Welcome to Simon Philp's Blog

Subtext

I have a to-do list that's getting bigger by the day.  I have had several emails asking when Part 2 of "Creating your first subtext skin" will be going live.  It's coming, I promise. Hopefully next week I'll be happy with it and send it to a couple of reviewers before publishing it.  If you want to be one of these reviewers please feel free to contact me. 

My websites skin is slowly being updated and I do have a list dedicated to it.  Once this list has been completed I will be putting the files on the subtext skin site for download.  More skins are coming just not enough time in the day.

Tunes

A current favourite podcast of mines is the latest from Si Jobling aka 1 Phat Dj called Bikini Beats.  With the Scottish summer being delayed until next year this mix has certainly put me in the mood for a nice hot, sunny, relaxing holiday, so guess what I'll be doing this weekend???

Talking about Dj's from my podcast subscriptions it's been a while since DJ Cruze has released a podcast due to becoming a father, Congratulations.  I am looking forward to his next podcast so Marc get your finger out :P.  His current podcast is Number 31 Sweet Harmony.

I hooked up with an old friend Johnny Walker aka EZE last week.  He has some awesome scratch videos on his myspace page. He is also bringing together his own compilation 21st century FM, some of his work again can be found on his myspace page. 

There are blogging engines/CMS's out there that have built-in functionality to prevent or certainly reduce the amount of spam being pushed on to a site via comments/trackbacks or from a contact form. If your not using software that prevents these invasions then there are free components out there you should be able to integrate very easily or you can implement some simple methods.

On Wednesday morning Andy and I travelled down to Harrogate to our Datacentre to drop off a couple of servers before heading to our hotel in preperation for the InTechnology Golf Day.  During our tour of the centre one of the private suites stuck out like a sore thumb. 

On to the golf day.  Being complete novices to the game Andy and I were put into the beginner teams where we learned to putt and pitch along with driving. 

It was then a matter of playing 3 holes where unfortunately Andy's team won. Andy also walked away with 2 bottles of Champagne one for winning and the other for a birdie.  How lucky........

I had a fantastic time, learned quite a bit about InTechnology and a few things about golf which maybe one day I will persue.

 

There surely isn't a web developer who hasn't heard of jQuery.  jQuery is Javascript library that simplifies effects, events and Ajax interactions.

Today jQuery 1.1.3 just got 800% faster and it's only 20kb.  This release see's a number of bug fixes and handful of enhancements. At the time of writing it had over 1200 diggs.  Certainly a library I will be looking to use again in the future in conjunction with my skin for subtext.

For more information about other Javascript libraries there is a good post over at sitepoint that contains most of the big contenders : What Ajax Library do you recommend.