The personal blog of
Dafydd Vaughan

Page 4

Talking about Website Accessibility

Number 10 website with text scaled up

Earlier today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Dublin, Robin Christopherson from UK charity AbilityNet gave a talk on website accessibility.  I’ve seen quite a few different talks and sessions on website accessibility and understand how important this topic is.  This talk however really hit home – Robin is blind and gave the [...]

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CllrTweeps – The Directory of UK Councillors on Twitter

CllrTweeps version 1

A quick update this week! Last weekend I was pleased to launch CllrTweeps.  The new site, inspired by TweetMinster, aims to list every local councillor in the UK who is on Twitter.  After our first week online, we have already tracked down and verified the first 100 councillors using the service. The first version of [...]

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School Closure Information

Snow on the 3rd February 2009

Unless you’ve been in a cave (or outside of the UK) for the last few days, you’ll know that we’ve been experiencing the fun of a ‘severe snow event’. The exact definition of a severe snow event remains unanswered, and I’ll leave the debate over whether what we’ve been experiencing is severe to another time. [...]

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Google falls over

Google harmful message

Well, I never thought i’d see the day, but Google search has completely fallen over. No matter what you search for, Google returns a message saying that “This site may harm your computer”. Google will not let you visit the page unless you manually type the web address into your browser. It is even labelling [...]

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It’s official… politics 2.0 is here

WhiteHouse.Gov, the new White House Website

This week it feels like a new phase in social media and the internet has begun. The beginning of the week saw America inaugurate a technology-savvy president, who, along with his team, appears to understand the importance of technology and the internet. Throughout last year, Barack Obama and his team made fantastic use of social [...]

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TechCrunch goes for the cluttered look

Techcrunch redesign

Back in August, technology blog TechCrunch updated with a new design, which was slowly but surely rolled out across its network of sites.  At the time I wrote about how much I liked the new design.  It was simple, clean and effective, as well as quick at loading. More recently, the blog network has taken [...]

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Aims for the next 12 months

A scene from Govilon on New Year's Day

In typical fashion, I’m over a week behind in this obligatory post marking the start of the new year. In fairness, I had the notes written on New Year’s eve, but for one reason or another, didn’t actually write it up until today. So, here we are, a brand new year. What have I got [...]

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Cinema-style content ratings for websites

Recently, the UK Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Andy Burnham did an interview with The Telegraph. During the interview he confirmed that the government was looking into a cinema-style rating system for websites. As a web developer, hosting provider and internet user, I do not understand how such [...]

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Designer’s block

Last week I was busy trying to put together a new design website design for an important client at work.  As always, we were on a very tight deadline and it had to be completed the end of the next day.  I’d left work early so I could concentrate on the design without being distracted [...]

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Staying ahead of the game

The web design & development industry is incredibly fast paced.  What is current and acceptable today, might not be tomorrow.  New technologies are being developed all the time, new ways of doing things, new ways of thinking.  As I’ve mentioned before, keeping on top of these changes is almost a full time job in itself.  [...]

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