Ran 2.65 miles and felt great. First post-marathon run. At least I can still work up the enthusiasm to leave the hou... [link]

Hi. Come on in. This is my place.

So this is the traditional about page, de rigeur for any personal blog, where you can learn all about me. Except that I haven’t actually written all that interesting stuff yet, despite having had almost two straight weeks in which to work on it.

I’ll be adding lots of microformatted XFN links to this page, hopefully; fun ways to connect the dots online. In the meantime, here’s a brief summary:

• Twitter
• Flickr
• All Consuming
• Last.fm

What’s with the song lyrics?

Back in 2005 I wondered what the effect would be of including lines from songs in the title of this site (the name that appears in the bar at the top of your browser on the homepage). I was interested in the effect it would have on search engine rankings for those phrases – and I also thought it might be funny if anyone searching for their favourite song lyrics ended up here instead.

Links & Thoughts

1. 11 October

   jwerty - Awesome handling of keyboard events #

2. Subtle Patterns | Free textures for your next web project #

   “Quick, what was big about a year after tiling background patterns were discovered in 1998? I’m going to start a blog about that and be rich…”

3. 4 October

   Nate Hallinan Portfolio #

   I wish I could draw properly. :(

4. 3 October

   Wonderputt #

   Beautiful little Flash golf game.

5. 30 September

   jQuery Masonry #

   Another one for the layout toolkit.

6. Fluid Squares v2. A responsive grid experiment. #

   Pretty much exactly what I was planning with the design for the lifestream app I’m building. Yoink!

7. 29 September

   The Psychologist’s View of UX Design #

   Some useful psychological heuristics for assessing your UX work.

8. 27 September

   Mobile Web Resources from Breaking Development #

   Jumping into Mobile First with both feet.

9. 9 Things Designers Can Learn from Target’s Checkout Form #

10. 25 September

    Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS #

11. 16 September

    Critics call foul as Google takes aim at JavaScript with Dart #

12. 26 January

    Less Framework 3 #

    A possible candidate for inclusion in any redesign I may do, although my mind doesn’t work well with odd numbers of columns…

13. Less Framework 3 #

    A possible candidate for inclusion in any redesign I may do, although my mind doesn’t work well with odd numbers of columns…

14. 24 August

    Justin Bieber 800% slower #

    Reminiscent of Blade Runner-era Vangelis, and surprisingly listenable.

15. Periodic Table of the Elements #

    Finally, a genuinely useful piece of information design.

Featured Videos

Featured Quotes

1. …exercise isn’t just about physical health and appearance. It also has a profound effect on your brain chemistry, physiology, and neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to literally rewire itself). It affects not only your ability to think, create, and solve, but your mood and ability to lean into uncertainty, risk, judgment, and anxiety in a substantial, measurable way…

   The Creative Brain On Exercise | Fast Company

2. Good design is not an accident. It’s not something that just happens by someone getting lucky. Sure, once in a while someone stumbles upon a cool core mechanic that happens to work, but to create a solid interface that many people can use and enjoy takes real attention to the details.

   Interface Design is Copywriting « Bokardo

3. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.

   Making things, infinite games, and Fred Brooks

4. A general rule of thumb is that if you look at a section of code and think “Wow, I don’t want to try and describe that”, you need to comment it before you forget how it works.

5. A general rule of thumb is that if you look at a section of code and think “Wow, I don’t want to try and describe that”, you need to comment it before you forget how it works.

   From Drupal’s coding standards