As another year draws to a close, looking back on the events of the past twelve months gives me a chance to reflect on the things that I have done and the things that have affected, changed me and - in some cases - made me a better person.

The arrival of our son, Noah

Our most important, most treasured, most beautiful gift - Noah - arrived back in August, and changed our lives forever. Friends, relatives and colleagues had all explained to me how this would happen, and whilst I knew that my priorities would be altered for the rest of my life, until I held our perfect little boy in my arms that morning, I truly had no idea.

The last four months - seriously, four months - have been the most rewarding of my life, as Noah learns to smile, laugh, respond and develop his personality. They've also taught me the value of time itself, and I now try to spend as much time with Noah and Bella as I can.

Becoming a Black Belt

As one journey begins, the first part of another comes to an end. I've been training in karate-do for nearly six years and credit most of my recent successes in my career and life to the positive changes that have come about through that training.

On Sunday, December 19th, we escaped the snow and ice of Warwickshire to travel up to Nottingham. After a wait of nearly three quarters of an hour, it became evident that the key holder for the venue had been unable to make the journey, due to adverse weather conditions, and the decision was taken to move the grading to Leicester, where an alternative venue was available.

After three hours of intense examination - of our technique, endurance, kata (form) and kumite (sparring) - I was thrilled and proud to be among the dozens of students who were told that we would be grading, and I received a black belt to go with the black eye I received scant minutes before.

Being able to share the experience with my friends who train alongside me, one of whom achieved the incredible feat of grading to Nidan (second dan), was amazing, but having my family there to support me and share the day was truly wonderful.

Success on the web

Recognition for any achievement, personal or professional, is always welcome, but the process we go through in order to gain those achievements is often more valuable than the achievement itself. At work, my team and I are very proud of the things we build, and when we relaunched the Listers Group website last year, it was the first step on a journey towards making the website more effective for our customers.

Winning the Dealer Group Website of the Year award was a fantastic achievement for my team and validates the approach we take and the direction I've steered our website in since the relaunch. Awards are great, but having the increase in visitors and almost 150% increase in enquiries from the website since we relaunched is almost more important.

Our plans haven't changed either, and we're going to keep pushing forward with a 'responsive refresh' of our existing design - an ongoing, evolving alpha of which will live on my alpha site until we're ready to put it on our beta site - tailored to fit the 'one web' vision, championed by Tim Berners-Lee and people like Jeremy Keith and my pal Paul Robert Lloyd who really understand the principles of having a content-driven, responsive design that works for all devices.

Along with it will come heavy optimisation, more tweaks to our back-end code and databases to ensure things run quicker than ever before and lashings of HTML5 and CSS3, in a refresh of our current design that already focuses on functionality instead of cross-browser pixel-perfection.

In Memoriam

Sadly, 2010 was also a year in which friends and family left us. I had to say a final farewell to a great uncle, a great aunt and other friends who I'd prefer were still here. I take solace in the fact that my friends, family and I are better people having known them, and that I will continue to smile when I recall memories of them - memories to which this post is dedicated.

Looking Forward

I'm hoping to do more next year, pushing the boundaries of what's possible with new technologies, bringing more things together and learning more by attending excellent conferences such as New Adventures in Web Design in January and dConstruct in September. If I only manage to make two events this year, I'm certain those will be the highlights.

Next year will bring its own challenges and triumphs - of that I am more than certain - but given the preparations I've made, the tools at my disposal and the support of friends and family, I'll be heading into 2011 confident of my abilities to meet them head on.

Between now and then, I'll be spending my time with family and friends, so have yourselves a fantastic Christmas and a wonderful new year!

See you in 2011!

We'll be switching to HTML5 next year, as part of our realign, and I'm thinking about the best way to mark up some of the elements that will be surviving. Working from the bottom up, I'm starting with our site's footer, and the featured vehicles, events and jobs.

Each of our featured items - be it a vehicle, an event or a job listing - are marked up in a similar way. Vehicles have a photo, which the other items do not, and events have a date next to them, which the other items do not. With styles applied, they look a bit like this:

The markup we use to get this isn't pretty and, because HTML - prior to HTML5 - didn't allow block level elements to be nested within an anchor tag, we had to mark items up inside them using different methods. For instance, for events, we use the following markup:

For a vehicle, we currently use this markup:

As you can see, neither takes advantage of the new elements that HTML5 has to offer.

But what elements to use?

In the quest to be as semantically correct as possible, it's easy to get bogged down in the choices on offer. Do we carry on using unordered lists, or switch to articles? The latter is arguably a better choice, since each item that we link to is atomic. Each item will either be a vehicle, a job listing or details of an upcoming event.

Currently, each of the featured sections is marked up like this:

Switching that to sections, using articles inside each section currently seems to me like the way we'll go. But marking up the individual items - the vehicles, updates and job listings - seems like the next hurdle. I'm sweating the details right now - but am I going over the top?

What markup would you use?

If you're on Facebook, you've probably seen this update from some of your friends:

Change your Facebook profile picture to a cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same for the NSPCC. Until Monday (December 6th) there should be no human faces on Facebook but an invasion of memories. This is [a] campaign to stop violence against children.

I started seeing this pop up in my news feed from a bunch of my friends on Saturday. Many of my friends started changing their photos without posting the update.

I didn't.

Some of my friends were outraged by my comment. A few realised what I was getting at.

Show your apathy with a Twibbon or Profile Badge today!

People are outraged by many things - child abuse, threats of funding cuts to services, huge losses of jobs, investment banking, politics - but very few people are actually moved to the point where they get off their arses and do something about it.

Some people will even change the entire colour scheme of their websites for a day, or even a month. I would wager that the majority of individuals who make these kinds of changes won't give a second thought to the actual cause, nor will they donate their time, skills or money to anything that might, y'know, actually help.

What did you do? You changed a few pixels of your profile photo.

Well done.