I have spent yesterday and will spend today and tomorrow in a Microsoft Partner Training on the new parts of Visual Studio. It is quite an impressive IDE, and can now also deal with XML and schemas quite nicely. Maybe if it also supported DTDs properly, the HTML output of .NET wouldn’t make us weep any longer.

I really liked the idea of introducing snippets of code as an anazingly new feature. :-)

We all knew that the success of the million dollar homepage will spin off lots of imitations and plagiates. One of the more funnier ones is Buy it off where you can buy parts of a female body to be revealed and link to your site. Visitors can also solve puzzles in these parts of the body and win money – which means that there will be more people visiting that site.

Now, good marketing and an almost unique idea, but the technical implementation is really bad, you’ll need MSIE to see the lady undress – if that many people can be bothered, as last time I heard there are naked ladies somewhere on the web for free, should you be interested.

Older and more honest seems to be TinaTina, a German student who tries to finance her studies by revealing more and more in photo series of superb quality and taste. “Better naked than daft” is the motto.

Personally I think I will spare you a dress-off Chris to finance this site, but I might keep it in mind it as a last resort…

I just got greeted by this happy chap at the tube station:

He collected donations for a male cancer research charity and I must say he has balls doing so dressed like this.

Can you imagine the interview? “You want me to go dressed as WHAT?”

Only in England, I love this place!

I had some people complaining about the price for accommodation in London. Well, it is true, this city is bloody expensive, but if you are not too afraid to rough it a little, and you get together and book a room for more than one or two people the Generator Hostel at Russel Square is cheap and good to use.

12 people could share a room for £12.50 a night each for example.

I have a 6×1.5m balcony, in case you want to bring a sleeping bag.

I am currently writing up my follow up article for my digital web article 10 reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility aptly named “Seven habits of projects who fail to deliver accessibility”.

In it I’ll be listing mistakes I have encountered and done which caused the final product to become less accessible than it could have been. Examples are taking all the accessibility responsibility away from the client and believing the product description of a CMS without really testing if it delivers what it promises.

What are the snags that you kept encountering in your products?

One I just had to suffer again is a company trying to cut down the amount of incoming emails by looping requests through an FAQ system that fails to help:

Dear Christian,
The following may help in answering your question:
No matches were found.
If this response did not answer your question, you can submit it now

No, it didn’t help me, and a clever system would not even bother showing this message.