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i-JK | Web design & development by Jim Kirkpatrick - Winchester, Southampton, Hampshire

Hello there! I'm super busy and still in the process of redesigning this site so please excuse the blandness here right now. Once my commitments to clients and volunteer work are met I'll get on with making this site all sexy and stuff.

Blog

Redesigning i-JK - Episode I: A new hope

Submitted by Jim Kirkpatrick on 14 February, 2009 @ 5:15am

I put my original site design together in a few days last autumn because I needed a web presence quickly. I always planned to come back and create a better theme and now I am ready to do so.

I'm going to redesign this site from the ground up to fix the problems with old, crappy web browsers (Internet Explorer 6, I'm looking at you!) and provide a look and style more befitting a freelance web designer. The original wasn't really me, nor really representative of my skills, nor sexy enough to make my potential client's salivate.

So here we are, I've installed a blank-ish Drupal theme that is ready to be made all pretty and stuff. Actually, this basic theme running you see now is the BlueTrip CSS framework and is actually deceptively good. It provides developers with powerful tools that allow me to start with good stuff like nice typography and cross-browser compatibility already built in. It provides a grid system which allows layouts to be built quickly and with a lot of flexibility, plus some nice effects and icons for links and buttons. In short, it saves a lot of time and pain while providing better value for money for my clients.

Event: From Bust to Bloom - The Green shoots of recovery

Submitted by Jim Kirkpatrick on 19 November, 2008 @ 4:03pm

From Bust To Bloom: event Dec 11 @ Discovery CentreCome hear and ask questions of 4 of the most important speakers and environmental campaigners on the evening of Thursday 11 December, 2008 at the Discovery Centre, Jewry Street, Winchester!

As part of my work with Winchester Green Party, I have been helping to arrange and promote this exciting event. We are honoured to have these fantastic and inspirational speakers confirmed:

  • Caroline Lucas MEP - Leader, Green Party
  • Tony Juniper - author, environmental campaigner and former Director of Friends of the Earth
  • Rob Hopkins - author and co-founder of Transition Towns
  • Robert Hutchison - Chairman, Winchester Action on Climate Change

WinACC website relaunch

Submitted by Jim Kirkpatrick on 21 October, 2008 @ 5:01pm

The new website I developed for WinACC has successfully gone live and will be officially launched later this month.

WinACC's new site is Drupal-based and replaces the old Wordpress blog site completely. It adds, apart from all the usual Drupally goodness, a membership system and the ability for members to post carbon footprint reports.

WinACCIt's been hard work because there was a fair amount of modification of Drupal's forms to allow the distinction between individual and organisational members. The key criteria for the site was ease of use and simplicity, so the membership sign-up and submission of user's carbon footprints had to flow as best it could. In addition to all that design and development, the old site was quite extensive and well established so I wanted to make sure the overall user experience was enhanced by the upgrade.

The bright side of fail

Submitted by Jim Kirkpatrick on 9 October, 2008 @ 2:22pm

When financial doo-doo and economic fan blades collide so precipitously, a glance behind the whirring insanity provides hope for a better world.

Horribly, predictably, the sky is falling. The wheels are falling off the financial system and everyone is blaming the bankers and financiers for the credit crunch. Doom and gloom is here and in your face.

This post isn't going to explain how the current state of affairs was an inevitable consequence of credit expansion over the last 15 years, and progressive city deregulation for the last 25. Nor will I go into how the early days of Peak Oil have precipitated the collapse in US housing and confidence which imploded all that dodgy credit last year. I will not be drawn into reminding people how a select group of insane, greedy sociopaths and ideologues created a global depression that even I, a person with no academic economic background, could see in 2001 was numbingly inevitable. I won't blame Greenspan or Blair, Brown or Bush, though they are as culpable as any in power who looked the other way during the run up to this wind-down.

3 Mobile broadband on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

Submitted by Jim Kirkpatrick on 25 September, 2008 @ 12:26am

(Updated 23 Feb 09: The information and instructions below work fine but for a bug where websites are sometimes not available. More on that at the bottom.)

I do most of my work away from an active Internet connection due to the lifestyle I lead. Asking to share a Wi-fi connection is often an imposition and I really need the net every day, so I decided to get mobile broadband from 3 (UK). It works out at £7.50/month for 5GB capacity when combined with a new with a mobile phone contract.

After a bit of faff trying to get my Huawei E169 3G USB modem to connect, I decided to do a clean upgrade of Ubuntu from 8.04 'Hardy Heron' to the as-yet unreleased 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' alpha 6 version because it has built in support for 3G modems and wireless GMS networking. So I installed, played around, put in my 3 mobile broadband settings and the damn thing still wouldn't connect. Long story short, I had the wrong settings. Ubuntu 8.10 works very well with this 3G dongle and network with no extra drivers or installs.

Hello, good evening and welcome.

Submitted by Jim Kirkpatrick on 18 September, 2008 @ 1:47am

i-JK is my new website. Welcome.

Things are still very much under development and being designed so nothing you see here is final, but it's ready enough for the prime time. This site's purpose is to provide me with a web presence, allowing me to showcase the projects I've done and the clients I've worked with, hopefully helping gain me more work in the future. It's also place to vent my spleen and comment on happenings in world news, environment, science, the web - plus write about and encourage comments on design and developement work I'm currently engaged in.

Perhaps surprisingly this is my first personal website despite me having done web design and development since I first got on the Internet back in 1996 when I started reading Media Computing at Exeter University. I've been writing code since I got my first rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum and making digital images and designs since my beloved Amiga 500 arrived. So I've been a builder of websites for over a decade, a hacker of code since I was seven (I'm 31 now) and a pusher of pixels since my first mouse-based computer in 1989. If my pedigree and commitment isn't in doubt, why only now do I decide I need this site?