Drawing on examples from a few sites I know quite well (Spread Firefox, Linkedin), and quite a lot more I don't, here's an analysis of the design patterns used by the best of current web designs:

• Simple layout
• 3D effects, used sparingly
• Soft, neutral background colours
• Strong colour, used sparingly
• Cute icons, used sparingly
• Plenty of whitespace
• Nice big text

See the examples, and a fuller explanation of each of the patterns at
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm

Garrett spotted and spooled this fantastic CSS layout generator app. Not only is the code extremely high quality, it's amazingly well commented, detailing all the browser hacks it's using.

I'm putting money on me using it to build the replacement templates for this site...

http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/pie-maker/pagemaker_form.php

Dave Fitch spotted this great postcard which is as close to my so-called career as anything I've seen before.

I'd love to draw parallels with the old Guild levels of Apprentice, Journeyman and Master, but I feel I'm still Journeying.

The esteemed Mr Handelaar recently opined that Websites should join the list of Laws and Sausages as things you shouldn't see being made.

Can't argue with that, and I'm exposing the guts a bit here more than I'd like. But you'll have to live with that, eh?

So, the site is here. This theme's a bit pret a porter, and it'll develop once I've lived in it a bit, and when I get time to work on it. I've moved from the initial Bonsai theme to one of my own design. It's all fixed width, based on Golden Sections.

The old content's still over in Zope, and as it's not in a standard RDBMS, extracting it and porting it will be a bit of a manual labour. But I'll be bringing it back as and when I get time, and it'll be at the same old URLs thanks to Drupal's Path module.

That nice Handelaar fellow has been busy lately, working on a number of projects supporting an Irish version of WriteToThem (né FaxYourMP).

The most recent one is a mapping project, to enable you to place a given address on a map, without paying an absurd amount of money for the dataset.

So, here it is: The Holy Grail of Irish Geocoding. Put in a street address and town in Ireland, and out pops a lat/long pair and a Google Map to go with. With which, we discover that my sister lives in a field.

Thanks to an extended flight delay this morning, I was able to listen to the excellent Radio 4 documentary on the Skye Bridge Tolls, abolished a year ago (how did I miss it?)

However, the coverage was spoiled by the outright and blatant revisionism of Brian Wilson, who claimed to have been always for the tolls. Would this be the same Brian Wilson who campaigned against them (as did the local Labour Party candidate, one Donald Munro) in advance of the 97 election, and was heard in January 98 uttering this statement:

as rapid progress as is possible must be made to reducing and removing tolls.

And who would seem to have been even more strongly against them two years earlier, if Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish (then a Tory minister) is to be believed.

But then, this is nothing new to Labour's ur-partisan attack dog (making John Reid look like a cutesy puppy by comparison), who the morning after the devolution vote was on television putting the boot into the cross party consensus to start Labour's Holyrood election campaign on the very shows designed to allow the non-Tory parties a moment of Isn't it good when we work together for the common good.

Next time TB et al claim we went into Iraq to remove a repressive dictator and therefore we're on the side of the angels, let's all point to this. These are the Craig Murray memos to the FCO, detailing why our 'ally' Uzbekistan is as bad as Saddam's Iraq ever was. Just as in pre-Kuwait Iraq, we're prepared to put up with just about anything as long as they're useful.

http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/node/714