Soup of the Day

A new leplop.com

So okay, this isn’t exactly breaking news, but as not much else is going on around here this week it is worthy of a mention.

Once upon a time, in a town far far away… I was at the University of Teesside in Middlesbrough. During my time there I met a lot of people, as one does. During my renaissance period as I like to call it, I met Pip (as I knew him then).

Pip was tinkering with Flash and PHP when I met him. I had just come back from a year in industry tinkering with Flash, HTML and some 3D. Needless to say we had a lot in common, but it was very clear he was doing some interesting stuff in PHP.

I was always aware of PHP having used Perl, PHP’s mothers tongue, during my time at British Telecom Labs. Server side languages were a novalty to me at the time, since I had spent the first six years of my web life just creating static HTML pages. Pip had his own site that was server-side processed and dynamic, it was amazing - well not that amazing really, but amazing to me that one guy in his bedroom was doing stuff that the companies I had just finished working for had paid a lot money for.

So what did I do! Nothing! I didn’t learn PHP and I didn’t watch what the web was doing. Instead I got busy re-doing my second year, which involved a lot of animation and not much else - then I made a short film that won an award

Fast forward to last December. I had just been thrown out of my former employers company (well, I resigned technically) and I was in need of some inspiration. Luckily for me I had been playing with PHP whilst at my previous job and knew enough to delve straight in. Now I am developing web sites with it, plus developing my own software that uses PHP with other languages to create visually rich, but accessible content.

Unlike a lot of ’so-called’ web design companies, which my former employer tried to fashion itself as (believe me they aren’t), Pip and I have an understanding of how you can create sites that are visually rich, but still accessible. It is a shame that we individually have companies providing these services and would technically be competitors, although I think we’re far enough away from each other not to be fighting over territory.

Anyway, the point of this whole post is to say that last month Pip launched his new ‘personal’ site, Leplop. I am adding it because Pip wrote a special PHP script that allows you to wrap text around images properly, as one would expect in InDesign or Quark. His site demonstrates this script beautifully, plus its a nice jumping point for many other sites.

http://www.leplop.com - Pip’s newly redesigned site