Stuart Turner

I cannot believe that its nearly the end of April and I haven't made a blog post since the end of February. What have I been doing?

Well it's kind of interesting - a number of things have been keeping me busy - work, family, business and fitness.

First of all fitness, which is very important to me - I've been cycling, running, going to the gym, RPM'ing etc - all very good.

Work has been interesting - working for the financial industry has meant there have been some very big ups and downs with the recent credit crunch.

Family - busy as ever - everyone doing well (crossed fingers it stays that way).

Business - squeakymouse is doing well. Lots of recent projects - some i can't mention - but lets just say things are going TOO well!!!

Thats all for now - will be back with some more meaningful updates.

Recently had someone call me about a problem where they would start using Live Messenger, but then it would freeze showing an hour glass and Internet Explorer would need to be terminated through task manager.

At first, thought it may be a firewall setting, but that didn't make much sense when I thought about it a little longer.

Looked at the amount of "Browser Plugins / Helpers" and was amazed to see quite a few listed.

Took out anything that I thought were not useful e.g. Google toolbar, Yahoo toolbar, McAfee site analyser, iTunes helper, Facebook helper" - you get the picture, there were tons of them.

Once I did that, everything worked fine.

I could of started switching them back on one by one to see which combination worked, but to be honest the people didn't need them and didn't even know what they were for ... sigh ...

Some cheesy things to keep your visitors entertained:

• Snake Game
• Lottery Picker
• Image Switcher

Below are some links to layout components that I may leverage on the fottie portal re-write. All are from the excellent Dynamic Drive website.

• Ajax rss scrolling ticker.
• Accordion view.
• Nice way to do pagination.
• Tabs.
• Controllable status bar.
• Clock with Date.

Nifty cubes is a javascript library that gives you rounded corners without images. Useful if you want to keep playing with content etc.