An acquaintance has been asked to work long hours using a painfully basic form-based website. It’s a site that won’t let you change the CSS with Stylish — because the site has no CSS. The site is so database-centric that the techies who coded it didn’t even think of styling it. The employers refuse to […]
Archive for February, 2010
How to force a style on a site that doesn’t use CSS
17 Feb 2010 at 19:52
David Haden
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Tame the web! 10 easy steps any Firefox user can take.
My quick guide to 10 easy steps any Firefox user can take: 1. The SurfClarity addon. Permanently and elegantly block unwanted domains from Google search results. 2. Get your Google search results in widescreen, arranged as three columns. Stop Google from preventing you from copy-and-pasting links from results. 3. AdBlock Plus, of course — removes […]
Advanced Random Posts
I’ve started tweaking the new template. I’ve added a nice sidebar widget, Advanced Random Posts for WordPress (homepage). It plucks a random post from my blog archives, re-sizes any image it happens to find, then displays the image and a link to the original post. The widget can be configured to select only from posts […]
Smooth
Experimental heffalumpin’ with an off-the-peg WordPress template. Needs some customisation…
Designing for Children
Designing for Children — all the PDF papers from a five-day international conference which has just finished in India.
Smothered in bubbling mud, out-competed by audio books and Spotify
13 Feb 2010 at 12:32
David Haden
Creative industries, Entertainment, Zeitgeist
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Is national-broadcast UK DAB radio a defunct medium? Even the niche stations can’t seem to get traction… “£12.1m per annum on the Asian Network when its peak audience nationally is only 31,000 adults” In speech radio, the presentation format is the problem for me. BBC Radio 7, for instance, has always been a disappointment. It […]
Playing with blocks
Overcoming creative block.
Microsoft XNA GameCamp
Microsoft XNA GameCamp, in Birmingham on 19th-20th February 2010… “X48 is a marathon gamecamp where students and indie developers use Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 3.0 to create a game in less than 48 hours. UPDATE: 4 Spaces available for Birmingham”
iCatching: Shopping Design Online
09 Feb 2010 at 15:32
David Haden
Creative industries, Zeitgeist
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The Shop Floor Project takes a cue from those intricate Director-based multimedia CDs of the 1990s, and recreates a shop as a web site. Not enough amusing clickable hotspots for my taste, but a nice try. They have a new book out today, iCatching: Shopping Design Online, surveying 40 of the most striking online shops.
One square mile
1mile² Smethwick an arts project straddling arts and ecology… “between Visiting Arts and Urban Living, delivered by a local team led by Hybrid, Ulfah Arts and ecology partners the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country.”
Future of digital content
08 Feb 2010 at 19:35
David Haden
Birmingham, Creative industries
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It’s invitation only, by the looks of it. 18th February 2010, 9.30am to 4pm. NTI Birmingham, 15 Bartholomew Row, Birmingham… “The Future of Digital Content […] bringing together some of the brightest minds to explore how the future can be created. What new business models, what policies, what industry partnerships need to be created to […]
Slash and burn
Front page lead-story on the paper version of today’s Guardian, “Thousands to lose jobs as universities prepare to cope with cuts… “Universities across the country are preparing to axe thousands of teaching jobs, close campuses and ditch courses to cope with government funding cuts, the Guardian has learned. Other plans include using post-graduates rather than […]
In Our Time archive
All the BBC Radio 4 archives for In Our Time have just been switched over to using the BBC iPlayer. Which I think might be annoying for listeners outside of the UK, since I understand iPlayer access is only available to those in the UK. Previously, anyone in the world could listen. So, for those […]
Britain Loves Wikipedia
This sounds deliciously likely to annoy museums that claim ownership of visitor pictures of public-domain works: the Britain Loves Wikipedia event… “is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest running in museums and cultural institutions across the UK through February 2010. The aim is to increase the number of pictures available to illustrate Wikipedia […]
Creativity and Place
A call-for-papers for a June 2010 UK conference on Creativity and Place.
A chat with Eno
Conversational snippets from the new BBC Arena documentary on Eno.
Very Birmingham
Very Birmingham
Another fine silhouette-style animation
A wonderful semi-silhouette style animated intro for the Winter Olympics TV coverage, by Jon Klassen and Marc Craste…