I know, I know. I’ve been a bad little blogger. I’ve not been keeping you amused very much of late. The truth is I’ve just fallen out of the habit of writing regularly¹ and I’ve found it diffi­cult to get myself back into the groove.

I’ve sat down umpteen times to write about something and just been completely unable to make any headway. I’ve started writing, thought “that’s complete crap” and just closed the browser. My in-built self censor­ship has got in the way a bit too: I’m quite shy by nature, so when a diffi­cult subject comes along I can find it hard to talk openly about it, even with close friends and family. The same carries through to my writing, although to a lesser extent.

It’s not like there’s been nothing for me to write about. Plenty’s happened since I last wrote anything much about my life. There’s a couple of things I want to get out there over the next few days and hopefully that’ll kick me back into blogging. We’ll see.

1. It’s not just here either — my posts on mailing lists and fora have almost completely dried up too. Some might argue that it’s a good thing ;)

Sheila² got me: The object of the game is to reveal 5 things about you, which most readers probably don’t know, then nomin­ate 5 friends to do the same.

So then, here’s five things you might not know about me:

1. My dad and I went to watch the Isle of Man TT several times on his classic bikes, includ­ing a Matchless G3LS (350cc single), an AJS 500cc twin and later a Honda CB750 (the rest of the family followed in an old VW Minibus). The Honda was my favour­ite at the time, though I look back on the 350 most fondly. The last time we went, the I.O.M. Steam Packet Company crashed one of their ferries into Douglas harbour. Joey Dunlop was a boyhood hero of mine, so seeing him win at the TT was pretty special.
2. At school we built a wall-climbing robot that got us second place in the local Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. It used compressed air and suction cups to climb up smooth surfaces. I did all the artwork — it was probably my first proper bit of design. Looking back, it was a bit rubbish. The awards were held at the old motor racing circuit at Brooklands in Surrey.
3. On the same day I had a look around the Sultan of Brunei’s old private plane which was housed there. Very plush. A few years later at college, I became friends with Steve, who comes from Brunei. The plane was still at Brooklands when I visited an Auto Italia event with Owen & Anne a couple of years ago. The three of us finally made it out there for Steve’s wedding earlier this year.
4. I’m a founder member of the Kusatado Ninja and I’ve got the bright yellow jersey to prove it. We took turns “racing” mountain bikes round in circles for 24 hours. I use the term “racing” in the loosest possible sense — we didn’t do very well, but we had a great time burning round on bikes, burning on the blazing sunshine and getting high on RedBull. Wonderful.
5. When I was a kid, we used to live right on the River Wey, in Guildford. We had a large canvas-covered canoe that my dad, my sister and I would row up and down the navig­a­tion, carry­ing it around the locks and gener­ally having a laugh. We had a big adven­ture one day after some partic­u­larly heavy rain. The current carried us for miles, we took some inter­est­ing detours through water-meadows (they take the overflow when the river floods) and nearly got dragged down the odd weir. In the end we had to phone my mum and get her to come and collect us in the minibus.

You know what? It was good fun remin­is­cing about that lot. Good times.

And with that I tag you Weon, Matt, Simon, Rich and other SimonAndy.

I woke up this morning to find Google Notifier telling me I had 205 new messages. What the hell?

Ah. They’re all failed deliv­ery notices. Some spamming bastard has sent out a batch of unsoli­cited e-mails spoofed to look like they came from someone at thinkdrastic.net.

Rest assured it wasn’t me. I hate spam as much as the rest of you.

Nope, I just get to clear up the mess after­wards. No doubt I’ll find my domain on all sorts of black­lists now. Oh great joy. I’m in such a great mood now.

Oh, happy christ­mas everybody.

You know that thing where despite the fact that it’s utterly miser­able outside, you drag yourself out on your bike? You should do that more often. It’s ace fun!

I headed out with Weon & James on Sunday. It was raining, windy and gener­ally horrible and you know what? That really didn’t matter. We had an absolutely ace time.

Owen was on a mission on the way up the hill. Once we got off-road, he went for everything. The Tramway, which is a soul-destroying drag straight up the middle of the hill was conquered first, before he took on and beat the sting in the tail of Dog-Poo Alley. I’d have managed it too if my bike had been willing to change down to the granny gear, honest guv’nor!

James is still quite new to mountain biking, so he’s keen to try everything out and absolutely burst­ing with enthu­si­asm. It’s really refresh­ing to see someone shout­ing “YES!” because they got through a tricky section in one piece and giggling like a loon when they fall off in the mud.

One trail we hadn’t ridden for ages follows the escarp­ment across the top of the hill above Sandy Lane before diving down into the woods. It’s an ace bit of single-track, especially when howling winds, driving rain, wet roots and James diving into the under­growth all make it that little bit more challenging.

We finished off by slipping and sliding down Daisy Bank (cheeky!). James fell off at least once, I did that thing where your wheels follow differ­ent ruts and you end up at 90° to the trail and somehow Owen made it down in one piece.

One of the best things is the looks people give you on the ride home across town. They’re sat snugly inside their cars staring out at us: soaking wet, caked in mud and clearly having the time of our lives. Brilliant.

Man, this morning’s commute was hard work. It’s not very far, but this morning I rode out onto the Tewkesbury road into a headwind that nearly had me going backwards. I bet it’ll have swirled a full 180° by the time I come to ride home, too.

Even so, the ride always becomes more fun when I get into town. Inevitably most of the traffic gets snarled up at some point, so I can often bomb past it all. This morning it was especially good, as I traded places with a rather nice Porsche 911 several times, before eventu­ally beating it to the town centre. Winner!

Right, I’m off to get some new batter­ies for my head-light. It’s slightly discon­cert­ing when it fades away to nothing as I’m riding around a big scary roundabout…

“Hey Olly, you just hipped off that jump.“
“You what?“
“Yeah, you rode in, took off and swung the bike around under you.“
“Sweet! I had absolutely no idea.“

I wouldn’t have the first idea how to hip-jump. The truth is, getting air still scares the crap out of me.

So, I’m creat­ing a layout that looks something like this:

It’s a fairly simple three-column layout. The thing is, I’ve used some funky negat­ive margin trick­ery to swap the first and second columns (so that the HTML is displayed in the correct order for non-CSS user agents).

Unfortunately, IE6 renders this:

…except in some hard-to-reproduce circum­stances when it gets it right.

It turned out to be a combin­a­tion of bugs, which made it ever so slightly diffi­cult to track down. First up was The IE Doubled Float-Margin Bug. Adding display: inline; to the CSS for the floated columns appeared to just make the problem worse, but was in fact needed to correct the issue.

Once that was in place, the page was only correctly rendered once I’d moused over certain links. It took me quite some time to figure out what was going on: IE was incor­rectly calcu­lat­ing the funky margins: Instead of basing them on the width of the floated column’s parent element, it was working them out from the body element. I figured that out because the render­ing was slightly differ­ent depend­ent on the width of the window.

The solution was to wrap yet another element around the outside, and set the width there too.

I’ve created a simple test-case that explains the solution for the anybody else that runs into the issue.

I’ve been evalu­at­ing some content-management systems recently. We’ve got a few require­ments that rule out a lot of them straight off: It’s got to be a .net system, be able to run over SSL and be very secure, have decent version­ing, document manage­ment, audit trails and so on. There aren’t many products out there quite fit our needs.

We’re currently working with one (I’m not going to name names here) which has a document manage­ment compon­ent that looks something like this:

It’s a simple tree-view that works very simil­arly to Windows Explorer. Believe it or not, to build that simple box they’ve used twelve nested tables, a div, a span, endless inline styles, javas­cript: URIs and even a made-up HTML attrib­ute (view the full horror). Even if you don’t know HTML, you can see that it’s overkill. Apart from one on the outer-most element, it’s lacking any useful IDs or class-names for me to hook into with my style-sheet.

I know I’m a mark-up purist, but really that’s just taking the piss. Accessibility? Search-engine friend­li­ness? Page load-time optim­isa­tion? Nope, never heard of them. It’s alright though, it does AJAX.

It’s no wonder that so many corpor­ate web-sites have appalling mark-up when this is the state of the default output from the “enter­prise level” CMS products that drive them. If web stand­ards and best practise are going to go truly mainstream, we’re going to have to reach out to the developers of these products and nudge them in the right direction.

I’ll leave you with this exerpt from Bruce Lawson & Patrick Lauke’s talk at the multipack’s Geek in the Park event:

Legal & General… made their site access­ible because they were worried about the legal risk.

And they found as side effects: 30% increase in natural search engine traffic, a signi­fic­ant improve­ment in Google rankings for all their target keywords, a 75% reduc­tion in time for pages to load, access­ible to mobile devices, their time to manage content reduced from an average of five days to half a day per job, they saved £200,000 a year on site mainten­ance, they got a 95% increase in visit­ors getting a life insur­ance quote (which was the purpose of that site), a 90% increase in sales online, and 100% return on invest­ment in 12 months. And that was the side effects of making the site accessible.