Today (while procrastinating about things that I should've been doing), I gave myself a little kick in the butt about this website. As Brian's Mum would say, I've been a Very naught boy! I've barely managed one post every couple of months since I got the site back up and there's only been one comment in the last 18 months. It's got to the point where redevelopment of the site is like a running gag in a sitcom or late night show (see "I'm f**king Matt Damon") with me talking about various things that I want to do but never actually do. Now the time has come to finally fix things.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Jeremy Keith is probably my favourite AJAX specialist, especially with his focus on Hijax. So I was really happy to hear that he's now written a book. Bulletproof Ajax looks like it's going to be a great book for those of us who want to experiment more with AJAX but aren't necessarily JavaScript pros. It's definitely going on my shopping list. (via)

Before I started travelling around I handled all of my email from Mozilla Thunderbird on my Desktop PC using POP3. Thunderbird's spam filtering was great at filtering my spam client-side and I was content. But then I sold my PC and started travelling. I quickly switched to using the RoundCube webmail client (I could have used DreamHost's default SquirrelMail but it's ugly as hell) but ran out of time to configure SpamAssassin to protect my inbox from the torrent of junk floating through cyberspace. So I traveled the globe, often with little time to check with my email, sometimes weeks apart... and the spam piled up.

This is something that I've been meaning to post about for ages but haven't gotten around to, so I'll do it quickly now.

When I originally wrote my portfolio into the website... well I don't know what the hell I was thinking. There were no links and it instead used JavaScript to pop-up a window based on the id attribute value. Obviously I was asleep that day. It was completely non-accessible and you had to have JavaScript enabled just to view any piece.