Hello, and welcome to stephen gentle dot com.
Although my main profession is web development, I'm also interested in photography, and video production. I have a photo gallery and a video section where you can see some samples of my work in these areas. You can also take a look at my little open source operating system project, called Symmetry.
I keep up a blog, which I usually fill with ramblings and rants written after a long debugging session working on my 'fun' projects. If you're not into technology, there's probably little that you'll find interesting over there!
If you'd like to learn more about me, head over to the about me section. My contact details are on my email me page.
Latest News
Some Typography and Other Changes
I had been using the Myriad Pro typeface as the default on this site since I re-designed it a couple of months ago, but this had been causing the fall-back typefaces to have very dodgy sizing for people who don't have the font.For this reason, the site now uses Lucida Grande and Verdana as the default fonts for Mac OS and Windows (respectively), which should look better for most people.
I have also made a lot of other little tweaks that make the site just look generally better, so I hope you like it.
Latest Blog Post
I hate people that use javascript: in links!
Seriously. It's just plain annoying, and it's bad practice. Time and time again, I go and read an article, which has a few little pictures. Now, when we click a link, we expect it to open in the window (or tab) that we're currently on. So instead of clicking an image, I'll middle click it to open it in a new tab for viewing after I'm finished reading the page.
What should happen is that I have a few tabs showing the full image in them. What often does happen though is that instead, I have four or five tabs with blank pages and javascript:show_image_popup(...) or something in the address bar. It's now very irritating to have to go back and find the article if I want to actually see the pictures.
So don't ever do this:
<a href="javascript:show_image_popup('lolcat.jpg')"> ... </a>
The right way
<a href="lolcat.jpg" onclick="show_image_popup('lolcat.jpg')"> ... </a>
Notice that the link actually points to the picture now? This way, when I open the link in a new window, or a new tab, I actually see what I want to see - the picture. If I just normally click it though, the javascript runs and you can pop up your annoying image window. Now, I hear you asking "but won't the browser navigate away from this page if the link is set to the picture?". The answer is no, as long as you make sure your javascript function returns false.