Ian Pouncey

Happy New Year (2012)

Another year gone by, and once again it has been a great one.

In January I started a new job, web developer on the Frameworks team at the BBC. Five years or so ago I came up with a list of three companies I would like to work for. Yahoo! was one of them. Tick. BBC was one of the others. Tick! I’m pleased to say that my expectations have been exceeded, I work with a great bunch of people and enjoy (almost) every day. Starting on Tuesday, my first day back after a Christmas break, I’m going to start work on a very exciting accessibility related project, making my job for the next month or so even more interesting.

In March I co-presented ‘Inclusive Design: Creating Beautiful, Usable & Accessible Websites’ at SXSW Interactive, and the following week had the best conference experience I’ve ever had at CSUN 2011. This year I will be attending again, and also speaking on the subject of Cyberethics and Accessibility.

In July, my first book was published. I’ve had enough time away from writing it to think that I’d like to have a go at the 4th edition, but this time write it from scratch instead of revising a previous edition.

After all that the second half of the year seemed quite quiet, but passed just a quickly.

This year there is one other big occasion I am looking forward to, the wedding of my sister at the end of April.

So, what else has been going on?

• I finally started to lose weight, still a long way to go, but I’m getting there. My sisters wedding is a big incentive to lose a lot more.
• Still no place of my own, but I’m a bit more hopeful of buying somewhere this year.
• I attended a few more gigs in 2011 than I did in 2010. Best of them were: Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden (saw them twice in just over a week), Within Temptation, and Terrorvision (the second time I saw them, although they were good the first time as well).
• On a related note, I’ve not picked up my bass for an entire year. I really need to buy a new one, but that has been the case for years.
• Now I’ve started to lose weight I’m hopeful that I can take up Judo again, without damaging my knees every time I play.

So, life is good, and I hope yours is too. Have a great year, everyone.

Published

Today my first book, Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design, was released. Published by Wrox, this is the 3rd edition of a popular book that was previously written by Richard York, and I can only hope it is reviewed as favourably as his editions.

Richard gets author credit on the 3rd edition because this a revision, albeit one with lots of new stuff, rather than a rewrite. When Wrox offered me the job of creating the 3rd edition they let me make the decision on whether to revise or rewrite - I choose to revise it as I had no idea of what I was getting myself in to and figured it would be easier than starting with a blank page. In fact I found editing another persons words harder than writing the original copy in the book. If there is a next time, I’ll know better.

The process of writing / revising a book was interesting, a combination of frustration, hard work and satisfaction. I spent over 6 months knowing that whenever I was doing anything in my spare time other than writing that I had something I should be doing. At the same time browser vendors don’t have the good grace to stop working on their products (not even Microsoft!) so that the book doesn’t get out of date so quickly. While everything I wrote applies perfectly well to the latest versions of browsers, the deadline for the last chapter was just before the release of both IE9 and Firefox 4, and I knew nothing about IE10 or Firefox 5.

When I was done it was a great relief, but only a few weeks after I was already missing it, and couldn’t stop myself working on a chapter outline for another book. Whether I’ll ever write it is a different matter.

For now I can only hope that someone, somewhere, learns a thing or two about CSS from this book, and that they go on to enjoy creating websites as much as I do.