Bite Size Standards is not a failure

John Oxton (of joshuaink.com) writes that his recent project Bite Size Standards is ‘currently a failure’, as it has received some criticism of late. The site was set up six months ago to serve little tidbits of code and understanding, and is a purely altruistic effort from John and his helpers to help a few people out along the way.

I didn’t see any criticism along the way, and I think what is being offered is top notch. Maybe just because something hasn’t lived up to the expectations of one person doesn’t make it a failure? It’s better than most people have done…

Site plug: JohnHopkinson.com

I’ve been helping my dad out with IT while he sets up his new venture and i’m very proud to announce the new website for John Hopkinson & Co. The site is a showcase for services available and properties/land for sale. Soon we’ll be making available some papers and articles relating to chartered surveying, valuations, arbitration and inheritance tax.

From a design point of view, the site is all Strict XHTML valid and features RSS feeds and a few other nifty features.

Commenting policy

Due to a large amount of spam comments (1150 in the past week!) all comments will now need to be moderated unless you have a previous comment already on the site.

I know a load of people are commenting (especially on Ice Age) – you guys should all be ok as most of you are repeat commenters. Thanks a lot!

Robby Todino, the Time Travel Spammer

Robby Todino was known as the Time Travel Spammer due to his habit of sending over 100 million spam emails requesting time travel equipment. Unusually for a spammer, Todino was not trying to scam money out of innocent people, but he actually believed that time travel equipment was accessible if he reached the right people, and he was willing to pay.

Robby Todino on Wikipedia

High speed photography

Lots of photos of things exploding, shattering and fracturing

‘Creative plumbing’ delivers beer

A plumbers mistake connected a kitchen sink to the beer cellar of a neighbouring pub

Lulu.com: A great idea in need of work

I’ve just stumbled upon Lulu.com, a website allowing creatives to publish books, calendars, comics, music and software without any technical knowledge and with no minimum print run. The idea is very simple and the breadth of products available is great combined with the ability to print one-off copies of your work.

But for a site with such a creative audience, many features could have been more intuitively designed. The site is screaming to be Web 2.0, and while they have obviously tried to mimic Amazon they have missed the boat on many pages. The ‘Browse > All Categories‘ page shows a nested list so narrow it’s unreadable (even on 1280×960), and the next page links on the bottom of the product pages just don’t work.

All I can think is what a great idea this could be – imagine if 9rules published printed article anthologies at, say, $12 per 100 page tome?

Where IE7 could beat Firefox

I installed IE7 Beta 2 today, to see how a new site design worked, and I am quite impressed. The development team seem to have actually thought about how people interact with an application and have made some of the features quite intuitive. Read more

Pages+ v0.2

I’ve released Pages+ v0.2 and moved it to it’s own page! Updates include a sort toolbar and a few slight tweaks.

Ricky Gervais on iPod

I’ve been listening to the Ricky Gervais / Guardian Unlimited podcast, and I have to say he’s a comic genius. Much like The Office, I can’t say what it is that’s so funny – he just is.