Continued to develop the new theme for my blog a bit this evening. Put a bit of navigation in place along with a short intro paragraph. Feels like it’s starting to come together a bit now, although a couple of bits still need some work. Aiming to switch focus to my new portfolio site this week.

Turned out that today was an unexpected free one, bar a couple of hours. Enjoyed the chance to work on an idea for a clients website that I didn’t think I’d get to work on for a while. Good to stretch the brain cells with some CSS3 that allows you to do things previously only reserved for JavaScript.

I’ve a photo I took a few years ago from my second trip to Israel that I really want printed and framed. I haven’t been able to find a place that prints large scale photos, anyone got any recommendations?

Always good to enjoy a catch up with old friends over a good burger and a glass of wine or two!

Fed up of opening Mail.app to my inbox where there might be emails despite there being none moments ago, I’ve decided to try an experiment. I just created a mailbox called Zero that when I’ve finished what I’m doing in the app I now click on. The idea is that when I open Mail I’m greeted by a blank screen so I can send an email without seeing my inbox until I’m ready to see it. We’ll see how it goes.

The curse of double jobbing. A 10 hour shift on my feet all day followed by some late tweaks to a design project after dinner.

Words are important. A single word can mean so much. It can have many meanings depending on context, how you read it, and what your understanding of the word is. More often than not we take a single meaning for a word and apply it broadly across every instance we come across, but sometimes it’s really important to actually look at and consider all the meanings behind a word. Apply all the meanings of a word to a sentence and it can bring a whole new depth of meaning and understanding. A whole new way of thinking about that sentence. Words are important.

Home try on from Glasses Direct arrived this morning. In need of some new sunglasses but the two for one offer is tempting me into replacing my everyday glasses as well.

An extra day of doing design work tomorrow which I hadn’t expected, unfortunately it means I’m working in The Pod on Saturday which is less than ideal.

I genuinely love CSS Grid. Never before has designing something visually interesting and easily responsive for smaller screens been so easy and fun.

I’ve seen several posts on Twitter today commenting that because the media is reporting about the new Royal Baby, we shouldn’t forget about Windrush and NHS funding. The implication that those items are far more important and shouldn’t be sidelined by something like a birth of a child is incredibly patronising to me. Whilst I would agree those things are important, why can’t people just take a moment and realise that the birth of a Royal Baby brings many people a little bit of joy in amongst the stress of life? The Royal Family is an important part of our British heritage, when events like new babies happen in that family it’s something which we can all share in the joy. Just as many people filled the streets for the last Royal Wedding because it brought them an excuse to celebrate and forget about the difficulties of life for a bit, so too does the arrival of a new Prince. There’s nothing wrong with the birth of a Royal Baby taking over the headlines for a day, it won’t do us any harm. Those other matters will still be around, and will still be in the news cycle tomorrow or for as long as they are deemed important enough to be. So let’s just relax a little, and share the joy of a family as they celebrate the safe arrival of a new little boy into the world.

Really enjoyed working a piece of print design this afternoon. I really enjoy designing and building websites, but there’s something about designing for print that the web doesn’t always meet. Print pieces give a feeling of working on something that’s more substantial and useful when compared to the rapidly changing world of the internet.

Always fun to try out a new beta for a Micro.blog app. This time Icro from @hartlco, impressed so far.

Also pleased to get the first instance of the new word mark for my name that I’ve been refining over the last month or two out into the wild.

Just to demonstrate my thinking behind getting a very unfinished new theme up on the blog, I’ve already revised and fixed several things. Now it’s a case of clarifying all the broken bits and features and slowly adding them.

The first part of that is a new theme for my blog, or at least the beginnings of one. I’ve been playing around with it for ages, but decided that if I don’t put it on the site I’ll just keep playing and never actually get it to a point I’m happy to use. There are still many things to fix and develop the design of, but I want to get away from a stock theme and use one that’s as personal to me as my blog is.

Another typical Forest performance. Defensively frail at set pieces and didn’t take the chances we created. Story of our season. Thankfully the celebrations weren’t too exuberant, helped by the distant action of an epic thunderstorm midway through the first half. #nffc

Getting ready to watch Nottingham Forest v Cardiff City with a Cardiff supporting friend. There might be need for a celebration agreement before kick off. #nffc

@colinwalker just exploring your method of adding the date to a tile of a status post, does the code in this post go in functions.php?