To speed things up somewhat, all large files hosted on this website are now called via the Rackspace Cloud Files CDN. This means wherever you are in the world, you should be downloading the largest parts of this site from a server very local to you, rather than a server that’s maybe the other side of the world.

Find out more about CDN’s here. I’d recommend Rackspace over Amazon’s offering any day!

First, is the Active Bar, from the guys at IE6update.com. There’s been a lot of debate on this topic – and whether it’s a good idea to mislead users into upgrading. My own views on the topic, if a user is mislead by this banner, and upgrades from IE6 to IE8 – then no harm done, and one more person’s computer integrity saved.

I would start questioning morals if people starting using this to link to Firefox or other browsers though …

Secondly, a warning message at the top of every page:

These might seem a bit strong, especially for people who can’t upgrade from IE6 within their corporate environment – but the site is still accessible to these users. I strongly believe IE6 is out-dated, and provides a big security risk for those using it – as well as not following any of the decent web standards. The sooner we can convince users to upgrade, or bully their network admins into doing something about it, the better.

And for those who are still not convinced, you can always sign the petition to save IE6:

www.saveie6.com

The final event was streamed live from the Brixton Academy to thousands of people across the world, with several surprise guests:

View the full playlist at YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6E0BF7A44686EB04

Just found some pictures online from the launch party:
http://rdujour.com/2009/08/27/david-baileys-alive-at-night/

It provides a quick and easy way for you and your friends to access all the latest GavinPearce.com news from within Facebook by means of a Tab on your profile. You can also quickly share tips and articles to your profile stream.

Why not check it out? I don’t store any of your user data, and you can quickly remove it again if you hate it!

http://apps.facebook.com/gavinpearce

And to add the Tab:
http://apps.facebook.com/gavinpearce/tab.php

After plenty of time working on client projects, I’ve finally built myself a decent place of my own.

To introduce myself … I’m a great believer in Open Source and the principles behind it, and have been working full-time developing Web Applications for a number of years. I love coding to standards, and religiously follow various W3C specs and guidelines, taking it to heart when I notice others don’t.

Having worked in agencies big (Wunderman – the largest DM agency in the UK) and small (TBS – a grand total of four staff), along with a large agenda of freelance  and personal projects, I am always stumbling across things that amaze me every day – and shall be sharing most of them here.

I have to admit at this early stage – I am going to largely use this whole website as my own personal information store, but you are of course more than welcome to read, comment, and disagree as much as you feel fit! And although I can’t always release all my source-code, I solemnly promise to post and share as much as can, as often as I can.

In my spare time I’m a keen sailor, and water-sports enthusiast, so you very well may find the odd sporting article creeping into here, ignore or laugh at it as you feel fit!

I’m always looking for interesting ideas and projects to work on, so always feel free to get in touch!

YouTube won’t allow you to embed this video, but I thought I’d end this introduction with a link to the classic scene from The IT Crowd, about “The Internet”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

It was good to meet you!