2005 has been a great year. In April I spent a lot of time redesigning my blog for the May 1st CSS reboot. It was great to have the motivation to do something different with my site though in the end the whole thing ended up being a bit of a rush job and I was up till dawn on the day of the reboot to try and get everything finished and working :-).
In June Work paid for me to attend @media2005 and following the second day's presentations in particular, I was inspired to raise my game as a web developer and to really focus on the details, doing all I could to create sites the 'right' way. This enthusiasm on the back of @media allowed myself and my good friend and colleague Tim huegdon to be able to bring about change at work and turn other members of our team on to web standards.
This new drive towards web standards lead to the development of the new Rentokil-Initial site which was then subsequently featured on Stylegala.com. From there on the web development team at Rentokil has been steadily moving in the right direction and we will be continuing to work towards developing with standards into 2006.
Right after @media I decided I needed to fix some of the mistakes I had made with my site's current design. So I began to tweak the existing design into the fixed/fluid/elasticated/dropping columns site you see before you now. The markup was cleaned up, the CSS overhauled and I added funky caching to my homemade CMS. All of this culminated in the Fall CSS reboot but I felt like a bit of a charlatan as there wasn't that much of a visible change between the old and new design.
October saw me finally make it over to the dark-side and I purchased a second-hand 12" Apple Powerbook. Since I've had it I've loved using it and can't wait to get my grubby little hands on one of the new Mac-Intel powerbooks so I can run OSX, Ubuntu and windows all on one machine!
In early November I got the chance to attend the d.Construct Web 2.0 conference held by clear:left. I picked up a lot of useful information from the event and found a new love for collaborative editing using subEthaEdit. I also met some great people
Next up was Molly Holzschlag's Geek dinner which was great event and I had a great time meeting up with everyone there. I really hope there will be another event like it when Molly is back over in the UK in February.
On the 1st of December I was really surprised to see an email from Paul 'Scrivs' Scrivens saying I had been accepted into the 9rules network. As we go into 2006 I am really looking forward to being part of the network and to keep improving this blog.
As 2005 is coming to a close I am looking forward to what 2006 may bring. As far as the plans for Muffin Research Labs go, there will be plenty more quality articles coming up and in 2006 I am hoping to be able to bring about a community project idea I've had for a while now. More on that in due course.
Here's wishing everyone a great Christmas and a happy New Year, now I'm off to bed as I have a plane to catch in 4 hours time. Catch you all after Christmas.