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

I am very sorry to have had to cancel my cookie law event in Birmingham. Please accept some links as compensation. The cancellation is a big disappointment. The key speakers could no longer make it so we tried to find someone else at short notice to give a neutral, authoritative overview of the legal situation. Sadly, without [...]

The good folk at civicuk have built a free tool that takes all the sweat out of complying with the cookie regulations. Cookie Control creates an opt-in for your visitors that is clear, uncluttered and unobtrusive. You can tell it whether to pop up when the page is loaded, how long to pop up for, where to [...]

Sinatra itself has useful help pages, but (so far) this the best tutorial I’ve found. Creating Database-driven Apps with Sinatra

An up-to-date set of comparison tables for browser support of CSS3 selectors and HTML5 properties. It doesn’t include IE9, because they have a whole separate page of tables previewing IE9 support for HTML5 and CSS3. Visit Web Designer’s Checklist

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 [...]

This is a very nice demonstration of what HTML5/CSS3 is capable of, and shows how ready the various browsers are for it. Visit HTML5 Readiness

I’m trying to teach myself Rails, but I’m not even a programmer. So when I’m stumped, I’m fairly stumped. Currently my app is not saving form data when it should be, and redirecting when it shouldn’t. Update I’ve actually fixed this now. It was the ‘home_path’ route that was causing the problems. Thanks to everyone [...]

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 [...]

This is really interesting, because I always assumed that online registration forms were easier to use if their components were separated clearly. This post suggests that in fact a narrative paragraph containing the form fields in-line is more likely to encourage use. Thanks to Martin Black for drawing my attention to this on Twitter. Visit [...]

A set of very handy lists of online web development tools, neatly and clearly laid out. Covers inspiration and design as well as markup, coding and marketing. Visit Web Design Dashboard