Sponge Project closing to new business
As the title suggests, Sponge Project will be closing its doors after a relatively modest run of 3 years. Simple fact of the matter is that I cannot dedicate the time to running this side business and juggle a family and full time job. Existing customers will still be serviced for hosting and website maintenance contracts, but any new customers will be pointed to Fantastic Machine.
New client site: Life Planning Online
An extension of an existing client relationship via Exam Angel, Life Planning Online is now live! Run by the fantabulous Jon Dunckley, this new company is dedicated to providing people with life planning and coaching support to help them achieve their goals. Built using WordPress as the back end and using some CSS3 and HTML5 for some cutting edge goodness.
Life Planning Online - Helping you to bring about the lasting and positive changes you want to make
New client site goes live: Stanley Villas
Yey! Blowing the dust off this blog is good, especially when it’s good news a bout a new project going live. Stanley Villas is a Bed & Breakfast here in Tewkesbury who wanted a simple, yet elegant site to attract customers. The site is powered by WordPress and links into Eviivo’s online booking and accommodation management system. I did the design, build and offer the web and email hosting facilities – all at a very reasonable price I may add 
Haute Cuisine template updated
One of my free templates, Haute Cuisine, has been updated with some extra shiny HTML5 goodness:
- Improved semantic styling, including addition of
hgroup,figureandfigcaption. - Addition of microformats onto the contact page for address and phone number.
- Tidied up some other code.
- Retains it’s minuscule footprint of just under 62kb unzipped.
It’s available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. What are you waiting for? Download Haute Cuisine now!
Side project changes – Jobatronic now something else
As with some things in life, what you envisage to begin with isn’t what something ends up being. Such is the case on my part with Jobatronic, a side project launched at the start of this year.
What started out as “I can do that better than the other guys” turned into “I’ve proved I can do it, now can I make it commercially successful?”. In short the answer was no, primarily due to a lack of time and focus on my part, but also a swift realisation that the market was saturated. Still I learned how to develop on the Jobberbase platform, something which I hitherto had not been able to do.
So this brings me back to the change in the side project. The eagle eyed follower of mine (there may be more than one…) will have noticed how the Jobatronic website has changed style and focus. It is now a showcase for my Jobberbase skillz, allowing me to offer free to download or purchasable templates. Over time (read: once the new Year hits) I’ll start developing my screencasting skills and running some tutorials on how to edit Jobberbase templates and setting up an associated blog. One step at a time.
IE9 ain’t very good
Ouch!
Now you know why Internet Explorer’s E is blue: it represents how IE suffocates and strangles Web innovation.
From CSS Wizardry.
No new clients, but still busy
It’s been a while since the last post, so thought I’d give an update on where things are. Given I’m working full-time it’s hard to fit in work in the evenings and weekends and not end up neglecting my family. What has been happening however is a few bits and bobs for existing clients and some outsourced activity.
Existing clients
For those not in the know I run the Exam Angel website which needs ongoing maintenance and care. Specifically it’s been enhanced with some nifty discount coupons and will have a new set of question styles added. All built in PHP.
As for other existing clients, I’ve been tweaking the previously designed White Rose Scuba Diving website with a new corporate visual identity.
Original design
Tweaked design
Outsourced activity
As with most things someone you can always find someone else willing to offload some work onto someone else in exchange for cash. Well I’ve been doing the receiving of work in exchange for cash and so far so good. Have done two PSD to HTML conversions and all bar the initial learning curve I seem to have settled into a groove with turning them around. The sticky point comes where the designs get complex and you have to cut it all up and re-assemble in HTML. But that said nothing insurmountable…yet.
Client work live and new hosting offering
Remiss of me to not mention this stuff on the blog, but I’ve launched a few client site recently, some of which are probably worthy of being added to the Sponge Project portfolio.
Your Health Club UK
WordPress-powered website for a gym and health club that allows the client to easily update content. Pre-set colour theme based on the client’s existing corporate colours made for a vibrant overall theme, counterbalanced by whites and greys. Am particularly happy with the photos on the home page. Has some interestingness added in the form of nested text-shadow for heading and footer text (more information here) and the ‘ol faithful jQuery rolling image gallery on the home page.
Check out the Your Health Club UK website to see it all in action.
Tewkesbury Battlefield Society
Something slightly different in that the client is a local charity based here in Tewkesbury, who’s aim is to maintain the site for the Battle for Tewkesbury and promote awareness. If you’re interested in your War of the Roses history check out the Tewkesbury Battlefield Society website as it chronicles the battle that ended said war.
Sponge Hosts
Yet another new side project for website hosting in Tewkesbury called Sponge Hosts. Nothing fancy going on here, but follows the same theme as the main Sponge Project website.
Messing about with CSS3
Am branching out more into CSS3, basically further than simple box-shadow, text-shadow and border-radius attributes. The most recent find is using background-size and multiple text-shadow attributes.
Size matters
It’s bugged me for a while that I couldn’t control how large background images displayed on some website without resorting to crude implementations with hacked img elements or tables for structure (shudder). However the latest ALA article: Supersize that Background Please! by Bobby van der Sluis gives me a really simple and workable solution that I was hitherto unaware of.
The gist of it is that by using the much ignored background-size attribute you can make any background image set within your CSS re-size relatively to your browser viewport. So a super sized image will be super sized on a big screen, but scale down nicely on a smaller resolution. The real magic is that the aspect ratio is kept, so you don’t get any strange image squashing you might otherwise get.
So in short the (truncated) CSS code looks like this:
body { -moz-background-size: cover; background-size: cover;}
So far I’ve implemented it on News for Gloucestershire and plan to do the same on a couple of other sites I have in the kitbag. I’ve only tested it in Firefox and Chrome, but it does degrade nicely in IE8 simply by giving you the background image as if the CSS code was ignored. Not great, but acceptable. What I couldn’t get to work was the @media declaration, which resulted in all things contained above the declaration in my stylesheet rendering fine, but everything else going screwy. That’s one for another day though as I need and want to get my head around media queries.
Flaming towers of Godzilla
As seen on Chris Coyer’s tutorial, originally inspired by David Desandro’s site, I’ve taken the same kind of concept but applied it to header and footer text to help lift (literally) off the page on a recent client project: Your Health Club UK. The code is relatively easy to understand once you realise you can stack the text-shadow property:
h1, h2 , h3{ text-shadow: #DE6422 1px 1px 0px, #DE6422 2px 2px 0px, #DE6422 3px 3px 0px; }
So far so good. Now to tackle @media declarations!
Falling out with Firefox
I’ve had a long-term loving relationship with Firefox probably since about 2000 when a web developer friend introduced me to it. Since that point I’ve not used another other browser for day to day surfing, other than testing designs or at my day job (corporate, so forced to use IE6…shudder). It’s fast, secure and flexible. Everything you could ask for in a browser. I’ve been faithful.
The break-up
I’ve been running XP on my machine at home for ages and was getting bored of it’s dated look, lack of driver support and just how damn sluggish it was. So a week ago I ordered Windows 7 and proceeded to install the 64 bit version. The rationale being I have a relatively new rig with 64 bit processor so why the hell not take advantage of the processing power? This is where it all started to go wrong.
Turns out Firefox doesn’t run on a 64 bit system. Well duh!
you might say, but I had assumed that one of the most loved and advanced browsers in the world would support the latest computing architecture. How wrong was I? Turns out it doesn’t work on a 64 bit system. Bang go my saved password, bookmarks, browsing history and plugins.
The new partner
So WTF do I do now?
I thought. IE is definitely not an option. Ever. Not sure about Safari or Opera, although they are excellent browsers. I’ll just try Google Chrome and see what gives.
Turns out all is well again, apart form saved passwords. I’ve managed, via a long winded backup restore process using my children’s PC, to get my profile data from Firefox into Chrome format and onto my machine. Chrome installed without a fuss and just works and for that matter, is bloody quick to render. Javascript in particular seems to be quite speedy, although there are some CSS3 elements not supported yet.
The divorce
I have to say that I am hugely disappointed and very surprised that Firefox doesn’t work on a 64 bit system. Frankly it beggars belief and so far I’ve not seen any firm commitment from Mozilla to address that imbalance. I’ve used this browser for ten years and through no fault of my own am rewarded for that loyalty by being forced to choose another web browser. As and when a 64 bit compatible version comes along I will have to seriously think about going back to Firefox. If Chrome holds out and becomes embedded in my day-to-day habits I don’t see the need. So long Firefox. It was great while it lasted.
