Released nearly three years after their sophomore effort, Common Dreads, Enter Shikari may have made their strongest album yet. A Flash Flood of Colour is an explosion of ear-candy: roaring guitar riffs layered with thumping dubstep basslines; anthemic singalong choruses with hardcore screamo breakdowns; topped with thought-provoking, heartfelt, politically-charged lyrics. Some of those themes might instantly worry some readers, but I urge you to continue reading and give the album a chance. Virtually every song switches back and forth between numerous genres, so at the very least, parts of each song should appeal to different listeners.

The album is so varied in style, it has reminded me of artists as diverse as: The Streets, Slipknot, Skrillex, 30 Seconds To Mars, Biffy Clyro, The Prodigy, Frankmusik, Rage Against The Machine and AFI. But fear not, the album doesn't sound like an album by any of those artists — it sounds like an Enter Shikari album. The multitude of genres stitched together has become the band's trademark sound. Switching so frequently and distinctly may seem a recipe for disaster, but the St Alban's four-piece manage to pull it off. A song can start with a gentle, synth-led intro with spoken word lyrics, switch into something that could easily be found on a dubstep or drum & bass complication, then just as quickly switch to something that metalheads would happily mosh to. It sounds crazy, yet it somehow just... works.

It may be obvious to some visitors that my name is of Irish origin. I have always known that my paternal grandparents were Irish, and although both myself and my father were born and raised in England, I do consider myself part Irish and I am both proud of and interested in learning more about my Irish heritage.

Although when I began researching my family tree, I originally stuck to my maternal line, it was natural that I would move onto tracing my Irish ancestors; something I knew would present more of a challege due to an assumption that at least some records would be available only in Ireland. It wasn't until that I started researching this line that I realised the extent of how much harder Irish research is to English/Welsh.

This article is to give anyone researching their Irish ancestors some tips on how they can find out more about them.

As we're coming up to the end of the year — and I don't have any more gigs until next year — I've decided to summarise my five favourite gigs of 2011. I've linked to full reviews of the gigs where relevant.

I have always found that there has never been a really simple way of swapping one image for another when you rollover it. We could use CSS and replace our img tags with elements with background images, and use the :hover pseudo-class to switch them round. But then we lose the semantic value of the image — it wouldn't actually appear in our document's hypertext, couldn't be saved, hyperlinked, etc.

Therefore we generally always have to rely on Javascript for this. However, a lot of methods that implement this just seem messy — especially the awful Javascript code (MM_swapImage) that Adobe Dreamweaver generates. My proposed solution is to use jQuery, a clean Javascript code library, as well as using the relatively new HTML5 data-* attributes.

Many members of my family share the middle name of Collingwood, including my great-uncle, two of his sons and one of his great-grandsons, as well as my great-grandfather. This name has in fact made researching my mother's paternal family history relatively easy as although it is not hugely rare, it is by no means common either, especially as a middle name. And generally, the less common the name, the easier the research.

This post documents my research into the Collingwood family.

Last Friday — 25^th November 2011 — I went to the UKF Bass Culture event in North London. The event, hosted in Alexandra Palace, showcased over 30 electronic music acts, specifically dubstep and drum & bass acts. Unlike any other gig I have been to before, this one was an all-nighter, with the last act finishing at around 6.00am on Saturday morning.

I thought I would write a fairly brief article in time for Remembrance Day, an event very close to my heart. In this article, I've told the tales of four of my military ancestors who fought in the World Wars - both my grandfathers and two of my great-grandfathers.

This is my first attempt at writing a review for a gig, so feedback would be appreciated. Last night (6th November 2011) I went to The Blackout's gig at the Roundhouse in Camden, London with two friends — @foggface and @jonnyeyles. As it was on a weekend, we went into London fairly early to have some leisurely pre-gig drinks and get some food in our bellies. After settling at The Ice Wharf on Camden Lock — which I thoroughly recommend as one of the nicest Wetherspoons bars I have been to — we made our way to the venue in time to catch the last support band who took to the stage at 8.30pm.

If you regularly post blog or news articles, and you have a Twitter account, you may tweet about each article once it's posted, but it would be much easier if a tweet was posted automatically once you post the article. Using the Twitter API with OAuth, and using shortened links using the bit.ly API, this can be achieved with PHP.

So I've decided to try my hand at a full review again, rather than my “In my car stereo” posts. I think this one is a little better written than my last. Feedback appreciated.

Although not a very recent release, Good Charlotte's fifth album is one I have only recently come to enjoy. I have been a fan of the band for a while now, especially their commercial success ‘The Young and The Hopeless’ and the dance-influenced ‘Good Morning Revival’ albums. Although I listened to this album when it was released, I just couldn't get into it. However, after seeing the band perform live at V Festival this year, specifically after performing this album's single ‘Like It's Her Birthday’, I tried giving it another go and I was much more impressed this time round.

So myself and my colleagues — @ecallaghan, @joseph_whelan and @vratnay — have decided to participate in Movember this year.

If you don't know what Movember is, it is an annual month-long event where men grow moustaches to raise awareness and money for male-specific cancers — prostate and testicular.

I'm sure many people have wanted to be able to customise the bullet icons used in a standard unordered list — I know I have in the past, and had to once again recently, so I've found a solution.

The default solid bullet point can be changed to a number of things using the CSS property list-style-type, such a a circle or square. But with this, you are limited to a few options, and you can't really customise the list style much; for example, if you change the colour of your list item text (by styling the <li>), the bullets inherit this colour too.

A family legend told to my mother by my grandmother was that there was an ancestor, “Jane Gray”, who had an affair with a landed gentry which resulted in an illegitimate child. I had uncovered a fair bit about my grandmother's ancestry and hadn't found anything that confirmed my grandmother's story. After I realised I had made a mistake with one my ancestral lines, I soon discovered that the legend could be true after all.

I generally have an album in my car's stereo for about a week before I change it for something new. Occassionally, I switch back to one of my favourite albums depending on my mood, but I try to listen to an album I haven't listened to before.

After my review of 3 Doors Down's latest album, it dawned on me music critic is more difficult than I thought, and I'm not going to attempt to review albums to such an extent again. I'll leave that to the professionals, but I will give some of my thoughts on the album at the end of each week.

This week, I have been listening to Example's latest album, Playing In The Shadows.

So I'm not actually going to write an article here, but instead link to two articles that a good friend of mine, @MrFoggEsq, has written over the last couple of months. I promised him I would re-post them on here once I got my website up and running.

They both make for very interesting reads, so I encourage you to give them a go.

So I finally got round to launching my new website. Consider it a 'beta' release, as there may still be some issues, so if you find something that doesn't quite work as it should, then let me know. There's a form at the bottom of the page that will send me an email.

I've added a few articles over the last few weeks, so have a look through what's already on here and I will hopefully be adding more fairly regularly.

When the 1911 census of England and Wales was released a year early, it was great news for genealogists as for many, it could crack unsolved mysteries or knock down brick walls. I had relative ease finding most of my ancestors (those of whom were still living) in 1911, but there was one person who I initially could not find for the life of me — my great-great-grandmother, Ann Cummings Gray. I tried searching for every variation of her names I could think of, "Ann", "Anne", "Annie", "Grey", "Gray", etc. and all combinations thereof. I found a couple of records that were close, but I was pretty sure none of them were correct.

This is how I managed to solve the mystery and find Ann in the 1911 census.

If you have ever wanted to printed out the alphabet without having to manually write out 26 of the same link, button, etc. use this handy PHP script.

Although it is probably still possible to carry out family research without the use of the internet, it would certainly be a much more difficult and labourious task doing so. There are a number of websites that are essentional to any amateur (or professional) genealogist and I have listed them below. They are generally geared towards someone researching ancestors in the United Kingdom, but many are worldwide resources.

The company I work for have numerous Twitter accounts for the various parts of the business, and wanted these feeds to show on the respective websites. I had done something similar to this in the past but had faced problems then with Twitter's request limit (which I believe is around 150 requests an hour). This caused the feed to disappear until the limit reset. I decided to look into writing a reliable solution for this.

I have become a big fan of 3 Doors Down over the last few months, and I recently bought their entire back catalogue before their latest — and fifth — effort, Time of My Life, was released at the end of July. It certainly doesn't disappoint, like all their previous albums.

I am a bit behind when it comes to developing websites for mobile platforms I’ve only recently jumped on the iPhone bandwagon, so have come to appreciate when designers and developers spend the time to make a mobile-friendly version on their websites.

I am currently in the process of redesigning and updating the content management systems of the websites for the company that I currently work as an in-house web designer/developer/administrator. I came to realise that certain aspects of the new website (and the terrible, current one) would not logically make sense when using a mobile device such as an iPhone or an iPad – in particular elements that require the user to hover over an aspect of the site. You cannot hover when using an iPhone, so I would have to rethink these parts of the website. I decided to construct a mobile version of the website, which surprisingly didn’t take very long.

Ancestry.co.uk have released a new collection of employment records from the British Post Office, the “British Postal Service Appointment Books, 1737-1969”. If you had an ancestor who worked for the post office, this can reveal some information about their working life.

I've used Klaus Hartl's jquery.tabs.js plugin for a while now and it works well and is easy to implement. I faced a problem at work recently when a newsletter was being sent out that needed to link directly to a tab on a page on our company's website. Linking to the page shows the first tab only. Here is a solution for this problem.

I have always been a fan of Google Chrome, and out of all the current browsers, it is definitely the best in terms of web standards and support for HTML5 and CSS3. However, I have generally always used Mozilla Firefox out of habit, but decided today to make the switch as I begin using more and more of the latest web technologies.

One thing that I noticed after a while is that when opening a new tab using Ctrl + T, I wasn’t taken to my home page, but instead a page that shows the most recently viewed pages. This may well be useful to some people, but I simply wanted the browser to open my new tab on my home page (Google).