Posts from 2015
Terry Abraham’s wonderful outdoor films
Published in
Terry’s videos make me want to turn off my computer and head for the British hills immediately: whether to a well-known place like the Lake District or to places which will be new to me.
“The fold” is still very important in web design
Published in
Website visitors can and do scroll the page to find what they’re looking for. That doesn’t make this scrolling action a good user interface design solution.
Die Bergretter – Air Zermatt
Published in
Fast anderthalb Stunden in Begleitung der «Rotbiene»: der Rettungsdienst von Air Zermatt rund ums Matterhorn. Wenn ich mit 28 mit mehr Geld im Konto in die Schweiz gekommen wäre, wäre ich Helikopterpilot geworden. Weil meine Geschichte diesen Weg nicht folgte, muss ich mich mit ein paar Touristenflüge pro Jahrzehnt und das Zuschauen von solchen Dokumentarfilmen zurecht finden.
Bloggen in einer fremden Sprache
Published in
Ich schreibe seit den späteren Neunzigern Blogposts und lerne seit 2001 Deutsch. Nach drei, vier Jahren hierzulande, am Anfang fast nur von Schweizern umgeben, hatte ich die neue Sprache einigermassen in Griff. Viele Stunden im Büro, viele Stunden vor Stefan Raab im deutschsprachigen Fernsehen, haben mich weiter gebracht. (Von Raab habe ich gelernt, dass es in der Tat eine
Ladies bike for sale
Published in
Jo bought a new bike in 2012 but hasn’t used it as much as she’d expected, so it’s up for sale at Fr. 450 (or near offer). It’s a 21-speed Kalkhoff bike, made of aluminium, and in near-new condition. If you’re interested, there are photos and details at http://velo.mhm.li/: please do get in touch via email, Twitter
Doctor Who has been sending chills up my spine since I was a teenager. And the trailer for the next series looks as if it may be great. Although I agree with Thomas Capon: give the Daleks a rest, for goodness sake!
Using bounced flash to improve the quality of light in your portraits.
Funky Kitchen Club website
Published in
Remembering my work in 2008 on Swiss t.v.’s Funky Kitchen Club.
First to Tierwang via Bachalp
Published in
A picturesque hike on the way to the Faulhorn, from Grindelwald First in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland.
Gries Pass
Published in
Attempting to get away from baking temperatures, we headed for the mountains and a hike across summer snow fields to the Gries glacier.
Facebook implemented Open Graph tags a long time ago, so that links from blogs and websites automatically pull in preview images and a summary text. That helps the viewer to see more about the linked page without having to click through. Twitter Cards does the same thing for Twitter. I’ve been lax and only just recently
The tourism organization for Lake Lucerne has just launched a great-looking new website. Modern design, nice typography, beautiful pictures and a simple navigation all add to the experience. But one small improvement could be made by adding a few simple lines of code to the .htaccess file: making sure that visitors to the site automatically
The Great Escape
Published in
A lovely idea from Graubünden Tourism. Set up an interactive video advertisement in Zürich’s main station, showing what a beautiful part of the Alps you could end up in by just getting on a train. Then invite passers-by to join you by printing them a free ticket on the spot. (And wait for the initiative to spread across
Containers and modules in web design
Published in
Using modules in front end web programming to allow more flexibility and more independence from site layouts for content elements.
Blow-up boating on Lake Thun
Published in
Jo found that because we’d saved so many points on our supermarket card, that we could “afford” a kayak using points alone. A few days later, and a large and heavy cardboard box arrived on the post woman’s scooter trailer and we had our dinghy: an Intex Challenger K2.
The freedom to take photos in public places is under attack. Until now, in most countries in Europe you were safe to take and publish photographs that are taken from public ground: a law called “Freedom of Panorama”. When you’re on holiday, you can take a photo from the London Eye and share it with your friends on Facebook.
Avoiding specificity issues in CSS
Published in
Holy moly. What a discussion we’ve gotten into over on Twitter about CSS specificity, BEM, and inheritance. I wrote yesterday that the idea is flawed and tries to work around problems which aren’t actually problems at all, but part of the language of CSS. As Duncan noted: the problem is actually, “people write bad CSS”. Dirk from
Disabling persistent MySQL connections in TYPO3
Published in
TYPO3 occasionally throws the following error message when attempting to connect to the MySQL database, blocking the operation of the website. The error also occurs when reporting is set to Production mode in the install tool. Uncaught TYPO3 Exception: #1: PHP Warning: mysqli::real_connect(): (HY000/1040): Too many connections in […]/typo3_src-6.2.13/typo3/sysext/core/Classes/Database/DatabaseConnection.php line 1199 | TYPO3\CMS\Core\Error\Exception thrown in file[…]/typo3_src-6.2.13/typo3/sysext/core/Classes/Error/ErrorHandler.php
