Yesterday the 1st BarCampOrlando was held. It went extremely well.
I am honestly very impressed that they were able to have as many talks, just about non-stop from 1 PM - 8:30 PM. My biggest regret is not doing a demo.
Talks I enjoyed
- Introduction to Facebook
- Introduction to Agile
- Cow orking
I’m a bit frustrated I was stuck trying to get the live Flickr feed to work and missed Elliot’s talk.
I recently joined the Ubuntu Florida LoCo team and it was cool to meet a few people from the team there. Also the install fest was cool, not a ton of participants but those who did try it out booted up fine. Especially impressive is that it booted up on a Macbook Pro.
So I’m in the middle of building these templates that five sites will use, and I’m starting from scratch, or was. A few months back in a couple days I built this same sight, well 4 pages of this same sight and did that from scratch. I have to admit though I hacked up a storm to get that out so quick and it only worked in IE 7. For my purposes it was great work done faster than could be expected. But for production, I think not.
So I decided today that YUI Base, Reset, and Grids are going to be included in the templates.
One concern about using the grids is that the grids are mostly fixed width, well for my purposes that’s fantastic since I’m creating this site off of it’s current tables based design. The move to CSS is a HUGE step in the right direction. I’ll keep working on a layout that works fluidly for another phase.
The new Stars album In Our Bedroom After the War is quite good. By-the-bye they are playing in Atlanta on Oct 27th. Maybe I’ll see you there.
Today I spent a lot of time trying to configure the new (dv) base server. I must say changing Linux environments like this throws off my command line flow. It only took me a few hours to get yum installed. Couldn’t get bzr installed at all. I did get Subversion installed, but didn’t actually do anything with it. I still need to figure out if upgrading Python to v2.4 will take me out of the UOP.
David Seah has a great article on how to configure the (dv) for WordPress, and I’m gonna use it as a guide post for configuring this (dv) for ExpressionEngine. Thanks Dave!
To-do
- Python 2.4
- Kill SMPT connections
- Configure MySQL
- Configure PHP
- Learn more about yum
- GET MY CAR FIXED!
I have a conference call with China on my Thursday morning. Need to practice some phrases…
So today I got access to our new MediaTemple (dv) base. Sweet!
I’m still trying to figure this whole thing out but it looks pretty stinking awesome so far.
Let’s hope China can ’see’ things now.
So launching a Global website really means people around the world should be able to see it.
Apparently at the moment the mainland of China can’t.
Okay, okay, I’ll fix it.
Sleep…mmm… goood.
Work at Google. Heh, I wish I was that smart.
Intranet recommendation down. Global Website to go down.
My presentation on using Expression Engine sold. Now for step two, 5 profit centers.
I saw some lighttpd benchmarks today. Also ran across this instructions for deploying Django with lighttpd on Textdrive.
So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed
It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.
Today I am writing my first Expression Engine Template. So far I can tell it’s not that bad once you get used to it. It is semi-frustrating to feel like people make things more complicated than they need to by using template systems. But I am really in no position to evaluate it’s effectiveness yet.
So launch is um, we don’t know when. The goal is though to have the entire site re-written in a WCM ((Web Content Manager)) of some or other type. Hence the Expression Engine template.
In other things Elliot helped me configure postfix for the first time. That was pretty easy. I’ve also done a few mysqldump’s and imports. It feels really good to be able to dump a site and then import it on another server and actually have it appear magically. I feel like I’ve been missing out by being too lazy to learn.
Elliot also showed my this amazing commenting setup. I really like the way it looks on the Django Book site. ((I linked to a page where you could see it.)) So that makes me really wish I was smarter. That JS stuff seems pretty light weight. I could be wrong. That is really slick stuff regardless. I’m so impressed it loads about 50 million times faster than a lightbox and is way more useful. I wonder if there is a way to cache every light box image on a page in the background so that it loads faster. That makes me wish I was smarter also. I might be able to figure it out.
Back to the template…
Work has been a touch slow over the past few days. Today, that changed.
I’m am the creative and technical lead on a resource site that will support both internal and external members of the team for a large account. I’m very excited about it. It’s going to rock. (The site that is.)
At a debrief meeting today some new ideas were tossed around. One in particular that rung very true was the need to have a social network element added to the current intranet. The goal is to reduce barriers between different parts of the organization that stem from them being in a different part of the world. What seems to happen currently is people don’t connect as freely with each other if they are not in the same part of the world. The more people feel like they know each other, the more inclined they are to collaborate. Thus, better global implementation takes place as internal unity is strengthened. Cool idea, not my baby, yet.
Next, I was in a smaller meeting to do some catch up and planning on where things were with the Global website and what tasks we could tackle during the three week build out leading up to beta testing. Lots of things. I mentioned the workspace/information resource project already. Also I was assigned to research podcasting and wiki’s. A W E S O M E. I love this job. That’s what I was most excited about. I also got some other to-do’s with writing the style guide and outlining who needs to buy in on what before we proceed. Which we noted is kinda the backwards way to do it. Design the site and then figure out the style guide. But hey, they started before I got here.
So to the wiki drawing board. Elliot tells me about Socialtext. Again, awesome find. I also start getting these emails about the SNS (Social Networking Site) solution ELGG that has been suggested by someone who knows.
That was a post I started over a week ago. Obviously I got a little bit busy at work. heh.
Recently I’ve developed a irritated right eye. I’m not sure why. One idea I have is that it’s because I’ve been staring at a LCD all day and drinking coffee - my eye gets dehydrated. Another is that I don’t get enough sleep - my eye gets dehydrated from not having enough time to bath in my cool refreshingly moist eyelids at night. Another idea is that I don’t blink enough. But only on the right side.
Spreadsheets
Google Spreadsheets is a high quality web app. I love being able to pull up the same document anywhere and not even having to think far enough in advance to know that I’d need it on more than one computer. Do I suffer for my lack of forethought? No, not with Google Spreadsheets.
I need to get a little more creative with my formula usage. Right now I’m too static to be implemented long term.
The news of a Presentation App is impressive. I’m not very excited about it since I don’t make many presentations. Being able to share them at a URL like many of the other Google apps would be neat to see.
- Band of Horses
- Pop Riveter
- Feist
- Camera Obscura
- Low
- Destroyer
Code
I don’t really fancy myself a programmer because I don’t have a very thorough understanding of any object oriented language. Over the weekend and into yesterday (Tuesday, April 17th) I managed to hack out 4 pages of a website. I learned SO MUCH! Why CSS menu’s are hidden by Flash and how to fix it in IE 7. Amazing CSS techniques on Image Mapping additional info pop-ups. My grasp of inherited properties increased. Gradient backgrounds without images. (Looks bad, heh.) Div naming pit-falls. And generally just what it is to crank out a websites code. Granted it is a very simple site. But it was a challenge and while I wasn’t surprised I could do it, I’m glad I was able to figure out exactly how in such a short term.
So first I have to explain the title of this post. I did research today to find out how to use UTF-8 special character codes. Curious if they worked on the fly in WordPress I just made one up. Conveniently it worked and provided the second word/character for my title. BAM!
“I threw up on your bed.”
Writing a style guide is quite a task. I noticed a few references today mentioning that people leading that task for larger ‘papes tend to retire after finishing the guide. Or retire so they can finish it. Hopefully this wont be quite so involved and long strung. (Heh, long strung, I like that.) I was reading ALA’s guide and was mondo impressed when they mentioned that it’s important not to dumb down stuff too much on there since web professionals read the site. However, not to go over board. For example they mentioned that just because a CSS programmer knows all 317 CSS workarounds doesn’t necessarily mean they have heard of Edward Tufte. I was so glad I knew who Tufte was. Because I certainly don’t know 317 CSS anythings.
I’m starting to get a slight understanding of typography issues associated with the web. Typography is such a massive topic it seemed to me at first glance, certainly worth sinking my teeth into, but only it in little pieces at first. I’m amazed at how quickly some of it is making sense. I don’t like the construct of those last sentences. Another time.
I got one of these mini optical mice for my lappy. It’s tiny.
One gripe I have about using this leg top putter is that the little touch pad is forever experiencing an ID10t error because I bump it with my thumbs. I’m hoping as I get used to typing on it I’ll lighten up on the accidental touch pad cursor moves. Nothing kills a train of thought quite like jumping three sentences and randomly inserting characters. I enjoy the portability however.
I still use ‘though’ far to much in just about anything I write. I’ve done better this round but it was conscious.
