Howard Jones held his 25th Anniversary concert at the indigoO2 arena recently to celebrate his ‘25 years in music’. In preparation for the concert, I was commissioned to produce a promotional trailer which would be broadcast at the arena itself and also on YouTube™ to advertise the forthcoming event.

dtox Records, Howard Jones record company, were extremely happy with the final result, so they further commission me to produce three further videos which would be shown within the actual concert itself; at the very start and during the two intermissions that were in the set schedule.

Howard Jones - The 25th Anniversary Concert videos

CSS skills are hard to master these days for numerous reasons. One, there are about half a dozen different ways to achieve the same result that you want, so you are constantly doubting yourself on whether you are using the right one, and two, due to Internet Explorer being ‘non-compliant’, you’ve got mess up your perfect written code to make it render correctly.

Well, I came across this book The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks that basically tells you how to accomplish the effect that you desire by using the correct method, the tried and tested method. I found the book extremely helpful and insightful, so I thought that I would give it a mention on my blog.

So, if you need to brush up your skills in CSS, or you need to know how to do a certain ‘trick’ like round-corner boxes, then this is the book for you. The book is in full colour, 400pgs and the for the code itself, you can download from the supported website. If you don’t believe me, check out other people’s reviews on Amazon (link above).

If you yourself have this book, please leave a comment :o)

I can’t believe that it has taken me so long to discover Wordpress! What an excellent piece of software, and the beautiful thing is, it’s absolutely FREE!

So, what is Wordpress exactly? Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) that runs on the open source PHP and MySQL programming languages, hence why it’s free. Wordpress is primarily used as a personal blogging tool and is one of the pioneering applications that has spearhead the Web 2.0 movement on the Internet today. So why have I moved to ‘Wordpress’?

Well, to be honest there are a few reasons really. One, I wanted a web presence that is easy to create, maintain and customise without the need of mucking with XHTML and CSS. Two, I wanted a web system that I could access anywhere in the world and three, I wanted automation in regards to tags, RSS etc. Wordpress fitted the answer.

Initially, the package looks difficult to use and set up, but surprisingly it is easy to use. Setting up was relatively easy I have to admit. All you need is a hosting account that offers PHP and MySQL, luckily my current ISP does, but at a slight cost.

Once I had the server side setup, logging on was relatively easy. Unfortunately, the Wordpress website doesn’t offer a whole PDF manual from what I could see. The manual is all HTML base, so I purchased the Quickstart Guide to Wordpress 2 and it has helped out tremendously.

At the moment, there is a serve lack of content, but I hope to populate this site with the old very soon.

Thanks for reading