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After the CSS workshop last month I'm all booked up for another Carson event, this time a conference entitled "Future Of Web Design", or FOWD if you're into the catchy acronyms. I had actually booked my place and time off work before I told my boss about it, and it's gratifying to have him reply "yes, sounds good, lets go" even though it's likely to be from a design rather than a development point of view. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be rubbish and show me up, though given the line-up I shouldn't think so.

Speaking of designiness, production on the next generation of mochaholic is on hold, as I try and reconcile my ideas with current trends and get around page hierarchy guidelines. I've uploaded a gif of how it stands at the moment, next stage would be to cut down the number of pages and introduce some content below the fold, hopefully that'll work as a compromise.

Mika at Popstarz next friday! Woopwoop.

Year of the Bond.
Yeah, I'm slow.

Any likes/hates?

Currently 2x1280x1024. I'll have the check my resolution at home and fill it in later.
Arf!!

Seriously though; I have a whole bunch of resolutions, although few of them count as "New Year's" precisely, as they're not new. One of them was to see more bands, and accordingly I've been keeping an eye on what's incoming, albeit taking the slightly lazy approach and using sites like ents24 to tell me when exciting things are happening. Anyways due to this pseudo-vigilance and a surprising influx of good bands to be vigilant about I've now got a few lined up! Woop woop. Next week we?re seeing Imogen Heap*, the week after it's Mika, with Metric and then Scott Matthews the week after that. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Regina Spektor and the Shins are February lineup. Woot woot! I've probably gone a bit overboard to be honest, but then you have to grab 'em when they tour or you miss out.

Still on the lookout for bands unlikely to ever play this side of the pond like The Faint or Stars (are they even together anymore?). Mind you their records are in the shops so I can but hope ;-)

*I would have linked to the official site but it's just too fugly.

Pan's Labyrinth is kinda Alice in Wonderland meets Schindler's List meets 28 Days Later and scores a whopping 95/100 on Metacritic, so it's the best film of 2006 by their rating.

Bloodly brilliant film; powerful, gripping etc, but HOW IN THE HELL IS THAT A 15?!

Being as it's very quiet at work right now I'm pretty much left to mimble about the web. Far from slacking, trying to get my feeble mind to absorb all the knowledge therein is probably as draining as if I had work to be getting on with, but then it's probably more interesting. I've been fiddling with PHP and JS, whittling down the old thoughts.txt (de-angstathon), trying to get a handle on contemporary web design, and basically trying to grok the web and my place in it, as a developer, as a punter, as a wannabe designer, as a sometime-blogger.

[Non-Geeks skip this paragraph] In terms of actual technologies learning what is 'best' is in most cases pretty easy. For (archaic) example the semantic document structure and scalability of pure CSS solutions blows tables out of the water. Progressive enhancement is self-evidently better than broken JavaScript links. However it seems to be much more difficult to keep a similar handle on web design trends, as trendy gidgits are pass? to the cutting-edge designer blogospheres before Joe Client has even heard of them. Same deal with the sociological aspects: I'm told with certainty by experts that social network web-apps are where it's at and that forums are now perceived as lame… But all those people on the forums don't know this, or care, and there are a lot of them. On the other hand the same might be said about Hotmail, and we all know Hotmail is the work of the devil. Figuratively speaking. I hope.

I've come to the conclusion there is no middle ground between the web-centric elite and the utilitarian proletariat, only a kind of gradual one-way diffusion that seems painfully slow. Although that frees me up to yoink the ideas of the trailblazers willy-nilly with the vast majority not knowing the difference, it's not a satisfying or pleasing conclusion. IE6, tables, Hotmail and clueless clients will live on, despite being well past their shoot-in-the-head-by-date. I guess I can take comfort that I'm certainly as bad or worse in other aspects of my life: e.g. I shop at Tesco. It's too expensive, has a mediocre range and lazy staff but hell, it's on the way to work…

ANYWAYS, between all this pondering I've set up a wordpress blog where I hope Mochaholic 2.0 will eventually emerge. However early indications are not good. It's an open-source free for all, so there are endless opportunities for downloading dozens of badly-integrated modules and skins guaranteed to break at the slightest provocation, the much-vaunted widget functionality seems to be ridiculously complicated considering it's in lieu of cut-and-pasting a few lines of code, and the oft-repeated implications of plug-and-play-like ease-of-use is just a big fat lie. And as it's all under-the-hood PHP shenanigans designed for people unwilling to tinker with HTML by well-meaning amateurs there's no feedback as to WHY anything breaks.

Quite frustrating. Also, I win at hyphenation.

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

The Faint are my current Favorite Band. Dirty electronica-funk synth-rock type stuff, kinda what I hoped Muse's latest album would be like, but of course they were seduced by grandiose guitar-based soaring operatic stuff. So anyway The Faint rawk, particularly the Wet From Birth album, a few songs from which feature on this odd flash game.

Go see!