David Dorward's Blog

Accidental redesign

2013-04-04T11:23:19-00:00

I’ve been writing a new CMS for ages (it’s been a low priority rite-of-passage project). It is getting to the point where I am almost ready to start using it.

I know! I think. In advance of moving to it, I’ll update the data in my old CMS and hit build.

Unfortunately, I forgot that I’d started redesigning the site a while ago. I’d also been getting experimental with colour schemes and fonts. (For “experimental” you can read “crazy”).

Worse, my backup includes the change in design.

Even worse, the old system predates my use of version control (I love version control … now).

So the net result is that my site is going to look hideous for a little while. This is motivation to get the CMS finished off at least!

The homepage isn’t going to look hideous, it is just going to look dated and ugly. This is because it is generated from a different set of templates, on a different machine.

Overly complicated and twiddly? I knew there was a reason I was writing a new CMS!

Wine-bar training

2013-04-04T08:15:00-00:00

I love the Perl community.

Via London.pm:

I currently have no plans to record, stream or “webinar”[1] my courses. I mean, yes, I’d love to do something like that in the future but have you seen the budget for Perl School?

[1] What ever that means. Seems to be an anagram of “wine-bar” but doesn’t sound half as much fun.

The courses, by the way, are reputed to be rather good. I might manage to find the time to get along to one at some point.

The 2013 rendering ending shake up

2013-04-04T07:26:00-00:00

So Opera isn’t dropping Presto for WebKit but for Blink, which is Google’s new fork of WebKit that exists, as far as I can tell, because Google and Apple have a hard time playing together nicely. (See this HN thread in which people make various claims).

Meanwhile Mozilla is teaming up with Samsung to write a new rendering engine (Servo) from scratch. One which, from first impressions, is very heavily geared towards mobile devices.

I’m going to have to revise my testing platforms before very much longer, aren’t I?

Do I like Forecast.io?

2013-04-03T13:46:35-00:00

I’m trying to decide if I like Forecast.IO. One thing is certain, there are a few pieces which I don’t like about it. This is the greatest of them:

Detecting that someone is using Mobile Safari and then not letting them use a web application without “Installing” it, is obnoxious.

Detecting that someone is using iOS and then not letting them use a web application without using a feature that isn’t available in their browser is worse.

Golfing World live on the Samsung TV App Store

2013-01-23T10:05:04-00:00

We’ve managed to get our new Golfing World application into the Samsung TV App Store.

I wrote a large portion of both the front end and the back end for this, so I’m quite pleased that we’ve finally got it launched.

Now you all need to develop a love of golf and buy a Samsung TV made in the last couple of years and you can stream lots of golfing videos over the Internet!