to see Google making big strides towards full HTML5 & CSS3 support.  Chrome ti

What's missing

According to our tests - which are not immune to error - only the following items are missing from the new Chrome 5 beta:

• Native Audio Support for MP3 & WAV
• 2 New Form Attributes "autocomplete" and "list

Of course there are probably lots of things we're not testing for.  If there are any new browser features you'd like to see added please let us know by leaving a comment below. 

The web is moving forward and here at Deep Blue Sky we like to stay ahead of the curve. That's why we invest 10% of our week each Friday working on internal projects with the aim of enhancing our capabilities for the benefit of ourselves and our clients.

Helpful Web Applications

In September 2009 we produced the initial concept for a web app which would present browser support for HTML5 and CSS3 in a simple and easy to read format.

This site would go on to become FindMeByIP.com, a site which is now used by thousands of web professionals around the globe to help them implement progressive techniques on their websites.

From Tiny Acorns...

Although initially only a limited concept, the popularity of the site spurred us to develop it into a full browser testing suite, enabling us to provide statistics for all the major web browsers. As a result we went from receiving a couple of hundred visitors a day to over a thousand.

The ability to scale a project so rapidly was made easy thanks to our web development framework Spirit, the platform on which all our websites are based.

Deep Blue Sky is very proud to be helping Dickies, the leading workwear brand, find the UK's most deserving worker.

Yesterday, 29th April 2010, we launched ukworkeroftheyear.com a website where any of the UK's workforce can put themselves forward for this prestigious prize.

Capitalising on Social Media

We wanted to make sure that the competition and the Dickies brand reach as many people as possible while the competition is running to ensure a rich seam of candidates from which to judge the finalists.

So we're delighted that Dickies have agreed to our addition of a "Peoples' Choice" award, voted for by the general public, to run in the months of June, July, August and September.

Holding a public vote allows us to encourage those who enter to spread the engagement of the competition to their friends and family through the common social networking channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

Rapid Web Development

We're very proud that the whole site was designed, built, tested and launched in just a couple of weeks to meet some pretty strict press deadlines.  This rapid development of intricate systems is only possible because of our development framework, Spirit, on which all our web solutions are based.

Are you the UK Worker of the Year?

If you think you deserve to drive home one of the Renaults on offer why not enter yourself and become Dickies UK Worker of the Year!? 

Twitter was founded in 2006 and four years and over a billion tweets later we are still using it to let others known "what's happening now". The service is very popular amongst web designers. Unsurpising really, as they tend to spend 90% of their day in front of a screen.

If you're anything like me you probably follow a few "celebrity" designers/developers in the hope that some of their skill talent magic might rub off on you. These "weblebrity's" are usually professional tweeters, but even they had to start somewhere. I've compiled a list of 13 top web designers and their first ever Tweets.

First Tweets by 13 Top Web Designers

• Paul Boag: "Sitting in my hotel room at the Refresh06 web design conference" (5:37 AM Nov 17th 2006)
• Zeldman: "scratching" (9:15 AM Dec 12th, 2006)
• Elliot Jay Stocks: "Working through a number of bug fixes in preparation to moving on to the Carsonified redesign project!" (2007-08-16 13:15:02)
• Remy Sharp: "Signing up to twitter and having a flitter." (12:12 PM Jan 16th, 2007)
• Andy Clarke: "working on an interface design for a national research organisation" (9:11 AM Dec 1st 2006)
• Mike Kus: "Uh oh!" (6:55 AM May 10th, 2008)
• Mark Boulton: "has finally caved" (3:47 AM Mar 10th, 2008)
• Joe Hewitt: "coding" (6:19 PM Mar 15th, 2007)
• Larissa Meek: "eating tacos" (8:54 AM Mar 21st, 2007)
• Ryan Carson: "Leaving for Venice!" (3:36 AM Nov 22nd, 2006)
• Jason Santa Maria: "Trying to wake up." (4:12 AM Dec 12th, 2006)
• Grace Smith: "Just had a crap takeaway so am consoling myself with a large cup of tea and a large dose of Arrested Development Series 2" (2:48 PM Dec 15th, 2007)
• Megan Fisher: "Being horribly bored at work. Can't wait for the WWDC to start." (6:48 AM Jun 11th, 2007)

Who's missing?

Have I missed anyone out? Found amusing/interesting first tweets? Share them with the community - leave a comment.

Data

Data for these tweets was sourced via the very cool My Tweet 16 web app.

Update: This issue has been filed as a bug report and has been fixed as of Firebug 1.6a9 (see here for bug report)

I recently had a problem with the latest version of Firebug whereby when inspecting the DOM via the HTML tab, the view would automatically refocus and highlight an element that had been updated via a piece of Javascript

Is Firebug "buggy"?

This was very annoying. For a long while I wasn't sure how to fix the issue and so I tweeted about it.

The best response came from none other than Paul Irish, who responded explaining that I should have a drop down list on the Firebug HTML tab. This would have the option to disable DOM Highlighting.

Having checked and rechecked however, I was sure I didn't have this dropdown.

The Solution

As with all things computer related the classic "uninstall/reinstall" combo did the trick. I simply removed the addon and reinstalled it using Firebug's built in AddOn manager.

This updated the faulty install of Firebug and revealed the hidden HTML tab dropdown.

I then went in and unchecked "Highlight Changes". This fixed the highlighting issue.

Ongoing Problems

Soon after fixing the issue however the HTML tab dropdown disappeared again. The auto focus problem didn't return but the dropdown had mysteriously disappeared.

If anyone has an explanation for this behaviour (am I doing something wrong?) or a better solution please let me know.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention?

At Deep Blue Sky we do like to think we’re a bit “different”. We’re not saying we’re “zany”, we don’t say “you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps”, and we certainly wouldn’t be caught dead in a comedy tie but we do like to take a different approach to problems and their solutions.

We accept that client work is not always going to give us the opportunity to experiment, which is a shame because it’s this experimentation that allows people like us to find new and creative solutions to a client’s problem.

Kicking Back in Binary

In order to give us time to work on projects that aren’t necessarily going to bring in the bucks, but are going to make us better at our jobs we made a decision a few months ago to work a 4 day week. We’re not saying we send all our staff off to the pub for 8 hours of the working week – far from it – we just do work that makes us happy, and gives us the opportunity to try out new ideas.

Stuff What We Did

So what do we do in the time? What could we get up to in the 384 hours of free time this gives us? We work on web applications, joint ventures, or stuff that’s just plain cool (from our point of view anyway). Here are a few examples…

FindMeByIP.com

This is a simple web based app that tracks your web browsers ability to support the more advanced features of CSS and HTML5. It’s useful because of the way it presents its findings, making testing very easy for geeks like us.

Gate54

Gate 54 is our hotel directory that provides booking services for over 75,000 hotels worldwide. We built it using our Spirit Framework development platform to prove it could handle a massive and multifaceted database with a booking engine bolted on for good measure and you know what? We were right.

Returntags.com

Return Tags – like most great ideas on the web – is very simple. You buy a set of Return Tags which you stick to high value items like an iPod, iPhone or a Grandmother. If someone finds the items they go to Returntags.com, punch in a code and it’s matched to a set of registered contact details that allow the finder to contact the owner.  Stick it, lose it, get it back!

We built the site in conjunction with a client using our Spirit Framework Development Platform with a simple user registration and database module.

Awarding Ideas

Awarding Ideas is a competition we’ve started to find the next great idea for the web. We’re giving away £10,000 of free design, development and hosting to bring it to life. There are no barriers to who can enter (apart from we’re not allowed, that would be silly). The competition is an example (we think) of our commitment to innovation in everything we do.

For more examples of our Friday Projects keep checking the Deep Blue Sky Blog – and if you have any great ideas you can enter Awarding Ideas here…

When Google started crawling CSS files some years back there was a lot of noise amongst SEO experts about how much rendering was going on in their data-centres.  But without working at Google ( or Yahoo or Microsoft ) it's very difficult for any of us to tell quite what's going on... until now.

FindMeByIP.com

fmbip.com is a service set up for the web design community to help understand what CSS3 & HTML5 capabilities their clients browsers have.  Basically you send your client to a page and we send you a table showing you exactly what browser they're using and what CSS3 & HTML5 capabilities their browser supports.

"Googlebot", "MSNBot" & "Yahoo! Slurp"

Like many of us it seems that Google, Yahoo and Bing have all been along to take a look at findmebyip.com and I was surprised to find this morning that we've caught their spiders submitting their own results for what CSS3 and HTML5 capabilities those spiders support.

Fingerprinting a Spider

While Googlebot appears to have broad support for HTML5 & CSS3 I was surprised to find that it's not quite at the level of Chrome 4.  Microsoft Bing's MSNBot, even more remarkably, has quite good support for HTML5 & CSS3 where their IE browser, well, doesn't! 

So we ran a fingerprint comparison of the Googlebot, Bing and Yahoo results against our full set of tens of thousands of "in-the-wild" results and found a startling result: it looks very much like all of their web spiders are running Firefox!!. 

• Googlebot 2.1 : Firefox 3.6
• MSNBot 1.1 : Firefox 3.6
• Yahoo! Slurp : Firefox 3.0

Sharing the Wealth

We like to share here at Deep Blue Sky so we thought we'd make the information available to everyone.  So for all you SEO experts who need to know exactly what these bots are capable of here's a table of the three biggest 'bots and their capabilities:

Deep Blue Sky were tasked with upgrading the aesthetic of the Festivus website and making the navigation and user experience more intuitive and rewarding.

Taking into account clear directives from the client and feedback from users we implemented updates to make the site easier to use, give access to key information more quickly and portray the Festivus brand well.

Spirit Recruitment

Festivus is built using Deep Blue Sky’s “Spirit Recruitment Development Platform”. The flexible nature of Spirit allowed us to create a new skin for the website without having to change any of its core architecture.
The Spirit Recruitment module includes the following features as standard: 

• Management of Jobs Listings and Content
• Email list Management
• User Registration and CV upload
• User Profiling and Search Tools
• Search Engine Optimisation and Promotion
• Usage Reporting and Statistical Analysis

Festivus is one of many recruitment websites that have been delivered by Deep Blue Sky using this platform.

To find out how we can breathe new life into your Recruitment website call us on 01225 444674.

After much delay we've updated FindMeByIP.com & the Web Designers Browser Support Checklist; the web services that display browser support* for HTML5 and CSS3 in a clear and easy to read format.

The last few months have seen two of the major browser vendors - Mozilla & Opera - release new versions of their web browsers. Modernizr , the javascript library that drives the testing behind FindMeByIP, has also jumped to version 1.1 offering a wealth of new features.

As a result we've relaunched FindMeByIP with better accuracy, a greater number of tests and a larger number of browser results.

What's changed?

The biggest change is probably the upgrade to the latest version of Modernzir, the javascript library that drives the testing behind FindMeByIP. This means we now test for:

• new HTML5 input properties (eg: autocomplete, pattern,step.etc)
• HTML5 Audio and Video codec support
• Mozilla Firefox's new CSS Gradients syntax

...to name just a few.

We've also added test results for two of the world's most modern browsers:

• Opera 10.50 - the "World's fastest browser"
• Firefox 3.6 - the "World’s best browser

99.99% accurate

We're confident that the results produced by FindMeByIP.com are more accurate than ever.

Tweaks to the site's mechanics combined with the much improved Modernizr 1.1 testing library mean that you can be confident that the results you see will be a fair summary of your browsers' support for HTML5 and CSS3. However...

"Nobody's Perfect"

As the old saying goes, "Nobody's perfect" and whilst we've endeavoured to ensure our results are as accurate as possible there might still be a few bugs waiting to be squished.

That's where you come in. Notice a bug? Let us know in a comment and we'll fix it. We want FindMeByIP.com to be bug free as much as you do (we're web designers after all!). 

A High Brow Introduction

Blogging (from the Latin Web Log) is an integral part of Web 2.0 – the development of the web from a controlled medium to “an architecture of participation” where people become not only consumers of content but generators of it.

A Bit of Common Sense

Blogging isn’t only for ultra web savvy technocrats – it’s a useful tool in the marketing armoury of all small businesses. Learn how to use it, commit to using it, and you might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Why Get Involved?

Blogging achieves a few useful things that should matter to you:

• You get to demonstrate to your visitors and customers that you’re an expert in your field
• You’ll make your website “sticky” and increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website – increasing your chances of a sales or enquiry
• You’ll help your site be more visible to search engines
• You’ll increase the chances of creating 2 way conversations with your customers and engage them with your brand or business

Be That Golden Rule

All of these are good things but we have to get a few basics right before we send you off into the Blogosphere. Stick to a few rules and you should do OK:

Pick a voice and stick to it

Work out in advance the tone you’re going to take in your Blog. Are you going to be conversational and chatty? Are you going to knowledgeable and informative? Make sure your tone is relevant to your brand or business – if you’re an accountant using text speak will not go down well with the business community.

Be Committed

Building an audience for your Blog will take time, so don’t give up at the first hurdle. Make an Editorial plan and stick to it. Try and produce articles that are relevant to events and deadlines. If you’re an Accountant cluster relevant articles around HMRC deadlines, if you’re an Event Planner base articles on Holidays and Occasions, if you’re a Taxidermist…you get the idea.

Make it SEO friendly

Blogging will help your search rankings if you make sure your content is optimized. In English that means you need to use your top keywords in your article. Don’t shoe horn them in for the sake of it, you’ll just look silly, but keep it in mind when writing.

Write for the Web

People read differently on the web. They don’t read, they integrate content to get to what they need. They look for key words and like bullet points and titles so keep it punchy, keep it short, and make life easy for the reader.

Remember Your Audience

Keep the content relevant to who’s going to be reading it. Accepted wisdom is that you should write for an educated 12 year old. I’ll be honest – I feel patronising even writing that but just me mindful of your audience. Which of these statements work better?

or...

You get my point.

Writing the Thing

Make life easy for yourself and keep to a process when writing. Finding the time will be difficult but if you get into effectives habits life will be a lot easier for you.

Plan, Plan, Plan

Plan your article before you start writing. Sketch out some sections and titles that keep up the rhythm and tempo of an article and lead logically to the conclusion you want people to reach.

Plough On Through

Once you’ve started writing, don’t stop until you get to the end of the article. You can edit it later.

Edit the Hell out of it

When you’re editing keep in mind that you have to keep it short and punchy. Ruthlessly get rid of anything that isn’t vital to your core message. Your readers will thank you for it.

There Endeth The Lesson

So that’s it, I send you forth to Blog your little hearts out. Blogging will work but you have to make a plan, be mindful that you won’t get success overnight and keep it at it.

One last point – just having a Blog does not mean that people will read it so get the word out. Mention it in your Direct Marketing, E-Mail Outs, PR, on the phone and in conversation with your customers. Shout about it and you’ll start to get some love. And just so you know, that whole Latin thing at the start was me making a funny. I know, aren't I priceless?

YouTube videos are great but they can often be long, especially if they are tech related. What if you want to cut to the chase and link to a specific point in a video?

Linking to a Specific Point in the Video

YouTube allows you to append a "Time" parameter (t) to the video's URL. So, if your video's URL is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SLcruwnkLk

...then to link to the point in the video at 18 minutes and 25 secs, just add the following (in bold) to end of your URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SLcruwnkLk#t=18m25s

Explanation

"t" stands for "Time". All you then do is specify the point in minutes (m) and seconds (s) where you'd like the video to start playing.

Don't forget to include the hash "#" character as well.

Very simple but extremely useful.

Example

Try it yourself. Here's a link to an amusing video of a talkng cat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KrfjeEqQGk#t=0m13s

If anyone has any more useful YouTube video hacks leave a comment and let us know.

Since we launched FindMeByIP.com back in 2009 we've collected tens of thousands of results for you all showing what HTML5 and CSS3 features your client's browsers support.

We thought it was about time we shared that information so from today we've a (very experimental at this stage) chart showing each feature and what percentage of results show that the feature is available.

Check out the Availability Chart here

At this stage we're asking you all to let us know how we can make this data more useful so please, if you've any thoughts on the subject let us know.

This coming Friday we'll set to work to implement your ideas.... or, if no-one makes any suggestions I guess we'll just go to the pub early!

On Saturday the 7th of March I'll be running the 13.6 mile 2010 Bath Half Marathon to raise money for a wonderful local charity; SWALLOW.

Sponsor me now
... it's quick and easy.

SWALLOW's aim is to promote independence and equality for people with learning difficulties, supporting its members to gain the skills and experiences required to live their lives as they choose.

If you could spare just a few dollars, euros or pounds to help me raise money for this wonderful, local charity I would be ever so grateful.

Many thanks,

Jim

With today's launch of Firefox 3.6 we thought we'd update our web designer's browser support checklist and see what's new with this new, apparently faster browser.

You can compare Firefox's support for HTML5 & CSS3 in version 2, 3, 3.5 and 3.6 on this checklist.

Multiple Background Support

It looks to me like the only thing that's been added is support for multiple backgrounds, now supported by all the browsers except Opera... and, oh yes, you've guessed it, IE.

Deep Blue Sky are extremely pleased to announce the launch of the very first Web Innovation Awards, a competition to find the most exciting and innovative idea for the web.

Register your idea on-line today.

Here at DeepBlueSky we enjoy creating websites and web applications that make people's lives better and so we're offering an award of up to £10,000 in design, development and hosting costs to the person who can come up with the most exciting idea.

Who can enter?

The competition is open to anyone and your idea will be judged against 5 main criteria assess it's merit:

1. Innovation
2. Value
3. Engagement
4. Realism
5. Originality

How do I enter?

You can enter online and revisit your idea at any time. Entries close on the 30th April 2010 and the winner will see their site built and developed by our expert team, becoming a reality and going on-line within months.

We'd like to wish everyone the best of luck and we hope to see some really exciting entries.

Register your idea on-line today.

Staying together for the Users

Choosing a web partner for your business is a difficult process; get it right and you will forge a relationship that will breed understanding, partnership, success, a great user experience for your audience, and a wealth of ideas and innovation you thought not previously possible.

Get it wrong and your experience will be a frustrating one characterised by misunderstanding, the dilution of your core sales message, and wasted investment.

Whether you choose Deep Blue Sky as your web partner or not taking some key steps before you start your journey will save time, effort, and money.

Know Thyself

Most businesses will now have a website of some description – from a brochure website to a full blown interactive experience connecting with their customer base on every conceivable level.   The inherent pressure to get a business online can cause some basic questions to be left unanswered. Ask and answer these and you’ll be off to a great start in your web project:

• What do I want to achieve?
• Who are my audience?
• What do I want the users experience to be?
• What is the core message I want to send?
• What action do I want the user to take? Buy? Call? Subscribe? Email?

If you do not know the answers to these questions then you will not be able to communicate your goals effectively leading to a muddled brief and an ineffective end product.

A Bass-line of Ability

There are a few things that you have every right to expect from a web partner as an absolute minimum. Ask for examples and question effectively and if you’re unhappy move on to the next candidate.

• A Grand Design  - Can they produce effective, practical designs that will enhance your brand and your users’ experience?   Some designers can fall into the trap of doing too much or producing clever designs that showcase their talent and know how, but fail in the ultimate objective of winning you business.
  
• Delivering the Goods - Make sure that you set a workable deadline for your project. This will ensure that your project will not get lost in the daily grind of running your business. Ask for examples of when they have achieved these core competencies for their clients.
• The Technical Stuff - Can they deliver a strong development platform on which your websites runs? Will you have the ability to update it yourself and keep your content current? Again, ask for examples and get them to demonstrate an ability to deliver a website that delivers value to your business.
• A Sound System - At its core web design and development is delivering a tool to help you achieve your business objectives. This process should be flexible but solid with ample space for feedback and focussed and relevant change.   A good web partner will have sound project management systems and processes in place to ensure effective and timely delivery.

It's Love, Actually...

At base a good relationship comes through understanding.   You will be able to trust a well chosen web partner to tell you when something is possible and sometimes more importantly, when it is not.  Make sure that they have taken the time to understand your business and understand your motivation and objectives.

If this happens they will be able to suggest changes, additions and ideas that you hadn’t have thought which can transform the success of a project.

Trust your gut – will you be able to work with them?  Will you get on with them?   If not, move on to the next one.  Like speed dating - but a lot more heart-breaking.

The Good Client

The customer is always right….except when they’re wrong but won’t admit it.  If you have a good relationship with your web partner you will trust them when they disagree with you.  It’s usually for a good reason and it will be based on knowledge and experience.   Give them the ability to do their job through a clear brief, a reasonable deadline, and stationary goal posts and they will deliver something exceptional, rather than satisfactory.

The Happily Ever After

Take on board these simple steps and your online life will be plain sailing and lead to a long, enduring, and successful working relationship based on integrity, innovation and partnership.

Love your web partner, and they’ll love you right back.  

I use Fireworks (CS3) for design work and like any designer I regularly rely on the simple keyboard shortcuts (nudge, delete, undo...etc) to improve my productivity.

The other day however, disaster struck when Fireworks crashed and suddenly all of the keyboard shortcuts stopped responding.

After trawling the net  I found this simple fix:

1. Start Fireworks.
2. Go to Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts.
3. Select "Fireworks" from the "Current set" dialog.
4. Select "Miscellaneous" from the "Commands" dialog.
5. In the large drop down below scroll down and select "Nudge Up (UP)".
6. Focus the "Press Key" dialog below and press the UP arrow cursor key on your keyboard. This should reset the "Nudge Up" command to be UP.

As a result of resetting this one shortcut Fireworks seems to get the kick it needs to restore the keyboard shortcuts. Phew!

I hope this helps someone out, but please remember I only tested this in Fireworks CS3. If someone has this problem in another version of Fireworks please comment below with your fix.

Building on the solid foundations of the original iStylista.com, founders, and recipients of The Independant  "Top 100 Online Fashion Award" Chantelle Znideric and Hayden Allen-Vercoe needed a website to deliver a unique user experience.

The Challenge

We were asked to construct a unique structure and system that would:

• Allow users to construct a unique personal style profile taking into account personal preference, build, and colouring
• Enable users to profile clothing options against a range of different criteria
• Automatically provide users with details of suitable items, discounts and promotions via email
• Be flexible enough to incorporate additional clothing lines via data feeds from participating stores, fashion houses and retail

It was a given that the site would also require an intuitive and simple user interface that would enable the user to take advantage of the full power and breadth of the site with a minimum of fuss and maximum of effectiveness.

How we created iStylista

We used Spirit Framework, our development platform to affect a quick roll out of a beta version of the site and integrate clothing and accessory feeds into the iStylista database. This allowed the iStylista team to begin categorising and reviewing products in parallel with our design and development work. This saved valuable time on the project and enabled the project to go live quicker than anticipated.

Having completed the design, build and development phase we integrated a Blog Module and automatic email generation to enable iStylista to keep in touch with their audience on a regular basis.

The End Result

iStylista.com has gone from strength to strength garnering broadsheet coverage, awards and incorporating new lines of clothing regularly. The Blog is popular within the fashion community most recently – it was most recently featured – with Chantelle – in the January 29th Edition of the Telegraph Magazine.

Their website was poorly structured, lacked direction in its design and failed to make use of the incredible opportunity to sell its fantastic location.

What We Did

In the initial phases of the design process we made sure to collect as much as possible from the client in terms of their thoughts, opinions and ideas they had but could not translate to the web. We developed a clear content strategy, ensured that all the necessary Calls to Action were properly placed to convert visitors to bookings utilizing our Spirit Framework development platform.

The Unique Selling Point (Just Look at that View)

The site is designed to draw as much attention as possible to its Unique Selling Point – its stunning location and the views from its charming rooms.

We developed a prominent slideshow that could be updated regularly and complimented this with accessible content and simple descriptive text that did not detract from the imagery of Snowdonia.

Big and Small

Bryn Melyn is a great example of how we can use Spirit Framework to deliver a cost effective website that delivers exactly to the business objectives of a small business.
We are now assisting the client by targeted SEO advice to drive as much traffic as possible to the site and stimulate new bookings.

To find out how we can help your business call us on 01225 444674.

View Updated Site

Support for Forms, Web Applications and Selectors

Since launching a couple of months ago we've had lots of great feedback. We've listened to your requests for a wider range of tests and now added support for:

• HTML5 “Forms 2.0”
• HTML5 “Web Applications”
• CSS3 Selectors

Full Browser Support Tables

On our blog we also promised to make our results more accessible to our users.

Therefore we've used the testing service LitmusApp to create a fully comprehensive table of browser support results, with features broken down my section and clearly labeled for your convenience.

View Browser Tables

Coming Up...

We're introducing more browsers to our tests including "edge cases" such as Flock, Konqueror and older versions of the major browser vendors.

We're also consider adding tests for Flash version & Screen Resolution.

If you have any features you'd like to see added to FindMeByIP, or you've got some feedback for us then please let us know by leaving a comment on our blog. We'd love to hear from you!

We would like to point out that of course none of our clients over the years have ever said anything to us that would make us post their emails on this site... 

... but we do love it nonetheless:

http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com/

Clients beware! :-)

Most of our clients presume that keyword stuffing is all that's involved in search engine optimisation.  

We think your website is possibly the least important part of your SEO strategy and so we thought we'd provide our 3 golden rules of seo here for all to see in order to put that fallacy to bed for good.

1: Quantity of inbound links - Volume

Think of your website like a celebrity. There are two basic principals at play here:

1. Volume
   The more you are discussed the more important you must be.
    
2. Importance
   The more important the people are who are discussing you the more important you must be by association.

This is the underlying principal that lead two students, Laurence Page & Sergey Brin, to invent a thing called Google, a search engine that used link citation or references to describe a graph of importance known as PageRank.

If lots of important websites refer to your website that makes your website more important which makes Google, Yahoo and Bing more likely to send people to you.

2: Quality of inbound links - Context

Quantity isn't enough on it's own so you need to make sure that inbound links are of good quality too.  

There are three areas to consider here;

1. Website Context
   If there are links from David Beckham's blog and the Manchester United website to your website it's safe to assume your website is within the "context" of football.
    
2. Link Content
   If David writes the following "and so if you want find a great football shirt shop then they're the best" then it's safe to assume that your website is a football shirt shop.
    
3. Link Depth
   If David links to your home-page that's great but if he links to a specific, page deep within your site ( like mywebsite.com/football/shirts/ ) then it's safe to assume that this page is more specifically related to the subject.

The second point is vitally important.  This link is independent, descriptive and trustworthy.

The content and context of links on other people's websites is far more useful to Google than the content of your own pages because it's independent and so can be trusted a little more than the content on your own site.

3: Your website - Phrasing & Markup  

Last, and - yes - least, is your website itself.  Your website is, of course, really important but we can't stress enough that it's the least important of our 3 golden rules of SEO. 

When optimising your website there are, again, two things to consider:

1. Phrasing
   Think about the phrases people use when searching for your service.  The more closely the phrases of your website mirror the phrases people use when searching the more likely you are to appear.
    
2. Markup
   Make sure every page of your website has a good title and that you're using headings correctly.  You need to turn off all graphics & CSS to get an idea of this though.

What your website looks like ( to the average visitor ) is irrelevant to getting people through the door.  You need to treat Google as if it were a visually impaired visitor - it can't see any of your images.  Additionally it doesn't run scripts and it doesn't fill in forms.  Making your website accessible and optimising it for search engines is really the same thing. 

Is that it then?

Of course not - there's a massive amount more to say on the subject and this is as good a place as any to start. 

I'll be adding a 4th and 5th rule shortly.  These are a little more technical but explain a little about what to tackle first to get the best results.

In the meantime if you think I've missed anything let me know!

I'm by no means a writer - I design and I code, but working on the web means that I encounter examples of web copy (both good and bad) on a daily basis. Therefore, although I'm not an "expert" per se, you could say I have some experience in this area.

I regularly try and pass on my knowledge to clients who are coming to write web copy for the first time. To help them (and us) with this I've compiled a short list of principles which serve as a basic guide to writing text for websites.

1. Make Content Easily Scanable

Reading copy online is harder on your eyes than reading from paper based mediums. This is partly due to the relatively low resolution of monitors (eg: 96dpi) compared to print (300dpi+) which means that our eyes/brains have to work harder to decipher the letter-forms.

Research has shown that rather than reading from top to bottom, users tend to scan copy using visual cues to determine what they want to read. Therefore, large chunks of unbroken text simply won't cut it.

Things to do

• Break text up using descriptive headings.
• Use lists (bullet points) and short punchy paragraphs to break up copy.
• Sprinkle copy with visual cues such as occasional emphasis and links to add interest.

2. Get to the point

Considering that it's difficult to read large amounts of copy online it's generally best to use the Inverted Pyramid style of writing. Make your conclusion first and then proceed to provide a few examples to illustrate your point.

The advantage of this approach is that  your users won't have to invest time in reading the whole paragraph before they can decide whether the content is relevant to them or not.

With web users becoming increasing impatient, this style will make you popular with your visitors.

Things to do:

• Read a few newspaper articles both off and on-line to get a feel for the style.
• Read Writing Inverted Pyramid by Jacob Nielsen.

3. Be concise

You may have lots of information to convey to your readers but nothing is more frustrating than a paragraph that goes on forever and comes to no conclusion.

Get to the point, fast.

Unless your cater for a specialist market, your users probably only want the essential information about your product/service. You might be an expert with lots to say, but don't overload them with too much information which could be found elsewhere.

As regards length, if we consider that studies have shown that reading on screen is 25% slower than on paper, you probably need to be looking at reducing your word count by at least 50% to make your copy effective.

Things to do:

• Look for areas where you are saying something that is not crucial information and remove it.
• Strive to cut out all unnecessary words.
• Remember: "Get to the point and be concise".

4. Write in "Plain English"

Don't be unnecessarily complicated. Keep your wording and naming conventions simple and unpretentious.

For example, you might have internal naming conventions for your products/services but if these are potentially confusing for your audience then you need to replace them with simpler versions.

Many professional web copy writers advocate aiming your copy at a medium reading level so as to achieve maximum comprehension across a wide section of the public.

Don't dumb it down too much, but don't use terms that are going to confuse your readers either.

Things to do:

• Avoid internal naming conventions
• Remove confusing terms or phrases
• Keep everything simple

5. Make it keyword rich for search

Make no mistake, web copy should be written primarily for humans not machines. However, as long as it doesn't impact on readability there is no harm in trying to include keywords/phrases that will help position yourself in the Google search rankings.

For example if you are a self catering business in Scotland, you might try sprinkling relevant keywords throughout the copy of your website.

eg: "There is a wealth of accommodation in Scotland..."

If you are obeying the points outlined above the keywords should slot naturally into your text, especially in your descriptive headings and internal links.

Things to do:

• Write primarily for humans not search engines.
• Research keywords/keyphrases and sprinkle your copy with these.
• Focus on headings and links.

Final Points

This is by no means a comprehensive review of how to write effective web copy and other authorities on the subject have written far more exhaustive guides. Nonetheless, it should prove useful as a beginners guide.

I'd love to hear if you think I've missed out something crucial. Why not leave a comment below and I'll get back to you with my response.

The web-sphere gets more and more exciting as each year passes.  International phenomenons like Facebook and YouTube often eclipse the equally amazing apps which, while not as appealing to the sofa surfing masses, are making a real difference to the way we, an you work and interact each day.

We thought we'd round up just five of our favourite web apps; on-line tools that have made a real impact on our day to day lives.  There must be a hundred more equally deserving apps out there.  I'd love to know what they are!  I'll write this article again next November so if anyone wants a shot at that please put your favourite apps forward!

1: Freshbooks - On-line Invoicing

• 
  On-line Invoicing

According to their website since May 2004 Freshbooks has acquired one million new users and I can tell you why.  They've taken the pain out of the arduous task of invoicing your clients and made the whole process a breeze.

I can't believe that once upon a time we used to raise our monthly retainer invoices manually!  Can you imagine what a dull task that was?  Freshbooks has changed all that.  

A simple, slick and solid interface allows you to raise estimates quickly and easily, ping them at your client to one-button-approve and then, when the time comes, convert them to a digital invoice.  Recurring invoices like bills for hosting are raised and sent to the client without any intervention at all.  Just the time it saves for any small company like us is enough to justify the tiny cost ten times over. 

Those of you in the US will get to enjoy slightly better integration with PayPal that allows for repeat billing but nevertheless even here in the UK hooking up Google Checkout, PayPal and so on is super simple and very effective.

Things to improve:

• Ability for clients to enter a purchase order when approving an estimate would be great.
• Improving the 'context' of the page you're on so it's harder to lose your place.  Basing the pages on a URL structure ( "/invoices/client-name/create-new-invoice" ) would make bookmarking a breeze and (imho) fix the problem.

2: ActiveCollab - Collaborative Project Management

• 
  Project Management

ActiveCollab is a host-it-yourself project management tool that, again, has changed our world quite a bit! If I'm honest we've been using ActiveCollab since its version 0.7 days but a total re-write and commercialisation of what was ( I think ) a bit of a pet-project has seen this app mature into a solid, extensive and fundamentally important tool for us.

Collaborative project management means inviting your clients in to share in the process of planning out your project and keeping it on track. AC provides segmentation of projects from Milestone -> Ticket -> Task, all of which can be both independent and associative, time-tracked, assigned, etc. etc.  

Like all good apps it's also extensible and the guys over at AppsMagnet have developed two great add-ons for reporting and planning, the latter providing interactive Gant charts of multiple projects which is a massive help for managing your working week.

There are a couple of extensions which, largely because we've already other things in place, we haven't even looked at yet.  These are invoicing and Version Control.  I'm doing AC no justice at all with this quick little mention.  If you want to know more about the document sharing, time tracking, iPhone version, inbound email etc., etc., take a quick tour.  

ActiveCollab has become the bedrock of our planning strategy and the time it saves us means that we can afford to hit deadlines and still keep Fridays to ourselves!

Things to improve:

• Wiki-Text for the collaborative pages, and tickets would be brilliant, particularly wikiLinks a la Trac 

3: LitmusApp - Email Client, Spam and Browser Testing

• 
  Email & Browser Testing

Browser testing is one thing, particularly these days, because on the whole most browsers do most things the same way ( with the obvious magical-mystery exception of Internet Explorer ) but email testing remains a real pain the the Outlook!  

To the rescue - LitmusApp! Fire your email at a magic email address ( or just upload the source ) and the guys at Litmus will render your email in seventeen email and web-mail clients.  For each you'll get opened, unopened, full page, with images, without images etc..  

You can also publish your results so your clients can see...take a look at this example which is a email to the golf members of The Park Resort - a local hotel and golf resort that we look after.

It doesn't stop there either.  The same email will go through all the big spam filters and spam testing of the major clients - twelve at present - advising you if you're missing text/plain or your font sizes are too big etc.

Using a tool like this makes me wonder how we ever managed before.  A combination of blind faith, a lot of RAM and a massive amount of patience and we were no-where close.

With Chrome, Opera, Safari and Firefox all pulling in the same direction HTML & CSS standards are coming on in leaps and bounds.  The sad fact is that html-email rendering standards are going just as fast backwards.  Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided that Word is the worlds favourite html renderer and even Gmail is pretty awful in some areas.  The point is that Litmus mitigates so much of the potential hazards of html email by showing you exactly what everyone else sees.

Things to improve:

• Would be nice if they tested web-pages too.  Oh, no, they've done that...
• Would be even better if you could test pages you only see once you've logged in..   dammit! ;-)
• Could do with looking into the buggy Outlook 2007 capture.

4: DropBox - File Sharing & Storage

• 
  File Sharing & Storage

Celebrating their first day on their rightful domain dropbox.com is, again, a very simple idea, blindingly well executed.  

Download ( if you wish ) a little app to your Mac, PC or Linux box and sign up for a (to start with) free account and hey presto you've a folder on your computer that follows you everywhere.  That's it. Done.  My stuff that I'm working on in the office is now in my study at home, on my lap on my sofa or even on my phone.

What I think gives DropBox some credibility is that we've been doing this ourselves for years...we've servers in various places around Bath and indeed Europe and tools like rsync provide an amazingly quick model for synchronising [the changes in] files between your servers.  So what's new?

First; Execution. DropBox is a desktop tool and it's not intrusive in any way.  You just get used to the fact your files are always there - like synchronised bookmarks ( in Chrome 4 beta - woo hoo! ).

Second; Collaboration.  Invite clients in seconds to share specific files or folders and suddenly you've done away with FTP and "I can't email you these high-res photos, I'll burn a CD" entirely... on a day-to-day basis it's totally changed the way we work with clients like Dickies who have lots of catalogue data and thousands of high-res images to deal with.  We just have a shared drop box folder and the stock of photos lives there.

Third; Access.  Because you don't even need to install the app.  Just visit dropbox.com and there are all your files... wherever you are in the world.

Things to improve:

• Excel.  It's a sad thing really and the guys at dropbox do know about it but Excel touches its files when you open them - triggering an update of the file even if you don't save any changes.  The conflict management does spot it if two of you have the same file open and take evasive manovers so it's hardly a big problem.
• Locking.  Conversely the Excel touching thing could come in handy as much as it would actually be nice if it knew if someone else had the same file open.  Particularly relevant to documents and spreadsheets.

5: Xero - On-line Accounting

• 
  On-line Accounting

Last, by oh-my-no means least is Xero.  

"But everyone uses Sage and they always have" said my accountant,  "It'll never catch on, it won't know what it's doing, it'll take too much learning" he continued.  (Sorry Simon!) 

Xero is possibly one of the most comprehensively well put together pieces of web-software I've come across ( except for back-end of our Spirit Content & Business Management Framework of course! ;-)  Even if you've no interest in Accounting, if you're just a web designer, you should still take a good, long, hard look at Xero for its UI design.  Even the help-centre is impressively well organised.

Underneath it's beautiful UI is an incredibly capable and ever improving accounts platform that already blows Sage out of the water.  All the standard things from repeat invoicing to account journalling are there as you'd expect.  

But it's the end-to-end integration of everything that makes the difference.  We're lucky enough to bank with HSBC who will feed your bank statement data straight in every day ( no importing ), as will PayPal.  From there the reconciliation process is practically automatic - Xero will recorgnise most of your statement lines and match them to the corresponding invoices.

All the reports you'd expect from your VAT return to full end of year accounts are just a click away. 

Accounts doesn't often get exciting but Xero really does rock.  It's making a massive difference and, like all the apps here the time and hassle it saves more, far more than compensates for the small running cost it represents.

One last thing to say is this:  moving from Sage will seem like a massive struggle.  Believe me; persuading your accountant will be most of the battle.  When it comes down to it it's actually very straight forward and simple and definitely worth it.

Things to improve:

•  We would've saved time knowing that you could complete the setup and retrospectively import outstanding invoices but then, well, we probably didn't RTFM.
• Automatic/bulk mailing of recurring invoices ( although I heard a rumour that was on the way! Yippee ).
• Integration with Freshbooks... oh, yes, I think I can hear that round the corner too. Nice!
• ... and possibly, if I'm being picky, Xero suffers a similar workflow problem as Freshbooks that, if you're looking at a client getting to that clients invoices and, particularly, when you've finished a task being returned to that client's invoices doesn't seem to happen.  It's not a massive problem - Ctrl+clicking things into a new tab or a few extra clicks but...

What have we missed out??

I'm sure I've missed so many great apps from this list and I'd love to know what they might be.  If you've got a favourite app, something that's really changing the way you work I'd love to know about it.  If it's something we might use then I'll test-drive it in 2010 and, if it really is great, I can talk about that next year!

Since the launch of FindMeByIP.com we've received some really great feedback from everybody. You've let us know how we could improve the service and it's provided a great insight into the kind of problems web designers run into on a day to day basis.

Retrieving Client's Browser Information

For me one problem really stood out above all others - the need to find out what browser your client is running.

We've all been there. The client rings up to tell you there's a bug on their site. You ask "What browser are you using?" but they don't have a clue. You then spend ages explaining to your client how they can find out their browser details.Tedious!

We set out to solve this problem...

The Solution

We've taken the original FindMeByIP.com engine and added the ability to run reports on your clients' browser environment.

To get detailed reports you simply:

1. Sign Up for an account
2. Send your client a dedicated (and customisable) URL (eg: findmebyip.com/my-company-name)
3. Receive complete FindMeByIP reports on their browser and system environment.

It really couldn't be easier!

What Information will I get?

You'll get a full report on your client's:

• Browser version
• Operating System
• Browser support for [a selection of] HTML5 and CSS3 features
• Full User Agent String

We're adding new tests all the time so watch this space for:

• Plugin detection (Flash...etc)
• Screen/Window resolution detection.
• CSS3 selector tests.
• Extra HTML5 tests.

Let us know what you think

Think we've missed something? Found a bug? We'd really like to hear from you. Just leave a comment on this article and we promise to get back to you.

We don’t need to tell you that social media has taken hold of the net… and isn’t about to let go, that’s old news. What we do need to tell you is that social media holds the key to more reservations  perhaps much more than you think.

Here are our top ten ideas for how hotels, conference centres and spas can really embrace social media:

1: The twitter concierge service.

Set up a twitter page and encourage visitors to your website (through a link) to ask questions and get immediate responses through twitter. Hyatt have done this very successfully, take a look at Hyatt's concierge twitter account. 

2: Share your positive reviews.

Post your positive reviews to your blog and set up a twitterfeed to help you propagate the good news through twitter and Facebook.

3: Find new staff through social networks.

Trust me, if you’re looking for new staff then try tweeting about it… you’ll see for yourself just how powerful a medium it is when you have CVs flying in and no recruitment agencies hassling you for fees.

4: Set up a blog and double organic traffic.

Download a Wordpress blog template for free and start writing engaging, search optimised content that is going to get picked up through natural searches. See Grayshott Spa for one of our examples of how providing valuable content for your guests provides rewards for you in terms of traffic.

5: Want more weddings, conferences etc?

Demonstrate your position as an expert. Use blog posts and tweets to position yourself as an industry expert. What are the biting issues or advice in those sectors? Content doesn’t necessarily need to be related directly to your hotel – think laterally and on topic.

6: Promote your best pieces of content.

You’ve just spent a couple of hours writing a killer piece of content around a subject that is relevant to your market or industry. The worst thing you can do is let it sit there and fester… pro-actively offer the article to your industry magazines (on and off line) as well as other thought leaders (bloggers) relevant to the topic.

For example you write a great piece around the importance of having a Christmas party as a business. Take it to small business blogs. If they publish it, you’ll not only get their web traffic but you’ll also get a valuable link back to your website.

Some great places to start in relation to hotel marketing are www.hotelemarketer.com and www.hotelmarketingstrategies.com.

7: Bad press?

Start managing your online reputation effectively. Many hoteliers have had sleepless nights thanks to the likes of social sharing sites like TripAdvisor. These sites are definitely here to stay so stop ignoring them and hoping they’ll disappear. If you get a negative (or positive) review you must respond. You have the opportunity to do this on TripAdvisor. If the review is particularly negative then we suggest featuring your response on your blog. Sounds like madness? Of course not; you’re showing the world that you have nothing to hide and therefore will gain respect.

8: Keep prospects and customers informed.

Social media has made it easy to share information and now it’s time to get your head around how to do this. Build up a twitter following or perhaps a Facebook Group over time and give them exclusive offers and discounts before anyone else… your following will grow faster than you think!

9: Keep abreast with what the competition are up to.

Find other hotels on twitter through Twellow, a very useful twitter directory service. Follow them and keep an eye on what they are promoting and when. This may give you inspiration, but will ultimately allow you to gauge just what’s going on in their world.

10: Get personal.

Take pictures of your guests holding parties, conferences, weddings etc and feature them on your blog (with their permission of course) and you’ll be building a loyal community without even knowing it. They will feel attached to your brand and no doubt share the picures/stories with their friends… hey presto new clients and a lot of trust!

It looks like Google aren't letting up on expanding the power of their (free) analytics tool.  A recent announcement lists a number of great advancements many of which we're already finding very useful.

Many more goals...

I'm a fervent believer in measuring "Goal Conversions" not "Visitors"...  this website's a perfect case in point.  FindMeByIP.com and a couple of Dave's recent blog articles about CSS3 & HTML5 have brought more visitors per day than we usually get in a year but does that mean any more business for us? ... well no, sadly.. probably not immediately anyway.

So we don't just track visitors, we also track "Goals" because this is a real measure of what the website is contributing to the business. And don't be fooled into thinking Goal Tracking is just for E-Commerce sites.  With a little ingenuity you can off-line the goal tracking process, putting you in control of the conversion.

Goals used to be limited to four per profile - meaning that if you had plenty of contact forms you want to track ( The Park, for example, has enquiry forms for Golf, Weddings, Meetings and Leisure Breaks - ok that's four Goals already - so what about online reservations, membership, jobs, general enquiries.. ).

Expanding the number of goals that can be tracked is a great development.  Google now allows you 20 goals, in 4 groups of 5.  More than enough for most of our clients.

If you need more than 20 you can, of course, just set up multiple profiles for the same tracking-id... giving you potentially hundreds of goals to track.

Double Analysis...

Another great new feature is double analysis.  This is a very simple addition ( cosmetically I mean ) that allows you to add a second level to your segmentation of results.  Try it in any of your reports...  if you're looking at a report by "Medium" you can add "Source" as a second breakdown, giving you ( source X medium ) rows of information.

This is very useful, for example, to help you understand the different landing pages that different referring sites send your traffic to.  Something that's previously required some digging.

Custom Variables...

Most exciting of all is custom variables... but this is, sadly, where this article's going to have to go on hold because I've discovered, having looked more closely into the announcement that the reports aren't yet available to everyone.

To give you a quick idea of the power we expect them to provide...  

Spirit has a pretty cool "Role Management" framework within it.  In simple terms, when someone logs into or interacts with one of our websites Spirit analyses a tree-structure of roles and assigns that user to a few appropriate roles.  Membership of a role can effect dozens of low level systems within Spirit - all configuration, row-level database access, consequence of form interaction, access to pages, content , emails communication or just behaviour of the website.

In probably no more than an hour on Friday afternoon I was able to identify add "Role Membership" of a few selected roles to Google Analyitcs as Custom Variables.

I'm experimenting, first off, with a client website iStylista - a personal shopping service.  

I've chosen two branches of the Role Management tree to look at:

• "Logged In" (or not)
• "Profile Complete" ( or not, and if not how much is complete ). 

iStylista provides two principal services for women. First, it provides a 20-30 page personalised Style Guide helping women choose what styles suit them according to thousands of variables the user provides.  Secondly it provides personal shopping advice based on slightly fewer variables.

In the latter case the customer doesn't need to provide any information to use the service but the more information they provide the more accurate the choices the website makes based on the information the stylists have provided.

What intrigues me is whether the people who use iStylista to help them shop are getting the most out of it.  

With Google's new Custom Variables we're now recording roughly how complete the consumer's profile is and whether the user is logged in.  This should tell us whether we need to make it easier for people to profile themselves, what bits of the profiling ( bodyshape, sizes, budget ) people find most useful and so on.  All of this should help us make the experience quicker, simpler and more accurate for the ladies who use the service.

All we're waiting for now is for Google to provide us the report that shows us all the data we're collecting!! 

Download Icons Now

Most of you will be only too familiar with the problems associated with Internet Explorer 6 and alpha transparent PNG images. It's inability to correctly render semi-transparent pixels (alpha channels) mean that web developers constantly have to use javascript hacks to remove the ugly blue border which appears around these graphics.

This situation is bearable if you are using only a few PNG files in your design, but what if you have a design that uses many smaller images, such as icons? When this happens you can quickly find yourself having to "fix" numerous instances of the dreaded "blue border" in IE6, which is not only inconvenient but can also really slow your website's rendering speed.

For example, here at DeepBlueSky we regularly use the fantastic Fam Fam Silk icon set by Mark James. It's a brilliantly useful set of 16x16 png files which make full use of the alpha-transparent format. It's great for modern browsers, but it produces unacceptable results in IE6.

The Solution

Thankfully however, there is a method for exporting png files which contain alpha transparent pixels so that they look acceptable in IE6 whilst still looking great in modern browsers. This solution has been well documented and effectively removes the problem of the "blue border" in IE6 allowing you to drop in your png icons without having to worry about backwards compatbility.

I've used Adobe Fireworks to create a PNG-8 versions of the whole Silk Set icon library making it  "backwards compatible" in Internet Explorer 6. Modern browsers get the full alpha channel experience whilst IE6 gets an acceptable compromise similar to that seen when you don't specifiy a Matte colour on transparent .gif graphics.

Download

You can download the full IE6 Silk Set (with kind permission from Mark James) direct from here. All the original licenses still apply so please see Mark's site for full details.

Last week we launched FindMeByIP.com, a simple app which reveals your browsers' support for CSS3 and HTML5 features in an easy to read format using Modernizr.

We've had a great response and we're going to be implementing some of your feedback in the near future.

For now though I thought people mind find it useful to know the state of support in the current browser market.  I've taken all the A-Grade browsers and tested them one-by-one for their feature support . Needless to say it's produced some interesting results.

Safari 4 (Win)

Safari (on Windows) has by far the best  feature set in the current market, outdoing competitors like Firefox 3.5 and even Google Chrome.

Particularly interesting is the excellent support for CSS3 animation properties such as CSS Transforms & CSS Animations, which enable the developer to define javascript-like rotation, movement and easing via CSS (advanced demos).

HTML5 features are well supported with Canvas, Video and Audio all implemented. Only the Geolocation API is currently not available, although apparently this is in the pipeline.

Firefox 3.5 (Win)

Firefox 3.5 has good support for features that you might be looking to use in your client work on a day-to-day basis. @font-face, box-shadow, rgba() and border-radius all work nicely.

Although, it doesn't quite match up to Safari when it comes to CSS animation, it makes up for this with solid implementation of HTML5 media (video and audio).

A major plus is that Firefox 3.5+ implements the first public draft of the Geolocation specification from the W3C which I anticipate will be very useful in future web applications.

Google Chrome (Win)

As you'd expect for a WebKit browser, Chrome has really excellent support for almost all of the Modernizr tests generated by findmebyip.com.

The big let down is the lack of support for @font-face. This has been widely documented and there are known work arounds for it.  Google has promised that the next version of Chrome will add native support for web fonts.

I was very surprised to see 3D Transforms return positive.  I believe this is currently only supported by the iPhone and iPod Touch so I'm not sure about the accuracy of this result.

Opera 10 (Win)

We got quite a few comments about Opera's perceived lack of support for advanced features. It's true that support for CSS3 features is poor, especially when border-radius still hasn't been implemented.

Nevertheless, as Bruce Lawson has suggested to me, Opera does have good support for other important web standards which are currently not being tested by findmebyip.com.  He highlights  "Web Forms 2" and SVG support as two primary examples of Opera's excellence in these areas.

Nonetheless, I still feel that Opera needs to catch up with the CSS3 spec if it wants to be adopted by the mainstream web dev community.

Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8

And now the one you've all been waiting for.  Lets all have a good laugh! Well not quite, because unlike some other contenders, Internet Explorer does actually support @font-face (all be it only in .eot format). In fact it's supported it for a while, with even IE6 providing complete support!

Nonetheless, with the exception of font-face, Internet Explorer does display a marked lack of support for almost every kind of advanced/progressive feature.  Hopefully the IE team will be able to look at this in a future release, but I'm not holding out any hope.

Summary

There is now a consistent level of support for many of the CSS3 and HTML5 features that the average developer might use for progressive enhancement.  From my survey the most widely supported features were:

• rgba()
• hsla()
• opacity()
• border-radius (except Opera)
• canvas

Outside of these however, support is patchy and is largely dependant on the whim of the browser manufacturer.  Some browsers are way ahead of the game (Safari), whilst others have a intermediate (Firefox) or even poor(?) support (Opera).

It should be noted however, that findmebyip is not perfect and as a result doesn't report on all advanced features.  We'll be upgrading the site in the near future to include a full range of tests for Web Forms and even SVG graphics, so perhaps another test will be in order then.

Finally a request to you Mac geeks out there.  Unfortunately, we don't run Mac's so I can't comment on OSX versions of these browsers.  If anyone would like to let us know how the Mac versions of these browsers perform and post them as a comment we'd be very grateful.

Here in the DeepBlueSky offices we've been making a new effort to dedicate Friday afternoon's to "in house" projects. This week I've created FindMeByIP.com, a simple little app that uses a combination of CSS and the Modernizr javascript library to clearly display your browsers' support for advanced CSS3 and HTML5 features.

Why did I build FindMeByIP.com?

As we all know different browsers have varying levels of support for advanced features. If we follow best practice, then it's generally accepted that people using more "modern" browsers get a better experience than those using older models.

At DeepBlueSky I use the Modernizr javascript library to enable advanced features to display in those browsers that support them. The problem is that I keep forgetting which browser supports which feature which means I continually have to inspect the classnames  on the <html> tag!

What does FindMeByIP.com do?

FindMeByIP.com solves this problem by presenting your browsers' support in an easy to read bullet list format. Each feature is tested by the Modernizer javascript library and then shown with either a "tick" or a "cross" icon to designate the level of support.

How does it work?

The website relies heavily on Javascript and the use of CSS descendant selectors to achieve its results.

• The Modernizr library adds a suitable classname on the <html> tag if a feature is supported by your browser.
• The site's CSS file contains a list of rules which mirror those used by Modernizr and apply a background icon of a "tick" if matched.
• Each "feature" is enclosed within a list-item and given a class which matches the rule used in the CSS file (eg: the "border-radius" list-item has a class of "borderradius" and the "canvas" list-item has a class of "canvas").
• The result is if the feature is supported then a tick appears next to the list-item with the classname that matches that added to the <html> tag by Modernizr.

It's certainly not the most accessible method ever seen, but as the whole site (necessarily) doesn't work without Javascript it's something I can live with.

The future

In the coming weeks we'll be adding some great new features to the site and implementing some of the feedback we've received so keep checking back for upgrades.

We'd also love to hear from you. So if you have anything you'd like us to know please leave a comment below.

Do you love Gravatar? Do you want a little a more control over which image shows up?...  Here's a simple trick to allow you to convey your mood when you comment on somone's blog using Gravatar..

Ingredients:

• 1x Gravatar Account
• 1x Google Account (optional)
• 2x Pictures
• 1x Cup of Coffee 

How it works (plus symbols in email addresses):

GMail ( and some other MTAs I think? ) will allow a plus symbol (+) to appear in the left-hand-side of your email address.  The plus and everything after it - up to the at symbol (@) - is ignored.

That means that these two email addresses are effectively the same and they will both route to the same inbox:

• jimbo.morrison@gmail.com
• jimbo.morrison+helloworld@gmail.com

Gravatar, meanwhile, allows you to have lots of email addresses and assign different images to your different email addresses.

So armed with as many email addresses as you like through your one Gmail account, your Gravatar account, your library of self portraits and a cup of coffee we can start to have a bit of fun with this...

Step 1: Google Account

First thing you'll need is a Gmail Account.  If you don't want to use gmail don't worry - you don't need to.  Google have a very open policy and you're welcome to either forward all your gmail to Hotmail, Yahoo! or anywhere really or you can pick it up from IMAP or POP.  You never need visit Google again. 

Step 2: Gravatar Account

Next you'll need to get yourself a Gravatar account.  This just takes a few minutes too - you can sign up for a Gravatar  account here.

Step 3: Upload a few pictures

Now you've a gravatar account you can upload a few photos of yourself in different moods, poses or, in my case - because I'm camera shy - a picture of your dog and the cow you met on holiday!

Step 4: Invent some mood-accounts

You'll now be able to add ( and verify ) a few mood accounts in Gravatar.  In this example we've gone for jimbo.morrison+megan@gmail.com ( Meg is the dog ) and jimbo.morrison+highland@gmail.com ( and it's a highland cow )...

Step 6: Assign the pics to the mood-accounts

Now you can select each of you your 'mood accounts' in Gravatar and select the picture you want to associate with each.

Step 7: Show us what you've got!

Last but by no means least - test your new mood-gravatars out and show us what you've created by commenting below!!

There’s much more to life that Facebook and twitter... in fact these two platforms represent just a tiny part of what social media is all about.

Imagine for a moment that social media platforms are like cocktail parties and you or your brand are guests. The concept of mingling and communication works in exactly the same way – social media has broken down the barriers to communication and now allows you to talk to prospects and customers like never before. Now we’ve made that clear, hopefully you’re now starting to get an understanding why so many people bang on about the importance of social media.

Here’s our top 5 reasons to embrace the good of social media as a business:

1. It’s free

OK, maybe that isn’t directly true... you need to pay for your broadband connection after all, but in essence it’s free to use many of these social mediums (some charge). It also takes time to engage in and this is where many businesses falter... social media marketing is a medium to long term strategy on the whole and you need to be committed to it. Twitter for instance is entirely free and possibly the fastest way to build a list of prospects, but it doesn’t stop there – you need to keep them entertained and informed and that takes valuable time. The platforms are ready to use... so what you waiting for – start with twitter.

2. It's where your peers are 

There are so many deals waiting to be done out there. Whether it’s aligning your brand with another, a JV or perhaps even finding someone to bounce an idea off – social media lends itself perfectly to connecting you with other people just as passionate about a particular industry. Start by looking on twitter and sending a direct message to someone of interest, retweeting their messages or even go to the lengths of making positive comments about articles they may write on their blogs. Anyone who’s anyone is joining the social media revolution so don’t get left behind.

3. It's the best way to get publicity

From experience I have found that most journalists are using social media to communicate and listen to buzz. Twitter, especially, is a great way to communicate directly with journalists and pitch exclusives and breaking news. Prominent blogs are also a fantastic new resource worth sharing your news with. You’ll need to know how to speak to bloggers in the first instance (no, sending a plain ‘round robin’ release just doesn’t work), but if you make friends with them and respect their work you’ll find a link from their site and a steady flow of web traffic is worth a lot – and you haven’t spent a bean!

4. It helps you make more sales

Whenever you are communicating through a social medium you are helping to build a little more awareness about yourself, especially if you have something truly interesting or exclusive to report. Coming back to my ‘medium – long term strategy’, the more online publicity you get, inbound links you attract, journalists/bloggers you bond with etc... the more web traffic you get and therefore more likely to increase sales – simple eh!

5. It’s the future

No business wants to get left behind right? Every single day that passes the more your competition promote across social media. This wave of social media marketing is here to stay... and if you don’t jump on board now you are severely hampering your chances of longevity online – which is where more business is going.

So where next?

Before you go blindly winging your way into the social mediasphere, a word of warning if you will:

Plan your attack!!!

You can waste hours on social media marketing to no positive effect, therefore allocate some marketing budget to dip your toe and get some assistance if you are not 100% sure of how to approach the medium. Also beware of cowboys. There are lots of agencies springing up claiming they know the score when it comes to social media, many of whom are PR or SEO agencies who are scared of being left in the cold – get some references!

I really like Opera. They've always been way ahead when it comes to pushing for web standards, and with people like Bruce Lawson onboard they're paving the way for HTML5 and CSS3 to become "main stream".  As a web designer I like Opera.

Knowing this then, it's hardly surprising that the latest web browser to roll off the Opera production line (the imaginatively named "Opera 10") is a really cute piece of kit.  Opening it up for the first time you know it's going to be cutting edge when a little notification pops up to tell you that "Turbo Mode" has been enabled!

As you'd expect with Opera you get the usual plethora of gadgets including Mouse Gestures, Opera Dragonfly (Firebug for Opera) and a Session Manager.  There are UI improvements too, with new resizable "Visual Tabs" (thumbnail previews of your open tabs) and interface design by respected designer Jon Hicks.

However, it seems the main development budget has been invested in rendering speed improvements with claims that Opera Presto 2.2 is now 40% faster on resource intensive apps like Gmail and Facebook.  This has been coupled with Opera Turbo, which uses Opera's servers to compress web pages, boosting your browsing speed by (a claimed) two times.

The Obvious choice?

In light of all this amazing technology you'd expect that as a hard-core web user I'd have Opera 10 set as my default browser.  Or would you? In reality, I just can't find a place for Opera in my web world.

Opera for Front End Development?

I do a lot of CSS work and whilst Opera's Dragonfly is a good bit of kit, I'm way too comfortable with Firebug to consider learning a new tool.  Inevitably then Firefox 3.5 is my browser of choice for web development and that ain't going to change any time soon.

Opera for Utility?

As good as Firefox is, I find that all my web development addons do tend cause it to become pretty visually bloated.  I crave a clean interface with minimal clutter where I can focus on content and not be distracted. I could choose Opera for this task, but I actually opt for Google's Chrome browser.

The reason for this is Chrome's ability to create "Application Shortcut's" for certain web pages which removes the browser "chrome" (see what they did there?) from around the view port.  This is great for things such as Gmail.  I just make a application shortcut and add it to my quick launch bar and I want to open my email quickly I just hit the icon.  So convenient and there's nothing to distract me.

Opera for Speed?

Ok ok, so Opera's got to win on this front surely.  Well yes...and no.

Whilst Opera's speed is a really great selling point, it's just not enough to prise me away from either Firefox or Chrome.  I'm sure that if you measured one against the other, Opera might be 2/10ths of a second fast at rendering a page, but even to someone who works online everyday this simply isn't a noticeable enough difference.

So what is wrong?

I really want to use Opera 10.  I think it's great but I just cannot find a reason to have a 3rd browser in my life. Despite all it's great features the overall package doesn't incentivise me to ditch either Firefox or Chrome.

I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on this.  Do you use Opera 10? What features make it stand out for you? Why do you think that's it's still not making any inroads in the browser market?

What a lovely introduction to business networking.  Thanks to the FSB, Homeward Park and to everyone who attended this morning.

Photographers

Two of  the chaps I met were photographers.  

Tim Gander strikes me as an incredibly talented, traditional, journalistic photographer of all kinds of people, places with a real eye for capturing a moment.  Bath being such a small world it turns out we've both done work for a mutual client - Bray Leino PR over in Bristol.  He's done some really fabulous work... which you can see for yourself.

My other photographic encounter was Robert Brown a 'high impact aerial photographer' - and the photos are really very striking - but it's done not from an aircraft but from some sort of modified army tank mast...  Robert tells me that he can get to pretty much any location, set up the rig and get the photos done in just an hour or two which is just not the way airborne photographers work.   

You can see some of Robert's work here and I've already recommended him to one of our clients, Langley Waterproofing, who are I'm sure always keen to get good shots of the roofs that they've comepleted. 

Green Roofing

Talking of Langley I also chatted briefly to Will Sturges who's company Sturland is all about keeping building green.  Putting green roofs ( I'm talking about living, breathing, grass roofs ) on buildings seems to me like a pretty good idea.

Getting out and meeting people

I'm sure there are a million and one little networking groups like this and after FOWD a couple of weeks back and now this great introduction to the FSB I think I've got the bug.

Can anyone recommend any other groups in the South West that are worth meeting up with?

A Unique Challenge

Designing and building 3 sites that needed to express the uniquity of each hotel yet maintain a common thread in branding was a unique challenge that we were happy to take on.

Each destination has its own character so in order to retain that and maintain brand consistency we chose a simple yet effective device – colour. By making colour a variable across the 3 sites we retained brand consistency while allowing each hotel to project their unique identity onto their site.

Planning Saves Money

To ensure that all 3 sites were consistent in their layout and the typography used we utilized a core CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file to control all of these elements centrally. Each site has its own unique “style code” which determines it colour, imagery and the backgrounds used which means that any alterations cane be made across the portfolio of sites with one action – saving our time and the client money.

Continuing the Good Work

We have continued to support each hotel with further application development, email marketing and Search Engine Optimisation work which has achieved the following results:

• Identifying, driving and converting up-selling opportunities to create £216,000 of revenue through online bookings
• Generating 140,000 visitors and achieving top Google rankings for key search terms

This project is an example of the power and flexibility of our Spirit Framework development platform and how seriously we take not only delivering a great website but also ensuring that our clients achieve a significant return on their investment through targeted consultancy and online marketing work.

DeepBlueSky are pleased to announce the launch of the new website for Powabyke, UK's premier electric bike manufacturer.

The Challenge

Supporting and portraying the Powabyke brand through their new website was a given from the start of this project. It emerged that the main challenge was to design and develop a site that provided the experience required by 2 distinct audiences with differing needs; customers and dealers.

What We Delivered

In order to meet this challenge the design we produced included:

• A clean and modern aesthetic that allowed focus to remain on the products
• A clear and descriptive primary navigation that allowed both Customers and Dealers to access the information they required
• Effective use of Product and “lifestyle” imagery
• Clear Links and Calls to Action leading to the Customer and Dealer information zones

A Foundation for Development

In building this site we made use of our Spirit Framework development platform that can integrate Content Management, eCommerce, CRM and email marketing without the necessity of a full re-build. In doing so we have provided a web site that will be able to grow with Powabyke.

We are presently working with Powabyke to introduce eCommerce functionality to allow customers to purchase spares and accessories online.

When Dickies Workwear asked DeepBlueSky to oversee the re-design and launch of their flagship catalogue website we were only too pleased to help.

The Brief

Dickies clothing is hardwearing, functional, and great value making it the preferred choice of thousands of professionals worldwide. Over time it became clear that their previous website no longer reflected their brand or the wide range and quality of the products they offer.

The primary focus for the new website was to allow users to:

• Browse Dickies products by collection or type intuitively and quickly OR
• Easily locate a product by name or product code

The finished site also needed to:

• Work in tandem with Dickies offline marketing and catalogue AND
• Stay within corporate branding guidelinesWhat we produced

What We Delivered

Deep Blue Sky produced a website that met and exceeded Dickies requirements. The site features:

• A solid and scaleable architecture built on our Spirit Framework platform allowing future eCommerce functionality and any required systems integration
• A strong design which conforms to all brand guidelines and creates an intuitive user experience
• A clear, well structured and useable navigation between product ranges
• A seamless integration of lifestyle imagery to enhance the user’s visual experience and further support the brand guidelines
• A fully functional site search which accepts codes derived from the Dickies Printed Catalogue further reinforcing the link between online and offline media.

We have continued to work with Dickies management, operations and technical teams to introduce further functionality and integrate the website into their logistics, sales, CRM and business development strategies.

Scenario: 

You send an export of your content database to be translated into French.  When it comes back you want to pipe it back into MySQL but the text you copy out of Excel's not UTF-8.

We often handle foreign language data given to us as Excel spreadsheets and use CONCATENATE() to build up the SQL to pour the data into MySQL... it's not pretty but it's pretty quick and flexible.  We use the following four lines in our pipe to make sure the data's UTF-8 when it goes in.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Encode qw( from_to is_utf8 );
while (<>){
from_to( $_, "iso-8859-1", "utf8");
print;
	

Usage:

All you need to do is save that somewhere sensible and add it into your pipe:

#cat foo*.sql | ~/to-utf8.pl | mysql -p database

Question:

Anyone know why some French hyphens and apostropies are still difficult?

Next month we will be launching the all-new istylista.com and we're very excited about what we've been up to!

On top of some upgrades and changes to our personal style guides we're launching a totally personalised shopping experience designed to save you time, money and above all save you from fashion overload! 

If you've not already done so why not sign up to istylista.com today and your account will be automatically upgraded when the new service is live!

Here's goes - changing the way you shop!

I tend to use Fireworks to create my web visuals. I find it to be quicker than Photoshop and more suited to a pixel based design medium. It's a great programme but it does have some flaws. One of which is the Dash stroke style that can be a applied to vector shapes and lines. I always find the individual dashes to be too long which doesn't mimick the behaviour of most modern browsers whose border-style: dashed CSS property has short dashes.

For a long time I wasn't aware that it was possible to customise the styling of strokes. There is a way however, and it's hidden under  Stroke Options => Advanced in the "Stroke category" menu. In the dialog that appears, simply navigate to the "Options" tab and at the bottom you will notice "Dash" options where you can set the length and spacing of the individual dashes.

There's also tonnes more options there to play with and most Stroke types have options you can set. Give it go!

Some time ago I came across jQueryify; a bookmarklet that dynamically inserts the jQuery library into any webpage. Well I came to thinking: "Why isn't there a version of this for Prototype?" After searching the net and coming up with nothing, I decided to modfy Karl's script and change it to insert Prototype instead of jQuery.

If you want to you use it as well, all you need to do is Bookmark this link (I added mine to my Bookmarks Toolbar).

One thing to note is that the script gets it's source from the Google AJAX Library, so you'll need to update the "src" value if you want to upgrade to the latest version of Prototype.

I've noticed a few bugs and issues with the script so I'm hoping to come back with a new, improved and entirely original version sometime in the near future. In the meantime please be sure to visit Karl's website and thank him for his work.

Since we all use a multi-desktop app to keep our workspace organised your Gmail window isn't always there when you need to write a new email...

.. but a little playing with Google Chrome's "Application Shortcuts" means you can have that "New Message" button on your desktop to quickly compose a new message.

You'll need Google Chrome to do this.  You don't need to set it as your default browser so don't worry, nothing else will change... but making Application Shortcuts like this is a Chrome feature so you'll need to install it and login your Gmail this once through Chrome.  If you've not done so already; download Google Chrome here.

Setting up your first shortcut - to Gmail...

• Vist Gmail and log in..
• Click the icon in Chrome and choose "Create Application Shortcut" and add the shortcut where you'd like it.  ( Quick Launch toolbar in this case )

Making a new shortcut for "New message"...

• Find the Quick Launch toolbar and right-click ( don't right click on an application icon, find a little space so you're clicking on the actual toolbar itself ).  Choose "Open Folder  "
• Now duplicate (copy & paste) the Gmail shortcut
• Rename it to.. "New Message" or something similar.

Getting hold of the web-address for your new shortcut...

• Now go back to Gmail and Shift+Click the "Compose Message" link to get a new message in a new window.
• We want the "Web Address" of this window... so click on the icon (probably a Chrome or Gmail icon) that's right up in the top left of the window to get the window menu.
• Choose "Copy URL"... which will copy this URL/Address into your clipboard.
• Now go back to your "New message" short cut, right click and choose "Properties"
• Make sure you're on the "Shortcut" tab.
• Change the web-address in shortcut... so find where it says "--app=https://...etc" and select everything beyond the "=" and paste (Ctrl+V) our new web-address in here.
• Done!  Close this dialogue and test your new shortcut.  You should have a new window with a new message in it.

Setting up a pretty icon...

• Click "Change Icon"
• Change the location at the top ( "Look for icons in this file" ) to "filbble" and click OK.
• Windows will complain that it can't find and icons.  That's fine; it'll now present you with a default set of icons to choose from.  Choose one you like and click OK.
• Now OK the Properties dialog.

Our comprehensive hotel directory - Gate 54 - has, this week been relaunched with some great new features and lots more to come.

Gate54 has, for many years, provided a hotel reservations service for some 75,000 hotels, spas and resorts worldwide.

Now totally re-designed and re-built the new Gate54.com also provides access to last minute theatre booking, cruises and guided tours in most major cities; from tours to find Nessie to a moonlit tour of Milan everyone should be able to find something that takes their fancy!

Being a web guy I live in the world of RGB and the thought of CMYK and the finality of print scares me (alot!). However, I reguarly need to convert a logo to CMYK in Adobe Illustrator from a graphic that is in RGB colour mode. To do this in Illustrator you simply do the following:

• Go to File » Document Color Mode and check CMYK

Yeh I know it's simple but being a AI newbee, I have spent ages searching for a solution before remembering. This process also works in reverse (CMYK to RGB):

1. Go to File » Document Color Mode and check RGB.
2. Select everything in your document and go Filter » Color » Convert to RGB.

A good way to check what colours are being used in your document is to:

1. Open up the colour pallette.
2. Bring up the menu by clicking the little arrow in the top right hand corner and select "Small List View". This brings up (suprise suprise) a list view of all colours with a little symbol representing the colour mode type (ie: RGB, CMYK...etc).
3. Now click on an element in your document and the list will jump to the colour being used. You can then determine whether it's CMYK or RGB...etc

Hope this helps?

Dave

This tutorial is based around the original which can be found at PSD Tuts. However, unlike the original I'm going to show you how to do this using Adobe Fireworks. I'm going to assume you have a basic knowledge of Fireworks, but if you don't then check out this post for a quick primer.

Can't wait?

If you're impatient and can't wait you can see the finished article here.

Step 1

Create a blank document (I used 500 x 500) and create a square shape which fills the entire canvas. Fill this square with a subtle gradient running top-left (#434343) to bottom-right (#1C1C1C). The gradient creates the illusion of light shinning onto the canvas from the top-left corner.

Step 2

Using the text tool write some text onto the canvas. It pays to use a typeface which is bold and blocky - I used "Avant Garde BT" with the bold option turned on.

Now with the text selected click on the text-fill pallette (directly right of the font size box in the "Properties" window) and set a linear gradient running top-left (#FFFFFF) to bottom-right (#C2C8D4). This further reinforces the illusion of light shinning onto the canvas from the top-left corner.

Step 3

Next duplicate your text layer, remove the gradient and set the fill to be solid white (#FFFFFF). Now hold Ctrl and press the DOWN arrow to move this text layer one layer down the stack, so that it sits behind your grad fill text layer.

Now with the text layer still selected hit the UP arrow once and then the LEFT arrow once to move it 1px up and out from behind the original layer. This should create the subtle highlight effect we're looking for where the text looks slightly raised.

Step 4

What we have looks quite good but we can see an obvious step gap of 1px where we've moved the solid white text out from behind the grad fill layer. We can solve this duplicating the solid white layer, moving it down 1px and reducing the opacity to 70%. This covers the vertical step. We then repeat this to cover the horiztonal step, this time reducing the opacity further to around 55% (you'll need to experiment to get the best effect).

Final Product

There we have it. A subtle highlighted text effect where we've used light and shadow. This effect is used a lot by the Envato network on all their tuts sites and it's really nice, although I fear it may become a cliche trend all too quickly!

Let me know if you have any thoughts on how we could improve this effect.

Dave

This solution is the work of Shaun Inman over at www.shauninman.com.

Basically the solution involves 4 simple steps:

1. We wrap the input with a label tag.
2. We assign a background image to the label tag and apply some dimensions.
3. We hide the input tag using CSS opacity rather than "visibility" or "display" (this ensures that the input is still clickable)
4. Javascript is used to ensure that the button of the file input is always positioned exactly underneath the cursor.

 I'm not going to go over the details here, but if you want to see exactly how it's done you can read the original tutorial or see the demo. Great work Shaun!

Gmail now allows multiple-file uploads from a single dialogue box - something which I thought the HTML file upload mechanism wouldn't allow.

Yes - before you think that it's done using <input type="file"> it's not... it's flash.

Still it is very cute, very useful and so long as you have Flash installed ( which almost everyone does ) you'd never notice a different peice of technology in use.

Flash has always provided nice little bits of add-on functionality.  Many years ago, before the phrase AJAX was coined we used it as a model for powering html-updates in the client without polling the server constantly because flash provided proper socket-level connectivity to the client.

Anyway - a very nice little trick, probably not original and well worth investigating for implementing in Spirit's asset-management systems me thinks...

The PNG image format has three types:

1. PNG8
2. PNG24
3. PNG32

If you usually use Photoshop then at this point you may well be thinking "What's this PNG32 thing?". Well basically PNG32 is PNG24 but with support for full alpha transparency. This means you can have varying degrees of transparency for each pixel, whereas GIFs can only have transparency turned on or off for each pixel. Therefore, when placed on complex or ill-matching backgrounds, transparent PNGs will have nice smooth edges.

Yes I know what you're thinking, "But Photoshop can produce alpha transparent PNG images!". I know! It just doesn't present it to you correctly and that's what had me confused.

Being a keen advocate of Adobe Fireworks I have always realised that PNG32 was the only PNG file type to support true colour alpha images. However, if you regualrly use Photoshop then you'll know that "Save for Web" only offers PNG8 or PNG24 file types in the drop down.

As I'm sure most of you know all you do is tick the "transparency" box in "Save for Web" and you get a alpha transparent PNG. But really what this is doing is creating a PNG32 graphic - Photoshop just decides to hide this from you. Strange...

I often see sites such as Smashing Magazine presenting lists of free icon sets. This sounds great, but to be honest I'm often left feeling less than impressed by the quality of the sets. That's why I was so impressed by the Function Set of icons by talented designer Liam McKay. Liam runs www.wefunction.com  and produces templates and icon sets for fun and for profit. His totally free set features full-colour, clean icons that cover almost every possible requirement.

You can download the Function set from wefunction.com/2008/07/function-free-icon-set/. All that Liam asks is that you provide a link back to his website - a small request for such a great product. Thanks Liam!

We're very proud to report that istylista.com, the personal stylist & shopping site has recently been awarded "best in class" at Surrey Enterprise's Online Marketing Workshop.

Hayden Allen-Vercoe, marketing director at iStylista said: “We recently attended an online marketing workshop with the stylish lot over at iStylista.com which turned out to be rather fun.”

The site was given the once over by a couple of incredibly tough talking techies who analysed its SEO, build structure, functionality and usability and gave it a chic 8 out of 10 all round. There’s a couple of areas marked for improvement... but with a cutting edge online concept there always is eh!”

We're getting very close to launching istlista - phase II, with some really great, new and exciting features so hopefully next year that'll be 10/10!

I came across this Internet Explorerbug (IE6/7) when working on site recently, whereby if two container div's (#nav & #content) have position:relative then any drop down navigation will appear (render) underneath the content div. This is a problem as links can't be clicked and of course it looks awful!

I won't go into the details here (Aleksandar Vacić provides a comprehensive overview and test in this article) but there's a very simple fix to what could be a extremely annoying problem.

Fix

Simply apply a z-index: 1 to the content container (whichever div your menu is hiding underneath) and a slightly higher z-index of 2 (z-index: 2) to your navigation container. I believe that both containing div's must be position relative for this to work, but it fixed the problem for me.

Please let me know if you found this helpful or if you need extra advice.

Dave

I've recently found out about a great little event happening in Bath called Bath Camp. It's basically an informal gathering of web professionals talking about "interesting things". Ok, so that doesn't sound overly interesting until you learn that Paul Boag of Boagworld fame will be the guest speaker. Paul and the team run an excellent web design podcast that dispenses lots of interesting advice and he's well respected in the industry so I'd imagine he'll be worth listening to.

If you think that sounds interesting, the event - hosted by Ryan Carson - takes place on the 4th February, at 8pm upstairs in the Revolution bar ("Revs"), Bath. Worth going along I'd say.

The new Google Talk Labs Edition is very cute.  More of a one-window style of interface.  But it's got some prohibitive bugs - like you can't select text, you often can't click links and so forth.

Well here's a quick solution to get you the nice new interface but without the bugs:

1. Open (or download and open!) Chrome 
2. Visit this page: GTalk Browser Edition
3. Click the page menu  
4. Choose "Create Application Shortcuts" 
5. Add the shortcuts wherever you find useful.

... now you have the new interface ( a flash file effectively ) running in a Chrome app.  The interface is the same (afaik) as the Labs Edition but doesn't have all the bugs that the labs edition seems to have.

DeepBlueSky is pleased to launch Traditional Boundaries - a small business Spirit Foundation 'Starter' website for those seeking natural solutions for estate and woodland management near Surrey.

Traditional Boundaries features a unique web design and is powered by Spirit Framework.  It has also been optimised to provide the best possible change of ranking well for choosen keywords in Google and other major search engines.

To learn more about Traditional Boundaries please visit the live site now at www.traditionalboundaries.com.

PS.  Yes - I'm sure they're in the documentation somewhere but I didn't rtfm :-)

This article explains how to force Windows XP to allow you to restart the Windows Time service in the Service control panel, in order to allow you to synchronise your computer time. To see the solution please skip to the solution, otherwise feel free to learn how I arrived at my discovery.

This week I've been working on a front end development project with an external company who use Dreamweaver to develop their websites. Being a bit of a purist myself I would never dream of using Dreamweaver to create a site (Homesite and Firefox for me!) but needs must when a client says jump.

Everything went smoothly until I needed to "Check In" my files to the live server via DW's FTP functionality. Every time I tried, it simply would not allow me to connect and upload my files, even though FileZilla could manage it perfectly. After much hunting I came across this sitepoint article which explained Windows Time not being in sync as a possible cause. Thinking I'd cracked it I went straight to Windows' Date and Time Properties -> Internet Time and clicked the "Update Now" button to manually synchronise my computer with the time.nist.gov website. Unfortunately I got a big ERROR - windows could not - it seemed - sync my time.

Having recently discovered the value of Windows "Services" control panel I suspected that I could restart the Windows Time service and possibly solve the issue. However, upon locating the service it provided no option to Start/Stop (i've not idea why this happens but it does). Luckily I was able to find a fix that forces Windows to allow you to Start/Stop the service again.

Just go to the "Run" command line (under the Start Menu) and type:

regsvr32 w32time.dll

Please note that this makes a change to your registery so please do this with caution! I'd advise you to create a system restore point before attempting this step at the very least.

This command should fix the issue and allow you to Restart the Windows Time service. As for the DW problem, I still can't figure it out - no wonder no one uses it! Let me know if this fix works for you.

It's -5° outside... so while my fingers thawI thought I 'd jot down a list of podcasts I'm currently listening to on my way into work....

Web & Tech

• Boagworld - slightly off the wall but fun an interesting...  David recommended these guys to me. It's an hour long show from Paul Boag & Marcus Lillington.  Full of useful insights & some interesting interviews..  the first show I listed to, for example, had an interview with Joe Stump from Digg about web scalability.

BBC, History & Comedy

Most of the rest of what I'm listening to comes from the BBC at the moment.  Quick list for now because I must get on...

• FOOC - From our own correspondent is a weekly collection of short reports from the BBCs foreign correspondents.  Always interesting, insightful and simply different to the normal homogonised and sanitised drivel that you get on the news.  A definate must.
   
• In our Time - A slightly random Radio 4 (Wed 10am?) show hosted by Melvyn Bragg and discussing odd bits of history, science, politics and philosophy with a few experts.  Always pretty interesting; previous topics in the past few weeks include 'The Great Fire of London', 'Heat (the history of the concept of thermal energy - seriously, for an hour)', 'The Great Reform Act' etc..
   
• A Point of View
   
• Start the week
   
• Friday Night Comedy

... any recommendations are extremely welcome!

Silly little thing, but for the benefit of anyone else who misses this;

When installing the PECL Package APD for all your profiling, stack-tracing fun if you get the following error...

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Invalid library (maybe not a PHP library) 'apd.so'

... then make sure you add your extension as a "zend_extension" not just a normal extension thus:

; My Extensions
extension = runkit.so
extension = memcache.so
extension = xcache.so
zend_extension = apd.so

Hope this is of some help to folk :-)
 

Dave has recently been playing about with a little slideshow.js that we found on Tom Doyle's blog.

It's a great little script (thanks Tom) but I thought it could do with a litte upgrade to encapsulate it in an object so that it doesn't get interfered with.

Here's our version of much the same code: slideshow.js

It's very simple to use so I've dropped the documentation into the top of the script.  Basic synopsis is:

I'm often left wondering why Microsoft didn't include a "Create New Folder" shortcut in the toolbar buttons in Windows Explorer. Many a time I've been forced to wait whilst I right click, wait for the menu to load and then locate the appropriate icon. If you have to create multiple folders it can quickly become tedious.

Today I became so fed up with this state of affairs that I had to hunt down a Windows Explorer add on which would fix this problem. May I present bxNewFolder courtesy of our friends at BAXBEX. It sets F12 to be the shortcut for creating a new folder and if you're lucky enough to still have Windows XP you even get a icon added to the toolbar of Windows Explorer.

However, if you don't wish to download any software you can still use Windows' built in HotKeys. Simply go in to Windows Explorer, hold the ALT key and then hit F followed by W. This should open the file menu and navigate you into the "New" menu where Create New Folder should be selected automatically. Easy, but I still prefer F12! 

Google have just released a great little SEO Starter Guide for the uninitiated.

Isotope has long stated that we don't offer SEO as a service because we vehemently believe that the way we build websites through Spirit provides the best optimisation of your content.

This Starter Guide is a great illustration of exactly what this means and how we acheive such great search engine success for our clients.

You can download the Starter Guide here or read more about what motivated Google to write it on the Webmaster Central Blog.

Recently I was sent a PDF of a marketing poster which a client had asked me to turn into a HTML email. The design firm who had produced the poster had used a non web standard font (ie: not Arial, Verdana or the like) but I still wanted to use it as my primary typeface in my font stack (the CSS font-family rule) and allow the typeface to degrade for those users who didn't have it installed on their system. The problem was that I didn't recognise the font!

Having exhausted all other avenues, I turned to my boss, who promptly showed me the following technique to extract font information from a PDF:

1. Open your PDF.
2. Go to TOOLS -> Advanced Editing and select the "TouchUp Text Tool".
3. Click on the text that you wish to extract the typeface from and a bounding box should appear.
4. Highlight a portion of the text and right click to bring up a menu. Select "Properties".
5. Information about your font should be displayed under the "Text" tab, including the font name. Easy!

The one issue with this technique is that - to the best of my knowledge - you need to have Adobe Acrobat Professional (I used Version 8.1.2) to use the advanced editing functionality.

If hope you find this useful, and if you do be sure to comment.

David

Isotope is always extremely proud to be involved in high-profile projects and never more so than when they win awards!

Cheddarometer.com a micro-site build for Bray Leino and West Country Farmhouse Cheesmakers has just won a silver at the Chartered Instituite of Public Relations' Pride Awards.

This award follows in the footsteps of the highly successful cheddarvision.tv website we developed with Bray Leino and West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers last year.

You can read more about how Bray Leino made such a success of this campaign here.