Rob

We'll be announcing the exact time and experts today. Who's thinking of submitting a question?

Hi everyone, I'm Rob, you might not have seen me around much. I'm one of the old-guard here and used to be a moderator, although I gave that up when I started university. I now work for Mozilla as a Technical Evangelist and part of my role involves engaging with Web developers like yourselves. Ask MDN is one-hour Twitter event that happens weekly. It allows any Web developer to submit a question to a panel of experts that are hand picked by Mozilla. Each week we focus on a different topic, the first (next week) being HTML5 gaming and creative JavaScript. Something I'm really interested in. To get involved you just need to follow @AskMDN on Twitter and submit your question for our experts to answer next week. We'll be announcing more on Twitter as plans progress. This is a brand new idea for use, but we're excited to try it out! I know how much of a help WDF was when I was active here, and I'm sure that Ask MDN will supplement that help. Perhaps we can talk to Ben about a WDF and Ask MDN link up Rob

Hi everyone, Some of you may remember me from around these places, and some of you may not. My name is Rob and I'm a visual programmer and ex-mod from this forum. The reason I'm writing today is to let you know about my book that I'm writing on HTML5 canvas. If you want to win a copy of the soon-to-be-released awesome book, then sign up to the newsletter right away. It will take you no longer than the time it takes to write your email. For extra kudos you could even get your friends to sign up or post the link on Twitter, Facebook, and / or your favourite method of social shenanigans. Much HTML5 love and kisses, Rob

Bravenet were awesome back in the day. I just remember using all their plugins on my sites; visitor counters, guest books (remember them?!), contact forms. You could never have too much on a website in those days.

I started building websites when I was 12 because I really needed to tell people how cool Digimons were. God bless Geocities and Bravenet with their awesome WYSIWYG website tools! Still, it gave me the bug so I learnt HTML in the following months and the rest, as they say, is history.

I'm only 57.2% geeky apparently. My girlfriend would disagree but according to the survey she's in my imagination!

Only have an about page if it serves a purpose. There is absolutely no requirement for them on a portfolio website. The same goes with any content, never clutter your site with stuff you don't have a legitimate reason for being there. Concentrate on the stuff you need on your site and forget about the rest. You'll find you enjoy making it a lot more that way as well.

I use JavaScript a lot and got 12 wrong! I've never seen JavaScript that unnecessarily complicated in normal uses so I'm not particularly worried about being a dunce.

Either our voices killed Tyler or he was so amazed he forgot to say what he thought! I'm surprised 70 people have checked this thread and only has 1 responded. Does no one want a proper web design podcast?

Hey everyone, I thought it would be appreciated if I updated everyone on recent events. John O'Nolan, ErisDS and myself have recently launched a new regular podcast about web design and development. It's called ExplicitWeb and it involves half-hour(ish) shows with the three of us discussing a variety of topics relating to the industry in an honest and opinionated fashion. We've had a lot of positive feedback so far and it would be great to get some more listeners and hear what you think. Check out the ExplicitWeb website, the first episode of the podcast, and most definitely follow us on Twitter. We're currently waiting on iTunes to approve our feed so we'll be available on there soon enough. We're now on iTunes so get subscribing! Thanks, Rob

I bought the black version of this case from the online Apple store. I have no idea who sell them in this colour though.

I'll keep an eye on the animation in other browsers. I've done testing but perhaps I missed something. But it looks so pretty and has all the features I want that aren't in 1.6.8; proper file management, CodeIgniter, etc. I'll upgrade on my dev environment first and see how it all looks. Thank you! Everyone loves a good rocket They'll be plenty more Twitter / Arduino related stuff on the site in the future.

A few people have brought up the search box so I'll definitely be putting it down on my things to watch. The main issue is browser compatibility, I'm using a positively Mac only search code at the moment. Thanks Rob! I absolutely love EE and the power and flexibility it gives you. WordPress seems like a child's toy in comparison. The new version is out today which I'm going to be upgrading to asap.

Thanks guys. Do you have any constructive comments about how I could improve the website in any way?

Hi guys, Sorry I've been so inactive of late, I have a hundred and one things that need doing in my life right now. The second year of university accounts for most of that, I see what people mean by the second year being the hardest! In my spare time I've been working on the new Rawkes website, which is a massive change from the old one. The new site focusses purely on blogging and my experimentation, I've dropped freelancing completely. Some things you should know about the new site: It uses HTML 5 and CSS 3 exclusively I used Compass (SASS) to build the stylesheets The header is animated with JavaScript and Canvas, not Flash This is just the beginning, I'm sure there are plenty of niggling bugs (the header only rotates on blog pages) but I needed to get something out into the real world so I can move on. If you're interested I wrote a blog post about the relaunch which goes into more detail. Check it out and I'd love to hear what you think about it all. Rob over and out.

First up, why do you need 200Mb/s over the already substantial 85Mb/s? Don't fall under the illusion of the marketing speak that faster = better as it really depends what you need the network for. 85Mb/s a more than enough for a normal internet connection with a household of computers. As for which brand, I've had personal experience with Devolo as I set up a friend's house with the system last year. They needed to get an internet connection to an office at the end of their garden and wifi, even with signal boosters and bigger aerials, just wasn't stable. The solution was this "powerline" technology provided by Devolo and I have to say that it's really impressive stuff… I'll certainly be using it in my own home if wifi isn't enough.

I've been in a similar situation and in the end I decided that the job was too much hassle (not the client's fault) and cancelled the job. It was a really hard thing to do as I hate letting people down. I did learn one thing from the whole experience though; don't say yes to a job without properly considering if you have the time, resources and energy to complete it, whether that's right now or 2 weeks away when you're half way through.

Be careful with '===' as although it means identical to, it literally means the two compared elements have to be of the same data type as well (int, boolean, float, etc).

Jeremy Keith wrote a really good article on the state of HTML 5 and answers some of the arguments against it's seemingly restrictive specification.

Sounds like fun but I'd only be able to attend if it's in or around Dorset – skanky students can't travel too far on their loans

That is a bloody lovely website. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that they've catered for the iPhone and even produced a dedicated icon for it (it's in the HTML head code). Yes they paid a lot of money but it looks like it wasn't wasted!

It would depend on the company and the potential for that job but yeah, I reckon I would consider it.

3 goes for me. I didn't even know what I was doing the first time!

It depends entirely on the purpose of the rounded corners and the target market of the website. If the corners are there as a simple enhancement to the design then I feel using CSS3 is perfect because it won't detract from the design if the corners are square in Opera and IE. If the corners are integral to the whole design then maybe you should use a different option like Canvas/SVG and not images, although I'd argue that rounded corners are never integral to a design… At some point we need to start removing full support for older browsers and push the boundaries with new technologies. If we keep accommodating for browsers that don't support these features then we're going to get no where.

Seeing that just about every man and his dog uses Twitter nowadays, I thought it was about time we had a dedicated repository where members of the forum can share their Twitter username and follow others (or not if they feel anti-social). For the time being this thread will stay un-sticky but if it proves popular I'm sure we can keep it near the top for easy findability. Please keep this thread to a single message from yourself containing your Twitter username. Any other messages will be removed for the sake of keeping the thread clean. I'll get the ball rolling… I'm Rob Hawkes and my Twitter username is @robhawkes.