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SCORCHIO! It was amazing being without the rain and the wellies at Glastonbury this year, but the sun provided its own challenges. The tents became unbearable by about 8 am, so no lie ins in spite of only getting to bed at about 6. Shade was like gold dust; every fence had a line of people squatting to get out of the sun. After a day of the relentless heat I caved and borrowed a friend's sunblock as I didn't want the complication of burning, and deciding hats were mandatory I bought a terrible one with "Sheriff" on it in red plastic like something out of a lego set. The Camelbak type thing I'd bought on a whim a few days before proved invaluable, whether filled with water or vodka orange, either washed the dust from my throat nicely.

Highlights included:

• Camp fires every night thanks to manly Gareth
• Rolf Harris, though he's 80 years old he was showing a whippersnapper MC how beatboxing's really done.
• Miike Snow's album shows only hints of the phat electro noize they pump out live. Loved it.
• Shakira was just filth. Sexy sexy filth.
• La Roux + Heaven 17 doing Temptation (not the rest of their set, it was shit.)
• NYC Downlow was filth of a very different kind, East London party times inna tent. Mind you the rest of the party village was just insanely awesome. Ohai Gomorrah! Thank god you're only around a few days a year or civilisation would like totally fall.
• Napping in a hippy tent. Wasn't even planned, it was just humid and comfy and we all drifted off.
• Scissor Sisters + Kylie (so SO gay). The rest of their set was good too, crowd pleasing hits interspersed with new stuff carried off on Jake Shears' drug-fuelled energy.
• Pet Shop Boys were surprisingly amazing. Great set. Fantastic dancers. Tune after Tune.
• The Kinks (well, 2 out of 5 of them). Gobsmackingly amazing. Several "Glasto moments" all rolled into one set, including Sunny afternoon, Waterloo Sunset, Days and Ray Davies being furious at having to cut his set short.
• Excellent food. N00bs assume that everything out of a van is shit, and certainly if you grab the first thing you find you won't be disappointed, but there's serious noms around if you keep a look out.
• Crossword solving. The easy one though obvs, we were hungover after all. Guardian sponsorship was apparent everywhere.
• Stevie Wonder was unsurprisingly amazing. Michael Eavis, however, can't hold a tune in a bucket.
• Pea soup mist and popup-tent-folding at 5 in the morning on the way back to civilisation.

It was a little weird being out and about without my camera but it was also oddly freeing not having the responsibilities of both looking after it and of documenting everything. Being with a bunch of friends all suffering from sleep deprivation meant a lot of hysterical nonsense was talked, which was similarly relaxing. It was just an easy breezy time, and in the days since I've had to stop myself dancing in the street to my iPod and skipping when I should be walking. Good times.

Though it sucked that it took 7 hours to get home there wasn't really any time for post-party comedown, what with the charidy gig on Wednesday where I knew everyone playing, London Pride on Saturday where we watched the parade, drank in soho then dressed up in 60s gear for Duckie's Gross Indecency and partied till dawn, then on Sunday was Tommy et al's massive BBQ.

On top of all the expensive party times I've just shelled out 400 quid to go to a web design class (and the dConstruct conference) in September! After thinking about it for a bit I decided I just couldn't pass up the opportunity of a day being taught by one of my favourite web designers, plus it can go straight on my CV, so there.

I'm now tired and poor. Hurrah!

So in the past month I've had a hectic period where I've been too busy to think, and then a slightly calmer time when I managed to finish off this website! The initial scope anyway, there's always going to be a list of tweaks and improvements. I need to add an "all" and a "close" button to the portfolio page, find/take and stylise a picture of myself for the about page, ajax up the tips on the landing page, add some css3 to the mouseovers there, typography on the blog area, yada yada yada.

Something that's really helped me stay enthused is walking up and down the Thames listening to podcasts about the web like the Big Web Show, which has been surprisingly exhilarating. It sounds dubious but seriously: sun + awesome scenery + three mile walk + mini web seminar in my head = amazing. It leaves me energised and relaxed but at the same time filled with the post-conference ambitious tension that keeps me thinking about the web. With that sort of daily injection of buzz it'll easy to keep the webdev side of things ticking over with nips and tucks moving forward, in spite of this site moving out of focus a bit now.

That's needed though; the next couple of weeks are going to be very busy with the Glastonbury Festival and London Pride on consecutive weekends, so I think this is a good place to draw a line under it. Also my PC is grinding to a halt, and in the dirge of smartphone and ipad info I'm hopelessly out of touch with PC tech; research needed towards getting a shiny new one. The other big thing is I need to look into finding a place to live come September: I like the idea of moving east, from Wapping to Bethnal Green to Bow, but beyond that I've no idea. For the first time in forever I'll need to move in with all-new people too! Scary!

Yesterday evening I had my first of eight physiotherapy classes to help sort out my back. It was a surprisingly exhausting affair which amounted to a supervised round-robin type gym session with some awful group therapy tacked on at the end. Some embarrassingly novel experiences: working out in public, trying out an exercise bike and a treadmill. I feel like going to a real gym would be less of a big (read: unknown and scary) step now. After that I felt a little braindead so just whiled away an hour or two playing flash games. A spectacular waste of time to be sure, but arguably not more so than games like Mass Effect 2 or back-to-back Star Trek: Enterprise episodes.

Today I spent at the Future of Web Design conference (London 2010). I went in '06 and '07 too, though in those days it was a smaller event, and MUCH cheaper. It's scary numbers now, but thankfully the company I work with are sending me, providing I can cobble together some learnings to spread among the tech and creative departments in a presentation or two. There's a lot to take on board, plus a couple of key talks I missed due to a clash that I'll have to stream when they put it online, and there's another whole day of it tomorrow! MY POOR HEAD. I'M NOT EVEN A DESIGNER. But then again the main subjects were HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, which is exactly what a Front-End codemonkey like me should be learning, perhaps I am a designer. It's confusing.

In any case "dossing around with flash games" + "new experiences" + "inspiring talks from luminaries" = "thoughts". Though I'll have to reflect more carefully on the speakers and the subjects when I digest them for the MRM London audience, there were a few small easily-forgettable things I wanted to jot down before they're buried under the wisdom of tomorrow's speakers, mostly under the theme of "Keeping Score", by which I mean a sort of IRL-metagaming: staying goal oriented in order to keep productive, fresh, enthused, interested and interesting. I'm fighting the temptation to over-analyse but as that's just the adult equivalent of colouring in your revision plan I'm going to try and avoid well-meaning procrastination, skip the theory and just take stock.

Fresh: Change is a good thing to keep score on, and new sources of info. One that's gone stale is blogs, I just don't read them any more! My google-reader goes unnoticed and the things I do read tend to be list articles. I need to unsubscribe from 90% of them and start again. Similar story - though not as severe - with ipod tracks; they need a good pruning. Quality not quantity! Tangentially, I should look at grabbing podcasts or audiobooks for Thameside walks at lunch.

Fitness: I've relapsed into old eating habits in the past couple of weeks which is perhaps regrettable, and I've stopped walking at lunch which might be fixed with more interesting reading material, but as workouts are going fairly well I'm not too cut up about it.

Funtimes: I've no ambition to cut games books and sci-fi out of my life, but there are other non-productive things with are much more self-evidently a total waste of time, usually when I'm bored. I need to learn to recognise and avoid these troughs as they happen.

Social: As I've stopped using a couple of social-networking sites I feel a little isolated sometimes, which could be fixed by going out more than the once or twice a week I do now, but again it's not a disaster. Keeping busier would help too.

Website: It's going well. Light at the end of the tunnel, etc. A few of the talks today provided some good insights into nift of the UX or jQuery variety that I will definitely follow up.

• Tone: Jocular? The cv section is a little informal which might be ok, but it still needs way more work. Giving my penchant for editing to the nth degree I probably won't be totally satisfied with it for weeks so I need to shortcut to the next stage.
• Typography: Vertical spacing/gridwork is a mystery to me, I need to find out about that. Finding non-standard fonts to showcase would be excellent if I can find a monospace pretty enough.
• jQuery: Fade out the "working" gifs, then get rid. Condense the "tips" section, and bring in the html from another page to reduce clutter and also demo another bit of pseudo ajaxyness (does that count as ajax? Find out). Have the "previous" tip fade out faster than the "next" fades in to give the impression of more whitespace.
• UX: fade in the dangovan logo onload as a cue to the user that things change. Introduce some more "discovery", perhaps more graphically rewarding on mouseovers? If that can be done without losing the simplicity.
• Portfolio section: title at the top, on mouseover the year slides down from top, the blurb slides up from bottom and the left/right button slides in from sides. Some possible sections: pride stuff, HTML email, localisation, design work, ITM3, big names, etc. Include link to live?
• Design: #999 background on the last.fm pics? Make top-border thinner? Work on a me-pic, similar to obama/hope but in red/grey/white and dashed.
• Nice-to-haves: Mobile version? Yoink simple tools I use anyway?

Closer and closer I get to completing all this, maxing out the nift, groking jquery and finishing the content. Ok not that last one; writing a cv and portfolio is tricky when you don't know what you want it to look like, and vice versa. I've had to start with old content and style it (though the pages aren't yet navigable) and now I'm at the stage where I need to re-write it all. It's been a crazy couple of weeks with two long weekends and the general election hilarity, but I'm trying to get my head down again and it's going pretty well.

It's also been extremely gratifying that I've been able to use so much of what I've learned tinkering with this lot in a professional capacity. "Twitter feed you say? Oh I did that last week. Twice." "json? Oh yeah I know all about that." When (if) this is all "done" I should create a playground section to keep mucking about in!

Still todo:

• Work out nift-factor for portfolio section: eg mouseover behaviour, flicking between images.
• Compile portfolio screenshots according to appropriate themes and put them in as blog entries
• Find a decent/amusing photo of myself (perhaps impossible) and posterise it for the about page.
• Re-write CV
• Combine hover and focus for the mainNav slide
• Create a fastHover function as part of hiHover
• Then an awful lot of design/typographical fine tuning

In other news: 3 day weeks don't give enough time for my body clock to normalise. Who knew? Going out at the weekend, all-night vigils for elections, Mass Effect 2 tempting me to stay up in the week... NEED SLEEP. Also I dropped my camera on its front a week ago, breaking the telescopic lens and ending two years of devoted service. Knowing from experience that it costs a lot to replace that part I decided to just get a new one. I want a bit insane though, and got a top-of-the-range sony tx5 as a replacement. But it's so shiiiiiny! And also, ostensibly drop proof, which might help.

Whoa, it has been ALL GO on the webdev front. The homepage is done and all nifted up, though there's room for more work. The blog is looking all nice right down to the blockquote styling, the return of "random thoughts" and an awesomely compact archive navigation which leaves no need for jquery shenanigans! I'll have to use them elsewhere instead. The info page done with an overly detailed site history that nobody in their right mind would be even vaguely interested in, the 404 apology page is done and pointed at, the only big pieces missing are the CV and the "past work" page. The former's going to take a while to get up to scratch and I've been collecting screenies for the latter.

Other things I'd like to add:

• Navigational "here" state that also turns off the link, with a js/css combo.
• Dynamically swap out the intro text on the front page for nifty hints on mousing over other parts of the page.
• Pull out date of last blog post somehow?
• Get that and other hover-behaviour to fade in and out.
• Draw in more tweets and get the area to scroll down on hover
• Homepage details: border along the top etc.
• Poster-ised photo of myself on the info page.
• Both "work" and "cv" will probably featuring a nested-list nav on left and entries on left structure.
• Hide "commenting not allowed" copy from single-post blog pages.
• Snaz up the 404 somehow. Giant punctuation?
• Style the (horrible) blogsearch section. For some reason ExpressionEngine makes it a separate, table-ridden subsite. Ugh.
• Contact details? Though I don't want a spammable link and email forms always feel crude...
• Suddenly become a genius at typography and refine all the fonts throughout.