Ramblings From Craig
Back once again it's the renegade master... I once wrote an article entitled "Why you should make your own site". How clever I was to talk about content ownership and using side projects to learn...Fast forward a decade or more and I'd given myself a long term code and design maintenance project to progressively narrate over the years via various blogs and social media posts... [1], [2], [3], [4],…
Conference at the beach! Having not made the trip down to Bournemouth for re:develop 1 or 2 it was great to be in attendance for it's third incarnation. A single track, relatively economical conference re:develop is ideal for digital pro's or students to self fund or wrangle a bit of budget out of their line managers. (also... by God were we well fed; high quality breakfast, lunch and dinner all…
Making a game in a weekend Making games over a weekend... competitively... and we chose a dead technology... why the hell not! Although I'd heard of Game Jam's before I'd never had the opportunity to go along until John kindly organised one just up the road. - Essentially a hack day or days specifically concentrated on making a game in a small team, all rounded off with a demo session at the end…
Flying quadcopters with javascript? why the hell not Hack Days are awesome. How could they not be? you get to make stuff with like minded people with no bosses, no client deadlines, no point but the love of it. The best way to make a hack day more awesome? throw in some hardware so we all feel like the mechanical/electrical/aeronautical engineers that at heart we really wish we were. Can that be…
Very gradual change you can believe in. It's been a while since I posted. I'd like to say that's because a lot's been going on. In reality I got lazy and now I just happen to have something to write about that can make it sound like a lot has been going on. So I joined Dootrix.. and therefore left Headscape. To be honest that's not that big a deal.. certainly not for you. It is just my job after…
secretly... no really, it could be your new guilty pleasure......maybe I can convince you My first smashing coding article is now available! It's main aim is to convince people that .NET isn't all bad. Hopefully there'll be something in there for developers of all backgrounds - A basic intro to .NET for devs from other platforms and a little play with the lesser used .NET languages for the…
Learn to code? not learn to code? argue about who should learn, when and why?.. definitely. It's not often I write opinion pieces but the whole 'learn to code' thing seems to have been building since the beginning of the year. It's time to add my voice to the squabble. The big recent news of course is that Jeff Atwood added his voice to the fray with the rather comment baiting "please don't learn…
Finally it's here For the last few weeks I've been pulling together the concept of 'The Barn'. Ostensibly it's a company blog, but to me it's a bit nicer than that. In drafting up the 'about' page I defined it as 'Headscapers not Headscape' and that's my hope. The intention is that there is a clear Headscape tie in - Articles and content will relate strongly to what we're doing at Headscape, how…
This time with added hackspace. Having made the trip twice before I was looking forward to Barcamp Bournemouth. It's probably my favourite small event. Partly because it's so close, partly because it's a great venue but mainly because there's always something interesting and new (at least new to me) going on. This year Mozilla Developer Network had added a new element into the mix by sponsoring…
Ok so if you follow me on twitter you may know that towards the end of last year I took part in 'Alphalabs'. Organised by onedotzero this was a competition aimed at encouraging developers and artists to work together on the Lumia 800 platform. While not taking part in the eventual competition I was part of an initialteam creating projects for the launch of the event. This meant an intensive two…
Apparently doodling can be good for you. Although when I do it, it's not so good for Ed Merritt. A bit before christmas I finally decided to sketch out some ideas I'd been having for a new layout and design for cargowire. The idea was pretty simple. With the homepage acting as a funnel through which I push the various channels of blog, articles, portfolio and events I could have a consistent,…
You may not know this but this blog has been xml based since its inception (in fact there's a longstanding, not yet achieved, task to 'replace' it with a 'better' persistant storage mechanism -- clearly I must agree then, that the perfect is the enemy of the good). But anyway... don't worry. I'm not about to do anotherblogaboutxml. My point/warning really is that the root node of my articles xml…
Have I fallen out of love with my kindle? While reading a book the other day (C# in depth if you're interested... I'd recommend it to all you .net lovers out there.. yes you.. both of you) I suddenly realised something. I was holding a book. Now the odd thing about that of course is that I own a Kindle and that, as we all know, replaces books. Don't get me wrong.. I was very much on the Kindle…
Part of my role at Headscape has included looking at our development processes/practices. There's a blog in this (and it's coming soon), but as a brief teaser to that: I'm using Cruise Control.Net to automate MSBUILD builds from our source control provider. Originally this was happening on a regular interval... but that's just annoying (if you get annoyed by such things) and led to waiting to see…
The best made plans... So we're here... just, but with far less man points than we started... to be fair I think I've lost out to Ryan on this one For more info see...Ryans post
Year in review and resolution posts may seem a bit passe, cliche and anything else that ends in an 'e' that sounds like an 'a'... but let's get one out of our (my) system anyway. Rather than an elongated reflection over the year - what I have started, not started, bought, not bought, I'd just like to take the opportunity again to reiterate how amazed I am at the differences in the world in just…
In keeping with my 'write a blog post when I go to an event' approach to blogging... I was at fowa last weekend! Carsonified were kind enough to allow me to attend as a helper on the day (cheers again to Keir and Lou for sorting that for me). Which meant I was one of the 'Turqoise Shirts' helping with registration, ushering, getting prints done etc. As an aside I'd recommend offering to help out…
It seems that I mainly Blog (as opposed to write 'articles') after attending some kind of nerd based event, but here I am again, just after an event typing away... This time it's dConstruct, and I have to say it was a blast - very different from other events (FOWA, SXSW and smaller events like DDD, WebDD, Barcamps and user groups like NxtGen). Like Jasper I'd have to say that the thing that makes…
Continuing the theme of keeping myself busy with geek events! I also recently attended the Microsoft UK Tech Days Visual Studio and .NET 4 talks. To be fair a lot of the content was similar to what I had already heard at ddd8. So we're talking Optional Parameters, Named Arguments, Generic Variance and Dynamic Typing for .NET 4 plus multi-monitor support, changes to code highlighting and javascript…
Having been to a few of the 'big' conferences and just returned from SXSW it was quite refreshing to attend a more small scale, local affair. With other barcamp's often being either far away or both far away and starting too soon after work BarCamp Bournemouth made it easy, running over a weekend and being so close! I must of course say congratulations to the organisers for putting in the effort…
Having seen (or at least made notes on) 17 talks at last year's 'South By', coupled with the fact that this year pretty much the entire Headscape team were heading out to Austin I felt sure that my 'talk total' would be much lower. However I somehow managed to make it out to 21 different talks, panels and/or podcast recordings! Unfortunately I didn't find the time to write up these notes during…
It was my pleasure to take part in the 200th Boagworld (bw200) yesterday. A marathon session that started with Bob, Paul and I waiting outside the locked barn keyless and cold until Dave, Stanton and Ryan came to the rescue... In my mind the day was like a free one day, online conference with a brilliant lineup all sharing their time for free. There wasn't too rigid a schedule with guests in and…
Another Developer Day over, another enthusiasm shot for the day job. Here's the usual breakdown: Overall some excellent content with useful take aways.
During the end of December last year I, along with many others, somehow got caught up by the #p52 hashtag and, in true 'resolutions that I probably won't be able to keep' stylé, I took on the challenge. The idea is as follows: I'm kicking that off with a new article about useful .net dev resources and how to keep up to date. I've also finally made some good use of my free basecamp account by…
A new post has just gone up over in the articles section. Now that I've migrated the cargowire codebase to .NET MVC I intend to release a few articles in relation to the process. The first is with regard to routing, particularly extensionless routes that match my pre-existing urls but use the new Routing capabilities of .NET MVC.
Ok, so yesterday I jumped the gun somewhat with the rather over ambitious: asp.net MVC version of http://cargowire.net up now - pretty much the same (hopefully) fleshed out notes and added link to thebarn pagehttp://twitter.com/cargowire/status/6182546830 Inevitably this was followed by: @cargowire heads up for you this is what I see in Safari 4 for http://cargowire.net OK in FF3.5…
Just posted a new article covering how to get a previously installed dual boot of Ubuntu and Vista to work seamlessly inside VirtualBox running on Vista (check it out over in the articles section). It's something I did a while back and have been meaning to finish the article on. It has definately increased my usage of Ubuntu.
One of the reasons I've always enjoyed being part of the web is the fantastic people it attracts. Rarely have I met someone in the industry that I couldn't get on with on some level... and today that view was reinforced. Anyways on with the story... as with many others, when I first left University I signed up to a bunch of recruitment sites, as well as applying to companies direct (in classic…
Back from glasto.. after getting tired/wet/sunburnt all at once I've made a list of ten... exciting huh... Pick of the weekend? dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip. So glad I finally got to see them.
For those intrigued by my twitter activity tonight (OK, it was just Dave and I've already told him anyway), but still, I ambiguously cried out: As a .NET developer who likes to complain about webforms I was pretty keen to get to grips with the MVC framework when it was available. So, so I could play about with it at leisure I began a two step process: Thus began a process of occasionally coming…
Yesterday I Posted a new article covering some of my thoughts on .NET (check it out over in the articles section). It's in response to the many conversations I seem to have with people who are on the verge of being shocked and appalled that I use .NET. So I decided to get some of that discussion down on paper. It's not an intro to .NET or a comparison between .NET and the rest although aspects of…
Simple things apparently annoy me a great deal... .NET Developers should be aware of, and use, .NET constructs that have been around for ages: Obviously it's up to you in the context of each situation you encounter, but to never use these at all is surely madness.
The second ever Web DD is over and I'm finally home after a nice early start and lengthy drive. However once again it proved to be a worthwhile event with interesting as well as exciting presentations. Old school talk breakdown coming up (These are preliminary, i'll add to it when I get a chance): Hope to meet some new people there next time!
Having had only non-designer girls appreciate my design for cargowire I managed to cajole co-Headscapist Ed Merritt into creating an alternative. Ed provided me with a flat image source to work from (so I can be blamed for the ragged CSS implementation which will no doubt be fixed up over time) and I decided, instead of throwing away my design, to implement a style chooser (based on the classic…
Finally finished my last post on SXSW! took a while (and I kinda tailed off on the later days), but I'm glad I followed through with making notes and writing them up to help solidify thoughts in my mind, if nothing else... Day Five... Again, it was as if the quality of talks to attend had decreased as the days went on. However we stuck it out for the final day and visited a few talks that weren't…
Unfortunately after waking up early, quickly showering, grabbing breakfast and thinking about a taxi we realised there weren't any good opening talks today. So instead we hung back at the hotel for a bit and went in later. Joomla vs Wordpress vs Drupal. Each were given the same project - to create a site for use by Community Leadership projects. The task included a lot of functionality that is…
Breakfast was taken, taxi driver wasn't a conspiracy theorist... seemingly we've got this whole SXSW thing down now. With opening reference to WCAG2.0 and Section 508, it is clear that accessibility and consideration of assistive technologies is important. This is why I was so impressed to see a Flash accessibility panel on the schedule. Not only is it important for the users, it is important for…
After hurriedly writing my round up of Day One we missed breakfast and grabbed a cab to rush in to our first talk of the day. Without realising it (perhaps I should have read the description more) I walked into another REST discussion (after seeing a similar talk at DevDevDev last year). However it was an interesting talk marred only by a slightly incessantly nit-picking Q&A. At least this time…
After Car, Coach, Plane, Plane, Car we finally arrived in Austin (2 Hours ahead of Marcus and Paul - clearly we're connecting flight geniuses). A quick jaunt to the convention center to collect passes before the melee that was collecting them on Friday, followed by an excellent (if not slightly cliche texan?) chilli cheese burger meal with Paul and a multitude of people I've never met before…
Blog post now up over at Boagworld discussing our first foray in to the world of Adobe AIR. Would be great to hear any feedback, both on the app and the article itself. So please do let me know your thoughts. We're aware of a few little tweaks that could be made and minor bugs that could be fixed but I encourage anyone using it to take a look into their 'Program Files\Sitewatcher' folder to check…
You may or may not know that I recently created an aggregated feed for people from #theBarn. This can be seen over at cargowire.net/theBarn. If you are of the persuasion you can also consume this in a variety of formats. These include HTML, XML and RSS (as does most of this site in fact). I may add more in the future... but let's be honest it's probably only me viewing it as HTML at the moment…
Ok, I admit it this is a repost of something I commented on about 2 years ago on my old blog, but still... Whenever a holiday event occurs (Halloween, Easter, Christmas) sites will modify their design to reflect the season. This can be anything from snow effects to cartoon characters appearing on top of the usual design. We’ve all seen it.. pumpkins and bats on halloween, snow, trees and santas at…
Back from Developer Day! and once again inspired to code. It's a great day for getting you excited about technology and web development even if you don't necessarily bring away specific techniques that you want to try out. So here's a breakdown of the talks I went to:
Late night recommendations have led me to Wordle, an app that will create word clouds based upon text, feeds or tags. So obviously I immediately chose a long standing interesting blog to test it with... rather than self satisfyingly submitting my own article feed... Ok, so here's the cloud of my article feed: ...Pretty don't you think
Unnecessary info? you got it Now you can see where I am by using my little brightkite/google maps universe pinpointer thingy (it's under the menu over there). Additionally I've added to my RESTlessness with the '.rss' extension on my articles list if you fancy a quick subscribe. The most recent article discusses the issues surrounding Caching API request calls.
I've followed the current 'hip trend' of adding a twitter feed to my site (see upper right if you've not noticed it yet) and added the 1st draft of my date formatting article (I say first draft because I kinda rushed it this morning before heading out for the weekend). I'll probably return to it to polish and add some more explanation.
So today Mr Boag himself helpfully twittered this site address. The image below shows what shall now be known as 'the boag effect'. As you can see there was a 'slight' change in visitors this afternoon. I'd like to attribute that to my excellent content, exciting design and general awesomeness However I must concede that Paul may have had a minor effect.
FOWA Rocked! Heres the run down of talks I saw (to be updated/added to): This jquery slide down/up seemingly breaks in IE8 and FF2... doh I'll look into a fix or change
RESTless ? The beginnings of the delicious article have been started over in articles. To coincide with this I've reorganised my url structure a bit so that now an extension of '.xml' will return the data in xml format. I'll eventually add to this (the sneaky of those among you may find that I'm already using '.ajax' for my ajax calls - to identify that a partial should be returned).
Recently the portfolio content has been fleshed out slightly and a rough timeline for the articles I intend to write planned out. I've also plucked for a javascript syntax highlighter for any code examples I include. Heres an example of it in action: On a side note I'm massively Looking forward to the Future Of Web Apps in london next week.