Russell James Smith

Website back up!

My website is back-up after about a year of down-time, oops!

Joining the party

Living in a town in northern England has it's pros and cons when it comes to being a web-professional. We can follow the latest news on web 2.0, the Standardistas and Google vs MS vs Yahoo! just fine from here via a multitude of blogs and other news sources but it's hard sometimes to feel truly involved when you've never even visited the west coast of America.

I-VI-VIII or 168 is 360 in Hex

I must be a genuine geek, on reading about a new Xbox 360 viral thing on Kotaku I pretty quickly remembered that 168 is just 360 in Hex! (Maybe the big Hexagon in the mysterious symbol gave me a bit of a clue!)

UPDATE: This clue lead to the website hex168.com.

CSS Reboot

Those that have hung out on the web for a few years may very well have been aware of the May 1st Reboot. A project started to give people a little kick when it came to re-designing web-sites and moving web design forward. The premise being that on May 1st each year those sites participating will all upload new designs creating a virtual gallery of fresh new design right across the web.

Well over the years a small critisism has come to the fore, this being that the majority of the sites being "rebooted" are Flash based heavily design-driven websites. Now, impressive as some of these creations are they are to a degree removed from the day-to-day design many of us live and breathe made largely of HTML+CSS. So to answer this we now have a companion project: CSS Reboot.

I'm signed up already (this place needs a good coat of paint), if everything goes acording to plan you should be able to see the fruits of my labours right here on May 1st, wish me luck!

P.S. Tip-o-the-hat to D. Keith Robinson for posting about the reboot in his excellent blog.

New thoughts on web applications

I've just read a very interesting essay trying to sum up the approach taken to interfaces by some of the new web applications such as Flickr or Google Maps. Written by Jesse James Garret (author of the Elements of User Experience), he introduces the essay on his own blog.

After reading the essay and also some notes on it on Jef Veen's blog I realised I'd been heading towards this sort of approach myself. I'd picked up on some of the nice things these newer sites were doing but hadn't looked at them as a group. What I've been working on are more responsive search filters for Ecommerce sites and they may well benefit from this approach, but more on that when I have it nailed down.

Hot wheels

My mate Paul is lucky enough to be spending the season snowboarding in Mammouth, CA. Take a look at his website Very Exciting Times and check out the video of his new ride, a sweet 1988 Jeep Wagoneer, more beige than you'd believe they could put into a car!