If, like me, you've gone out and bought an AMD64-based machine to run Ubuntu (or any other 64-bit distro) on, you'll have discovered that there's no Flash player available. Which is an awful pain when the point of the machine is to be a safe one for the kids to use on the Interwebs, specifically the CBeebies site.

Fortunately, Adobe's John Dowdell pointed out a rather useful wrapper that lets 64-bit Firefox use 32-bit plugins.

Two minutes on Google later, and I'd found a one-click install script for Ubuntu that sorts out nspluginwrapper and installs the Flash9 plugin.

NB it needs to be run for each user, but other than that, is bluddy grate.

JD, my kids thank you.

My new site design is joining the cool kids by using LiveSearch. But I wanted to go one step cooler - with a few wee HTML extensions, Safari replaces the boring square search box with a curvy one that anti-aliases beautifully into the background.

Without Field Focus

With Field Focus

Here's how you do it: you add non-standard attributes to the input field:

But how to enable this for other browsers, without messing up the Safari rendering..? Read on to find out how.

I liked the general style of thisthe previous design (assume past tense from here - Ed: 24 Feb 06) - it's clean and curvy, and a big step forward from what went before. I'm not entirely convinced about the layout though. It doesn't quite fit on my laptop screen (maybe because you've forgotten how the box model works - Ed), and it doesn't quite feel solid and rational enough.

So I'm rebuilding the layout from scratch, and I'm using a very smart development technique for when you're using a fixed vertical grid - Khoi Vinh’s idea of using an image of the grid as a background image while you're developing.

So now I'm most of the way there with the updated layout - I still wanted to use Golden Sections as the basis, so it's an irregular grid that's more like a log-log scale. I've not yet applied the presentation styling, but have a look and see how it's going.

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

Regular visitors will notice the changed design. I never was really happy with the old one - some of the elements were nice, but the layout always seemed clunky.

So I've rebuilt it from scratch, which only took a couple of hours, I was surprised to discover.

It's the DDA-friendly version of the Post Office's Address/Postcode converter. Even better, it's registration-free.

http://pol.royalmail.com/dda/txt/home.asp