and if the rain won’t go away then while away the hours with CubeCraft.

All you need is a computer, a printer, and a sharp knife!

Mad inventor meets internet finds peace, presents an online op art tool for your screen or to project at dances and on bands. Give it a go and see how many patterns resemble stuff projected onto the walls in the old Top of the Pops television show! Just run Opartica and click on shapes to add them to projects and you can spin them, move them, overlap them, and set colours.

A great website that allows you to be anybody or be doing anything. Much like the seaside novelties where you put your face in a hole - but updated for the web. Very versatile and great results. You could spend hours on here.

FaceInHole.com

Earlier today Andy phoned in to say that the blog visual/HTML editor on our website wasn’t working properly for him. After unsuccessfully trying many different options that didn’t work we found the solution on this page, specifically the reply from ’selfobliged’ about TinyMCE Advanced plugin.

Thank you ’selfobliged’ - whoever you may be!

First Apple brought us the Ipod, then came the Ipod Nano, followed by the Ipod Shuffle.
Each time the product got smaller. Now, Apple bring you something even smaller…

This was the first time our boys (8 and 4 yrs old) have been to see a major band - and then they get to see six in one go. They’ve seen live bands before at motorcycle events, and while they’ve been impressed with the acts before nothing could prepare them for the performance from the Levellers et al.

The rain held off - we even had bouts of sunshine.

Here is a short run-down of the acts:

3 Daft Monkeys - a three-piece acoustic band that played, amongst other instruments, the fiddle, and guitars. Their set was very good and they impressed the crowd enough to ask for an encore (or two).
Chumbawamba - you may remember their ‘TubThumping’ single from a few years ago but they’ve been around a lot longer than that and they’ve played at a quite number of events since then. Their act was thought provoking and funny, even though they had a semi-political agenda.
Nathan & Quinn were, apparently, brought in at short notice - but you’d have never guessed it from the performance they gave. There set can best be explained as a brilliant acoustic folk guitar playing duo.
Seth Lakeman & his band. Mr Lakeman is an accomplished musician: he played the guitar and violin, and he sang well. They were good songs, delivered well, but he didn’t spark me off as the other acts did.
Dreadzone - Awesome, electric, brilliant, fun, cool (man). This group brought the event to it’s feet. Nearly everyone danced to the sound generated by this band - a mixture of dub, reggae, techno, and trance. I was so impressed I’ve now bought their second album ‘Second Light’.
The Levellers - after a short interval, while they prepared the stage after Dreadzone, the Levellers appeared and the headline act got the crowd back on their feet. For those that haven’t heard of them they are a folk rock band that play tunes that you can’t help singing (and dancing along to). During their encore they were rejoined back on stage by 3 Daft Monkeys to perform the final number.

This was all followed by a spectacular fireworks display.

All-in-all a brilliant days entertainment -
definitely ‘A Beautiful Day Out’.

When we are given a blank canvass to design HTML emails we take into consideration the following:

Preview Pane
We optimise the HTML template design for the top 2-4 inches as there is only this much space to tell the story and persuade the viewers to open our email instead of just previewing it.
75% of users use a vertical preview pane, 25% use a horizontal preview pane. To accommodate both sets of users we design the HTML email template messages so that it displays the most important call to actions and key content in the top left of the message.

Images
We do not use more than 30% ratio of images to text as most ISP and spam filter emails with will block emails with a higher ratio of images.
Up to 45% of viewers may have images turned off or blocked in their email client so we design the layout to focus the readers eyes on the key content of the message and also include image tags with full descriptions to encourage readers to download the images.

Width
We keep our HTML email width under 600 pixels to avoid users having to scroll to read the message.

Fonts
We use only universally supported fonts as non-standard fonts not supported by the reader’s computer may seriously affect the design layout.

Content
There are two distinct audiences, skimmers and readers. Readers are not a problem but skimmers will look at the top of the message, headlines and subheads and key bold phases throughout the message. We design the message, making proper use of bold face type style, so we can pull the reader down through the message and still deliver relevant content quickly.
Where possible we design the email to cover the main bullet points and use links to drive the viewer to your website. We encourage clients to include as many links as possible. Emails with many links will get a higher click rate than those with less links.
We include a text version of the email within the HTML so that it can be read by non-HTML email packages.

Scripts
We do not use scripts such as JavaScript as some applications view it as a security risk and will block messages. Instead we drive readers to a webpage where dynamic components are easily rendered.

HTML Code
We make sure our HTML code always conforms to W3C Standards. HTML code not conforming to WC3 can cause delivery and rendering issues.

It lives - finally.

And as David has already said - it’s not finished (well, what website ever is?)