Keri Henare

Today (while procrastinating about things that I should've been doing), I gave myself a little kick in the butt about this website. As Brian's Mum would say, I've been a Very naught boy! I've barely managed one post every couple of months since I got the site back up and there's only been one comment in the last 18 months. It's got to the point where redevelopment of the site is like a running gag in a sitcom or late night show (see "I'm f**king Matt Damon") with me talking about various things that I want to do but never actually do. Now the time has come to finally fix things.

As we all know, a blog is driven by it's content. I've made a commitment to myself to try and make one post per week. I might not post every single week, but that's my goal. I will most definitely be posting within the next week because I want to write about that thing that I was procrastinating about. To make things a bit easier, I've created a Fluid app solely for my Wordpress Admin area (I'll be talking more about Fluid and Wordpress at a later date). Hopefully having an app that I can bring up quickly with spotlight will encourage me to write more often.

As for development, I'm still sticking with Wordpress for the immediate future. I've previously talked about Django, which is soon going to at Version 1.0 stable release, as a possible alternative but I just don't have the free time for major development at the moment. What I have done today, is moved the site into a subversion repository because we should all be using version control. SVN will allow me to make incremental changes to the site without worrying about FTP. I've also added a few helpful plugins to Wordpress to make my life a little easier.

Will write again soon, until then, hasta luego (because I'm learning Spanish now).

Due to the limitations of my UK Visa and the financial pressures caused by those limitations I have now returned home to New Zealand, alone. I have had to leave my darling Carmen behind to finish the last little bits of her university work. Carmen will then be going home to Valencia for a couple of months to spend time with her family before permanently relocating to Auckland. I'm man enough to admit it... I miss her terribly!

Shortly after arriving home I found a great job with Pixel Fusion. It's a very welcoming work environment and I'm working with an amazing group of people. Look forward to seeing some great stuff coming from us in the future.

The new site, is still coming.

I really like CakePHP and as I have previously mentioned, I had been intending to use it for the all new KeriHenare.com. However, I've decided to forget that and try something really new.

I would therefore like to announce that development of the new version of this site is underway right now and it is being developed in Python, using the Django framework. I'd been considering this change for a while now but it's all a whole new world to me. Until a week ago I knew absolutely no Python. I've now started reading Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python which I've found to be one of the best resources that I've ever come across for learning a new language. Luckily for me Django is aimed more at designers than hardcore coders so it's pretty easy to get started with. I'm really excited about this change to Django and I think that Django has a really promising future.

As always, keep coming back for updates. I'll try to post a bit more often... At least I hope to try.

Dan Cederholm is in the middle of another live design refresh. In the meantime SimpleBits has no styling what-so-ever. I'm not a very patient person and I love Dan Cederholm's designs so I decided not to wait for the new design.

Dan removes the <link> element for his screen.css so I've created a Greasemonkey script that add's it back in as well as removes the little 'tune up' message.

var link = document.createElement('link');
  link.setAttribute('rel', 'stylesheet');
  link.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
  link.setAttribute('href', '/css/screen.css');
  link.setAttribute('media', 'screen, projection');

var style = document.createElement('style');
  style.setAttribute('id', 'hide-h2');
  style.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
  style.setAttribute('media', 'screen, projection');

var text = document.createTextNode('body > h2 { display: none; }');

document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(link);
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(style);
document.getElementById('hide-h2').appendChild(text);

The web standards community will probably remember today as the coldest day in hell. Microsoft have announced that the latest build of IE8 successfully passes the Acid 2 test. For those who don't know what Acid 2 is, it's a test page created by the Web Standards Project for browser vendors to use as a method for validating the standards compliance of their products. The fact that IE8 passes Acid 2 must have silenced a few of Microsoft's critics.

This news seems to have come at the worst time for Opera's antitrust complaint against Microsoft. The complaint was filed only a week ago but it already seems to be loosing it's footing as a major part of the complaint was based around Microsoft's lack of support for web standards.