The Problem
Could someone explain the following to me. I have a page with a couple of buttons on it. They sit nicely next to each other with a nice gap. Here’s the Html (webforms): Read the rest of this entry »
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Archive for the ‘ Work ’ Category
Sorry for reopening this old debate, but I have been struggling with getting my head around this concept but came to a conclusion of my own. Read the rest of this entry »
Many of you that read my blog The few of you that read my blog may have seen that I have been helping a good friend Donna, build her website and promote her charity Fighting Cancer with Music. She is currently promoting an event in Taylor, Texas for her friend Jenny Tepernning:
So if you read this and you are in that area, please head along and find out more.
What’s also cool is this allowed me to post my first blog on the awesome blog site Elephant Journal. Waylon Lewis was kind enough to let me post about what is Donna is up to. He has a phenomenal following of regular 30K visitors, with 170K more than visit at least once a month. So hopefully this will help Donna out in ways that I could never have possibly done. Thanks Waylon!
Mashups Galore
This world is now full of mashups. From music tracks to music videos, from companies buying companies, to online stuff. And being a developer the ones that excite me most are the ones where you take one website, say Flickr, and another, just for example Google, and you get some smart cookie doing some magic with the available APIs and producing a kick ass free tool available to everyone! Well that’s exactly what we did in my day job about 8 months ago (I must be that smart cookie?).
The Birth of iMapFlickr
So we took the Google Maps API and the Flickr API and produced iMapFlickr. This is an awesome tool that allows you to take all your photos, that have been geotagged, from Flickr and we will place them in the correct location on a Google Map. With tonnes of customisation options, and a free account to boot, we then give you the code to display your lovely creation in your blog or website – anywhere that can accept some HTML.
The reason I have started blogging about it now is only because we have started to get those cool wee extra links that Google sometimes puts under your website address in it’s search page. I was well chuffed to see that.
So get your map on people (if anyone is reading this which I doubt). Hundreds of other people use it, so it can’t be bad now!
Today, I found the “East Kilbride Promoter” on my floor when I was tidying this morning. On it was an advert for “Free Kickboxing Lesson” and being a wimp I thought I’d look in to it. There was a website address which should make it easier…NO CHANCE!
Joomla is a loaded gun
What we have is another website built in the pile of shit that is Joomla. Ok I take that back. I bet that Joomla is awesome in the right hands. The way I see it, open source CMS engines are like guns – in the wrong hands they are dangerous and so far the few websites that I have taken over this year have been built in Joomla and been murderous. Front end not working, back end not working, pages missing. Just a mess!
Standard People, PLEASE!
I harp on about this time and time again. In the web development and design industry, someone can pick up a book on a Friday and by the Monday set themselves up as a designer and developer. Am no designer, definitely not, but I can take ideas from other places and build quite good looking websites. And that’s quite easy. But you get people that think they can do both, and make a business out of it. What annoys me is, they do make a business out of it, and make money. But would you go to a dentist that was working out a market stall?
So why is it, in this day and age, and in an industry that few people know and even less understand, do we allow people to build crap website? Small companies now a days rely on business from the web, especially during the recession period.
If you buy something cheap, from someone that doesn’t actually have the creds to back it up, you can only expect shit. Doesn’t matter the price tag. Except the cheaper your site is, usually it looks cheap, feels cheap and works cheap.
I personally believe they should make professional exams compulsory for the programming world, especially now that people rely on their websites.
Rant over. (for now)
I have just put live a new website for a client in my day job. What has happened in the past is I have just added a link to a growing list of websites but because most the sites I do are seasonal or short lived, by the time anyone looks its a dead link or the site is only 1 page. So I have decided to add pics of the sites I do to my blog.
The creative, html and css was done by the talented Mark McMullen in my work, while I did the backend coding. Its a real nice website and hopefully you read this in time to play with it…it’s an exclusive!
[update]
We ran out of the freebe whiskey well before lunchtime on the Saturday after it went live. 5000 hits to the website in less than a morning. Overall we had over 22,000 hits on the site when I came in to work Monday morning. And nothing went wrong! Bonus!
Filed under:
Programming, Work
Yesterday my first homer of the year went live – http://www.myoneonone.com. It is a rebuild of a friend’s yoga website, the old one was badly designed, badly built, and the client was left to do what she wanted. Now most client’s should be left to do what they want, but within set guidelines. This new one is clean and simple. Never going to win design awards I grant you, but nice, clean and billion times better than it was!
The old site was built in Joomla, and the Joomla backend didn’t work at all, whatsoever! And my point is made again about open source. It breaks too easily! Ok not all open source is crap. jQuery rocks. And maybe I have never had a good experience with open source CMS engines – Umbreako anyone? But what my friend had to deal with to manage her website was beyond bad. But its dead, its gone, and long live http://www.myoneonone.com.
