clear:both

I’ve abandoned this blog for too long, my excuse being twitter took over my general communications attention and I have built more blogs in the last year and a half that the rest of my online career put together (about 250 odd blogs in just over a year).

The main driver for this was leaving publishing after eight long and enjoyable years in publishing to join Headshift Ltd. a social business consultancy (thus the multitude of blogs). I’m loving it, but haven’t felt the desire to blog much, I guess a coals to Newcastle type issue.

Yet it’s time to return to blogging, both as twitter, although an excellent tool is just that, a tool among many others that each have their own benefits and disadvantages. So as it’s a new chapter in this blog, it felt necessary to refresh the focus and design. Which has culminated in a more tumbler-esque feel (yeah, a bit obvious I know) in the sense that there are different types of blog entry; video, image, post and code (and maybe others in the future). That last category is because I want to speak more about code and my professional practice more, specifically css/xhtml/jquery as well as other concerns such as ux, interaction design, development (front-end + back-end) and all the bits inbetween (i.e. the issues with how those practices interact).

So I have categorised this post somewhat incorrectly as ‘code’ just because I can, to justify it, some css I use far too often, it’s generally non-semantic, there are other probably better methods (overflow:hidden on container for self clearing) but sometimes there is nothing more satisfying that popping this into a container after floated elements and see that bad boy get into line.

/* -------------------- */
/* =Clearing */
/* ------------------ */
.clear {clear:both; line-height:0; font-size:0; height:0;
padding:0; margin:0; border:none;}

Oh and btw, haven’t tested this in the IEs yet – not sure if I will (i will but I just want to be mean). Although they will be getting graceful degradation for the nicer more advanced bits on this design; you can’t make black&white tv’s show in colour so why try.

Right, hopefully it won’t be 6 months before I post again.

What not to write

Yawn, so thus starts the usual end of year reviews within the blogosphere, what happened in 2006 (quite interesting), what’s going to happen in 2007 (interesting but pointless – essentially a gamble that you can’t ever cash in) and of course the obligatory list of defining words/phrases for the last year or so.

Good one here: http://www.gawker.com/news/blogs/bad-lingo-blogmedia-clichs-222162.php detailing well used phrases such as Evar, OMG, made my [sensory organ] bleed etc.

I am often a little uneasy about articles of this nature, i.e. ‘we feel that [x] is overused and plebs are using them now so we must kill those words and make up new ones the plebs don’t use, thus guaranteeing our superiority’

For me language is not something to be owned by one group, it is agile and organic with groups choosing a selection of the lexicon to define and enhance themselves. This is admittedly what Gawker are attempting to do here, they feel that said definition is too wide so must distance themselves away and redefine. So although its the nature of groups to wish to redefine they’re own selection of the lexicon I guess I just feel that this excludes a lot of people and makes much text and discourse inaccessible to a wider set of users.

And as Gawker admit, they are just as guilty, as I am sure I am in earlier posts, yet if we want to communicate across divides, then understanding that inclusive use of the language becomes increasingly important in an evar increasingly fragmented world (and cyberspace). Ofcourse for those that are and want to stay within a community then the constant re-invention of language is quite necessary for definition and indeed survival.

Some stats (ARP05-MAR06)

Month Monthly Totals
Sites
KBytes
Visits
Pages
Files
Hits
Mar-06 805 617262 1299 3606 10425 19321
Feb-06 1672 1192074 2552 4988 15727 19814
Jan-06 1387 1000271 2546 4001 17224 21231
Dec-05 1021 758728 1854 3465 11325 15419
Nov-05 1339 1144525 2724 6144 23574 36199
Oct-05 1866 1517431 2495 7037 21419 26681
Sep-05 2325 1421019 3331 6481 25069 32646
Aug-05 10781 6463924 12186 20808 250686 265851
Jul-05 3001 1713853 3515 6463 57011 60511
Jun-05 409 151156 443 855 1537 2096
May-05 477 340664 829 1908 3542 4502
Apr-05 522 227459 712 1506 5008 14229
Totals   16548366 34486 67262 442547 518500
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