An email to Ocean Spray

Dear Sir,

After watching your advert on TV about how easy it was to drink Ocean Spray with gloves on, I decided that on my recent Arctic exploring trip, I would leave behind my usual Darjeeling and instead take your juice instead.

Upon arriving at the Arctic Circle, me and my chums decided it would be a prudent time to have a jolly nice sit down and enjoy some dry yet refreshing fruit juice. That’s when we were struck by total disaster. A nasty twist of fate. We were unable to open the juice with our gloves on. Oh, what we would have done for a nice warm pot full of a well brewed, full on Morning Breakfast. We were so parched that we would have even settled for Tetleys, but alas, it was not to be so.

After hours stuck in the Arctic Tundra with no accessible liquid, my dear friend, Sir T. Cup of Yorkshire, was getting desperate. He took off his glove and opened the juice. By the beard of Zeus, it was delicious, but was the refreshing taste worth the hand of a good man?

Yours sincerely,

Lord Clinton Montague.

(Oh, ok, I’m not really a Lord, have a friend who lost a hand or explore the Arctic. But it IS difficult to open the juice with gloves on!)

Update! They replied!

New site – devbytes

If you used to like the more tutorial based posts on slightlymore then this website might be for you. I will be posting snippets of code which will be highly tagged to try to create a personal delicious-esque code library. This is taken from the (quickly and badly written!) about page (or go straight to devbytes now!):

Welcome to devbytes. I want to build up a personal collection of useful code snippets, programming sayings, paradigms and ‘gotcha!’ moments (like when you first understand the JavaScript closure) for future reference. A bit like an ever evolving personal textbook, library, reference and cook-book.

I decided to put it into blog format because I know how useful it is to stumble across that page which has the solution to my problem on it. Now I’m not imagining for a moment that this will be anywhere near as good as many of the resources out there – but if it helps one person solve one problem then being a public blog rather than a private notebook then it’s all worth it.

Plus, at the end of the day, a blog is far more searchable than paper ;) For this reason, I intend to over-tag each of the posts too (it helps me search through delicious because I super-tag everything on there) but keep the categories relatively tight to separate the posts into things such as thoughts, design patterns, programming philosophy and other distinct types. But I guess I’m not really doing anything groundbreaking there, am I? It’s just that I use the categories in such a ridiculous way in all of my other blogs!

Anyway, I believe that I’ve waffled enough for now – I present to you devbytes.

As mentioned – this is designed as a personal reference – but if you find it useful or interesting too – then all the better! Naturally, it has a twitter account which will auto post when a new byte is posted (@devbytes) or you could subscribe to the RSS feed if that’s more your cup of tea.

Go to devbytes →

The place that’s halfway between blogging and microblogging

Imagine, if you will, a strange and wonderful place where the world is made up of postings and status updates that are longer than 140 characters yet shorter than a blog post. Imagine that this place was easy to get to, required no sign up and just worked. Easy. Believing that this exists must mean that I’m slowly turning insane, drunk, dreaming, or very, very high. Or I may have finally given in to the brilliance that is Posterous.

There’s so much cool stuff that happens that you just forget about – the classic one liner that you say and know will never be penned, the priceless photo of your aunt falling off her chair or the genius idea that you had while half asleep last night and can’t remember any more. Twitter isn’t enough to save these items to — plus it’s too volatile; a tweet will be alive for days (if it’s lucky). On the other hand, a blog post just seems a bit too formal (for me at least). Which is why Posterous is rather good. Just send it an email, and it will get added to your ‘site’.

You can see and follow the crap that falls out of my head that’s too long for Twitter and too short for slightlymore at http://iblamefish.posterous.com/; or, if you’re feeling lazy and want a save a few keystrokes, iblamefish.com will take you there too :)

Why I won’t be buying the Rage Against The Machine single before Christmas

Christmas number one used to be a special thing. Artists saved up their best and released it at Christmas for the ultimate prize. Songs released at Christmas used to be about Christmas. Rage against the machine just don’t get this. Their heavy music doesn’t encapsulate the spirit of Christmas — and that’s one of the reasons they’re such a great band; they’re in it for the music, not novelty.

Christmas number one is not suited to a rock band like Rage Against The Machine. That is why I’ll be holding out until December 28th to buy my copy.

And buying a copy of the most Christmassy song out next week.

Why this post has a cheesy image in it

I’ve just installed a WordPress plugin called Freebie images which adds in a new panel to the post editing page. It lets you search for free images which you can use on your posts – all you have to do is search for a keyword, then click on the picture you want to use. It’s really quite good.

But unfortunately, most of the images are American cheese with handshakes, people in meetings, and people with grins so massive that you fear that their face might fall off. Which is why I choose the picture for this post.

Redesigning slightlymore and a fun side project

My close friends will know two facts about me (probably more, too): I work a lot and I love roller coasters. I’ve already confessed to the near death of slightlymore in its current incarnation (more on this in a sec!) and after getting back from a holiday to Spain to a theme park, I have decided to write a book to give me something to do in the evenings instead of work.

I have been into roller coasters for as long as I can remember. In fact, one of my first memories is asking if I can go on a massive looming structure which I later worked out was a roller coaster. I’ve always wanted to write a book. So what better way to improve my writing skills, write a book and create something physical which I can say I designed than to write a book about roller coasters? Happily, there is a web site – BobBooks – which produces quality books of your design. So I’ve decided to create a roller coaster annual of 2009 (and hopefully follow it up each year with another – how cool would that be?!)

Which (via a bit of a tangent) brings me on to the redesign and rethink of slightlymore. Up until now, it has always been a kind of portfolio, tutorials and, well, impersonal. It’s my web site, so why not make it an online representation of me. That makes sense. As mentioned in my previous post I want a place where I can write whatever I want to write, not just write about web development. Why do I need a site which shows off my knowledge as a developer and not who I am as a person – it’s not like I’m looking for a job!

The new design is coming along quite nicely, and I should have it done by the end of the week. It will be a lot simpler than slightlymore currently, and it will be a lot more playful, which I think will encourage me to post more frequently. Under the hood, I am going to play around with just how little presentation I can get from virtually no markup. No unnecessary divs here or classes there. It’s going to really shine on the bleeding edge browsers yet still render nicely in older ones.

I have some really bad TV to watch now, so tata for now ;)

slightlymore is dead – long live slightlymore!

So it appears that my blogging activity at slightlymore has slowly but very surely ground to a halt. This wasn’t intentional – I set up the site with very specific goals; to own a website which was a great resource for developers with some great tutorials on it. I just don’t have the time to write that kind of content.

I’ve thought about the purpose of the site quite a few times, and remedied the lack of posting problem by introducing new sections. But that’s not the way to save a site. It might seem like it, but it’s not. The only thing that will create is a monster of a site with no purpose which is confusing to everyone except me. What I really need to do is start again, redefine what I want the site to do for me, and build it up from there.

I have decided to make the site much less faceless and much more personal. I want to write posts about what I think, not only what I do on a day to day basis. This way, I’ll be more willing to post whatever I want instead of being constrained by the rather tight requisite of a post being useful to the developer community. Essentially what I’m saying is that I’m going to stop taking the site so seriously (in the sense of making it look like a well-respected professional resource and all that nonsense), have a bit of fun and give the site a personality more in-keeping with my own.

The good news

If you’re one of the people who comes here for development tips and tricks, I’ll still be writing them every now and again. That’s the beauty of the new ‘mission statement’, if you will. I’m redefining slightlymore as a place for me to write about things I want to write about in a way that I want to write about them and to the length which I want to write to. That means that in the long run, I will be writing more stuff. And more interesting stuff too.

Also…

Everything which has currently been written will remain here clearly labled as archived. So if you have a particular article which you find useful and refer to, you’ll still be able to get to it and use it.

You won’t see much posting over the next month or so (not much change there, eh?!) as I’m having a bit of a redesign to accommodate the new structure of the site. But rest assured, if you’re an RSS subscriber or follow me on twitter you’ll be the first to know when the new site is ready and live!

Shameless pluggery

In the mean time, if you’re looking for something to read, why not try out OxfordBloggers or Diary of Things? Go on… you know you want to ;)

Google Chrome Frame. Saviour of the internet?

It’s a brilliant idea – and it’s simple to get working. Add this line of code into the head of your code…

<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

…and Internet Explorer will render the page as if it were being viewed in Google’s Chrome.

Why it won’t fix the internet

1. It’s a plugin which needs to be installed on the user’s computer. If they don’t want to/can’t upgrade their browser, why/how would they install a plugin
2. It will only ‘turn on’ when the website author has put the meta tag in their code
3. It might give the impression of a ‘broken internet’ when people view a website in one location with IE6 and Frame, then go home to view the site in their vanilla IE6 and the site being slow, not working and looking different

Having said that, I’m all for it, and I think that I might start using the tag; if people actively want a better internet but are stuck with IE, give them what they’re asking for – it’s the polite thing to do.

Diary of things

I’ll just tell you – you probably already know anyway. I’m a lazy blogger. I don’t seem to have time to write as many articles as I’d like for slightlymore. I know what the problem is – I don’t write enough because I have this strange inability to put small or waffley articles on it – I’d rather that it stayed as a blog devoted to development and internet related things.

I present you with my diary of things which I intend to use as an outlet for the frustrated writer in me who wants to write short snippets about cool stuff. That’s not the aim of the site, however. The aim of the site is for me to write about ‘that interesting thing’ which I found. I am planning on writing something every day (wish me luck on that!) but because it’s really only a microblog I hope that it will happen. And I reckon that a happy side effect of all of this will be that in the end I find it easier to write here because I will have already expunged the crap from my head :)

I’m not really sure what content will be going on to the site – I don’t even know what will be going on it tomorrow until I find it. All I can tell you is that if you’re a little bit nerdy, like me, then a lot of the content should be quite interesting and relevant. Be sure to follow @diaryofthings on Twitter to see when something new has been posted.

Or subscribe to the RSS feed if that is more of your cup of tea.

oxfordbloggers.com

It was around 9 or 10 in the evening in the Jam Factory. After a very successful Ox Tuttle, Ben Walker (@ihatemornings), Colin Mercer (@colinmercer) and myself came up with one of those genius drunken ideas. oxfordbloggers.com is it.

The aim is simple – to create a place to collect the thoughts and ramblings of Oxfordonians to give an idea of the general flavour of the local part of the blogosphere (man, I hate that word!)

The rules are also very simple. Live in Oxford? Have a blog? Want to be part of a relatively active nerd/geek/blogging community? Answer yes to those and you’re fully qualified to get your blog put on there too :) A rough outline/overviewy kind-of-thing reads something similar to this:

• We’re not going to put advertising on the site, or make money in any way.
• All content is fully attributed to the blog authors.
• All links go directly back to the original blogs.
• We’re not enabling comments – if you want to comment, go to the blog.
• We’re only doing this to get some more people to read blogs that we think deserve it.

Taken from the about page of oxfordbloggers.com

It’s still early days (less than 24 hours from conception to go-live) so excuse us if you manage to break something or you get a splinter from a badly sanded edge.