by Rob Mason ~ July 29th, 2008 Filed under: Random | No Comments »
It’s that time of the year again when A List Apart do their survey. This is our opportunity as web professionals to get together an share information on how we go about things around the world. Many improvements are promised over last year’s survey including a better categorisation for international markets - hurrah!
I covered last year’s survey and produced some results of my own which were a bit quick and dirty. Hopefully this year I’ll have more time to do a proper job.
So what are you waiting for? Take the survey now!
by Rob Mason ~ July 28th, 2008 Filed under: Random | No Comments »
So it’s one year on from the floods here in Tewkesbury and life is almost back to normal for most people.
The recent Over the Rainbow* event sought to remind everyone about the dramatic events last summer, but to also try and put it behind us and move on. Sadly this isn’t the case across the town as there are still people in caravans waiting for their homes to be sorted out, so it’s not over yet.
Loads of residents banded together to march through the town to show solidarity. Some also went to Westminster to petition the government against building any new homes on the floodplains. Sadly the government still pushed through plans to build over 14,000 new homes in flood affected areas ensuring that if the weather conspires against us again, we’ll be in exactly the same situation! I’ll restrain myself form expressing my views on the government at this point as I don’t want the post to degenerate into a political rant.
Still it’s great to see the town pulling together and making a point. This is what a community feels like and I’m proud to live in Tewkesbury.
* Aside rant: I know the website was probably pulled together quite quickly, budgets were low and it’ll only be used for a limited time, but come on! Lacklustre design, invalid code, clashing text colour, no semantic markup, inline styles…the list goes on. It’s disappointing the production values couldn’t have been higher.
by Rob Mason ~ July 25th, 2008 Filed under: Random | No Comments »

Bletchy Park owes us all a debt of gratitude, not just here in the UK but around the world. For those not in the know, Bletchly Park is the:
Historic site of secret British codebreaking activities during WWII and birthplace of the modern computer.
Basically without Bletchly our World War 2 would have been made a lot harder, not least because the guys that worked there broke the infamous Nazi Enigma code machine. Not only that the computer your reading this article on probably wouldn’t exist as we know it.
Now the sad state of affairs is that Bletchley is being neglected according to the BBC. Many people have commented on this, so I won’t rant on anymore, however I’d urge you to donate and keep Bletchly alive.
by Rob Mason ~ July 21st, 2008 Filed under: Aside | No Comments »
Slightly out of the blue, but welcome nonetheless, comes a review of my blog via Blogged. Yey for me!

by Rob Mason ~ July 14th, 2008 Filed under: Aside | No Comments »

Help save hundreds of thousands of web developers from exhaustion or anger-related accidents by joining the camapign to upgrade form Internet Explorer 6.