One Giant Leap for Tangerines

Houston, we have lift off! It was a bright, crisp autumn day in Bristol to match the launch of this shiny new site. Share the joy of this milestone with me. Share my desktop too:

Between starting this site and now, the keyboard has created many a client’s site by being depressed, and many a bizarre idea has destroyed the clean pages of the notebook. It almost sounds like this site is the product of mild mental illness. I’m saying nothing. It’s been a long road. Anyone for a pint?

Now, time for the sober, serious business: None of this would have been possible without the tender ministrations, and occasional mayhem of developer extraordinaire, Jon Gibbins. May the gods look kindly on his transgressions in pursuit of his art. Say no more. Nudge, nudge. Oh, I was being serious, wans’t I? OK, OK. He’s great. I owe him more than a sane man would give, or tolerate receiving. There’s more about Jon’s contribution in the colophon.

Wow, I feel like I'm playing pretend Oscars in front of the mirror clutching a hairbrush and a vase, but it’s all good. Let the exuberance flow where it may. Thanks also go to Chris, for never ceasing to apply the subtle pressure of asking about jontangerine.com—beware this man, he’s a lethal friend and webapp security guru.

So, what have we here? Well, let me show you around (imagine a big grin:) Under the hood (that’s bonnet for us Brits) we have some plain old semantic HTML (POSH) with juicy slices of microformats from hAtom to rel-tag and lots in between. It has been remixed with CSS but delivered to you without any background images or superfluous presentational shenanigans.

I think of this site in terms of user’s experience: Mine, as a publisher, will hopefully be one of managing a lifelong file; a notebook for my own life. In fact, that’s what you'll be seeing – notes garnered from diverse sources crafted hacked into entries. Hopefully, it will be something my family and I can read in years to come and laugh at Daddy’s dodgy writing style. Up to now we have a blog, and aggregated asides from my bookmarks, tweets and events. You may think of it as a blog. I call it log. Part humour, part true denominator. Hopefully you'll be entertained, at least for a little while.

Over the coming months and years you'll find me publishing on all kinds of different topics from interface design to typography to user experience, whether Web or not. There may even be a few tangerines hanging around. I'll try not to bore you, and I hope you like what you see. In the meantime, if you stumble across any bugs, please let me know, it will be much appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to wade through this thorny prose and please feel free to say hello, anytime.