Kim Hollamby | The anchor swallowed

Just seen this video - there are some well known pictures of French lighthouses in storms but seeing those waves move is something else again.

Just completed designing and running the lighting for Reading Operatic’s production of Oklahoma at the Hexagon in Reading.

In one sense it all felt a bit strange, the first show by this company since Geoff Bamford passed away. So a bit subdued at the beginning but the audiences picked up as the week went along and everything went well.

I managed to take a few reference pics for posterity - a lot of them have come out a bit orange, must learn how to colour balance that on the camera if possible next time around. And a mid-stage path of light using PAR64 CP61s got a bit wild on exposure but looked fine in reality. The pic here (Act II Sc2 for the record) is more representative although it does rather harshly show the effect of a wrinkly lower half to the backing cloth.

Lighting the dream ballet at the end of Act I was fun. I hadn’t got that involved in lighting for dances until earlier this year when I designed for a show put on by a dance school but am really interested to do some more now.

We’re beginning to reap the benefits of an awful lot of prep work in the team earlier in the year, and there’s no better illustration than IPC Connect’s recent launch of the new Good To Know portal which uses the IPC CMS2 project as a platform.

Following an extensive period of research the site maps and designs were in with my team at the end of May and we were in a position to roll out the site’s first three verticals covering diet, health and food at the beginning of August. It helped a fair deal that we had pre-prepped CMS modules waiting to provide much of the initial functionality.

That timetable also worked thanks to a highly collaborative process where we knitted together product and project management, developers and designers right alongside the brand team headed by editor June Smith-Sheppard, Publishing Director Oswin Grady and freelance digital designer Jesse Lewis.

While anyone can use a lift to travel a few floors in our building (and they are a lot quicker here in IPC’s new building compared to our old place) I think we’re really reaping the benefits of placing the web development team right in the middle of the brand teams (and hence be seen as a more creative function) rather than taking a remote space that resembles some kind of IT Area 51. It’s a real bonus for my team to work with such a wide spread of people here at IPC Media - print publishers and magazine-grounded people in particular are often seen as not getting ‘the Internet’ at all but like all throw-away lines that one takes a sometimes applicable grain of truth and makes it universal gospel - it doesn’t really say anything at all about the instinct and talent that sits inside this building. Harness that with some of the great digital developers that we have employed in the past 12 months through a slow and sometimes painful recruitment process, add a sound technical strategy and you create a very interesting basis for website development.

Good To Know is now in beta form with plans to release new features on a regular basis from now on. Some things we are pretty sure about but no doubt the users of the site will push us in as-yet unforeseen directions as the site expands.

IPC Media Good To Know release here.

Have just launched a series of websites covering our shooting and field sports brands - Shooting Times, Sporting Gun, The Field and The Shooting Gazette, all of them clustered under a new portal, Shooting UK.

This particular set of web builds burned a lot of midnight oil in order to get them ready for the CLA Game Fair - which then was cancelled due to the crazy weather that was the UK’s lot in July. Still it’s always good to have a target with site builds.

The internet is really an oddity, it has a notional deadline every second but often no real sense of timetable unless one is imposed.

Good news - Strand Lighting has done something to sort its website and it looks a lot better. Bad news - it hasn’t bothered to redirect any of its old links - try to access them and you get a page with some old navigation and a brace of javascript errors.

It’s not nice work, it’s often tedious but getting proper 301 redirects in place when you migrate site content to new platforms is at the least desirable and in real terms highly desirable from a search engine optimisation point of view. Bit focused on this at the moment as we have a lot of similar exercises to perform soon.

Meantime I’ve updated my blog on the Classic Palette and its Offline Palette software to correct the link for the software download.

Another hiccup with the site is the only product support seems to be for Strand’s current range. Fortunately there’s an alternative out there in the form of the independently run Strand Archive site.

Spent an enjoyable few minutes today looking at the incredible machines on the Bicycle Forest site.

My favourite part was the homebuilders’ gallery, 25 pages of wierd and often wonderful creations that can (sometimes loosely) claim to be bicycles of one flavour or another.

Speaking of which I sw someone cycling one of Sir Clive Sinclair’s A-bikes in London tonight (you know the one where trolley wheels meet folding frame. Couldn’t decide whether to admire or (silently) mock the pilot, although was dead impressed the speed he got…rim speed on those tiny wheels must be close to supersonic!

Have been a bit buried of late getting a new website launched.

House To Home is the second website we have launched on our new Symphony-based in-house developed CMS platform and the third major launch for my team this year, following Country Life in February and InStyle in May.

House To Home’s key feature is its broad range of room planning and decorating ideas, presented in gallery form. The site already has over 3000 articles in it, which is a massive achievement for the editorial team given the short deadlines involved.

The site itself represented a first airing for several new modules on the CMS including gallery, quizzes, notebook and product directory, as well as a premiere outing for new search tools based around the Nutch project. So there’s been a fair bit to bed in and we’ll no doubt be fine tuning and fettling for a little while longer yet.

When you work so close to a project for so many hours you start to lose perspective but fresher eyes than mine seem to be suggesting they like the look of what is a very heavily graphically focused site.

Not that we’ll be able to rest on our laurels; this is just the first in a series of phased launches for the site which will act as a flagship portal for IPC Media’s homes brands including Homes & Gardens, Ideal Home and LivingEtc.

Our next website launches happen in June in a very different market and we also have two sites planned for July, each of which being different again so plenty to keep us out of mischief at the moment.

ps - nice comment about House To Home here on the Shelterrific blog.

See this time lapse of the Radiance of the Seas in 2003 as she made her way through the Panama Canal. If only lock passages were that fast!

For no real reason other than a bit of self-indulgence I’ve been restoring stories I posted from my Grand Tour circumnavigation of Britain by motorboat in 1999. There were many moments that will stay in my head for as long as there are working brain cells in occupancy there but this day, eight years ago, was among the best.

My crew was Howard Jones, an unbelievable bundle of enthusiasm who knew the waters of the Severn like the back of his hand and whose hand had been involved in helping many boat owners in that part of the world. Our mission was a rare one-tide passage from Gloucester Dock to Bristol Floating Dock. This involved punching against the fast flooding waters of the Severn Estuary on MBM’s Sealine F36 Missing Link fast enough before the River Avon became a muddy ditch. Only one known boat had managed this before - Howard had missed that show and he really wanted to experience his own performance.

Michelle and I had already met Howard and his wife Jill on a Motor Boats Monthly flotilla cruise in Turkey a few years back where his almost manic enthusiasm for life became obvious about three seconds into that adventure. Howard was often in touch with the magazine, not least to point out the latest British Waterways folly (of which there seemed to be quite a few instances) in his capacity as chairman of the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal & River Severn Users Forum.

Far from boasting about his 180 or so pasages along one of the most difficult stretches of water anywhere in the world, Howard would more likely than not show you pictures of the day he got it wrong and parked his Princess Sea Mist in the middle of a field on a particularly impressive high water.

Sad to relate we were writing his obituary just two years later after he joined Missing Link’s crew for a week of the Grand Tour. But I’ll never forget the look on Howard’s face as he saw the lock gates for Bristol Floating Dock appear around a final twist of the Avon. After we moored up at Baltic Wharf he pulled out his journal, selected a red pen and started to write. “Today,” he told me, “is a rare red letter day.”

Wallpaper* magazine is celebrating its 100th issue by asking readers to vote on which of its iconic covers is the best. No doubt the results will be very mixed, not least because the covers themselves have clearly evolved over time, as you would expect. You can view Wallpaper’s 100 front covers here.

I remember well the trauma and excitement of front cover design. Way back we had a consultant to advise us on Motor Boats Monthly’s front covers who said there was too much blue (cue purple rain and yellow sea). Another design ‘guru’ came up with a masthead featuring a wavy line. D’ya know, we hadn’t thought of that one.

We did leave ourselves open for design consultants to have a field day with Motor Boats Monthly’s first cover. But as a response to a threatened passing off case by a competitor at the time, no-one could argue that masthead was anything other than unique.

Over the years we never had the pressure the Wallpaper design team must feel though. But at least any colour in the palette is, presumably, fair game!