My official blog has now moved from here to a new domain and everything. All my thoughts and musings going forward will now be posted at http://sam.clark.name.
This blog will remain as an archive of everything I posted between October 2005 to today. But from April 2008, all my blog postings will be using Chyrp on my new server over at http://sam.clark.name
Thank you all for reading and posting, see you on the other side!
20.Mar.08 
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Yes it has been a very long time since I posted here and this will probably be the last on this blog before it is retired and archived. The WordPress System has served me well, but alas it is time to move onto greener pastures. Over the summer, through autumn and certainly into winter, I have been very busy working on Polaris Digital 2.0, the next generation. It isn’t a massive site, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in functionality. The new blog (now named a ‘journal’) will be an integral part of this new site, but the buck doesn’t stop there…
As well as the journal, I will be integrating heavily with my digital persona’s on Facebook, Last.fm, Flickr and the ever-popular Twitter. In the future I will also add other services such as Upcoming, del.icio.us and Pownce. All of the site will be using POSH, Unobtrusive Ajax, CSS 2.1 and Microformats throughout or where applicable. All server transactions will be REST(ful) and it will all be coded using PHP (not Ruby on Rails as previously stated). So this will be a fully web 2.0 experience (what ever that really is!) and will be polished off with a new brand.
So that is what is coming. But what has been happening? Well as you may have guessed from the image at the top of this post, we’re now in London - East Dulwich to be precise. After two and a half happy years in Manchester it is time to move onwards and upwards and in the immortal words of Joe Strummer, “London’s Calling”. Apart from a slightly warmer climate, it doesn’t feel much different at the moment. I am sad that Manchester is now part of our past, but I look back fondly on our time there and I will be returning one more time this year for the GeekUp annual christmas dinner.
Meanwhile I have been busy in the work world too. A long and tiresome small claim battle is currently underway with a former client who just would not pay, needless to say that they have now been dropped. But greener pastures arrived simultaneously with several new projects, one for a marketing company called CDMS. The web site is a holding site for the new web site which I will start development on in Janaury 2008 if all goes to plan. But the holding site offers a little more than most, with Unobtrusive Ajax serving up contact details with embedded Microformats, plus some fancy jQuery action, nice! I am also working on a massive e-commerce project as well, but I can’t talk about that just yet.
So that’s it for now and that’s it for this blog. The next time I speak out it will be from the new web site sometime in the new year. Christmas in London is going to be fun and a trip through St Pancras international in the New Year is also on the cards. Much more about that and everything else next year on a new journal. But for now, this is me signing off once and for all. Good bye 2007, thanks for reading.
26.Nov.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
This week I am going to finish my first session of learning French professionally. For the past ten weeks I have been taking lessons to improve my pretty basic French, with the aim of finally being able to communicate with my fellow countrymen for longer than two-seconds.
So as one language goes out the door, I thought it was time to learn another over the summer while on recess. But what to learn? Well I have chosen to learn Ruby on Rails because I have been hearing so much about it. PHP is a very nice language and I have been using it for over three years now. Here at Polaris Digital it is the defacto language of choice as we spit at ASP and have no reason to use Perl or Java.
08.Jul.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Well after trying to resist it, a week in and I’m hooked on Facebook now. Not only that but the whole world seems to be hooked too, with vast droves migrating across from the Murdock tarnished realm of MySpace.
I have also come to realise that since joining Facebook that I have been rather neglecting my personal blog somewhat. But I have plans for my blog and they won’t revealed quite yet. Polaris Digital and associated web sites including Soup of the Day are nowing going 100% professional and Facebook will take care of all my personal notes from now on.
Look forward to seeing you on either.
04.Jul.07 Uncategorized Comments (2)
As you may have noticed, things have been quite around here. As I keep saying, quiet on the outside means much business in on the inside. This is very much the case at the moment as I am currently working on four web sites for clients, plus the new Polaris Digital site which is shaping up very nicely. Unfortunately it will not launch as originally intended, but clients work always has to take precedence.
Well I have been waiting for various clients to call, I have been busy working on some new projects. One of these projects revolves around the wonderful world of social networking. Most of the good social networking sites have a public API, allowing third-parties to develop their own applications that can harness the tools and services provided by the likes of Flickr, Upcoming, Facebook, Last.fm and many more - noticeably MySpace doesn’t have have a public API and I feel it is only right to ‘out’ them on this sad fact!
24.Jun.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
This photo I totally forgot about. I don’t think I’m the most photogenic person around, but every once in a while one appears that I enjoy.
Here is me standing in Nice - Ville station in September 2006 waiting for our TGV to whisk us back to Paris before returning home. I am wearning my new hat and wasn’t at all trying to be anything even resembling India Jones - honest gov’
21.Jun.07 Uncategorized Comments (3)
The eagle-eyed of you will have noticed that the old Polaris Digital web site has now faded into the dust and gone, for good. Yes, it is indeed true that after many months of planning using a humble pen and notepad, the new Polaris Digital web site is about to be rolled out into the bright of day.
I was hoping to have it up much sooner than this, like January. But as usual work gets in the way and it is actually a good thing too. Between January and now I have learnt even more about accessibility and user experience issues and put as much of that knowledge into this site. ‘Keep it simple’; ‘Content is king’; and ‘The user is queen’ were the motos jotted on each page.
Just as it was ready to roll out the day after returning from @media ‘07, I decided to pull the launch for a week because of all the new stuff I learnt about accessibility, user experience and microformats. So this last week is now being spent adding some additional features, but in the mean time there is a pretty splash page.
Oh and by the way, the splash page design has no relation to the final site design. More to follow.
12.Jun.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
I have returned from @media 07 with a fresh sense of direction. It was a such a great event, especially giving me the chance to debate and query some of the founders of todays modern web, as well as an excuse to get drunk for free. I want to say a massive thank you to Jon Hick’s in particular for the nice conversation and beer we had on Friday afternoon outside The Old Queen’s Head in Islington.
I have a lot to post about, particurly about the end of the debate on accessibility issues, or at least the end of Joe Clark’s debating, plus the great presentations from Jon Hick’s about how to be a “creative sponge”, Andy Clarke on western design and it’s detrimental effect on the rest of the world, Jeremy Keith providing a great talk about Ajax, HÃ¥kon Wium Lie on CSS3 (he wrote the first specification for CSS by the way), Dan Cederholm on Juggling Interfaces and many many more besides - not forgetting Jesse James Garrett especially for kicking off things so well.
However, one thing I enjoyed at the time and haven’t been able to leave alone since then is last.fm, which was presented by Hannah Donovan. I had heard of the service, but didn’t realise how great it is or how relevant it is to me until I had a demo of it, in front of hundreds of other attendees it should be mentioned. Last.fm is very hard to explain, so I”ll just give you my current radio station and let you join/play around as much as you like.
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More on @media 07 to come…
10.Jun.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Today I am off to @media’07 in London, the third and final leg of a tour that has taken in Asia and the US before finally finishing here in the UK for the Europe event.
For the un-initiated, @media is a global event for world wide web designers and programmers to discuss issues effecting web site design, especially accessibility and usability issues and how designers can overcome the so-called limitations this imposes on design.
Else where big players such as Adobe and Yahoo! discuss future issues and products that can aid user experiences on the web. It’s all very geeky, but “Geek Chique”.
If you’re there, I’ll see you there; if not hopefully see you next year.
06.Jun.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
On May 24th 2007 a story broke in the press about three people who where under control orders, a measure taken by the UK government to try and monitor potential terrorists, had dissapeared and where presumed missing. John Reid was called to parliment for an emergancy session to explain what had happened. You can watch his official statement on BBC Parliament . To simplify his statement to the main points; he blamed the system for the failure, claiming that the governement didn’t have enough powers to monitor terror suspects in a way which would ensure that they could not escape. He finished by saying that new legislation may mean that the UK has to ‘opt-out’ of the European laws on Human Rights, previously hammered out in the building pictured.
I think this is one of the most shocking and frightening changes to UK legislation our government has announced in it’s ten year tenure of rule. There are many factors that are each as equally as disturbing as the other, so I will try and distill what worries me so intently into managable bite-size chunks.
The first detail that jumps out at me is exactly who these people are and why this information is lambasted all over the media. All of the media was reporting on information they received from the Government, not journalism or investigation from inside the media itself. This means the Government told the media themselves of the missing persons that they consider dangerous.
29.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
