Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

This page has been around for a good while. I’m flagging it up now because I’m trying to build up a sort of toolkit and primer for colleagues managing websites; the rather unsophisticated ‘every user should have exactly the same experience on our website’ is – sadly and surprisingly – still a common attitude. This [...]

I’ve drawn up a legal primer for people commissioning or managing websites. This is by no means detailed or comprehensive: it is intended as a starting point and to raise awareness of the issues. I welcome feedback on anything that’s unclear or factually wrong. I’ve posted it here initially, but I may well move it [...]

Nibbler is a free online tool for testing websites. Give it a URL and it will test five associated pages against a range of criteria. It's still in Alpha, and I haven't looked closely to see how it actually works, but it could be very useful as part of a web developer's toolkit. Visit Nibbler [...]

I haven’t tried it yet, but this could make the creation of web accessible video much easier: it purports to enable you to add transcripts to your YouTube videos. Thanks to Andy Mabbett for alerting me to it. Visit Easy YouTube caption creator

Last week I went to hear Lord Carter discuss his Digital Britain Final Report in Birmingham. I took a laptop and tweeted a little. As a crude record of what I wrote, what follows is my Twitter stream for that event. All I’ve done is take the html from Twitter Search and pasted it here [...]

I’ve been playing with CSS3, just for fun really. All of the styles I’ve used work in Safari; most of them work in Firefox and Opera; none of them work in Internet Explorer 7. For my test page I wanted: paragraphs with transparent coloured backgrounds layered over images; each image to be different; the boxes [...]

Is it possible to work full-time without an office, simply taking advantage of free wifi offerings? To find out, I intend to spend one week trying it. And I call on others to do the same. The dates are yet to be confirmed, but I hope to try and work for a full five days [...]

These are my links for 5 February 2009 from 19:00 to 19:00

If the powers-that-be are so keen on digital inclusion, and for citizens to embrace social media, then they need to ensure that connectivity is completely pervasive. For example, the UK government wants to set up a scheme of ‘digital mentors‘. These people would help other people learn how to use ’social media’ to get their [...]

Quite often I hear advice to the effect of ‘Don’t express online what you wouldn’t be happy defending offline’. I agree with this insofar as it protects the writer, but I no longer agree with it as an attitude with which to approach the web. If (as I have written before) we should be willing [...]