Writing

As an era of Labour government led by Gordon Brown surely comes to an end, I reflect on my changing political attitudes and the decision I’ll be making at the ballot box this coming Thursday.

A follow-up on Hack The Planet, our hack day held in Birmingham last month.

I’ve finally released the long awaited update to my popular social media icon set adding 12 new icons and a few design tweaks for good measure.

Once again, I feel the duty falls upon me to remind those attending this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, that you really need not pick up that big, heavy, cumbersome and frankly useless bag of marketing junk.

I ended my review of 2009 promising to write more about green issues and how I plan to lessen my impact on the environment. Now I expand on those ideas further.

Just a quick reminder that Hack The Planet takes place tomorrow, starting at 10am.

I’m a huge supporter of the BBC, yet for many years I was unimpressed with much of it’s online output, where inconsistent design and poor implementation reflected badly upon one of our country’s greatest institutions.

My love of detail is often reaffirmed by my noticing the almost inconsiderable tweaks in the designed environment around me.

Holiday and illness means this is the latest I’ve got round to writing a yearly review. Whilst today is possibly the latest I can get away with such a post, I still think it’s important to reflect on the achievements of the previous twelve months.

After two and a half weeks exploring various cities, it was finally on to Melbourne, the final stop on my short tour of Australasia.

Since visiting Sydney in 2003, often considered which city in the world might be my favourite. As I flew over Sydney Harbour I realised there was no contest.

Wellington will remain the most memorable stop on my brief tour of New Zealand, although perhaps not entirely for the right reasons.

Having arranged my flights into and out of New Zealand before deciding upon an itinerary, meant I had little time to really explore the South Island.

Before the tan disappears I’d like to record my short journey across New Zealand and Australia. So over the next few days, I’ll describe how I ended the decade down-under.

I hoped that almost missing my flight would be the worst my trip to New Zealand would have to offer, but thanks to overzealous immigration officials at LAX, that was nothing but a minor blip.

The humble URL has been on my mind a lot recently.

I’ve long held two ambitions. The first: to return to Australia before this decade is out. The second: to welcome in a New Year on Sydney Harbour before I turn 30.

The web development community has certainly grown up in the last four years.

I’ve been living in Littlehampton for almost a year now, yet working 25 miles away from Brighton has meant enduring the somewhat tedious chore that is commuting. This is often a more eventful affair when the journey is taken later in the evening, and tonight was no different.

With an escalating national debt, the talk at this months party conferences is of cuts to public spending and smaller, more efficient government. I believe one clear way of achieving this would be to introduce a single unified brand across government.

Last week Birmingham City Council launched its new £2.8m website. Delayed, over budget and woefully inadequate, it rightly faced a storm of criticism on Twitter and from the local press.

In less than two months time, I will once again be donning my running shoes to raise money for Cancer Research UK.

As Summer hurtles towards it’s conclusion (and let’s assume for a second that it actually started) so the anticipation for two very special geeky events can begin.

A set of standardised icons for popular social networking services and tools.