Alan Coleman's

2008s project at work will be the next step in our re branding exercise, the development of an in house application to manage our content, otherwise known as a CMS. The technology will come courtesy of Microsoft’s .NET framework, that being a logical progression from the classic ASP (Visual Basic) set up used to create the web site and Intranet.

It is an exiting, if terrifying prospect, one that threatens a complete immersion in a whole new area of uncharted technology. However there is hope, already the human logic of those that developed this framework has started to show itself as little different from those from the open source sector. For instance, I felt almost at home with the concept of Microsoft’s Data Tier Components, and begrudgingly acknowledged that someone has probably put a great deal of thought into what I’ve always known as, Layer Separation.

This is only the beginning of a momentous project, but what is clear already is that the .NET Framework is not quite the bloated WYSIWYG editor that people like me used to say it was.

What’s this, Something positive about Microsoft?

Maybe, only time will tell.

I wrote earlier this week about the rebranding process we’re going through at work, and the problems that have surfaced regarding static legacy pages. The curse of the WYSIWYG has reeked havoc amongst the ranks, the files now stand in line like badly disciplined soldiers that refuse to obey the CSS, no matter how much they scream and shout… Or maybe that’s stretching it a bit far.

There is another enemy at play, tables. Not only that but nested tables and loads of them too, with those 1px high images that push the cells open. These are the most time consuming hurdles, trying to figure out what sits within what and why. Almost all of them serving no purpose apart from contributing to the endemic code bloat.

It’s sometimes difficult trying to balance time between doing what I think I should do, and what I actually have time for. To a certain extent rebranding an old website, built by someone else with no regard to any sort of standards, is an exercise in damage limitation.

There are busy times ahead. The company I work for as a web developer is changing its name, brand and identity. It is, to say the least, a task that involves an incredible amount of commitment and organisation from every aspect of the business.

The initial meetings of a few months ago seemed like a formality, just do this then that then everything else should slot into place, that was the plan anyway. Everything seems so easy when scribbled down in a flow diagram with arrows in yellow highlighter, and I’ve always found that approach to be quite good for holding back from getting stuck in.

There comes a point, as with anything in life, when the talking stops and the physical activity has to begin, which is usually the point where the scale of the undertaking is realised. The web site in question has evolved over a number of years and apart from some basic product titles and codes it is entirely static. It does however employ some fairly cool code that communicates with our CRM and back end on the fly, this is its saving grace.

I wrote this on my Boomablog back in August 2005 and thought that it would be quite relevant here.

It may sound like a bold claim, but in a small way this book changed my life for the better. Over the last year or so I’ve been trying to implement as much standardised CSS and XHTML code into my web development work as possible. This has been an enjoyable and enlightening experience that has been complemented by a gradual move to PHP / MySQL for my personal stuff. In the early days of the web it was like everyone was building their own car for the very first time, now people like me are waking up to standards compliant code as if we would the idea of tuning up the carburettor to make the machine cleaner and more efficient.

In Web Standards Solutions Dan Cederholm succeeds in bringing a sense of order to some of the paths towards standards compliant and lighter code that have been well documented over the past year or so. The book is broken down into 16 easily digestible chapters that each focus on a different aspect of design, there are workable approaches to each solution that are appraised and documented for their individual merits.

Personally I like the way that the chapters remain autonomous, many markup / scripting / code related books tend to revolve around a large project so you can’t turn to the bits you want to without having to relate back to the start. In that respect the examples can seem very simplistic, but that is where the power lies. Chapter 2 for instance, I’ve always used headings (h1, h2) but have never really had their importance laid bare in a simple manner - now it all makes sense and I can implement accordingly. The same goes for lists, ‘Evil’ tables and other elements.

Essentially what we’re dealing with here is a book that champions the merits of CSS, it does this by not trying to achieve to much and by leaving the real work to the reader, which I think is clever. It also demonstrates that there’s still life left in the book for this sort of thing, whilst all this information is available online this is a neat package that has a beginning and an end. And most importantly, you can put a bookmark in and read it on the train.

Hello everyone, and a happy New Year to you all. This year starts quite busy for me, as a flip side to the inconvenience of a full time development job, I’ve a load of great sideline projects to be getting on with. Stuff the latest celebrity show on the shit pump, the real winters entertainment for the dark evenings involves playing around with PHP on a local server, great fun.

I’ve been looking for an open source CMS (Content Management System) for a friends football club website for ages, but everything was either too vague or complicated. So in the end I’ve decided to make my own CMS, which will be a simple but functional. I anticipate it to be a few weeks worth of evenings, with the News section almost there. After the News I’ll be moving onto Fixtures, then Match Reports and finally Teams.

So I get to play around building the CMS, and Arron, the First team manager, gets to spend more time on the touchline screaming at people (probably whilst making a circular motion with one hand, and holding four fingers up on the other). Which he’d much rather be doing than arsing around with HTML and FTP.

I’m currently working on a redesign for Esher Athletic Football Club, who are managed by a collegue at work.

The current site is a bit old hat in the late 90s style of things, so I’ll be bringing an up to date web 2.0 look to things with a dynmic PHP driven presence.

The club badge was first for an overhaul, which involved a reworking of the origional design that was hand drawn. Using Illustrator to create a vector graphic version, the aim is to respect the identity of the origional but give it a more professional feel.