The latest project that I’ve done with Futurelab has kept up the tradition of being nominated for a New Statesman New Media award. Congratulations to the team on the nomination and commiserations that it didn’t win the award this year.

Congratulations to the Create-a-scape team on the announcement of their nomination in this year’s New Statesman New Media Awards. They’ve been selected as finalists in the education category which apparently “go to the body or project that has made the most significant contribution to education through the use of new media technology.”

I worked with them on the support website for the project and through that have read most of the support material for it. I reckon they’d be deserving winners. It’s an excellent and innovative idea and I hope it goes far — good luck folks!

[Update] Create-a-scape went on to win the award last night (24th July 2007).

New Media Awards 2007 Winners

Congratulations!

Go on, you know you want to swap a car trip for something better — walk, cycle, hang-glide, whatever — perhaps even work from home for the day if your employer will let you. Whatever you do, register it on the site I just built with the chaps at Tijuana Design:

Change Your World website

Planet Tony on breakfast news

Nigel from Telepathy spotted Planet 10 — which we made together — spinning away in the background as Blair gave a speech on education recently. This was the speech if you have the inclination to read it.

The Haystack Admin System powers the new website for the Arnolfini, Bristol’s premier art gallery. Well, most of it, anyway. There’s a standard news system with a bespoke database for managing the events that the gallery puts on, from film to exhibitions, from dance to performance art. All that remains to do is to build the vcal exporter so that people can subscribe to the schedule from within a calendar application such as iCal. I’ll update this entry once it’s done. In the meantime, get down there - there are lots of interesting things going on.

Yup, that’s right, the shiny revamp of the Bristol Old Vic website has gone live with the new incarnation of the Haystack Admin System. The updated system bristles with a whole heap of new features and modules, but, above all, I’m particularly pleased that I can now subscribe to their forthcoming schedule directly through iCal in Mac OSX, although I’m told there’s now a nifty iCal plugin for Firefox through which one can also subscribe happily on any OS. I don’t even know if the Old Vic staff are aware that they can get the schedule in RSS and iCal formats, but I decided to bung in the functionality anyway. Dan Brickley reminded me on the Bristol Wireless chat channel of the importance of the machine-readable web, and persuaded me that it would be worth the effort. I hope it makes a difference to someone… sometime… somewhere…

The Haystack Admin System gets another outing for the Encounters Festivals at the Watershed in Bristol with the launch of websites for the Animated Encounters and Brief Encounters short film festivals.

Solar System Explorer

Ever fancied a planet of your own design? Wondered what would happen if you then let it loose in the Solar System? Well theat’s just what you can do with Planet 10, a Shockwave 3D project that I programmed at Telepathy for NESTA’s Planet Science website way back in 2001.

Source image for my Underscore skin

I’ve been enjoying mucking around with templates for various open source packages recently. Firstly, after long discussion, I got tired of the chatter, and simply went ahead and revamped the MailMan mailing list manager templates for the Underscore Archives.

Flush from my success in upgrading the MailMan templates from rather dodgily-written HTML3.2 to semantically (more) meaningful HTML4.01, I then took another look at the Bristol Wireless website, which consists entirely of an install of PhpWiki. It was great to see how the site had come along in the last year.

So then, two new skins for two websites in two weeks, two new wrappers that I hope make more sense of existing content, and I have to say that skinning up has never been quite so much fun.

Dolphin swimming, photographed by Manuel Pinguinhas

The photograph above illustrates the homepage of the website I’ve just finished for The Dolphin Connection Experience, a company which will take you to the Azores and organise boat trips so you can swim around with - well, you guessed it - dolphins. Gotta be a good way to spend some time, methinks.