To start with, I guess it makes sense to explain what I've been doing recently. I had my second year uni exams until the end of June, and then went travelling straight away.

I'm planning to write another article outlining what we got up to on our travels, but the basic premise was an unplanned, unscheduled trip from London to Istanbul in our lovely 15 year old VW Golf MK III. As some of you know, this year I am studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, and so since getting home I've been trying to sort out accommodation and all the other boring stuff which goes with migrating. I've also been working on some new features for one of my clients, Pure Offices, which has left me fairly uninspired to work on my own stuff.

However, all this stuff is finally done! Which leaves me free to actually do something with my site. As per usual, my design ADD leaves me already wanting to redesign the current site without actually having finished it. I am nevertheless persevering: at the moment I am developing a sort of status bar for the top part of the frontpage, containing my recent twitter updates, my recently listened songs (which are pulled from last.fm), and perhaps the books I am currently reading. Haven't really decided on the last one yet. I plan to write a tutorial on the last.fm widget at some point, for which I'm simply using PHP to parse the XML returned by the last.fm API, and I figure it might be of use to some of you who have your own self-coded blogs.

Going to Paris will leave me with a lot more spare time, as the academic stuff I'm going to be doing there doesn't actually count towards my degree grade, so I can be a bit more relaxed! I've got two pretty big entrepreneurial projects in the pipeline, both based on the same architecture which I will be developing over the coming months, and both coming to a browser near you soon! I came up with these two ideas while traveling, and I hope that they will fill a need that is, as yet, unadressed. More updates to come shortly.

This site!

As this is my first post, I may as well go a little into this site. Westende, initially intended to be my portfolio, has been through a number of design iterations before the current version. To start with, I developed the site in Flash based largely on a few bits of Actionscript I had learnt. While this was pretty much learning as I went along, I soon realised that Flash really sucks for presenting large amounts of text. I decided to learn HTML/CSS in order to code a 'proper' website to display my work.

This resulted in the first public version of the site, a pretty basic fluid 3-column layout, assembled from various templates and tutorials around the web. That sat around for a while, garnering few visitors, until I posted a tutorial I had made on the site. That promptly got Dugg and Stumbld and meant about 7000 visitors in one day... I didn't actually realise until I got an angry letter from my hosts. Following the tutorial, I also received a few more job offers via my contact details that were available on the site, as well as many more offers to purchase oriental brides and enlarge / shrink various bodily appendages.

Eventually I got bored of reading the 'temporary portfolio' title at the top of my page, and redesigned the site again, resulting in the current version that you see before your eyes today. I consider myself a designer before being a developer, and I tried to really focus on the usability and aesthetic aspects of the site when thinking about how I wanted it to look. As you can see, this resulted in a very stark and sparse grid-based design, using only typographic elements and a few lines here and there. However, as I've already mentioned, I already spot many holes in the design, and I just want to start from scratch again! Unfortunately, I am also developing this site from scratch, using PHP, MySQL and HTML / CSS, which means that for every half hour of joyous designing, I have about 10 hours of tedious coding.

So, in short, nice of you to drop by and read this fairly uninspiring little monologue, and I promise there's going to be some useful and interesting stuff on here soon! As always, if you are interested in collaborating with me on any projects, contact me.