Aleks Krotoski gave a talk at d-Construct this year called 'Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place'. This is my summary of what she said and the bits of her talk that I liked the best.

Aleks talked about the shared goals of the web and games industry, how we could learn from each other, but how we don't seem to talk much to each other. The games industry needs to learn to build better community and could learn a lot from what the web has accomplished. We need to learn to achieve the 'stickiness' that the games industry has acheived. I'm not completely …

When I first went freelance I created some origami business cards that included instructions on how to make the card into an origami crane. They were very well received, but people struggled to follow the instructions and very few were successfully turned into the form that had been intended.

So, to help people I've created some video instructions. This takes you step by step through the process and lets you return to any step that you might have missed the first time through.

You can find the video instructions here:

Origami crane - video instructions

Steven Johnson gave a talk at d-Construct 2008 on the Urban Web. This is my summary of what was said, and the bits I found most interesting.

He told us a fascinating story of the Cholera Epidemic in London and how one outbreak, a map visualisation and combined local knowledge helped them figure out that contaminated water was the cause of the disease. It was a brief summary of his book 'The Ghost Map'. He then went on to talk about how the web, combined with geographical data could bring us all closer to our communities and local knowledge.

He mentioned Tufte, who I've heard people talk about …

When I do a piece of design that involves typography I spend ages choosing the right font. The font that will endow the work with the right feeling and the font that is most similar to the one I've got pictured in my head.

This normally takes ages, but I've written a Font Picker program in Flash to help me do it. It shows you a sample of your chosen text displayed using all the fonts on your computer. You can then whittle down this list by removing unsuitable fonts.

The best thing is that this works straight from your browser and still displays the fonts that are on your computer. I've also …

A List Apart have started doing a yearly survey of web professionals. I read their report last year but I missed my chance to answer the survey.

This year I've been quicker of the mark and answered the 18 pages of questions. So, if you work in the wonderful world of web then you should take the survey too.

My last project has been my most high profile since I went freelance. So, I'm excited to announce that it went live this week. The website in question is the new Oxfam International site.

I was working with Fortune Cookie, DGF Solutions and the web team at Oxfam. I was responsible for implementing Fortune Cookie's designs using Drupal and PHP. I worked with the Oxfam team to move a huge amount of content from their old site to the new site. I also gave training to the Oxfam editors on how to use their new Drupal Site.

It was a very challenging project, particularly making it multilingual. I …

They say the future is mobile. (Ed. Two years on since originally writing this post, it almost seems like the future is here. We might have all missed the App Store gold rush, but app development for mobile is still exciting and now there's Android, Windows Phone 7 and iPads to think about.)

So, I'm quite excited to learn about developing for this new platform and see what I can create. Will I be able to use my existing web development and programming skills, or will I need to learn a new set of skills. This is what I've learnt so far about what I'll need to know.

There are two options when …

I created this simple app recently to print out all the tables in an SQL Server database. It shows each table's name, description and information about all its columns. I mainly use it when I start on a new project that has an existing database that I need to fully understand.

This is an ASP.NET app, but it's based on the code from Jim Rutherford's ASP SQL Server Schema Printer.

It's just an ASP.NET page. First you need to add your database connection string and then you upload it to your webserver.

You can download it from here:

Simple SQL Server Database Schema Printer (ASP.NET)

I was getting the following error while developing my doodle flash application using ActionScript 3.0:

1502 A script has executed for longer than the default timeout period of 15 seconds.

I tracked the problem down to a piece of code that looped through a large XML document. At first I thought there was nothing I could do, but after playing about with it and pulling my hair out for a while I found out several things that helped me reduce the runtime by an impressive amount. I wanted to share my findings in case anyone else was having similar problems.

Finding 1: XML .. operator is very slow …

This is my latest creation using Flash and ActionScript 3. You can draw a lovely doodle on one of your Flickr photos and then save it and send it to your friends.

It started as a simple doodle program, but I thought adding Flickr photos would make it more fun. It uses the Flickr API to load the photos and a web service I've written in ASP.NET to save and load the doodles.

I've been sending people Christmas doodles this year as Christmas eCards.

So, why not go and doodle on your photos and send them to your friends.