I’ve just finished a new website for Italian Properties who have six holiday villas situated north of Lucca near Coreglia Antelminelli which lies in the beautiful Garfagnana region of Tuscany. I first made a website for them nearly 13 years ago to a design done by an illustrator friend. It was his first website and the fact that it has lasted all that time without looking too out-of-date is a testament to how good it was for the time.

The new site makes extensive use of FloatBox – the best of all the Lightbox clones.

Version 5 of TopStyle, the HTML and CSS editor, has just been released today. Stefan van As, the Dutch Delphi programmer, took over the development of TopStyle from Nick Bradbury (the original creator) some time ago and has introduced lots of new features to bring it up-to-date and make it compatible with HTML5 and CSS3. I’ve been beta testing and have also helped out by writing the code for new CSS3 definition file. I even get a name-check in the credits in the help files! If you hand-roll your own HTML and CSS you really should check it out.

As promised here are a few more of my photos from the ‘Thirties’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1979. These are of Highpoint 1, designed by architect Berthold Lubetkin and engineered by Ove Arup in 1935. One of the best examples of the International Style, the building was admired by Le Corbusier when he visited London.

For the first time Google’s Chrome browser has overtaken Firefox as being the most-used browser visiting the reeddesign.co.uk website according to the log files for August.

The actual figures are close with Chrome at 27.96% and Firefox 27.68%. Firefox has been top of the table since 2008 when it shot past Internet Explorer going from 2% behind in July to 16% ahead in August.

Interestingly (and annoyingly) IE6 is still a significant proportion of the 13.5% of people still using IE – and surprisingly it’s ahead of IE7. That’s only about 25 page hits a day, but still significant.

My personal preference is still for Firefox, which I’ve been using as my main browser since version 1 came out in late 2004. But I have all of the major browsers on my PC for testing purposes, most of them in several versions, the earlier of which I run on Windows XP virtual PCs.

Southwark Cathedral have just added a tour of three 360° panoramas that I produced to their website. The tour shows views of the nave, altar and crossing, and choir. The cathedral dates back to Norman times when it was known as St Mary Overy (over the water) although it only received cathedral status in 1905. Much of the current building dates to between 1220 and 1420 when it was rebuilt following a fire. In 1536 following the Dissolution of the Monasteries the church was rededicated to St Saviour. The tower and choir were restored in the early 1800s and the nave was totally rebuilt in 1839 in Gothic style. Further extensive building work was carried out in 2000 to provide conference and educational facilities.

I’ve just updated the menu system on the main part of my website using Project VII’s Pop Menu Magic 2. This allows for sub-menus to open upwards from my bottom menu. They make a great range of products. I just wish that they made them in a form other than Dreamweaver Extensions.

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.

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.