theoddsock.com

For the past god only knows how many years (12 or) I’ve been making jewellery; I’m really a frustrated wannabe art school graduate trapped in the body of a comp eng / maths grad - the horror!

Every 6 weeks or so it seems now I make yet another ill-fated stab at redesigning the website for my erstwhile jewellery company. I have better luck with my tax return - but then again I really ought to file that.

I am not sure what it is but I am never really happy with the site. Part of it is because everything I make is one of a kind, so i build up a stock pile of lovely shinies and never get around to photographing them since they should be all sold at some point. However, it would be nice to keep a record of what I have made…

I have been contacted to give a talk on beading at the beginning of August to a craft group based in a nearby village so my prep for that will be a good reason to not poke the site designs again.

I really do suspect that my day job as a web technology architect is perhaps the reason that I’m never happy with my site. I’ve picked up so much from the IA’s! Not that I am complaining it does relieve some of the monotonies inherent in code-bashing. That and I am super-critical about my work, even my writing (not the blog necessarily but my other writing that will never see the light of day) I feel is dull and/or derivative.

However, at least the code is semantic and css-y (no tables! - I have a Joan Crawfordian - ‘no tables for layout, ever!’ - reaction to table based layout)

Hopefully I’ll get inspired at some point, and in the mean time will continue trundling around looking for ideas…

A nice change of topic and scenery. I attended @media(07 as it was this year) with my colleagues from work. I found it quite an interesting experience. I enjoyed the talks I attended but for me the most interesting aspect was that was (not surprisingly I suppose) it was mainly attended by those focusing on the front end. A rough poll of the audience by one speaker put those of us with a CS or CompEng background in the minority. No more was this brought home to me but by the fact that one speaker ( Dan Cederholm - sorry Dan) pretty much intimated that the process from html markup templates to CMS was magic; he didn’t say what the CMS they used for a particular site was and I’m concerned that this was because he didn’t know!

Of course those working at the front-end who are busying coming up with making things look nice, as well as accessible and usable don’t need to worry or know about the intricacies of the back-end but as a web technology architect who isn’t ignorant to the requirements at the front-end it is a bit worrying to think that the ‘deep implementers’ - those who have to take the html templates and shoe horn them into them into the CMS - may be alone in realising that that it isn’t magic getting it all to work. I know myself that InfoGlue can be a bit picky about CSS files, and content types need to be explicitly set, its not like it was back in the day when we just put up files and Apache just got on with it.

For all my concerns though, I have to say that I am very lucky in that the team I work with, who are very talented, vociferous informationarchitects and designers, do understand that just as they get frustrated various browsers and their little ways with css so to those who are getting the back-end and front-end to mesh also have our traumas. Well in so far as they do believe in the magic server pixies who sort it all out, but they know its me

Of course the above is far kindlier representation of the ‘SunBug’ than Ooka’s in OpenKnightly http://visionmeld.com/openstrips/okday149.jpg. But I have mellowed since then, and I don’t keep a spear under my desk.

-Oh, and yes the conference was worth postponing the IUI cycle for .