Here is what I wrote.
I am from mars,
I'm twelvety feet tall and 5 miles wide.
I weigh 2 stone 10 and have four ten toes.
It takes me five eleven minutes to get dressed in a morning
and costs tup tup pence to get on the bus in my home town.
My name is not important, just that to be alive is a wonderful thing.
smile and the world wont smile with you, its a planet, not a person.
But other people might just smile back at you.
and if they dont then sod them really
but thats not important right now.
This site came about from wanting to actually understand what I did the first time I tried to make a site.
I spent a year on a work placement from University at a web design agency in Sheffield, where I first learned about Web Standards. I've recently worked for this place where I did lots of web standards, accessibility, template building css stuff, mysql and the odd bit of asp and php.
I'm currently running thoughtube limited, doing web design and IT consultancy.
It's kind of evolved since then, I try occasionally to add new things and stuff and gadgetry to the arse-end of the site to make me feel better about how it runs and the hard work that went into it. I'm sure that means nothing to most people but i'm too proud to put something that looks like it was build it the 90's and rebuild again in the 90's style in the new century. Oh the pain, the pain!
For anyone who cares, this site:
- has valid XHTML 1.0 Strict throughout (ok, there might be a couple of minor mistakes, but if you find them before I do let me know - i've got OCD you know, i hate it when things aren't right!)
- has valid, search engine friendly CSS layouts - disable the styles and see.
should work in any browser on any device. Be in handheld or otherwise. they won't all look the same, but everything should at least just work.Oh yeah, version 8 *won't* work in IE6 as it uses transparent PNGs. I've also ignored anyone with screens which can't show at least 1100 pixels width in a browser window. This site is no longer uber-everyone-and-everything-friendly. I'm far too fed up IE6 to keep making things work in that browser - it's over a decade oldfor God's sake! Upgrade to something good!- Tested and works in Firefox 3.6, Opera, Internet Explorer 9, Chrome 7
- Best viewed at 1280 x 800 / 1366 x 768 or (preferably if you'd like it to look good!) at least 1440 x 900 or higher at 32 bit colour through the eyes.
1280 x 1024 is probably the optimum resolution for it (since that's what screen size i designed it at in the first place!)It was designed and built on a 1920 x 1080 full hi def screen. Should work spot on for screen readers too, and you'll find in the code that the content is before the menus. That's for the search engines as well as blind users, it gets you straight to what you came here for. At some point, I'll chuck in a jump to navigation link to help you even more. - is handwritten. Yes all of it. every single line of code was written in a text editor.
- is tested in Firefox firstly and foremostly. This is my browser of choice, and since I built this site for myself, the only reason I tested on others
and made fixes for Internet Exploderis because I like to be able to say "hey, get me. I'm the pimp daddy" and so forth. Which I try to say at least once a day. Even if it's a lie. It just rolls off the tongue nicely. Plus, if you try out the second acid test in firefox, or opera, or safari 3 or any other browser besides Internet Explorer, you'll find they all generally do a much better job with CSS. We aren't living in the dark ages any more - get yourself a browser that works better! I couldn't do it. I tried but when I saw how poor it looked in IE6 I had to try and at least make it line up!
So there you have it. Peace out brothers.
Amen.