Havoc Inspired

Please start from the beginning… with Ryan Carson

Ryan Taylor — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:28:32 +0000

Ryan Carson, trilby wearing entrepreneur and founder of Carsonified – the organisers of such noteworthy events as Future of Web Design and Future of Web Apps – joins me to discuss his career and share his advice.

Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter to ensure that you don’t miss the next installment.

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Please start from the beginning… with Sarah Parmenter

Ryan Taylor — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:50:46 +0000

Sarah Parmenter, web developer (who does design) of You Know Who Design started her own business at just 19. In this weeks episode Sarah has graciously agreed to share her experiences and impart her advice to those of you out there that may be in the similar position of setting up on your own.

Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter to ensure that you don’t miss the next installment.

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Please start from the beginning… with Jonathan Snook

Ryan Taylor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:00:06 +0000

Jonathan Snook, author of Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries, Lead Developer at Square Space and collective member of Sidebar Creative joins me to discuss his career as a freelancer and his decision to move to Square Space.

Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter to ensure that you don’t miss the next installment.

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Please start from the beginning… with Mel Kirk

Ryan Taylor — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:34:01 +0000

The lovely Random Mel Kirk, Online Marketing Manager for White Label Dating joins me to discuss her career and have a chuckle.

Technical note: I apologies for the quality of the audio on my end. I’ve tried to improve it best I can but alas, it’s not great. But not to worry. It’s Mel that you want to hear not me.

Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter to ensure that you don’t miss the next installment.

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Please start from the beginning… with Drew McLellan

Ryan Taylor — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:14:15 +0000

Drew McLellan, Director and Senior Developer of Edge of My Seat and creator of 24ways.org, joins me to discuss his career path.

Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter to ensure that you don’t miss the next installment.

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Please start from the beginning… with Paul Boag

Ryan Taylor — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:36:34 +0000

The infamous “web strategist” of Headscape and host of the award winning boagworld podcast, Paul Boag, joins me to discuss his beginnings and the path he has taken to get to where he is today.

Paul has kindly submitted to being the first in a series of video interviews that I’ll be producing entitled “Please start from the beginning…” where I pose the simple questions “What do you do today?” and “How did you get to this point?”.

I find talking to industry professionals about their backgrounds, what decisions they’ve made, lucky breaks that have presented themselves and the how’s and when’s useful and inspirational. It’s my hope that you will too.

Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter to ensure that you don’t miss the next installment.

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Why have a boring 404 page?

Ryan Taylor — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:53:06 +0000

Plenty of people have custom “404 Page Not Found” pages. A quick search on google reveals plenty of galleries of such examples and Barry Wardrop appears to have been the first to spot mine.

Very nice site Ryan, glad to see it now with the kerning is sorted, absolutely love your 404 page error!! I nearly pooped myself thinking oooh what have i done!

that was great

Have a look for yourself here: 404 link

So what are the benefits of having a custom 404 page:

Your site doesn’t feel broken when a visitor hits your 404
Server generated 404 pages tell visitors nothing, which means they are more likely to give up and move on
You have control of your own 404 page, which means you can encourage visitors to keep looking for what they are after, for example by providing them with search facilities
You have the opportunity to make light of what is basically a failure to provide
It shows your visitors that you care about the details

It’s so easy to add your own 404 page to your site. If you’re using Apache web server and .htaccess files are supported you can simply add:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

And style notfound.html to your liking.

If you’re using a CMS/Publishing Platform such as Wordpress (which is the case for this site) you can add a 404.php file in your theme folder.

So there’s no excuse not to really.

What great 404 pages have you come across?

Launching Havoc Inspired v3

Ryan Taylor — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:33:15 +0000

I was growing really tired of Havoc Inspired v2. I suppose it had served me well for a while, appearing in .net magazine readers sites section and on design meltdown, but it had become a real bind to update and I feel the focus of the site was all wrong.

Havoc Inspried v2

I wanted a more professional looking site for my freelance work, with some fun aspects hidden away for those interested in exploring.

I’ve removed the necessity to have a thumbnail image for every blog I write, this was a real pain!

I also seem to be doing a lot more interviews and show for boagworld and I wanted a more prominat place to shout about it.

I’ve moved from Movable Type to Wordpress, and so far I’m really happy with it. Being able to manage my blog from my iPhone is a nice touch.

There are a few niggles that my pixel perfect eyes keep spotted, but for now welcome to Havoc Inspired v3.

I’d love to hear what you think.

Update: Thanks for the feedback guys. I’ve made a few updates to the site based on your suggestions. The foremost being the kerning issue. :-S

Launch of Infinite Path, well it’s a start at least…

Ryan Taylor — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:57:11 +0000

I have been brought on board as Head of Web Development to help establish a new web services agency based in Leeds, which, after much deliberation, we have lovingly named Infinite Path.

I have hastily put together a holding page for our site with a brief description of what we do and ways to contact us. You can expect to see the full blown site arriving very soon, once we have wrapped up a couple of existing client projects. The full site may be of a similar theme to the holding page but knowing me it probably won’t be, my mood changes with the wind, especially when it comes to design.

One thing that won’t be changing is our logo, well not much anyway. We’ve got two versions:

Logo for website, business cards etc.

Logo for invoices, letterheads etc.

Depending on where the logo is being used.

This is the first logo I have designed where I’ve drawn my own font, and I have to say I’m quite proud of it.

So that is a brief update of what I’ve been up to as of late. All in all I’m very excited. I’m working with a great team of people who are as enthusiastic about what they are doing as I am. So expect big things from us in the future!

Another stake in the heart of IE6?

Ryan Taylor — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:18:30 +0000

I think it’s great, Chrome isn’t the best browser out there but it is certainly an improvement over IE6 and surely it cannot be a coincidence that it has coincided with Microsoft’s announcement that IE8 is being pushed out as an automatic update.

I’m not sure if the button appears in the IE8 browser, I’ve not had chance to test yet, but if you have please feel free to enlighten me in the comments.

I think that will be an interesting test as well. If the button only appears for IE6 and 7 then Google are trying to speed up the demise of IE6 to improve the web for all, if it appears in IE8 also (which as we know IE8 has made big improvements in terms of web standards etc), then they are trying to steal some of Microsoft’s market share, in favor of Chrome…

Google homepage when viewed in Internet Explorer.