Mike Little's Journalized

I got back from the Linkin Park concert earlier and I have to say the guys were fantastic! Truly awesome!

The support bands were OK, with the Lost Prophets sounding better than local band Kinesis. But Linkin Park blew them both away. The level of professionalism was a world apart. From the lighting and sound to the songs themselves but mostly I think it was the band’s presence on stage. And the songs. And Chester’s voice (which took two songs to really warm up but which was then outstanding). And Mike Shinoda strutting round the stage firing his rap lyrics scattergun stylee. And the songs. And the fantastic rapport with the audience. You knew these guys were really enjoying themselves. They had tons of feedback from the crowd. Mike joined the people on the pit at one point. Rob on drums worked hard all night and along with Brad and Pheonix provided the solid foundation to most of the songs all night. Joe was great too, ignoring the fact that he seemed to be wearing what appeared to be a green halloween mask all night!

All in all a thoroughly fantastic night. I can’t wait for the Live in Texas DVD. It won’t be the same as being there but maybe the next best thing.

I am very pleased to announce that the company I work for, Zendor, have just published their new website www.zendor.com.

The reason I am so very, very pleased is that it is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. More than that, the site claims Level Triple-A Conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WAI-AAA).

We have designed our site to meet the W3C ‘AAA’ standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, which has been set up to promote world wide standards of access and to encourage wider use of the internet.

Unfortunately Bobby disagrees, but the priority 2 error seems to be a Bobby error and the priority 3 is being looked at.

Further, the site is extremely search engine friendly; check out some of the URIs

I wish I could claim to have had a hand in the production of this site but I cannot. My good friend Steve P took care of the standards compliance, and our design team managed to produce a good looking functional site without a single table! I can only claim to a little help with the occasional CSS problem and just about three years of solid evangelising for this level of standards compliance.

Well done to everyone involved.

Update: Steve P has pointed out that For compliance, two automatic checks are required – the two I [Steve] used were Cynthia Says and LIFT, I must confess to not having remembered the former and never heard of the latter. He also mentions that some consider Bobby to be unreliable. I do now remember that when it changed hands (wasn’t it hosted at the BBC at one point?) it became less stable.

I’m going to see Linkin Park at the MEN arena later today! I’m going with Steve.
I can’t wait. It’s been a long time since I saw a live band. I’m really looking forward to it.

I read with interest Mark Pilgrim’s highly pessimistic, but well thought out, article on comment spam yesterday. Whilst I find that I cannot disagree in principal with most things Mark says, I somehow feel that things aren’t quite at the throwing in the towel stage. On the WordPress developer list we have been discussing tactics which Mark hasn’t touched upon but which could be employed to negate the value (increased page rank) of comment spamming. Dougal sums things up nicely in the article he wrote over at the WordPress Development Blog