salt and lemon, with a pinch of css

I’m looking forward to seeing Sir Tim Berners-Lee tomorrow at NESTA speak about ‘The future of the web’. The event will be webcast live from the NESTA website.  For sure there will also be much tweeting via @innovationedge, too.

I look forward to meeting some of Steve Bridger’s friends - please come a say hello.

It was time to sit down and concentrate on the inevitable WordPress upgrade. I always have to dedicate a couple of hours to this task, to allow time for any fixes.

I was looking forward to the upgrade as I knew that there’s been a facelift to the 2.5 interface but my first problem was encountered when I was just about to hit the ‘upgrade wordpress’ link and read the message:

‘Database Upgrade Required
Your WordPress database is out-of-date, and must be upgraded before you can continue.’

Followed by the link ‘Update Wordpress’

My database is out of date? Does this mean I’m not running the required version of mySQL? This confusion meant that I couldn’t carry on with the upgrade straightaway. A message to my hosting provider and to the Wordpress forum and a couple of hours later I was up and running.

The problem was to do with the wording of the message. ‘Your database will be upgraded now…’ or ‘Your database is out of date but you nearly there, just follow the link ‘upgrade wordpress” would have been much clearer. Usability confusion.

Next time I upgrade I will know what it means!

I can’t do without coffee; I get my best ideas when I’m sipping a cup of good coffee. Fair trade coffee.

If you are still not convinced of either the quality or the ethics of fair trade products, you might want to think about it during Fair Trade Fortnight.

It was an real eye-opener to watch Black Gold, a film I highly recommend, which creates awareness where the coffee we consume in the west originates from, and the small but significant difference to coffee growers we can all make as individuals.

Tired of email spam, Roel Van Gils, in his ListApart article shows how to stop it for now Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation

Guidelines for UK Government Websites: government websites must meet Level Double-A of the W3C guidelines by December 2008

A working example of Alt text and link images, explained by Jared Smith

Looking to automate testing? Watir “Web Application Testing in Ruby” might be what you are looking for.