Alan Coleman's Web development resource

alancoleman.com

You should know about http://www.alancoleman.com, my personal contribution to the World Wide Web.

Introduction

Welcome to my web development resource.

This space is a central point for me to blog about web development and associated technologies, it's also an attempt at making a safe distinction between my personal and professional life on the web. It contains Multimedia stuff and my code snippets.

Multimedia stuff

Examples of my online work

Multimedia stuff is my online portfolio, it's not called a portfolio because that's a word that has become synonymous with Peter Mandelson, and that's enough to make anyone's stomach churn.

This part of my site gives a fairly broad idea of the kind of work I've been doing since started college in 2000.

Web development blog

Latest entry: The Blue Hamerite finish of JavaScript frameworks

Friday 30 May, 2008 // 2:52 PM

I’ve been working on the same project for several months now so haven’t really had the opportunity to mess around with new web page layout ideas. After looking around at what’s going on in the more visual fields of web design and development I was amazed at how much things have changed in such a short period of time.

All of a sudden, the web is looking great. It’s almost as if the whole thing has had a makeover following the initial hype of Web 2.0. Or maybe this is Web 2.0, it’s just that it took a little longer to happen than we at first thought it would.

One area of development that is particularly interesting at the moment is JavaScript libraries. I’ve made some fairly dramatic structural changes to our site at work using JavaScript working in conjunction with the Document Object Model, but these are scripts that I’ve written myself for a particular purpose and as such are fairly bullet proof. A library takes it a step further by offering the kind of functionality that I’d never have the time to develop.

My initial impressions of the Mootools framework was excitement tinged with the usual IE disappointment, and because of its Object Orientated nature I found debugging to be a much more drawn out process. Although it has to be said, that in itself was a superb lesson in Object Orientation.

Although we’re yet to go live with any of the functionality I’ve been playing with, it is great fun, there are simply hours of pleasure to be had from playing around with the framework and snippets of code. The whole thing reminded me of unwrapping my first metal toolbox as a child (Blue Hamerite finish).

Mootools

This is a great website too http://css-tricks.com/