Roger Walsh

Until pretty recently web designers haven’t had too many options for adding custom typefaces to their site. The only ones we could reliably use were what are known as ‘web safe’ (a set of typefaces that are installed by default on all PCs – fonts like verdana, arial, Times… the usual suspects).

To get around this limitation designers used to create graphics for headlines, or use flash based scripts such as sifr. CSS3 allows for easy embedding of fonts on a page, surprisingly it’s supported well across all browsers.

Close up of waterfall at Crawfordsburn

We took a walk around the Glen at Crawfordsburn Country Park yesterday. Unfortunately quite a dull, flat sort of day but it’s a really nice place for a quick walk

Most Web Designers will tell you Internet Explorer is holding the web back. I’ve always taken a rather pragmatic view about the whole affair. It’s not up to us to tell people how to surf the web. It’s up to us to design for those people. I’m starting to re-evaluate that opinion though.

Washed up

Each Sunday some friends and I try to get out of the house and away from the screen for a few hours.

Last week we took a walk along the coastal path between Holywood and Bangor. The weather was blowy to say the least, but the sun shone (a bit too low, but at least it was out) and the sea air was good for the soul!

Gotta say I’m pretty impressed! For the past few months I’ve been contemplating redoing my site. It’s typical… I design sites all day every day so the last thing I’m usually wanting to work on is my personal site.

As a result my own site has sat in limbo for years. Every so often I take it off the shelf and give it a bit of a dusting. Time for a spring clean. Up until now my own site has always been a static, hand coded site. More for personal gratification as I work on an in house CMS every day.

The drawback with that is that although I can create something pretty, it’s not that easily updated. Especially in this new age of iphones, tweets and syndication. Last week I spent nearly a full day installing and playing around with Movable Type. What a mistake!