This month we’re proud to support Kahaila cafe based in Brick Lane, London. They’re supporting some amazing young people to make a positive impact on the local community and serving great cakes at the same time.

Check out the work they do and if you’re ever in the area, settle in for a coffee.

Southampton Street Pastors are a charity that works with local police between 10pm and 4am on Friday and Saturday nights helping anyone who needs it. Their 50 or so volunteers clean up broken glass, get vulnerable people home, administer first aid, defuse violent situations and give out blankets, flip flops and sweets every weekend.

We’re pretty keen on Southampton and want to see businesses flourish here and the work these guys do is having a measurable and recognised impact on crime levels – they’re looking after the city in a different way. Please check them out.

A hard drive failure meant re-installing my OS and given that I’ve basically had the same install for >4 years I thought it about time I started from scratch.

My MBP feels way faster (Trad platter rather than SSD sadly) but on my virgin install I was having ssh connection timeout issues. Every few minutes it would bomb.

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WaterAid

This month Rareloop are proud to support WaterAid who use practical solutions to provide clean water, safe sanitation and hygiene education to the world’s poorest people.

Please check out their good work.

One of our case studies touches on the creation of a star rating system for data collection tool used by Tearfund in Sub-saharan Africa.

Stars I hear you say? Well that’s just images. Easy.

Yeah, we could have built it using images. Dull dull dull. We’re still of the mind that anything can be accomplished with a little imagination so we opted for a css based approach. And here’s how we did it.

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It’s been a while in the making but Rareloop.com has had a welcome update including a case studies section showing off a little of what we do (more on it’s way). We had a lot of decisions to make about how we portray ourselves but eventually decided that transparency and simplicity work best. We won’t be hammering our Rareloop twitter account or artificially pushing a facebook page, instead we’re going to keep talking about things that we care about (when we can find the time) and show people what we do.

We hope you like it.

CSS Counters have been in the spec since 2.1 and work well with the psuedo elements :before and :after. They’re pretty neat especially when mixed with nested elements where they can return even more granular results but I’ve never seen them used in the wild.

CSS Counters seem designed for list items but what if you wanted to create documentation, Ts & Cs or minutes for a meeting that had section & sub-section numbers but weren’t laid out as a list? Turns out there are a few tricks to getting this to work properly.

Other examples I’ve seen explore using counters on ordered or unordered list and give you options for declaring the value of nested list items, but I wanted a solution that would allow numeration of a more ‘free-form’ document. So that’s what I’ve tried to do here, let me know how you think I did. . . Continue reading →

So it’s the first blog post of my new blog. And I have a choice. The first post on a blog kind of sets out your stand so I’m thinking I should start with a write up of one of our recent experiences with HTML5 on mobile devices. But there’s something else on my mind:

Three reasons Apple got it right with the iPhone4S.

There was a ridiculous media back-lash (‘media’, as opposed to say, ‘normal’, ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’) to Apple’s press release last week with the ensuing sh**storm of naysayers saying, well ‘nay’, and other assorted pundits declaring that Apple is doomed. Here are three reasons I think they nailed it. Continue reading →