We are proud to announce the launch of boxwish.com — ‘The world’s first movie inspiration site’.

Tim and the rest of Team Boxwish have been working really hard to find all of the cool things you saw at the movies, but the real driver behind Boxwish is the user generated content, it’s a community site after all.

So get involved — sign up, and get Spotting!

Sign up to boxwish »

CAPTCHA (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) must have seemed like a good idea when it was first invented in 2000. Spam was beginning to become a major problem on the web and a method was needed to fight back. CAPTCHA at first glance seems ideal: a distorted image that would be instantly recognisable by humans yet incomprehensible to machines. Place some letters in the distorted image and get the user to type them back and bingo: you’ve stopped your spam problem.

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When the last iPhone was released it was a bit lacklustre as far as I was concerned. No 3G, no GPS, small memory, too expensive… Now Apple have fixed all of these shortcomings we figured it was time to jump onboard with the ‘breakthrough internet device’. In fact we decided to follow Carson’s lead and get them for everyone in the office.

It’s good to see you back! Wired network have resurrected every web designer’s fave resource and tutorial site Webmonkey.com

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Recently myself and Robin attended the Accessibility 2.0 conference. The agenda of the day was accessibility on the Internet in the ever changing world of rich media websites and social networking.

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One perennial web design issue that continues to vex and frustrate designers and clients alike is the limited number of typefaces available for text when set in HTML (i.e. without resorting to images or Flash).

But please don’t struggle against the tide. Go with the flow.

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Google Analytics rocks! I could spend hours/days/weeks sniffing about the statistical minutiae that Google Analytics serves up. Three users from X visited my site last week and each spent Y minutes on landingpage Z having been referred there by using the search term Z – amazing but probably not that useful.

If there is one metric you should look at, check out the bounce rate, the ‘I came, I puked, I left’ metric as so lucidly explained by Avinash Kaushik – check out the video presentation.

Why is it the owners of mailing lists just wont let you leave? Even when you have no interest whatsoever in what they are sending you.

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I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one to suffer from a condition that appears to be affecting my general perception of reality; a condition akin to one of the super-mutants in ‘Heroes’ slowly becoming aware of their latent powers.

Increasingly spending up to 12 hours a day interacting with software over a 20 year period is finally coming to a head as my virtual capabilities begin to bleed through to that other ‘hinterland’ of reality – meatspace (or as any flesh-jock may short-sightedly call it, the real world’).

This brave new world beckons and I’m ready to jump in.

I guess it started out with the familiar pattern of applying the celebrated shortcut CNTRL-Z (undo). Whilst working in Photoshop, I would try something out, not like it, undo and try again, repeating this pattern until I was satisfied. This would often mean hundreds of ‘undoes’ an hour, thousands over a week and millions over a number of years. This alchemical ability to ‘juggle the forms of everyday life’ with no consequence has begun to bleed through to the ‘real world’. I drop a pen, a synaptic neuron fires a CNTRL-Z event and my pen is expected to instantaneously appear back in my hand. A rosy apple in the fruit bowl shines attractively and a CNTRL-X event is fired. My car keys have moved from where I carefully placed them this morning, a search event activates.

‘Static’ objects glint, offering hidden interfaces and occult geometries of interaction. My dirty dinner plate almost reveals the ‘re-format’ button and the page corners of my magazine quiver in anticipation of auto-curl. A true convergence is happening and I can’t wait.

The guys over at Campaign Monitor have just released a new feature that automatically converts your beautiful CSS into the inline style format required for cross email client consistency.

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When IE8 is released there is talk of it rendering, by default, as if it were IE7.

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A challenge was made, a date set and geeks rallied.

Lifting the trophy aloft, it was remarked at how similar it looked to a bowling pin; fortunately not one of the dazed’n’confused staff had reported any missing. Two close games, the second only won by 7 points left Kyan the winner on this occassion. Special mention should go to Steven ‘Rocketman’ Thompson whose genuine loathing for bowling pins meant that not only did he get the top score but also managed to upset the ‘magic’ bowling robot so much that a ‘tek’ was required to fix our lane.

Highlights:

Paul taking out his own ankle with a ball
Laurent coming second last
Phil wondering how may pins in ten-pin bowling
Stevie T’s top speed of 24mph

Thanks to all at Computer Strategies, especially Tony for organising and sourcing the prices.

Microsoft proves it has genuine intentions to make Internet Explorer 8 Web Standards compliant.

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Well it must be Christmas because the parcels are flowing thick and fast through Kyan Towers. Our nice postie left a particularly sweet little package on my desk the other day
in the shape of the tiny new sub-notebook from Asus, dubbed somewhat peculiarly the eeePC.

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The team at Campaign Monitor have now setup their dedicated Email Standards Project website

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It’s live! We have launched a brand new reverse raffle website with our friends over at Raffle.it (raffle.it)

Great to see one of the most prominent brands and technology leaders finally catching up with the ‘correct’ way to build web sites.

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A great article on Vitamin gives some sound advice for any budding web entrepreneurs out there.

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Campaign Monitor, our email newsletter manager of choice, will soon be launching a dedicated website to help fight the case for Web Standards support in HTML email.

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When we went to the Future of Web Apps conference a while back everyone was raving about API’s – “You must build an API” we were told. I had no idea how much of an impact they were going to make.

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BusinessWeek have just published an article on one of the most influential web professionals in the history of the Internet – Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards.

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The ‘Font Font’ foundry reference book is back …

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It’s easy to forget that Rails only first surfaced in the summer of 2005, just two years ago, and even people in the industry are still discovering it.

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Ok, so this post is really just an excuse for me to try out the last.fm playlist widget.

Pretty soon we hope to be working on some music sharing widget technology with our friends Carbon Logic, if you haven’t checked out their site yet it’s really worth a look, and it’s free!

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So we’re no longer hosting this blog on Media Temple. Unfortunately their support was nothing short of terrible.

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Since the launch of Kyanmedia, our choice of company name has, for one reason or another, aroused great interest. I am frequently asked where the name comes from, and why we chose it. Having recited the story many times over the past five years, I thought that I would post the definitive account here, in the Kyanmedia blog, for anyone who cares to know.

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We don’t seem to do much with IIS now which I am very thankful for but every now and again I have to dive back into that scary world. Today I had to force a site to use HTTPS instead of HTTP, a task that is nice and easy in Apache but seems to be something of a complex issue for IIS.

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