Steve's blog

I've been thinking about how blogs can be used in a corporate environment. I know I'm not the first to look into this; I'm probably several years late in that respect. However, I think the Anglia Ruskin University could use blogs to great effect, both for its students and staff.

I spent an hour or so this evening working on some stuff for the blog.

To be honest, I stole all of the ideas from someone else's blog. This is Joe from work who, like me, will only ever write good stuff about work on his personal blog. Wise man.

Been doing some more on the blog this evening. Changed to a three column, full-width layout. I'm not finished yet, so loads of pages will look weird, and the banner is screwed up. Broken, in fact. That's because I'm not finished yet, but I'm a bit knackered today, so I'm going to bed. L8rs.

Did a few minor updates to the blog tonight:

• Added tooltips to the Amazon icons on the right
• Applied a three-column style to a few more pages
• Tidied up some css stuff

Plenty of things are still broken, though. Sorry. I'll get to them when I can be bothered. More importantly, though: here's some good amazing virtuoso bass playing from some random geezer on YouTube.

You just know this guy has some serious chops hidden away just under the surface, but he keeps this 'simple'. Ok, so it's hardly simple. In fact, it's really very tricky. But what I'm trying to say is he never goes over the top. He clearly knows (better than I ever will) that good bass playing is all about the groove. It's as much about what you don't play as what you do. I've not checked whether this is an exact copy of Stuart Zender's original line, or just a guy who can play every bit as well as Zender. Either way, this video is a major lesson inspiration for me. Enjoy.

I know that there's only one way to successfully pull off a black colour scheme: make it absolutely brilliant, otherwise is just looks very 1999.

Well, I haven't managed to make a brilliant layout yet, but I did find a stunning header image. Illustrator Greg Martin created this with Jessica Mae Stover. Quite something, isn't it? I'd chop off my right hand to be able to draw like this. Only trouble is I'm right-handed, so that probably wouldn't help much.

There are still loads of css bugs; I've only worked on a few pages so far.

And from the sublime to the...hornophone. Thank you, Harry Hill!

Universities, those bastions of venerability, are typically slow to respond to the technological zeitgeist. However, my employer is trying out some new and interesting things.

We're currently looking into the social networking phenomenon that is myspace, and will inevitably find interest in facebook in the future.

We also have some vids on YouTube, shown after the break.

It's refreshing to see some innovation in the HE sector!

A few months ago I wrote a Top Trumps game for a Reeves & Mortimer fansite. I'd forgotten about it until I noticed it on my web server this morning. Click on the card to have a game!

I've been working on some code to build a hierarchical menu system for PHP-driven websites.

I needed a flexible system that meets the following requirements:

• submenus build themselves gradually based on the branch currently being viewed (Windows Explorer style)
• the ability to separate menu levels, so that, say, the top level can be shown independently from the sub-levels
• a master menu file that can be edited in a basic text editor, and is visually obvious to people who don't necessarily understand multi-dimensional arrays
• outputs valid XHTML code (you wouldn't believe how unique my litle script is in this respect!)

I'm no programmer, but the solution I came up with is rather neat. Click here for a demo of the system.

The underlying PHP code is available upon request.

Inspiration from Joe's blog

Here for your delectation is a collection of the bestest damn videos you'll ever done see.

This starts off slowly, but stick with it...

Awesome skill

All-time classic

And the piece de resistance...

Following on from Daft Hands, Daft Dancing. Excellent.