Movie Poster Fan

I take my inspiration from many sources, but one of my all time guilty pleasures has to be movie posters old and new in any shape or form.

The amount of effort that goes into designing just the right look to grab your attention and hold it long enough to peak your interest so that you'll want to go see the movie... it's just incredible.

In my spare time, when I have any, I like to try my hand at reworking some of the classic old film noir movie posters or just tinkering with some of the more modern Hollywood blockbusters.

Go check out Paulo Gabriel's blog entry at Abduzeedo on some really excellent fan made movie posters for movies that have or should be made.

What's your all time favourite movie poster?

Website performance why should you care?

There's a lot more to website performance than you'd think:

• How many HTTP requests?
• How optimised are the graphics?
• Is JavaScript adding unnecessary bulk?

The thing is... few website visitors will care about the technical stuff, like how optimised your killer graphics are or how mean slick your JavaScript is, one of the few things they care about is how quickly they can get the information they desire and waiting a long time for a website to load can be fatal. Few people will wait, there are dozens of websites out there, if your website is slow to load you'll quickly lose your audience!

Good Performance

Good website performance by definition should be transparent to the visitor but can make the difference between a website that's a success or one that's a complete flop.

I use a number of website performance tools such as Yahoo!'s YSlow and Google's PageSpeed during the creation of my websites to ensure I can shave those vital few seconds and even milliseconds off website loading times thus enable a better user experience. I also follow Yahoo!'s performance best practices which allows me to test that the changes I make actually improve performance and give me a better understanding about what actually happens when a website loads into the browser.

For more information on some of the tools I use phpied.com has produced and excellent round up of performance tools with detailed information on each one. If you're interested in website performance I would recommend giving it a read.

If you have any tips/comments on website optimisation and performance or if there is a tool you use that's not in this round up, please feel free to drop me a line.

Highland Fling 2007

I attended the Highland Fling 2007 today.

"Highland Fling is an annual one-day conference in Scotland aimed at web developers and businesses with an interest in web standards and accessibility. This inaugural Highland Fling conference will cover the topic of progressive enhancement and is designed to make developers aware of both the benefits and pitfalls involved of using such technologies, how to use them, when not to use them, and what the future holds."

I'll admit I was impressed, this was definitely one of the better seminars I've attended this year and I'm a self confessed seminar junkie, I get the shakes if I go more than 2 weeks without ducking out of work to expose myself to (not at) a seminar.

Among the number of prestigious speakers, I was particularly interested in Drew McLellan's talk regarding Microformats and how it could possible to use them properly as a simple API for your site. Is that a gasp I hear before me, yes, it's entirely possible using the correct mixture of Microformat mark-up to allow you to ditch that mass of tired, battered API framework code you've been struggling to integrate and use basic HTML instead to form a very lightweight, accessable to those who want/need it API. The beauty of it is that it's just ... there!

If your not using Microformats yet, why not? It's going to save us all.... really, no really... HEY! don't walk away when I'm talking to you..... damn.

Adobe Flex 2

For some time now I've followed, with trepidation, the increasing hype around the Adobe Flex 2 framework and how it's going to save the unwashed masses from themselves while using the Web 2.0 (The Internet)

Adobe Flex 2 is at the forefront of building and producing Rich Internet Applications (RIA's) which bring desktop application capabilities to Internet browsers such as FireFox and Internet Explorer.

With a recent release to Flex 2.01, I find myself slowly gravitating towards a "hype" based mindset. Having had a dig under the hood, I have to admit, I'm impressed with what I've found. Coming from a PHP programming background normally I would baulk at relinquishing control to a glorified browser plug-in, but this time I'd be wrong. Adobe have done an excellent job of listening to it's user base and producing a product that may indeed just revolutionise the web applications as we know them.

With this in mind, I've committed myself to to bending my head around the Adobe Flex 2 framework and Actionscript 3 with it's newly structured Object Orientated slant. Wish me luck!

Merry Christmas

Sitting here in the lull before the storm, I'm nervously awaiting the family Christmas visit.

In this all to brief serene period I thought I'd take time out to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and hope you've all been nice, not naughty and got that long awaited vacation to a sunny place for Christmas. Have fun everyone.

Buzzword Culture Re-Design

Just finished the re-design of the Buzzword Culture Web Design web site. I wanted a cleaner design than the old one and to use technologies that I hadn't before on my own website, such as adding a full index search, this blog and adding an RSS feed.

We now also offer merchandise from T-shirts to mouse mats. Hope you all enjoy the new site let me know what you think.