I don’t usually like doing music-related blog posts, mainly because not everyone who reads my blog will be into my music taste. For example, if I see a CSS developer who’s in to U2, then no matter how good he is at web development, I automatically think he’s an idiot.

Anyway, here’s my top 10 albums of this year:

1. Titus Andronicus - The Airing of Grievances
2. Abe Vidoga - Skeleton
3. Wild Beasts - Limbo, Panto
4. Lovvers - Think EP
5. Deerhunter - Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.
6. Pete and the Pirates - Little Death
7. Crystal Antlers - Crystal Antlers
8. No Age - Nouns
9. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
10. The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent

Although I wouldn’t have ever been able to receive the prizes (they could only be shipped within the US), plus the fact I already own both books, I still thought I still should enter and give it a go.

My entry is below, you need to click to see the whole image:

Although, I didn’t win, I think I did pretty well and there was some complimentary comments about my entry.

The image was built using the always-ace Processing. I’ve also put the source on Github if anyone’s interested in learning the code behind the image.

You can either use the MIT licence or the GPL licence - basically the same licences as jQuery itself.

Also, if you want to get in contact with me, either email me at rik at this domain dot com or if you use Twitter, give me a nudge and I’ll try and get back to you as soon as possible.

Yes, it’s a new blog! And a new design! I’ve decided to start over again, completely from scratch, getting rid of the old blog and old thoughts.

Roughly a year ago on my blog, I wrote (after another good six month break from blogging) that I’d almost been forced into writing a post. I felt that blogging on my own site had become a chore, that I had to write something down just to show that I was still alive.

Recently though, I have felt a resurgence in my web presence. This may be due to my use of Twitter or perhaps my increased involvement in the jQuery community - either way, I’ve felt like it’s time to have a proper website again

But yes, this is going to be a bit of a ramble and it’s almost a re-introduction to me and what have I been up to in the last year or so. So here we go…

welovelocal.com

The last blog post on my old site was about welovelocal.com being bought by GCap Media. We built welovelocal from scratch, it was very hard work too and we did a great job on it for such a small team. We did a great job on building a huge data set that mapped all the areas of the UK to geographical co-ordinates. We did a great job of getting some new and innovate technologies into the site that fitted comfortably with it. We did a great job of getting an initial set of knowledgeable, engaging reviews too.

I don’t feel that GCap have felt the same kind of enthusiasm towards welovelocal as we did, which is why the site has stagnated somewhat since they took over and it’s a big shame as the site had/has a lot of potential and some great technology behind it. Considering they paid a rather hefty sum of money for the site, it’s surprising that they can’t be bothered to even get the blog up and running on there again.

VoucherCodes.co.uk

More recently, we - we being the publishing team at eConversions - have been hard at work making a new site called VoucherCodes.co.uk, treading into the dark and murky world of voucher codes and boy, there are a lot of cowboys out there. However, we’d like to think that we’re trying to bring some sense of professionalism and proper relationships with stores, rather than stealing codes like a voucher magpie. I think that we have a quality design that’s miles better than our rivals (who are already copying our designs) - there are a couple of things I would change, mainly the search and the reveal code mechanism but hopefully we’ll fix them soon. On the whole, I’m rather happy with the site.

Credit cards

Another site that we’ve been working on is a credit card comparison site recently, which should launch in the next couple of weeks. Now, there is a reason why I didn’t become an accountant or a banker - that’s because I don’t find that area of the web that particularly interesting. Obviously, the idea of a credit card comparison website isn’t a new one and there are a lot of similar sites out there at the moment, but the vast majority of them suck, so my motivation for the site is to make it better than all the other similar sites out there and to make it as useful as possible for our users.

So that’s really it for my year at work. It’s not been all plain sailing this year to be honest. The team have had some problems this year but we have ironed out most of the bottlenecks that hindered maximum efficiency and I hope we all can work as well as (if not better than) we have in the last couple of months.

The future

In regards to the blog, there’s several directions I could take it. One would be to be something akin to the previous site, where there were medium length posts of around 200-300 words regarding a variety of topics that was posted on a frequent basis, roughly twice a week.

The second direction would be to use the site as a place to write longer essays or articles that get posted on a less regular basis. Less of a scrapbook than the previous site and more a place where I can form ideas and theories.

The third option is write this one post and forget I had a blog.

I believe I’ve probably lost most of my audience from a year ago, and in that year, I do believe that my thinking has changed and has become more critical, so if anything, it is a good time to rip it up and start again.

Blog in rambling shock

So yes, I have rambled on, but I hope that’s kept you up to speed about my life and the future of this website. I don’t expect many people to read this blog and not just because I’m not famous-in-web-circles. Blogging has seemed to have slump recently. People seem to be subscribing to websites less and less. Attention spans are getting shorter. And if you can’t say it in 140 characters don’t bother.

But hey, it’s my site and I can do what I want.