Joyent seek to renege on lifetime hosting deal

Back in 2006 I invested $499 in a Lifetime ‘Mixed Grill’ hosting package from Joyent. The company was pretty young then and they used a series of lifetime package deals to raise capital. The deal on offer was very …

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A bit of a rant about Which? magazine

As we’re renovating our house and need to buy quite a few new household appliances, etc I decided to take up Which? magazine‘s offer of trial membership so I could get access to their online reviews and test results. …

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Illustrator ‘save for web’ anti-aliasing problems

Update: it seems I was completely wrong about this and Illustrator does have a special anti-aliasing option for type optimisation. The option is buried in a slightly strange place in the ‘Save for web’ dialogue, under ‘Image size’. Select

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A really simple font resizer using JQuery

Sometimes it’s useful to have links or buttons to increase the font size on a website. Even though browsers have built-in functions to resize content, not all users are aware of this, or can easily remember how to increase the …

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Using metaphors in web design

Graphic design is all about communication, and on a website we usually want to communicate something about a service or product or organisation. We probably want to tell people about its benefits and strengths. Of course one way to do …

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Setting up a local server on OS X Leopard

This week I’ve spent quite a few hours trying to set up a local development environment on my new Mac. Although I’ve used the built in version of Apache 2, much of the other software that comes pre-installed with OS …

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Correct use of HTML headings on a homepage

There’s been quite a lot of debate about the correct use of HTML headings (H1, H2, H3, etc) to define a document structure. WCAG 2.0 says that we should create a correctly nested structure of headings, not least to help …

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Designing Web Apps Workshop with Ryan Singer

Earlier this week I went to Ryan Singer’s workshop on Designing Web Application User Interfaces. Ryan is a designer at 37 Signals, the company behind the massively popular Basecamp project management software (which I use myself all the …

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