Want that retro modern push bike look that you may have seen recently on the streets of Norwich? Buy a reasonably priced gents bike, strip off those ugly extras, slap on a gold chain and don't forget your own personal little touch here and there (but don't over do it) . . . . easy rider!

So the mighty Apple have announced their plans for a new campus in California. Bravo and bring it on! I love the mixture of old and new in the City of Norwich but so many new ventures fail miserably at creating the modern build. The reason I'm sure is mostly down to budget but a good taste in design also goes a long way, take the new outdoor market for example. Give it 5 more years and it will look as contemporary as a smurf. That it why a lot has to be said for a more classic approach to design, true futuristic visions require ambitious plans and big bucks.

Anything we deem to be 'Cool' these days is always in danger of lapsing into something that is deemed terribly uncool. This is because every is moving so quickly and with todays fast paced lifestyles we have to keep a sharp eye on those at the top of the creative pecking order so as to be ahead of the game,

With any design project the out come is usually defined by 1 of 3 lead visual executions: typographic, photographic or illustrative. Yes it is true that a mix of all 3 maybe seen to be the idea approach for most websites but in the end providing you flex your creative license and squeeze out a little of that creative juice you will often find your self describing your creation as an illustration anyway.

For the last couple of years, the majority of sites we have built have been marketing to a global audience, which means we have taken on the challenges of displaying the site in an appropriate language (‘internationalisation’ or ‘i18n’) and often modifying the content for various countries and regions (‘localisation’ or ‘L10n’).

Following extensive experience of using Drupal to deliver intenationalised and localised websites, there are a few fundamental issues that keep catching us out - one of the main ones is ensuring that we use Drupal's t function approriately.

Here's a simple 'gotcha':

Wrong: <?php echo t('You are logged in as: ') . $username; ?>

Right: <?php echo t('You are logged in as: %username', array('%username' => $username)); ?>

There’s a sweet contentment knowing that a system is fully up to date and patched, but how uncomfortable it soon becomes when you find out there’s a new update or patch – leading to the nagging question of if / when to go through the grief of updating.

On the one hand, you know you should apply updates as soon as you can to get any potential benefit of new features, bugfixes or even improved security and performance – but anyone who has been around long enough will know that even the simplest patch can upset an otherwise stable system and be a royal pain to resolve.

I had a friend around for Dinner the other night and being a drummer in a band he soon brought the conversation around to music. We shared our enthusiasm for the ipod but couldn't help reminiscing on the good old days when you could flick through and admire your new artwork be it CD or Vinyl whilst listening to your latest purchase.

After the terrifying release of Jaws 3D in 1983, terrifying of course for all of the wrong reasons the very eighties gimmick was very quickly cast aside for movies that focused more on content rather than style. However things have most certainly changed since then. Its true to say that there are still a fare few movies with truly unforgivable content but there are so many big hits out there that are pushing the boundaries and visually blowing us away all in mere 2D and it makes you wonder what the next big wow factor will be.

In this ever expanding world of digital wonder it is still important to keep up with what's going on in the word of pen and paper. I am of course talking about books of a visual nature but should I ever feel compelled to pick up a worded novel over a graphic novel I will certainly let you know my thoughts. For the moment however rather than focusing on new releases Im going to be recommending and perhaps reminding you of some of those all time classics which no one with a creative interest should ever be without. 

Amazon have just announced a new addition to their web services family - Relational Database Service (RDS).

There are contributed modules that extend Drupal’s innate desire that all content should be publicly visible – notably node privacy byrole and Content Access. If you’ve defined your own node in a module, you can also use node_access() to set access rights to that node type.

This one caught me out for a good while – I’ve got my own data stored in a database using Drupal’s Schema API and one field I want is a date, so I used the ‘datetime’ type. But whenever I came to use a value anywhere I couldn’t get any of Drupal’s date formatting functions to work – they were expecting a unix timestamp (makes sense) but the Schema API uses ‘datetime’ as a field type on MySQL so was getting a MySQL date string in return.

I’ve been using Drupal in earnest since the New Year, and I have to say that I wish I’d discovered it sooner. It’s by no means perfect, but I think perfection is impossible with CMS systems and it’s doing everything I need it to.

I think I’ve finally found an almost perfect suite of tools to monitor webserver performance and availability – it’s only taken five years!

This post can relate to so many things – stylesheets, php code, glass fibre moulds – at some point when you’ve gone through a few iterations of an agile like process, you start thinking “If I’d known I was going to end up doing this, I would have started differently”

Not unique to Drupal, but common to any that use cookies to maintain login session information. I’ve met it before, but I just lost an hour and I have a brick shaped imprint in my forehead again, so I thought I’d drum into my head … don’t use underscores in domain names!

So often when using subdomains for setting up dev sites etc., it’s so easy to use site_dev.domain.com or similar. But, underscores are not valid characters in domain names.