Although the site isn’t really fully functional yet I at least now have a holding design and homepage up over at my new website cargowire.net Any comments would be greatly appreciated below…

This year just keeps on throwing up surprises…

So I started a new job, got back into a rhythm of keeping up to date with the web world and actually did some development on my new site!

I spent some late night time looking into the use of, and integrating, the del.ico.ious api into a site on my local dev machine. Originally I was going to go with making json calls but opted for the api as it provided more detail on the post information returned. Which is kind of odd really, for example, by requesting json you don’t receive the date of the post but you do if you request using the api? (at least from what I saw during the brief time I spent looking). Also, by using the api I get some lovely neat XML that I can transform straight onto my page!

So anyway, it turns out its all rather straight forward to pull out posts from your delicious account and do pretty much whatever you like with them. My initial thoughts were to simply pull them out and list them so my personal site acts as an aggregator of my various other online accounts. With a tiny amount of C# I was able to achieve this in a very short time and once I can get my local site hosted somewhere I’ll put together a brief article on how I did this (with code examples). Not that anyone will be interested.. but hey.. it’ll be fun to write!

Additionally:

I finally took the time to fix the includes problem on my wordpress blog (mentioned some time ago) so now the sidebar returns!

OK, so its been some time since my last post on website redevelopment! I put this down to Dawn of War, Team Fortress 2… and general life ‘busyness’

in terms of a new site I’ve decided to take a quite backend heavy approach and look into tapping into a host of APIs such as Flickr, del.ico.us etc for the purposes of image galleries, favourite links type sections. Although i’ve heard, from a variety of sources, that this can be slower (both in terms of dev and user access to pages) than simply building a quick database of items to pull lists (images, links etc) out of. I’m hoping it will be an excellent learning opportunity.

I’m also dithering over whether to take the plunge and change my personal site to asp.NET (after working with it commercially for the majority of my post university experience) or stick with maintaining my PHP knowledge..

…more updates to come.. hopefully on my progress with the above.. as usual its a desperate situation of balancing social life, work life and ‘non-work work life’

employed work life has been dominating my web related activities for pretty much the last year so I shall be attempting to find time for this!

by christening my meaning is more like that of no. 2 on dictionary.com:

1. …
2. a public ceremony in which a new ship is formally named and launched.

So I’m ‘launching’ my blog with some random updates, diatribes and general rambling.

Firstly then, I finally migrated my blog from hard coded text to wordpess powered PHP and MySQL. Oddly enough it was a great deal simpler than I initially thought it would be. Without really looking into it I was imagining needing to get my hands dirty with some exploration through the large number of php files included with the wordpress install. This was mainly due to my desire to keep the blog within my original site design. So after finally getting round to it I realise the true simplicity of making a slightly custom theme, which has enabled me to mirror the look of the rest of the site easily within one evening of TV, food and general computer related procrastination. I’m also totally seeing the benefit in Firefox 2’s built in form spell checker for the first time.

Recently I’ve been trying to get back into keeping up to date with current web related affairs. Which has essentially meant I’ve started updating my podcast subscriptions and spending journeys to and from work attempting to listen to the hours of material. The difficulty there of course is getting past the many podcasts that merely seem to be people pointing out things but not really going into solutions or drawing conclusions. For example cameron moll on the @media conference cast about the mobile web seemed to draw no real conclusions (although I admit to driving through peak traffic attempting to listen to what was being presented). Essentially what I took from it was that you have a range of options for mobile development from doing nothing to creating full scale mobile specific sites (with various CSS options [anyone for media=handheld??] inbetween). Ok, so thats fine but surely we all knew that already? (and yes.. I do realise i’m talking about a cast from august here!.. like I said.. I’m catching up). I can’t help but want to join the cohorts of ‘one web’ champions.. afterall develop once for any UA? sounds pretty appealing.. And the reason I say this is because I hope never to be working on a solely ‘mobile’ application (at least not in the sense of converting a current site/online app to a mobile only version), not because I hate all those technology aficionados synching their PDA’s to their mobiles to their work, home, holidays, brothers, mothers, sisters, aunties desktops while simultaneously viewing the latest sports results, purchasing stocks online and checking out what’s new on digg… but because I think it goes against the idea of content, presentation and behaviour being separate (although I do agree with the discussions of mobile content needind to be contextualised to the mobile environment.. anyway i’m going off topic here… my point is merely that listening to many podcasts on the web/future of the web/mobile web/standards/DOM scripting etc there seems to be little that is really said to the listener.

Speaking of ‘content/presentation/behaviour’ separation I’ve only really come to see the versatility and benefits of such ‘debulking’ of markup recently.. OK, so I’m a young developer and can be excused (mildly) for such an ‘un-current’ comment.. “hey we’ve had this since the major browsers started to deal with standards more effectively, you lived past 2000 yet?” but seriously even though I’ve been making websites since before I was twelve I still (very infrequently I must stress) fall into the situation of using ‘class=green’… for style rules when in a hurry.. I’ve even been known to add inline style tags for fonts/colours on the fly while discussing a design (with the reasoning that i’d “go back and sort it out properly later.. even though essentially I’m returning to use of the font tag by practising such behaviour). [Vow] = stick to semantic markup.

[afterthought] why is it I sometimes feel guilty about using positioning so much with document elements.. as if I expect them to fall into a correct design flow by relying only on the markup tree.

A further thing I’ve been interested in the concept of for a while now (thanks to fberriman) is Microformats.. not to a massive degree you understand.. more from an intrigued outsider perspective. Its the sort of ‘technology’ (if that’s the phrase I can use here) that makes me feel old. Like the grandparent who still calls the radio the ‘wireless’ or that distrusts credit cards/electronic money in favour of cash. I have a fear of them.. like they’re a bad thing that will open up all my contact details to the evil scary people (who obviously care a great deal about my details and will sell them to some kind of Yakuza gang desperate to profit from my phone number). I must admit a degree naivety to the full use of microformats. Although I do like the idea of hcalendar and markup for events etc. It all seems pretty neat; but the discussions I’ve read/heard about microformats being collaboratively created standards does cause concern as to the interoperability and future development of various, possibility disparate, microformat ’standards’ (then again its not as if the W3C ever had any real enforcement ability of its recommendations come standards). Also I now need a new microformat reader since tails’ firefox version was set to 1.5. Ideas?

Ok, I admit it. This was solely to get a picture into my blog… I’ve always found Halloween an odd occasion anyway (probably rooted in being english and not american but there ya go). One thing that does interest me however is sites that modify their presentation according to seasons. We’ve all seen it.. pumpkins and bats on halloween, snow, trees and santas at christmas and egg hoarding rabbits at Easter. I would be interested in seeing stats or investigation findings into whether that temporary re branding has an effect on visitors i.e. whether it has an off-putting effect in the vein of “popups are annoying and so is this downpour of snow over my content”. Or indeed the alternative that people feel more connected to the site that seems to be in some way ‘human’ by celebrating/recognising an external event.