Following on from FOWD London it was announced that Carsonified were taking FOWD on the road! This year the tour bus is stopping at Belfast, Glasgow, Bristol and Leeds.

I decided to grab a ticket straight away for the stop in Leeds and I know the early bird tickets are no sold out. If you’re thinking of going then stop dawdling and grab a ticket before they sell out!

The day is split in two, a morning of tutorials and an afternoon of presentations. To top it off they offer a chance to meet 15 potential clients during a speed networking session. I’ll definitely make sure I take my new business cards along with me!

The Leeds stop hosts some great speakers including Simon Collison. The days presentations will include talks on:

  * Unnatural Experiments in Web Design
  * Developing Your Ultimate Package
  * Top 50 Rookie Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

If you are popping along then let me know so I can come say hi!

Wow! Well what else can I say about the speed of moo. From ordering to receiving the cards on standard delivery it took 60 hours including a Bank Holiday which in my eyes is outstanding!.

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I’d booked my tickets for FOWD as soon as they were released and thought it’d be best go down the day before so I could have a wander round London. Having never been to London I wanted to see as much as possible but I think I walked a bit too far!! I went down with the lady and we randomly decided that the zoo would be a good choice, not been to a zoo in years! We only stayed in the zoo for under 2hours but I managed to go snap happy with the camera and take about 350 shots. I’ve just uploaded the best ones to Flickr so feel free to have a look around and let me know what you think!

What a long and exhausting couple of days that was and I’ll be posting about FOWD over the next few days and what I thought about each speakers presentations, some were great, some weren’t!

A brand new website! Whoohoo!

Finally after months I decided to get moving on my own websites. I’ve had holding pages up for ages and I’ve wanted to do something about that and seeing ExpressionEngine
working pushed me in the right direction.

So far I really like EE, had no problems with it and the community really seems helpful. I was going to go down the Wordpress route but I wanted to learn something completely new and the way EE seemed to work is more suited to how I like to work. I might do an EE for beginners tutorial, or series depending how much I waffle, to help other people to get started with the system.

If you have any working knowledge of PHP or a CMS then it really is simple to pickup. I’m fairly certain that there’s a steep learning curve somewhere, but for now I haven’t encountered anything too troubling.

So to go inline with the website I decided it was time to get myself some nice business cards printed!

I’ve got the designs all ready for the printers and I’m looking around for the perfect place to get them done. I’m torn between going all out and getting them letterpressed like I really want, or just some standard prints to see how they come out for now!

Let me know what you think, love to get feedback on new designs, especially for myself!

This was a micro-site designed by the great flash guys at LOVE. I helped develop the HTML section of the website where you can enter a competition to win £1,000 a day during National Bread Week!

So if you buy anything of Warburtons with the “National Bread Week” logo on it then make sure you go enter the competition!

Even if you don’t, go check out the National Bread Week and make a picnic portrait, its awesome!

In their own words, "Afflecks is an emporium of eclecticism, a totem of indie commerce in Manchester’s Northern Quarter".

The site was designed and developed all in-house at LOVE and runs on a customised install of Wordpress. From the front the site really suits the look and feel of what Afflecks represents whilst the back-end lets some user interaction with a heavily customised Flickr plugin. Mixed with a splash of jQuery it really gives the unique feel that Afflecks required to keep people up-to-date for what's planned within Afflecks and what you can expect to find on a visit there.

The site and emporium are both definitely worth a visit so make sure you check it out!

This is the first project I’ve just finished since joining LOVE and the first time I’ve ever seen CakePHP. Cake is a powerful PHP framework using the MVC approach, all of which was completely new to me, but so far it looks good!

Hopefully we’ll be using it in the future so I can learn a bit more about it but the basics will do for now!!