Photo by ir0cko

I absolutely hate Threadless Newsletters because I love Threadless! Damn them. They sent out a newsletter saying that they have extended their sale and within 15 minutes I had bought 1 t-shirt for myself and 1 for my girl!

Two t-shirts each $10, and $8 for the shipping. Coming to a grand total of £14! With exchange rates like I love the demise of the American Dollar because it means that I get original t-shirts which very few people in the UK wear. If you are from the UK, don’t check out Threadless because that means that I will be slightly less cool as you will end up buying something from their awesome range!

Photo by Jacob Bøtter

If I can I like to take the chance to kill two birds with one stone (Metaphorically speaking, poor birds.) As part of my assignment I have to design a portfolio website, and as this site is in need of a branding/positioning makeover then it seems like the perfect opportunity.

At the moment it’s just a plain ole’ blog powered by Wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, I do really like Wordpress, but it simply doesn’t beat my favourite CMS which is still relatively unknown. For my needs, Website Baker has always remained the number one tool, it’s simplicity, and as I’ve got to know it inside out; it’s power.

In combination I want to maybe add a more interactive point of view with video media, and will definitely be integrating Twitter and Flickr into the site. I’ll be working on a concept over the next few weeks, and hope to release something fresh. I’ll also be tackling the issue with the growing mobile Internet users, by also adapting the site for mobile content. I’ve recently experimented with this on a client site, and it’s been a great success so I hope I can reproduce similar results!

Also in the pipeline is a new media company, a venture with a great American counterpart, and another personal venture targeting the lower end of the market. Obviously these are secret works in progress but will be discussed more here once released!

Photo by geognerd

Well, I’ve order my brand new eeePC! Due to high demand it will take another 4 weeks to get here, but I really can’t wait! I love the simplicity, the size, the weight, and the specs of the little laptop and what’s more it only cost £220! Now I’ll be taking that where I go, partly to show off, partly because I can, and mainly because I can do everything on it that I would with my normal laptop!

I’m sure there will be a longer blog post about it, and maybe even a little review when I have time. Right now I’ve got some business cards to design for Debbie at Wedding Bakes, and then I’ve got a long list of client edits for Bishop Maginn High School! That will keep me busy for a few hours!

Photo by videocrab

Of all the places, I really didn’t expect Preston to suffer from an earthquake! It happened at 00:55 and lasted for about 8 seconds. It shook the floor, and I could definitely feel it on the second floor where I live. I couldn’t actually believe it, but I looked out the window, and there were quite a few other puzzled faces peering out of their windows across the road.

There was also the obligatory car alarm going off, signifying the end of the earthquake! Probably measured 0.01 on the Richter Scale, but then again I’m fortunate enough not to live on a fault line!  Well that’s tonight’s exciting news over!

Edit -News travels fast (thanks Facebook - you have one use at least), and apparently this wasn’t just limited to Preston. People as South as London felt this tremor, which must mean that it was actually fairly large to shake most of the UK. Hopefully it wasn’t anything like a nuclear bomb, and just a harmless earthquake!

Edit 2 - Just found out that the magnitude of the earthquake was a whopping 4.7!

Photo by Buddha327

It is often said that good coders write code from scratch and that great coders reuse code. If that’s the case then it appears I’m a great coder. I have about 4 or 5 different xHTML/CSS layouts which I am constantly reusing because they are just solid, cross browser layouts which can be modified and tweaked to suit most designs.

Most designs follow similar principles; a header, 2 or 3 columns and a footer. Therefore there really is no need to reinvent the wheel. As well as being time-saving, it is also a matter of consistency and ensuring that the quality and backwards compatibility is built into the templates.

This ability to manipulate templates really comes down to separating content from style and harnessing the power of CSS. Being able to keep underlying xHTML code exactly the same, and to change the design through just CSS is something that even today, some designers can’t grasp. All too often I see in-line styles where it’s not necessary and this makes updating a site very laborious, tedious and time consuming.

To see what I’m getting at, a great project by Dave Shea called CSS Zen Garden was started to really flex the muscles of CSS. Although this project is relatively prehistoric in Internet terms, it still attracts a lot of attention. This is how the web should be built, with semantics and accessibility in mind, however there are far too many Web Design companies that just don’t care about the ethics of the work they do, just so long as they get paid.