Monthly Rewind : May 2010

© copyright 31.May.2010 by Paul Bradley posted under Journal.

k9directory

It’s been a good month for the pet friendly cottage guide k9directory. What with the volcanic ash clouds and the recession, more people must be stopping in the UK for their summer holidays, and more importantly taking their dogs with them. Bookings are up, with over £76,542 worth of cottages booked during the first five months of 2010.

Here are the new listings added this month :-

  1. Glencoe Cottages - Three detached self catering holiday cottages at Torren Glencoe, each sleeping 6-8 in 3 bedrooms have been designed to give families, climbers, and hill walkers.
  2. The Masons Arms - is a picture postcard pub in a very pretty ham stone village in an area full of tourist attractions and places of natural beauty.
  3. Dairy Cottage - a self-catering cottage for up to five guests, on the outskirts of the village of Castletown, with lovely views of the sea at Dunnet Bay and beyond to Dunnet Head (the most northerly point in mainland Britain).

Learning HTML 5

Sites like k9directory are in desperate need for redesign, there are several new features I am keen to implement, and thought it would be a good opportunity to learn HTML5 and perhaps do the redesign using this new specification. So I have preordered a copy of Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers to see how I can harness the power of HTML5 in today’s browsers. I am particular interested in the new HTML forms along with the media tags for audio and video. Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 is also a very good resource, and I have found it useful.

As I produce the odd video, I was really interested in Drew Neil’s implementation of the video tag on his Vim Casts website, and maybe it’s time to consider stop using YouTube.

Changes

I have made a few small changes to this site this month, to help the layout look good on an iPhone, I have restricted the content width to 770px and have added an appropriate meta viewport tag.

<meta name=viewport content=width=770 />

There is also a small slide show of photos on the homepage, which makes use of jQuery and Jonathan Snook’s Simplest Slideshow script.

All code blocks will now use the Google Code Prettify script to colour code the programming code syntax.

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