Never download music again!.. or at least that's what I'm going to do. It's not often I come across an application that changes the way I live as dramatically as Spotify does.

Spotify is basically a streaming application, but different to any I've ever seen before. Their database contains a massive selection of songs, all of which are available to you at the click of a mouse. The quality of the service is so extraordinary you won't even notice a delay, the bitrate of the music streamed is around 160kbps and I challenge anyone to notice any difference to playing music...

It's the last session before Christmas, as part of the festive cheer I have hidden 7 Santa's and a Snowman on my site.

Whoever spots them all and post there location as a comment on this post first wins a box of celebrations!

(The Santa on this post doesn't count!)

Good Luck!

It's been a long time since my last article, so I thought I'd post a quick update. A few weeks ago I was approached by a developer I've known for a few years who wanted me to design a new website for his next project 'Stockazon'.

The concept is basically for a website that distributes SMS text messages to users alerting them when new stock arrives in on Amazon items that they're watching. Users can buy 'credits' from Stockazon via PayPal and search and add items to their basket via the website.

The website is still very much in development but you...

In the news this week is the apparent overspend by the BBC on the development of their new website.

Now I would certainly not be the first to acknowledge that the new website is the pinnacle of what we as developers look for in modern web design, pretty much everything about it is fantastic. But should it have really cost £85.1 million to do it?

There are many reports in the tabloids at the moment claiming the BBC overspent by as much as £36 million (Source: The Guardian); however the figure I'm more likely to be convinced by is what was stated...

Apologies for the downtime of the site over the last couple of days; it was caused by an explosion in Houston, Texas at ThePlanet.com's datacentre which knocked out over 9000 websites including my own. It took me a while to establish what had caused the problem, mainly because I'm down a hierarchy of 2 other companies before I get to ThePlanet (SureSpace.net that purchases reseller hosting from HostNine.com who rent space from ThePlanet.com).

The explosion was caused by an electrical fire in one of the rooms of the facility, the blast was powerful enough to take down 3 walls in an...