In lieu of more technical posts, I thought I'd put down my thoughts on my 2007. I'd love to hear yours.

Happy new year!

Firsts

London to Brighton. I moved (back) down to Brighton about 3 years ago now, and it was the first time that I rode the London to Brighton. It took a grand 7 hours, mostly due to congestion, but it's spurred us both on to want to the do the London to Paris in 2008 for charity.

Tech Goodness

Falling over on the way to work, cracking a rib and totalling my laptop, which resulted in a brand spanking new MacBook Pro.

Projects of 2007

I'm somewhat obsessed with creating new stuff, and most of the time they'll be web projects. Here's a short list of highlights:

  • jQuery for Designers - fortnightly articles detailing how to implement JavaScript goodness in to web sites.
  • HTML entity - lookup tool available as a widget, online tool, search plugin, Firefox plugin and AIR widget. Saves you looking through 200 odd HTML entities and finds the entity based on how it looks.
  • Conquering OpenID as a log in system - I'd love to re-work all the site I work on to use it, but alas, there's so little time and often not the budget (to back-engineer it in - there's always the budget to plan it in in the first place).
  • Todged - my unfinished code repository. Supports OpenID logins and avatar detection along with a host of other jQuery snippets behind the scenes. I'm aiming to be at a decent beta stage Q1 2008 which should cover most of the roadmap.

Best films I saw

300 and StarDust - I went to see both films expecting a lot, and both delivered, I felt, at the highest level.

I also (finally) saw Amélie, after much hype from Andy Boyd and my wife, and found it to be worth the wait. It didn't blow my mind, but it's definitely one I'll be watching again.

Looking ahead

The biggest/exciting challenges I've got ahead of me for 2008 are, physically: riding the London to Paris, mentally: turning 30, emotionally: spending another great year happily married to my wife.

Finally, in the spirit of not being able to sit comfortably, I'm going to re-skin my blog (again), I want something really simple, and wide enough to hold code examples (this current scheme is too narrow) and a small selection of sidebar widgets (like popular posts). I like all the widgets I've got going, but sometimes feel they're a bit much that aren't looked at that much! Suggestions would be welcomed!

Posts coming up

I thought it might also be a good time to offer a heads up to some of the upcoming posts for 2008:

  • Ajax pattern for form validation (following on from using Ajax to validate forms)
  • Avatar detection - whilst making the user think they haven't given any details
  • Freebase implementation howto
  • Poor man's JavaScript behaviours