On this page the following entries were made in the “April, 2007” time-frame.
Archive for “April, 2007”
Open Letter to Richard Benyon MP
Dear Mr Benyon,
As an independent web designer with a special interest in Accessibility, I naturally take note of what is going on in the world of web design and development. I was interested to read an article in The Register with reference to MPs awarding themselves £10,000 for their own site.
Today I had occasion to visit your site. I was intending to ask what was being done about the enormous waste of money on the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) web site.
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Birthday Meme
Strange word isn’t it. Apparently it’s pronounced Meem in the UK, Mem in the US but I prefer a different pronunciation as in this particular case, it’s all about Me Me.
What is a Meme? Well it’s kind of a chain letter thing but with blogging posts. One person does it, somebody else copies it and it works its way round the blogoshpere. Anyway, this one’s been doing the rounds as evidenced on Stephen Lang’s blog. The idea is you look up your birthday on Wikipedia and post 3 events, 2 births, 1 death and 1 holiday that happened on the same day.
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Squirm Time
Have you ever had one of those days when you just know if you had a brain you’d be dangerous? Yes? Well I’ve just had the absolute day of days.
It began with an email I received. I was busy on the phone and trying to do two things at once as usual and completely mis-read the sender. Assuming it was from a friend in Scotland I duly replied in my normal fashion.
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Spamming the spammers
Ages ago I signed up for an interesting initiative called Project Honeypot. The idea was that you took a script which contained links to a page full of emails donated by kind hearted people who weren’t using the accounts. You placed this code in your site and left a link lying around so the spambots would find it and grab the email addresses. Honeypot then track them down and squidgyfy them.
This appealed to my sense of justice so I added them to all my sites, and my client sites, and got great satisfaction checking my stats on the Honeypot site. I’ve personally helped catch over 50 harvesters. OOOOOOOH the satisfaction.
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Rip Off Britain, Creatively
We’ve heard it all before. We are more than aware that in the UK we pay more for just about everything than anywhere else in the world. Corporations know they can get away with it and we moan a bit but carry on shelling out.
At today’s exchange rate of £1 = $2.0037, to fill an average family car with petrol in the UK costs £50 or $100. It is, we’re told, due to Government import duties and taxes.
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A layman’s guide to Accessibility
I occasionally help out a computer class. The group is comprised mostly of adults in their 50s who have taken to computing in a big way. They’re all very keen and full of questions.
I volunteered to assist by going to the class once a week to pitch in but they didn’t want to put me out. Very big on self help this group, and that’s great, they learn as they try things but there are the odd occasions when they just can’t figure something out. So I volunteered to do phone support, something they were much more comfortable with asking for and it has to be said that the phone doesn’t ring very often.
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