Keri Henare

Due to the limitations of my UK Visa and the financial pressures caused by those limitations I have now returned home to New Zealand, alone. I have had to leave my darling Carmen behind to finish the last little bits of her university work. Carmen will then be going home to Valencia for a couple of months to spend time with her family before permanently relocating to Auckland. I'm man enough to admit it... I miss her terribly!

Shortly after arriving home I found a great job with Pixel Fusion. It's a very welcoming work environment and I'm working with an amazing group of people. Look forward to seeing some great stuff coming from us in the future.

The new site, is still coming.

I really like CakePHP and as I have previously mentioned, I had been intending to use it for the all new KeriHenare.com. However, I've decided to forget that and try something really new.

I would therefore like to announce that development of the new version of this site is underway right now and it is being developed in Python, using the Django framework. I'd been considering this change for a while now but it's all a whole new world to me. Until a week ago I knew absolutely no Python. I've now started reading Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python which I've found to be one of the best resources that I've ever come across for learning a new language. Luckily for me Django is aimed more at designers than hardcore coders so it's pretty easy to get started with. I'm really excited about this change to Django and I think that Django has a really promising future.

As always, keep coming back for updates. I'll try to post a bit more often... At least I hope to try.

Dan Cederholm is in the middle of another live design refresh. In the meantime SimpleBits has no styling what-so-ever. I'm not a very patient person and I love Dan Cederholm's designs so I decided not to wait for the new design.

Dan removes the <link> element for his screen.css so I've created a Greasemonkey script that add's it back in as well as removes the little 'tune up' message.

var link = document.createElement('link');
  link.setAttribute('rel', 'stylesheet');
  link.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
  link.setAttribute('href', '/css/screen.css');
  link.setAttribute('media', 'screen, projection');

var style = document.createElement('style');
  style.setAttribute('id', 'hide-h2');
  style.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
  style.setAttribute('media', 'screen, projection');

var text = document.createTextNode('body > h2 { display: none; }');

document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(link);
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(style);
document.getElementById('hide-h2').appendChild(text);

The web standards community will probably remember today as the coldest day in hell. Microsoft have announced that the latest build of IE8 successfully passes the Acid 2 test. For those who don't know what Acid 2 is, it's a test page created by the Web Standards Project for browser vendors to use as a method for validating the standards compliance of their products. The fact that IE8 passes Acid 2 must have silenced a few of Microsoft's critics.

This news seems to have come at the worst time for Opera's antitrust complaint against Microsoft. The complaint was filed only a week ago but it already seems to be loosing it's footing as a major part of the complaint was based around Microsoft's lack of support for web standards.

It has been an incredibly long 11 months (to the day) since I last posted on this blog. Sorry.

I had originally planned a quick redesign back in about April 2006, but then I went travelling. And then I came to England. And then I just never seemed to have the time. I took the blog down in an attempt to motivate me to get something done, but that didn't work. What can I say, other than :

The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.

I'm now in the middle of a redesign and the development of a custom content management system powered by CakePHP. In the meantime, I have put this simple Wordpress blog back up simply because I don't feel that I can keep quiet. I need to Blog! This isn't official Version 3 of KeriHenare.com, more like Version 3 Prologue. This isn't a reflection of the finished product but something to get me moving along.