After much deliberation, I decided to go minimalist and here is the result! In the process of the build, I’ve learnt a lot of new Wordpress skills and now have an even further (if that was possible) appreciation of the platform.

I’m planning on writing more frequently in the Journal so be sure to drop by now and again. Blog posts due to appear in the near future include: speeding up your website loading times, floats vs position and jQuery beginners guide!

If you have any comments about the new site then please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch. Otherwise…enjoy!

Chances are if you’re reading this you will already know something about IE6 but for those of you who don’t then here is a brief history and a list of reasons why us web developers hate it so much.

Way back when (around the turn of the millenium) Microsoft had seen off the challenge of Netscape Navigator and had a near 100% share of the internet browser market and, as such, did pretty much whatever they wanted in terms of adhering to web standards. This meant that a piece of perfectly written CSS would often render incorrectly and a hack would be required to rectify the error. This care-free attitude from MS continued for several years and culminated in the launch of IE6 in 2001. At this point in time, everything was fairly rosy in the world of web development as sites were built to IE6 specifications as it was the predominant browser.

For all these years, Microsoft ignored web development standards to the detriment of future web users everywhere. A rather crude example in Lehman’s terms would be a car manufacturer changing round the pedals on a car so the accelerator is the brake and the brake is the accelerator. The accepted pedal structure is not written in a rulebook (as far as I know) but would cause havoc for drivers were it not to be adhered to. Obviously car manufacturers have a lot of competition in their market, unlike IE6 at the time, but you get the general idea.

It isn’t just small display issues for IE6 either. Blind users who may be using a screen reader browser (which ’speaks’ out content on a website instead of a visual display) will not be able to use a large amount of websites (because they were designed to the specification of IE6) so it could be argued that, by ignoring recognised web standards for so many years, Microsoft has discriminated against disabled users.

2004 saw the launch of Mozilla Firefox and, as it became increasingly popular amongst internet users for, as well as other things, tabbed browsing and useful add-ons, finally Microsoft’s domination was beginning to be challenged. The purists at Mozilla had paid attention to web standards and this meant that all of a sudden a web developer, as well as a regular user, would find that websites would look different in Firefox to IE6. This is where the issues with IE6 started to become obvious to the wider web development community.

Microsoft now had a problem. Firefox was eating into their market share at a rapid rate but they couldn’t completely re-write their web browser to adhere to web standards as most of the websites on the internet are designed to display in their abominable creation - IE6.

And so we fast-forward to the current day. Microsoft have released versions 7 and 8 of their flagship web browser which, although marked improvements on IE6, still have gremlins and have the ongoing problem of plastering over their predecessor’s mistakes.

Fortunately, the internet (and websites) are now getting to the stage where IE6 is no longer viewed as a primary browser but it still causes web developers untold problems with its querky bugs which can add large amounts of time to projects.

And this is where IE6 No More comes in to give the devil browser the final shove into the grave. Led by David from Weebly, the group has garnered a large amount of support from big industry firms such as Justin.tv and Reddit and has even started to get mainstream media attention which can only be good for the future of the internet. The idea is that web developers add a small piece of code to their webpage which, if a user visits using IE6, they will be shown a banner making them aware that they are using an outdated browser and recommending they upgrade. It is a simple idea but one that could, and hopefully will, prove to be immensely successful at encouraging users to consign IE6 to the tech-graveyard.

Another shot in the arm for the web browser community is the European Court ruling that Microsoft cannot bundle Internet Explorer with their upcoming operating system Windows 7. This means that, hopefully, more regular web users will gravitate away from IE.

In my view, this volunteer project is one of the most important groups for the short-term future of web development and, to show my support, I have added the IE6 No More banner on my website.

Do your bit too. If you are using IE6 then please please please upgrade to a web standards compliant browser like Firefox or Google Chrome. Hey, even if your using IE7 or IE8 move in with the good guys and ditch Microsoft.

Happy browsing.

While Firefox 3.5 is still causing waves in browser innovation circles following it’s release in June and Firefox as a whole reached the one billion (!) download mark last Friday (31st July), the Mozilla team aren’t resting on their laurels and are busying themselves to even further improve the best browser on the net and devour further chunks of Microsoft’s browser market share.

Taking a look at the screenshots posted of Firefox 4.0, I am very undecided what to think of the cosmetic changes to the browser window.

There is a more profound use of the Windows Aero styling which, whilst very pretty, instantly reminds of Internet Explorer which isn’t a road I think Mozilla should be going down! The forward/back buttons as well as others seem to have been ‘lifted’ from a mixture of Safari, IE and Chrome. Of course, the beauty of Firefox is that you can change themes to customise the look of your browser but first impressions are everything.

I am not strictly a fan of the tabs at the very top of the window as featured in Safari and Chrome but the Firefox 4.0 ones are better implemented than any of their rivals as they don’t actually take up the whole of the title bar (a personal preference) with the nice addition of a home button on the left hand-side as well. I would very much like to see a choice offered in the next iteration to have tabs as they are on the current browser below the address bar area or at the top in the title bar. That way those of us stuck in our ways can keep to what we know and venture into unchartered territory when ready.

The whole of the address bar area for 4.0 has been simplified which seems to be the norm nowadays with hidden menus and less buttons to ‘get in the way’. The new combo button for stop, refresh and go is another streamlining feature which, although simple, is a classic Mozilla innovation. It changes colour and icon depending on what state the page is in (loading, loaded or new address being typed) and, lets face it, you can’t use all three actions at once so why waste the space with the icons?

The bookmarks button is clear and concise - a common flaw/annoyance in many modern browsers but the star icon in the address bar remains for quick bookmarking.

The new 4.0 concepts seem very much ‘less is more’ - still packed with features but cutting down on the clutter. Whether this means basic functions will be harder to find remains to be seen and whether Firefox should be ‘copying’ the models of Safari and Chrome by reducing the instant use of common features is debatable.

Of course, these opinions are all conjecture as the screenshots posted by Mozilla are very early designs and I’m sure the final version will differ drastically from some of the visuals but I’m hoping Mozilla stick to their guns and don’t jump on the bandwagon of simplicity too much. Maybe just follow behind on their push bike with a smug grin.

The real test for me will be the increased performance gains promised by the team. Loading times for Firefox still lag behind Safari and high memory usage issues still linger so lets hope these points are not overlooked in favour of wholesale changes to the cosmetics of the browser.

Watch this space.

Unfortunately after having to queue for quite a bit, VV Brown’s set passed us by which was was annoying but this was offset by the freebie hand-out of a pommegranate (sic) drink called Rubicon on the walk down to Vicky Park. Very tasty stuff indeed and we made sure we took full advantage of their generosity on the Sunday morning too!

After milling around and enjoying a bit of Dan Black and sampling some of the produce from the Pimms double decker we headed over to the Main Stage to enjoy an evening of music which started with Florence & The Machine. I’d been severely put off by all the hype surrounding her but despite the Curtis-cum-Kylie mad dancing I was quite impressed. The cover of Candi Staton’s You Got The Love was a great finish and one of my favourite individual songs of the weekend.

I was greatly anticipating N*E*R*D’s set and I was not disappointed! They absolutely rocked the place bringing out all the big ones such as Run To The Sun, Lapdance, Rock Star and Provider. They started getting people up with them on stage with a couple of songs left and as the opening notes of All The Girl Standing In The Line For The Bathroom played they invited all the women in the crowd to join them on stage. Cue mass bundle for the front and a result of about 50 girls dancing to the final number…all going suitably MENTAL AT BEING ON STAGE WITH PHARRELL! As Michael Winner would say - “calm down dear, it’s only a concert”.

I won’t bore you with what my pre-set thoughts of Duran Duran were - they were awesome and blew the ventricles off Lovebox. I surprinsingly knew more Duran Duran hits than I thought and this made it even more enjoyable when having a slight jig to songs such as A View To A Kill, Rio and Ordinary World. Simon Le Bon did an admirable job of playing the seasoned frontman (as he should!) with plenty of crowd interaction, costume changes and great vocals. And now to the first real disappointment of the weekend. After seeing Mark Ronson at Glasto last year I was expecting something a bit off the wall - a new twist on some Duran Duran classics if you will. Instead all we got were a few “come-on-make-some-more-noise” hand gestures and a couple of twirls mid-song. Quite why he was invited to play in the first place I have no idea…he might has well have not been there. Not that it took anything away from Duran Duran’s performance - they rocked Lovebox and have been doing the same to my headphones ever since!

Day Two started off a lot more sombre enjoying a beer whilst listening to Matt Berry (that guy from The IT Crowd) but slowly built up with Rokia Traore and then Noah and the Whale later in the day. Despite that annoyingly pretentious, Chris Martin, by-making-myself-look-depressed-it-makes-me-appear-’deep’ persona, Noah and the Whale were enjoyable and their hit 5 Years Time was very well performed and well received by the sizable crowd on the Gaymers Stage.

Back over at the Main Stage, Kiwi ladette Ladyhawke put on a brilliant show. I first saw her supporting Black Kids at the back end of last year and she outshine the headline act that night and she again put in a performance which asked the question why she wasn’t pushed further up the bill. My Delirium, Back of the Van and Dusk till Dawn were faultless and had the 20 thousand strong crowd really buzzing. I guess she hasn’t got the legs in terms of big records to put on a lengthy hour and a half long set but watch this space!

The less said about Doves the better (with the exception of Black and White Town) but their poor performance didn’t seem to dampen the mood leading up to GA hitting the stage. Their obligatory mammoth setup was broken up by a couple of short films that had been shown on the screens throughout the weekend. My personal favourite was Gopher Broke (which was apparently nominated for an Oscar) which is the tale of a luckless little Gopher who is trying to nick food off passing lorries. He fails miserably and too right as well the thieving little bugger!

The Groove Armada set flowed, as they usually do, from one orally orgasmic tune to the next (Easy, At The River and Fogma included) but it was the new material that really set this Lovebox performance apart. Their new vocalist is Saint Saviour from The RGBs (we did their website at Isle Interactive) and she did a great job of fronting - prancing around in a leotard with her fluroescent mic cable - and her vocals have added a whole new dimension to an already infinately sided act. The new album could well be another GA classic and I’ll be scouting for any upcoming tour dates to catch their new show live. Of course, no GA performance would be complete without a monster Superstylin’ finale and the 40 thousand-strong crowd were all bouncing along to, surely, one of the best festival tunes ever written.

Check out my Best of Lovebox 2009 playlist for some of my favourite tunes from he festival.

Best of Lovebox 2009
1. A View to a Kill - Duran Duran
2. Lapdance - N*E*R*D
3. 5 Years Time - Noah and the Whale
4. My Delirium - Ladyhawke
5. Everyone Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom) - N*E*R*D
6. Easy - Groove Armada
7. Black and White Town - Doves
8. White Lines - Duran Duran
9. Back of the Van - Ladyhawke
10. Girls and Boys in Love - The Rumble Strips
11. Alone - Dan Black
12. Superstylin’ - Groove Armada

There are many simple CMS’s out there but they all require some sort of time-consuming technical configuration and frankly with the famed Wordpress “5 minute install“, is there really any point in trying a new platform that is going to take the same amount of time to set up?

A colleague had pointed me in the direction of CushyCMS a while ago but I thought I’d have a dabble myself and found it an interesting application. It is essentially a stripped-down CMS with the usual WYSIWYG editors but everything is hosted externally (on CushyCMS’ servers) which then pulls content onto your webpage dynamically through the use of a ‘cushycms’ class on html tags, be it a h1, div, p…whatever. It even allows you to assign an img tag and then offers up an image uploader with auto-resizer…very handy.

I started off by signing up for a free CushyCMS account which requires just your name and email. Once logged in (no confirmation email required…another time-saver), you input the FTP details for your site which enables the very user-friendly interface to dynamically load the file and page structure of your website to the page from which you then select the directories and pages you wish to make editable. The areas of the page you have marked as editable (using the ‘cushycms’ class) are automatically recognised so you can edit away. The process from sign-up to editing content took me about 3 minutes (although I admittedly watched the instructional video on the CushyCMS homepage first which helped a little :-))…Wordpress install eat your heart out!

The one main obvious draw-back with CushyCMS is that content is not directly accessible to the website administrator but it got me thinking; is that such a big issue? CushyCMS is not aimed at prolific bloggers (that’s what Wordpress is for ;-)) or a huge news website like BBC or MSN, for example; it is aimed at people with small websites that need an easy way to update SMALL amounts of content very easily and quickly.

CushyCMS doesn’t require a blank canvas on which to work either. Hard-coded content is loaded and can then be edited meaning that if you are worried about your website totally collapsing if something goes awry at CushyCMS then you need not worry…just hard-code your content first and the worst that can happen is you revert to a previous version. CushyCMS doesn’t directly edit the html of your webpage, it dynamically loads in content which appears to be layered over the top of anything hard-coded. Occassionally copying any updated content from the website may be advisable so it can be replaced easily.

CushyCMS has two packages available; free and Pro. Both packages allow full content editing of specified areas of your webpages but the Pro package allows a developer to customise the CushyCMS interface as they wish meaning they can pass it off as their own to a client. This package does come at a considerable cost of $28 per month though which is another reason I believe CushyCMS to be a personal or small website CMS rather than a truly viable commercial option.

All in all, CushyCMS is a very good application for developers looking for a quick and FREE solution to edit basic content on a website. If you’re looking for a friendly interface and editing in double-quick time then CushyCMS is the one for you but if you are after lots of customisation then invest the time in learning to use Wordpress properly or contruct your own CMS. For the minute, I’ll be sticking to Wordpress and other solutions but I’ll certainly keep CushyCMS in mind for the future.

There are a number of differences between Spotify and Grooveshark, the first and most obvious being that Grooveshark is browser based rather than a downloadable client.

The Grooveshark interface is a little confusing to begin with but after a little use you realise it has a fairly intuitive tabbed-timeline based navigation. This means moving back is very easy - like a breadcrumb on a website.

It is also impressive when it comes to the bit that matters - the music. A brief search for some more ‘alternative’ types of music reaps plenty of rewards. I searched Bat for Lashes, Zero 7, Nightmares on Wax, Air, Oasis and Kings of Leon and it returned the majority of their albums plus loads of bonus tracks. In some cases the results may have been more plentiful than Spotify. I also did a cheeky search for My Piano by Hot Chip which is annoyingly missing from Spotify and it is there!

To summarise I’d say Grooveshark is more than a match for Spotify. Whether the team have the financial clout and can match Spotify in the long run is yet to be seen but I’d certainly consider it if you are after free music. Personally I won’t be switching my alliances because I am used to the Spotify interface and I prefer the desktop client rather than making sure I keep a browser tab open but I certainly give Grooveshark my seal of approval.

Indie 100
1. Dreaming Of You - The Coral
2. The Prayer - Bloc Party
3. Golden Touch - Razorlight
4. When You Were Young - The Killers
5. The Fallen - Franz Ferdinand
6. I Wanna Be Adored - The Stone Roses
7. A-Punk - Vampire Weekend
8. Living For The Weekend - Hard Fi
9. Wolf Like Me - TV On The Radio
10. Waving Flags - British Sea Power
11. Somewhere Else - Razorlight
12. Jager Yoga - CSS
13. Oh My God - Kaiser Chiefs
14. You! Me! Dancing! - Los Campesinos
15. Decent Days And Nights - The Futureheads
16. Mardy Bum - Arctic Monkeys
17. Valerie - The Zutons
18. Halfway Home - TV On The Radio
19. Don’t Look Back Into The Sun - The Libertines
20. The Angry Mob - Kaiser Chiefs
21. Waterfall - The Stone Roses
22. Girl - Beck
23. All These Things That I’ve Done - The Killers
24. When The Sun Goes Down - Arctic Monkeys
25. Slow Hands - Interpol
26. Pressure Point - The Zutons

I’ll update it from time-to-time with new tunes but there’s a real mix of established artists and complete newbies…some of which could hit it big (see MGMT c.2008).

Best of 2009 (so far)
1. Drop The Tough - Groove Armada
2. To Lose My Life - White Lies
3. Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ - Bob Dylan
4. The Girl And The Robot - Royksopp
5. Pictures - Sneaky Sound System
6. Stuck On Repeat - Little Boots
7. Poker Face - Lady Gaga
8. Daniel - Bat For Lashes
9. Alone - Dan Black
10. Don’t Upset The Rhythm - Noisettes
11. New In Town - Little Boots
12. True Romance - Golden Silvers

There are a number of acts I’m looking forward to seeing…obviously GA are top of the bill but I’ve really been getting into Ladyhawke this year and NERD are a class act. I’m keeping an open mind on Duran Duran!

Hopefully the weather stays good and it’ll be an awesome weekend. I imagine I’ll post up a Lovebox Playlist with all the best acts and songs that we saw during the weekend so watch this space.

In the mean time, check out the Lovebox website and get your ticket!