I found a couple of old hard drives lying around at home the other day, so I plugged them in to see if there was anything interesting on there.

I’m quite glad I did really, because I found a shed-load of pictures from my various digital cameras stretching right back to a trip to Afan Argoed in the year 2000. So now I’m slowly but surely backfilling my Flickr stream with some of the better ones. So when you see pictures of out-dated bikes and kit popping up, that’s why – although I still seem to have a lot of that kit now…

If nothing else it’s a great showcase of just how far budget digital cameras have come on over the years. Compare this photo from 2000 to this one from the other day: It’s quite a leap forward.

Update: Flickr caught-up!

A couple of weeks later and I think I’ve finally finished wading through them all now. Follow the links for pictures from 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. Normal (shonky) service might resume at some point…

I spotted Hope Technology’s new website a while back and branded it a failure. Alas that seems to be something that’s spreading throughout the UK mountain bike industry.

Mattmagic pointed out that both Mojo and 24Seven have recently launched redesigns. He’s left it to me to point out exactly what’s wrong though. Let’s take them in turn:

24Seven Bikes

• That’s possibly the most pointless splash page in the world, ever. What’s more, it’s completely inaccessible. Where a normal link would have worked, they’ve gone with an image map. They’ve used obstructive javascript instead of the href attribute. Best of all, they’ve forgotten to include any alt text. Search engines? Screen readers? No, I didn’t think so.
• Oh, I see, it’s supposed to open in a perfectly sized popup window isn’t it? It doesn’t though, because I’ve told Firefox to open links in the same window unless I say otherwise. Someone needs to read Veen’s Give Up Control.
• Frames? In this day and age? Are you quite mad?
• Great use of the title element. A nice helping of UNTITLED DOCUMENT across the top of the browser window looks really professional.
• Those are some nice navigation buttons you have there. I can’t read them though. Is there any chance you might choose a legible font next time?
• Whenever you use a graphic to create a navigation element, you must supply alt text. It’s not an optional extra.
• Speaking of navigational elements, using select elements to jump between pages is just plain daft, especially when they cease to work without Javascript.

Oh I give up. I could carry on for hours about this one.

Mojo Suspension Hoodoo

• Oh man, another great splash page. Why do people still bother with these? This one looks great if you’re browsing maximised at 1280 x 1024. Anything less and I start to get horizontal scrollbars. Even better is the fact that there are no obvious navigational elements. It takes a good few seconds before you realise those three words down on the bottom left are buttons.
• What the hell is an M-CYCLE anyway? Just write motorcycle and be done with it.
• We’re currently greeted with the message “THE WEBSITE IS CURRENTLY BEING UPDATED (20/03/06), SO SOME IMAGES & LINKS MAY NOT WORK. PLEASE BARE WITH US, AS IT WILL BE SORTED OUT VERY SOON, THANK YOU.” Firstly, you might want to spell “bear” correctly. Secondly, why did you launch if the site was going to be full of broken links? That looks professional, doesn’t it?
• Once we get inside we find great use of frames once again. I don’t tend to keep my browser maximised, and I quite often have a sidebar open. Thanks to the brilliant design of this site, half of the navigation disappears off the side of the page. Now, I know I ranted about unecessary horizontal scrollbars up there, but here’s somewhere I actually need one. Unfortunately, one isn’t forthcoming. Just fantastic.
• Clearly I’m going to have to shout it this time. ALT TEXT, ALT TEXT, ALT TEXT and not just when you feel like it, either.
• The bottom frame and the flash animation that sits within it: That really is completely pointless guff isn’t it?

Again, I could go on.

In conclusion

These sites are both great examples of work by someone who’s got themselves a copy of Dreamweaver but has virtually no idea how to use it, let alone an understanding of exactly what it does or what it outputs. “As long as it looks OK on my PC that’s good enough”.

As for semantic markup and standards compliant code, there’s no point even showing it to the validator. It’s awful. Not quite as bad as Hope’s code, but I suspect that’s simply because Dreamweaver has cleaned up it’s act a bit over the years.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t particularly enjoy tearing someone else’s work apart like this. I know that these companies produce damn good product and have great customer service. Alas their websites are absolutely awful and someone needs to say something.

So well done. Congratulations on your failed redesigns. Joe Clark would be proud. For your sakes I hope you got them dead cheap.

So, Dustin Diaz has come up with the idea of Naked Day. It’s simple really, you just switch off your website’s stylesheets for the whole of April 5th.

It’ll be interesting to see how well all of the participating sites out there work without stylesheets. Mine’s not too bad, but it could definitely be better.

I’ve put the stylesheets back now, after all it’s now April 6th here and I can’t stand to look at the nudeness anymore.

…is that they’re over too soon.

Making CSS layouts work in Internet Explorer for Windows has for me, until recently, been something of a struggle. I know CSS virtually inside out, and still the dreaded IE factor would always get in the way. Some fairly recent developments have changed all that for me though.

• First up is the discovery and subsequent documentation of Internet Explorer’s mystical “hasLayout” property. Basically, if your CSS can trigger hasLayout on an HTML element, it magically solves lots of problems with IE’s page rendering.
• Second is an obscure piece of the CSS specification, which basically says any element with overflow set to something other than visible should expand to contain any floated elements within it. This only works for Internet Explorer if you can trigger the mystical haslayout on the element in question (AVK has more).

Blah blah blah, obscure something-or-other, whatever…

You’re right, it’s pretty dull stuff, but put the two things together and they add up to something big. This very simple approach has solved two of the biggest fundamental problems with using CSS for page layout: Floated content escaping from it’s parent element, and compatibility with Internet Explorer.

• To stop floated content from escaping from it’s parent element, set that parent element’s overflow to hidden (or something else other than “visible”).
• To make the layout work correctly in Internet Explorer for Windows, give that same element a width or height (or use another way of triggering hasLayout).

Simple huh?

But what about the real world?

OK, let’s take the current incarnation of this very website. On each of the major structural elements on the page, I’ve set (for example) width: 25em; and overflow: hidden;. The former triggers hasLayout, and the latter encloses any floated content. Ah bisto! The site works in Internet Explorer with virtually no fiddling. Superb.

So take two things away from this: Non-visible overflow and dimensions. They are your saviours.

Yes Weon, I saw you smugly waving from the warmth of your car. I bet you didn’t have as much fun as I did though, did you?

You see, for the second day in succession, I waited until the rain stopped before setting off on the ‘dale. For the second day in succession it starting tipping down within five minutes of me leaving the house, but I was going by then and there was no way I was turning back.

By the time I got to Daisy Bank car park I was absolutely drenched. I arrived just in time to find Nick unloading his 222 from the hire-car (Oh, sorry, we’ve got no Corsas left -how about we rent you this nice Mondeo for the same money?). We whinged about the weather for a bit before setting off up the hill for a blast down the DH tracks.

The first run down was just plain horrible. It was pouring with rain, the trails were slippy as hell and not a great deal of fun. We contemplated not going up for another one, but seeing as we were already covered in mud…

The second run was absolutely mint. It was pouring with rain, the trails were slippy as hell and we were getting used to the conditions by now. Drift-o-rama. I was riding like a wet flannel (no change there then), so Nick left me for dead on every run – but that didn’t stop me having bucketloads of fun.

We got back to the car park to find Neil Cousins (of TFTuned fame) unloading his spanking new Santa Cruz V10, so we showed him all of the new trails. We went slip-sliding down each of the trails in turn. First up was “Love Child” – wherein I left the bike attached to a tree and slid down the trail on my arse. Secondly we took on “Second Coming” which I got down in one piece, somehow. Finally we rode “La Raclette”. I dropped my chain, which was the perfect excuse for wussing out of doing the stupid log-drop halfway around a 180° corner.

By that point we were all starving and the wind had started howling, so we called it a day. Neil kindly gave me a lift back across town in exchange for the use of our hose-pipe and a cup of tea. Bizarrely, I think we did more riding today in the pouring rain than we would’ve done on a typical summer sunday afternoon.

Oh, one thing. Next time I take the ‘dale out downhilling in conditions like that, can someone remind me to fit some flat pedals (or maybe take the 222 out instead)? The SPDs clogged up almost instantly, which is always rubbbish.

So then, the Sony Walkman NW-A3000. It’s a lovely machine in many ways. It’s beautifully made as you would expect from Sony. The sound quality is fantastic too, once you’ve purchased some decent earphones. The supplied ones really aren’t too hot.

Unfortunately, a few things let it down, so I’ve put together a wishlist of things I’d like to see improved:

The Software

• The Connect Player is unusably slow and it’s TinyHTTP.exe process is very resource hungry and unstable. Sort it out, please.
• The alternative, SonicStage, is better, but only in so far as it’s usable. It’s not altogether stable itself, and when compared with it’s biggest competition (iTunes), it’s not a very good music player / manager at all.
• Support for compilation / various-artists albums definitely needs improvement. Specifically, when viewing my music, it should give me the option to separate compilation albums out from the rest of the music. The option to separate artists that only appear on compilations from the rest of the artist listing would be great, too. The same complaints apply to the player itself.
• It would be nice if it could do the same with Podcasts. Some sort of poscast aggregation built into the software would be very nice, too.
• Make the whole playlists experience nicer to use. If they were sorted out on this side, i’d use them a lot more on the player itself.
• The ability to import playlists from other software – iTunes and WinAMP in particular – would be a very nice feature.
• Support for the Mac and other alternative platforms would be lovely, thanks. In fact, just documenting the disc format you use and releasing it into the public domain would be a huge help. You wouldn’t have to do the work then, would you? The folks over at Songbird would quite likely do it for you.

The Hardware

To be honest, there isn’t a great deal wrong with the Walkman itself. The majority of the problems lie in the software that sits on your PC. I do have a few bugbears though:

• It can be so very very slow at times. It’s usually when navigating through the music library while music is playing, but quite often it grinds to a halt and shows the “accessing” screen for ages while nothing else is happening. This is very frustrating. More speed please Sony.
• Support for compilation albums isn’t brilliant on the player either. Separating them out from the rest of the library would be nice. The same would be nice for Podcasts.
• Um… it’d be nice if you could squeeze in a bigger hard disc. 20gb simply isn’t enough for me anymore.
• You know deep down, what I really want, is to be able to just drag and drop folders of music straight on there as if it was an external hard drive. Not going to happen, is it? No, I didn’t think so.

It’s only 10:50 am and I’ve already consumed two cakes (a chocolate doughnut and a chocolate eclair – both provided by work) and I’ve just been given a big bag of Haribo Starmix.

I truly have the healthiest diet of all time.