The launch of http://ugli.hk

After weeks of fiddling around, I've finally decided to bite the bullet and launch http://ugli.hk.

You are most welcome.

First off, many thanks to the inimitable Jay Bodhi up the hill at China Stylus for the logo and design concept for the site. Jay is a wonderful designer and great fun to work with, and he managed to guide me through the process of creating the graphical identity for my precious new business without even the slightest grumble. Many thanks also to The Globe for providing the beer which made the process run so smoothly.

I've spent lots of time checking it for errors, but Sod's law being what it is I'm sure there'll be some things I've missed. I eagerly anticipate delighted comments from my friends and competitors (who are in many cases the same people) pointing out what doesn't work and what fails to render in IE6 and what just generally looks rubbish. Really, I do. Bring it on.

It's a cliché that your own website is the hardest one to build, and I'm learning why this is. Being English and writing promotional text about yourself simply don't go well together; I hope I've managed to find the often non-existent middle-ground between apology and arrogance.

The blog is an attempt to keep the site fresh and interesting, and to keep you coming back for more. The remit for what I'm going to be writing about is a still little vague, but hopefully it will combine useful technical tidbits with some more conceptual discussion on the general state of web communication. Forgive me if it wobbles a bit while I find my voice.

It is my hope that you feel inspired to comment on what I write. Currently, registered users can comment any time while comments from anonymous users are held in a queue for approval. I may revise my policy on this in the future.

I am going to try living without a captcha for now. If I get spammed into oblivion one will appear, on both the comment and contact forms.

For now, I've decided to go with the Facebook "Like Button" social plugin. (There is something sinister about the sound of a social plugin.) Go right ahead and click the little bugger if you like what you read. I also used the "add this" sharing button which seems to work perfectly well. In the future I may integrate with Facebook Connect to bypass the user registration and login system. We'll see.

Anyway - thanks for the visit. I'd love to hear your comments.