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So, a new start. Well, sort of.

In a world where all the kool kids are twittering rather than blogging, it might seem a retrograde step to be creating a blog, but this site has been long at the back of my mind, with precious little time to make it happen.

It’s precisely three years since I last designed and built a website and for a long time it has felt like that chapter had decisively closed. Earlier this year, and right at the time it hit me just how much I was missing the process of creating something, I re-found old favourites John Oxton and Jon Hicks via The Rissington Podcast.

It was perfect timing.

Hearing their still-fresh enthusiasm for what they do, and realising that, well, you know, I still know some stuff, made me decide to get my hands dirty in earnest once again. This site is driven very much by the desire to get back closer to the detail of pixels and code – a challenge to see if could actually still do it, and to re-find the creative buzz you are never going to find in a Word document.

So, what about it. The domain name comes from my insistence on something short, distinctive and a .com. I am already rather fond of it.

In design terms, it is, as you’ll guess, very much a work in progress but a few comments nevertheless. I wanted to reflect something of the endless Helvetica I saw on a life-changing trip to New York (if ever a city had an in-house font…), and to keep it simple, readable and clean.

There’s much, much more to come as I get my head round the various plugins I need to get familiar with, and tighten up what’s already here. There, got my disclaimer in early…

Having set up elsewhere temporarily with WordPress, it didn’t take long to realise that it wasn’t going to be enough. I like WordPress in many ways, and love where Zeldman et al. at Happy Cog are taking it next, but I don’t like being second-guessed on markup and I also needed the extra spur to avoid relying on an existing template – which WordPress, in a way, makes life just too easy.

Thank goodness then for a timely Rissington Podcast extolling the virtues of an old friend, Textpattern. It’s been the base for many of the sites I’ve built in the past, and returning to it has brought home how true its claims are to be a ‘flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system’. It doesn’t get in the way, it’s lightweight, it’s a joy to use. I ♥ TXP.

On the content, what’s here is a reflection of a view posts left over from the short-lived WordPress experiment and even a few older Vox pieces I wrote some time ago. I want use this space more in future to talk more about technology, its impact on our lives and our cities – London in particular. I want to give you a flavour of what I’m reading, and some of what I’m thinking about and why. This may or may not include occasional Arsenal-related diatribes.

Enjoy.

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