Stefan Lindblad – like me a long time CorelDRAW user and beta tester – has just published a series of interviews with CorelDRAW users… and I’ve been included!

You can read the full interview on his blog.

Also included are interviews with Fu Tiepeng, Jan Felber, Pratik Shah, David Millisock, Anand Dixit, Hugh Johnson and Foster D Coburn III.

Byron McGregor has just updated Floatbox to v5.0. Floatbox is probably the best of the Lightbox clones. Luckily I spotted a small problem with some of the graphic GIF files that come with the download. Byron had run these through Google’s Page Speed optimizer but some of them had been corrupted by this process. All’s been put right now, so if you’re looking for a Lightbox clone that does a whole lot more (see the demos on his website) start downloading. Floatbox isn’t free, but at just $20 per site license it’s a bargain – especially as the technical support (if you should need it – the documentation is extensive) is as good as it gets.

I’ve just produced a quick little website for a neighbour of mine to advertise her caravan for hire at Harlyn Bay in North Cornwall. I did all of the photography including a 360° panorama of the interior of the lounge. I didn’t realise how spacious caravans can be these days. When I was a student I lived in much smaller flats than this – and much less well appointed. Harlyn Bay is a beautiful spot, so if you’re looking for a week away…

ReedDesign has just produced the smallest website that it’s ever made. It’s for the executive mentoring company EBM. The website is based on the Luna template by Project VII which uses the menu to produce a scrolling effect between sections of the page. So essentially it’s a single page website, but with a fixed header and footer, judicious use of CSS3 and the scrolling effect I think its quite a stylish little site.

I’ve just published my London Blue Plaques Map using the GoogleMaps UI. It’s been a bit of a labour of love, but I think it’s the most complete version (there are a few others around) showing over 850 English Heritage plaques and about thirty from the Southwark Council Blue Plaque scheme. If you’re interested, there’s a beautiful book on the plaques ‘Lived in London – Blue Plaques and the Stories Behind Them’ edited by Emily Cole. It’s £40, but it’s over 600 pages and beautifully illustrated.

A few years ago I produced a Volumetric Calculator using some basic JavaScript for Scarlet Couriers, a Reading based courier company. More recently I worked on the website for APC Overnight who act as a hub for Scarlet and other courier companies around the UK where a slightly revamped version of the calculator was used on their site. I was very chuffed to see it got a rave review from the Midlands Business News website.

The website for Financial Management for Business – an innovative business finance foundation course – went live this afternoon. This is to reinforce the publication next Monday of the book that accompanies the course.

The FMFB course is a unique way of mastering the foundations of financial management. Through a series of interactive simulations and online self-tests, participants develop an intuitive understanding of financial management and new business skills that can be immediately applied in the workplace.

Not a major re-design at first glance (and nothing that affects this blog) but making the menu fixed to the bottom of the browser window on the main site involved making a lot of changes. The page will disappear under the menu if the page is long enough to scroll under a background PNG with graduated transparency.

In order for this not to be broken in IE6 I’ve got a conditional stylesheet that takes away the PNG and stops the menu being fixed. I tried all of the various PNG fixes, but having a combination of a fixed element and a PNG background image stopped the links working. Yet another of IE6′s bizarre little ways. Won’t it be good when it finally goes the way of all old browsers.

While I was doing this I took the opportunity to update the folder structure which had grown a bit unwieldy over the years. Checking all the links on the site – nearly 40,000 – and then working out the best way to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file was fun. Thanks go to Michael Fesser for advice on the use of RedirectMatch and regular expressions.

ReedDesign has just finished a complete redesign of the website of award winning composer Robert Hartshorne who goes under the scholarly business sobriquet of ECG – Ex Cantibus Gaudium – Enjoyment Through Melody. The site includes 60 audio and nearly 100 video clips that show off Robert’s great musical talent, including sections on Thomas and Friends and Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain.

I saw this notice in the window of an Internet shop in Clapham this morning!