Wheelz Online

So, as I said last time, i’m now back at work for a while.  I now go into Hospital for surgery on 22nd November and until then I’m full-time back at work.  This has been quite an adventure as with only 8 weeks of working time I’ve not been included in any projects to get stuck into.

So what have I been doing?  Well, before I was ill I was in charge of most of the online technology solutions (wiki’s forum’s etc) and was happy with that.  I knew what I was doing and felt as thought people needed me for things.  Now i’m back I find that I’ve lost control of all these to an admin person and all I’m left doing now is formatting Word Documents.  It seems that all that I’ve fought for over the last 12 months has been wiped off the face of the planet.  I put in place some unpopular workflows which created a sense of professionalism to clients that came to us but as soon as I go, they also go.

There is only so much fighting you can do before you give up and just go with the flow.  So this worker will now just do stuff which any monkey can do in his sleep rather than what i’m paid for.

OK, so its no secret i’ve had a struggle fitting in with having to share my new office with people, but I think yesterday things have started to turn around a bit.  There is a project that I was asked to get involved in last year but because of certain things happening I never did, but yesterday i was asked for my advice just passing on something and have now been embrassed into the project with open arms.  And then today another passing conversation might have added a whole new strand onto the work i’m doing which is great and I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks in the office now.

But on the bad side, Heath Ledger is dead.

Christmas was very good.  Lots of presents all round, fun family times & a chance to recharge my batteries.  What did I get for xmas you ask?  Well here goes.

• Flash CS3 Bible
• ActionScript 3 Bible
• Terry Pratchett book - Making Money
• Assassin’s Creed (Xbox360)
• Need for Speed:Pro Street (Xbox360)
• Heroes Volume 1
• Transformers Movie
• Bladerunner 5 Disk box set

and then on boxing day I got a SatNav.

So now i’m back at work.  Just before xmas I moved into a portakabin for the next 3 years and I was a little concerned about how it was going to go.  Well some of my concerns wasted away into nothing.  Its the first time in 7 years that i’ve shared an office with more than 3 people and I’m finding it a struggle but i’m sure I’ll get used to it.  I was told that also before xmas I was feeling isolated because I was in a different office to rest of the team. Well i’m now in the same office and I feel exactly the same - more if thats believeable.  I can see some ‘tricky’ problems coming to light in the next few weeks so stay tuned for play by play commentary on the politics of work.

I’m also looking forward to next week when I’m off to buy a new Macbook Pro.

As I may  have mentioned some time ago, I work for an educational establishment.  This has both good points and bad points.  Firstly the bad:  I’m not a ‘people person’; I don’t particularly enjoy working with a large crowd of people as I feel out of my depth in such a situation.  But I’ve also realised now that I get very bored when i work on my own, you see my office was home to 4 people and because of job offers and other things I am now the only person left in the office and its at the end of a quiet corridor.  This has meant that for the last week I’ve only seen one person around work, boring….

But now onto the good points of education jobs.  Free training!!!!  Over the last 12 months i’ve had £000’s of training from Adobe, Microsoft, Nikon.  This is the biggest draw of this job for me as I love to learn.  Plus its helping me in my aim of starting off on my own.  But its so hard to leave because of the ‘perks’ of the job.  What do I do?

I had been asked a few months ago to look into creating an online enrolment system for my employers.  Sounded fun and interesting considering all I had previously done for them was online learning work and the main company website.  So I get to work designing this thing using PHP/MySQL and Acrobat.  I’ve just about finished it now and am ready to upload it onto one of my hosting packages for internet testing; it all works fine locally.  Then today I thought I would just check to make sure that the webspace that they have given me at work is fine and this is where it falls down.  No scripting what-so-ever.

How am I meant to be able to create an online app when they won’t even let me use scripts.  This is because I am not ‘THE WEBMASTER’ of the organisation, although the person who has that job title is far too busy to work on it, but at the same time won’t let others work on it no matter what qualifications and experience they have.

Has anyone else run into this problem at their work, and if so how did you overcome it?

I’ve been working with HTML and Style sheets for a number of years and over that time I’ve learnt some important things. For example, because of the way different browsers use margins and paddings, one of the first things I do is create a style onto the body tag which zeros all margin and padding values. This allows me to ’start again’ with laying out pages.

Now fast forward to my present job. Here at my place of work we have a content management system, which as far as CMS goes is pretty good; it was written in house and after a few hours training, you can create pages which are better than in most other packages. But, and this is the problem, for uses who have experience of building websites you can also create pages in your favorite local package and upload completed html to the system. This is a really cool feature, or so I thought. One of the problems with this application is that although you can add your own header images, they need to be seperate html pages called by the CMS.

So I’ve created my pages and uploaded them; the site looks good and does what I want it to. All i need to do now is add the banner. I go to my trusty homesite or dreamweaver (depends what mood I’m in) and create a html page with just an image tag in it and a style block to make sure that it displays in the html site without any margin or padding. Then I upload the page into the CMS. You’d expect that I’d have a nice page now, but noooo. I get random characters above my header. How is this possible. I check the source code, and they arent there. I check the original html header file and they aren’t there. I even check the html page for the content on the off chance that the problem is with that but no.

In the end, I realise that that problem is with my zero-ing my margins. The CMS doesn’t support that, so i take out the style block and hey presto its fine. This has taken me at least a few days of head scratching and made me push back other important work.

Which is why I generally don’t like content management systems. They take away all control from web developers. I would love to know if other people have had problem with working with them.

Well, I’m back at work now. But I thought I would share my thoughts on @media last week with you all. One word pretty much sums it up for me - “Outstanding” The guys who organised it did a brilliant job with all the speakers and sessions they put on. Some of the highlights were

• Eric Meyer’s keynote along with his words of wisdom - Don’t eat anything larger than your own head.
• Jefferey Veen was very entertaining and got me salavating with possibilites for creating my millions with ‘web 2.0′
• I thought Robin Christopher’s session was very enlightening. Made me realise some important issues with regards to accessibilty for people on your sites.
• But the most interesting session for me was the one on Microformats by Tantek Çelik. I kind of had an idea what they were before, but after listening to him I get the whole point of them now.

So all in all i really enjoyed it. If i had to pick one thing which was wrong with it, the only thing I can think of is that the wireless network kept crashing. This did have an impact on Robin’s session, but apart from that I was entertained, given many many ideas and am looking forward to next year now.

You can see some of the photos from the event below on my flickr album.

Well I made it to London in one piece this afternoon for the @media2006 conference. I think one of the hardest things I’m going to have to cope with is being without my girlfriend for 3 days. I love her very much and this is the longest time we’ve been apart since we started living together nearly 18 months ago.

But on a more positive note, some of the sessions tomorrow and Friday sound very interesting. For example, Good Design vs Great Design. I guess that if I want to make it in the web business and be more than moderately successful then I need to produce Great Designs don’t I?

My online credit here at Virgin in Oxford Street is about to run out so thats pretty much all I’ve got to say tonight. Depending on the whereabouts of cyber cafe’s I should be able to post the best points raised at the conference tomorrow and Friday.

Till then…

So, at my place of work, I was the only online content developer who was able to spend time working on projects. The main web designer is already pulled out with keeping the business CMS up and running, so it falls to me to work on the project. Let me explain, I work for an education establishment, and our online work is very successful but getting it that way isn’t. When i first started on this path, I was asked to turn some content into a website. But the content hadn’t been written and the whole site had to be comleted in 5 months. To cut a long story short, I managed it, with the help of 2 people who felt the same as me.

Now flash forward 2 years. What’s changed??? Nothing, well except now that one project has turned into 4 and the deadlines have tightened to 3 months. When I say that I can’t do this much work I get told, “well you did it before”. So no holidays for me in the summer again and late nights working for the next 13 weeks. All in the quest for more awards from the establishment and praise for the managers. On top of that we now have employed a graphic designer/web developer that i have to train up. I so love my job.