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.

Had a great day at the Rock Oyster Festival today. Loads of good food and drink – including Stingers a very pleasant cordial made from nettles and a great mackerel burger from Nathan Outlaw.

I flew my Crane Rokkaku with the Carp streamers and was surprised to see a large white inflatable angel kite appear from behind me and even more surprised to see it being flown by Martin Lester – I’d forgotten that he’d moved to Cornwall from Bristol some years ago.

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 had two great days at the Blackheath Kite (and Bike) Festival last weekend. It’s always good to meet up with old friends and get to know new ones and there were plenty there, especially from Fractured Axel.

On Saturday I commentated on a trick flying display in the arena with Chris Goff and Piero Serra performing the tricks I called out to order.

On the Sunday there were a lot of people flying Benson Deep Space kites so we decided to do a group photo – 16 in all, although I think there were still one or two flying on the far side of the field.

The Scratch Bunnies (the current world champion kite team, on the day comprising Carl and James Robertshaw, Chris Goff and Sasha Reading) put on a great impromptu display. I think it was the only event in the arena to get a spontaneous round of applause from the crowd during their routine. Precision flying at its best.

One of my oldest friend’s son, Jethro Jackson, has just opened a studio/gallery at Porthilly, near Rock, on the North Cornwall Coast. Jethro and his father, Paul Jackson are both potters and more recently Jethro has started painting beautiful seascapes. The gallery is also showing the work of other potters including Chris Prindl and Eddie Curtis, sculpture and jewellery – and some of my photographs! This is the first time in nearly 20 years that any of my photos have been seen in public. Most of the photos are of Cornwall, either the North Coast or Bodmin Moor.

You can see some of the images in my Cornwall collections at Flickr and animated versions of the panoramas here.

The gallery is very light and airy and you can see Jethro at work in his studio at the rear.

About 100 metres down the road is the beautiful little church of St Michael which stands right on the coast at Porthilly Cove with views of Padstow across the Camel Estuary. It’s a fantastic spot and well worth a visit if you’re in Cornwall this summer.

The 12th Streatham Common Kite Day was a great success. The weather was good, although the wind could have been better – being from the north-east it came over the crest of the hill which made it very gusty and turbulent.

We had hundreds of visitors to the festival, due partly I’m sure to the live interviews with Bob Colover and myself on Radio London’s Lesley Joseph show on Sunday morning.

We’ve had people travel from as far as Devon to come to the kite day in past years, but this year we had a group of fliers who’d come from Thailand to show off their beautiful Chula and Pakpao kites. The Chula is the male kite. It has three bamboo barbs attached to its line for snagging the Pakpao female kite. The Pakpao is quite small and fragile. It is highly manoeuvrable and flown with a long tail with which it attempts to snare and tangle its male opponent.

Some of the invited guest fliers had pulled out at the last minute, so we were a bit worried that we might not have enough going on to fill the arena, but in the end everyone mucked in and there weren’t too many dead spots.

It was nice to meet Mike Slocombe of Urban75 after having been an admirer for several years.

You can see more photos of the day at the Streatham Kite Day Gallery or my Flickr account.

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