Hire Dudgeon is a custom equipment booking system I have designed and developed for Collingwood JCR Technical Services. It allows clients to browse and book kit which is available for hire, and in turn enables the administrators to keep track of items. Continue reading »

It is a universal truth that, however many cuddly toys they may have owned, everyone had a favourite teddy. You know the one I mean. It was probably the tattiest toy you owned. You will have taken it everywhere you went. If you got dirty, it got dirty. Even now, you smile when you think about it. That teddy has a lot to teach you about blogging. Continue reading »

Robert Hoekman, Jr.’s book is a must-read for anyone designing web applications, but it is also a great read for those involved in other stages of the web development process. Hoekman Jr. sets out the guiding principles of great web application design (read: simplicity) with the kind of persuasive force that will have you shouting “Yes!” at the book on almost every page. By the way of three quotes, here are three reasons to buy this book and read it and re-read and so on. Continue reading »

It all started one lunchtime while I as at school. I had gone to the computer room to print some documents but found myself in the middle of a computer club. A 6th Former called Benedict had just started a lunchtime club for people who wanted to learn how to make websites. (6th Formers seemed like giants back in those days. Now they look about 10.) I had not paid much attention to the notices in assembly: if anything, I supposed that writing code would require graduate-level skills in mathematics and would be incompatible with a thriving social life.

“Save the file as index.html and open it in the web browser. And there it is, your first website!” A website? Just like that? I had to have a go. Continue reading »

You don’t need to know everything. As with any field, there’s a lot you could learn about usability. But unless you’re a usability professional, there’s a limit to how much is useful to learn.

I’ve always liked the passage in A Study in Scarlet where Dr. Watson is shocked to learn that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know that the earth travels around the sun. Given the finite capacity of the human brain, Holmes explains, he cannot afford to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones:

What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Steve Krug, Don’t Make me Think, 2nd ed. page 6.

Read my review »

Music, even down to the shortest of riffs and phrases, has enormous capacity to reach your emotions. Filmmakers and advertisers use recognisable sounds to set scenes and convey a mood more quickly and effectively than they ever could with words. We all know the familiar tropes: The Jaws music means someone is in danger; a single violin means you need to reach for the tissues. But we hear hugely effective jingles every day without even realising it. Continue reading »

In a previous tutorial, I showed some inventive uses of the PHP rand and switch functions. You can do all this (and more) with JavaScript. So, for the sake of balance, here is how you make a Magic 8 Ball in JavaScript. Continue reading »

Consistency of vision and clarity of purpose are essential when blogging, but that does not mean you always need to stick to the same format. Blogging is an inherently creative activity. Today is a good day to shake things up a little. To express yourself in a way you haven’t tried before. Here a just a few ideas of new formats you could try on your blog, some of which I will be using over the next week or so. Continue reading »