We nearly didn’t write this post because our motivation was at a low point following the disappointment of this month’s cake experience: we look forward to our cake consumption with gusto and feel slightly let down by the latest sweet treat.  I’ll hasten to add that the picture in question is NOT the cake we consumed; we were not motivated to take a photo of said cake which was a “Tesco’s Finest” number which was neither “Fine” nor “Drizzly” but it was from Tesco’s, did have a hint of lemon and probably was a cake so they got some of the name right.

Out of obligation I have written this post as a warning to other would be consumers of the “Tesco’s Finest Lemon Drizzle Cake”; beware of frauds in your midst and avoid at all costs.

With the recent shock revelation that Mrs Kipling does actually exist and was once an actress in Corontation St we thought we should make sure that the exceedingly good cakes were as good as we remembered.

Safe to say that the despite the implications of some sort of power shift within the Mr Kipling marketing machine, the cakes are still high quality. Just take a look at Patrick’s face. He’s loving that Bakewell.

Halloween special – Mooncake! And what a cake; brought back as a present from Hong Kong this cake holds a dirty little secret. Inside, AKA Scotch egg style is a duck egg yolk. You might think this is normal, ‘cakes are made with egg’ I hear you say. But this one actually has a solid egg in the middle and so deserves another picture (below). Suffice to say that it didn’t go down particularly well in the office. In fact, I was the only one who tried a second bite and certainly the only person to partake in the egg. According to Wikipedia Mooncakes are ‘rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries.’ You can say that again.

Still, in the spirit of Halloween, these cakes are for the Zhongqiu Festival for lunar worship and moon watching. So fill your boots!

One of the first blog posts on the UV^d blog was about Java application called Wordle which created pretty looking tag clouds based on word occurrences in blog RSS feeds, del.icio.us accounts or any block of supplied text.

It is quite interesting to see a peripheral snapshot of how a blogs content changes over time. Saves the trouble of reading it all as well.

This is the first of our cake of the month posts. Today we found inspiration from an M&S Coffee & Walnut cake. Whilst discussing the finer details of our ongoing redesign we enjoyed moist coffee flavoured sponge with just the right amount of buttercream. Highly recommended by the whole team.

Future cake of the month reviews will consist of a wide variety of butter filled, sugar coated blog posts. Our intrepid team of eaters will be happy to accept free dessert based gifts from readers who wish to raise the profile of their cake making enterprises. Sponge, pie or flan; biscuit, Battenburg or birthday. We will eat it all. Stay tuned.

On the 15th January 2009 we finally found a new member of staff after 9 months of rigorous interviews. We have been waiting 1 month for him to work his notice period but our new developer- Vandon – started work for us today. He’s doing remarkably good for someone with slightly less experience than we had originally been looking for.

‘Conformance to these Guidelines will help make the Web more accessible to users with disabilities and will benefit all users.’

The site contains quite a bit of complexity and rich content and we have also built an interactive Flash component in AS3 for part of the site which requires alternative content.

We like to think we are pretty good at CSS and have built the site with all the pre-requisites. The only trouble is that when it came to releasing a test version of the site to the client, he was using Internet Explorer 6 (at the time of posting this accounts for 25% of all web browsers so not to be ignored).

We have spent the day painstakingly going through the site page by page to make it look and function just as it does in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox (of course) and Safari.

This got us thinking about starting a campaign: “One World, One Browser”

(and of course let it be Firefox*)

You may well say that this is dictatorial, anti-competitive, unimaginative even. But after tonight, who cares.

JOIN US. WE ARE ONE.

PS: More info on Accessibility on W3C here

*nb: update; I’m told now let it be Chrome.