Its been a busy six months, so busy in fact that I haven't been able to do a great deal outside of work. However that should all be about to change, after over a year of trying Allie and I are finally escaping from London. We are swapping the super crowded and stressful metropolis of London for the more laid back coastal lifestyle of Brighton.

For the past six months I have been contracting at T-Mobile working as part of a team developing widgets and applications for Mobile Phones (along with a bit of standard web). Its been a good contract but unfortunately its time to move on as I don't fancy a two hour journey to work. So I am currently on the search for new opportunities on the South Coast. Things seem to work at a nicer pace with less emphasis on pushy agencies (which is always good), and more direct contract with the employer. Big business appears to be few and far between, there is however a thriving agency/consultancy market which uses a combination of full time employees and draws from a pool of talented freelancers

Lucky for me there are a few good helpers in my new search for work, Wired Sussex seems to be the best place to look for work, while Planet BNM is the best place to keep up with the thriving freelance community.

As ready as I am to leave London there are certainly aspects of it I will miss, its somewhere that I think everyone should try out at least for a short while. The move is scheduled to happen in just under a month, so watch this space!

Following on from where I created my own font, I am now going to look at the best way of using this font on my website. In web design we are quite limited by the fonts that we use. To ensure a consistent design across all computers we have to rely upon a few select fonts that most operating systems (e.g. windows) have installed by default. One alternative is to create an image of the text in editing software (i.e. Photoshop, Gimp), this is however very time consuming. For example if you wanted a fancy title for each blog entry you would manually have to create an image each time you created a blog entry.

So a few nice people have created clever solutions which will allow us to use custom fonts on dynamically created text (this saves us from having to create an image each time). I am going to do a bit of comparison on 3 of these tools to find out which is best for my needs. Primarily I am going to be looking at download size, ease of use, performance, cross browser ability and overall quality.

My simple tests can't be considered an ultimate comparison, it's merely how I got on trying to set up the three alternatives for the simple usage that I require. For that reason I am using the services as they come, and leaving the settings as default. Unless of course they don't work at all, in which case I will do what I can. I generally use Firefox for developing, but will attempt some cross browser testing.