One of the most exciting things about being involved with the web is that new technologies are emerging all the time. The thing that sucks about that is new things are emerging all the damn time. If a developer is to remain competitive, pioneering and most importantly, in a job, then learning must be a…
“A Blog Without Comments Is Not a Blog”. So reads the title of an article by Jeff Atwood published in 2006, in which he argues that disabling comments on a blog is tantamount to preaching a sermon; it is a one way delivery of content that doesn’t facilitate further discussion or user engagement. But let’s…
Recently the Barbican museum in London held an exhibition called the Rain Room. It was an installation in which water poured from the ceiling, but sensors detected where people were standing and would turn off the taps above their heads so they didn’t get wet. It was a clever and engaging piece of interactive art…
“I saw my life branching out before like the green fig-tree in the story… I saw myself sitting there in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant…
WordPress powers a massive tranche of the world’s websites – 17.4% of them in fact, including this one. Over the years its huge community and ease-of-use as a CMS has won it favour with web developers looking for out-of-the-box solutions to homogeneous client briefs. The admin is friendly and clients tend to get to grips with…
A fellow developer friend and I often used to enjoy validating our career choices by comparing them to the ‘unproductive’ careers of our investment banker friends who were earning twice as much as us. We would scoff at the life choice of someone to pursue a career so utterly vacuous and money-driven. How could anyone…
I’m sorry, Miss Jackson.
The greatest successes in the field of HCI are those that bend technology to the will of human need. But bridging the gap of silicon and flesh is arguably one of the hardest challenges that faces those working in the tech industry. Building anything technical requires technical thinking, but to step away from that and…
“Think about it really hard, then forget about it” —Don Draper, Mad Men This oft-quoted soundbite may well be the essence of the creative process. Great ideas do not come whilst sitting at a desk for eight hours a day but whilst taking a shower or immediately before falling asleep. It’s the methodology of the…
With great movie franchises come great advertising opportunities, and few are more lucrative than James Bond. Skyfall, being the most expensive Bond film to date, has had a heavy and controversial reliance on product placement that has seen historic advertising contracts (Heineken having paid a reported £28 million for the usurping of the iconic vodka…