Archive for December, 2005
Coding is easier than flat packs
I have come to the conclusion today that you need to have more skills than the average bear to actually do a flat pack. I can fix a puter, I can code, I can do web design – yet appear unable to actually do a flat pack. Yes, the new Ikea opened in Milton Keynes and yes we did go crazy flat pack style.
Stick it in your USB
Whilst joining in with the Christmas eve insanity shopping, today I noticed a number of odd USB attachments. The first was a USB lava lamp – although this intitially brought out the ooo wow girlie in me that resulted in a disappointing purchase of the Urbz. I am beginning to wander what people really are thinking regarding these odd USB devices. I mean, with all we have sitting on our desk do they really think our ultimate glory would be to own a USB Christmas tree that sings jingle bells?
2006 predictions
1. Blog networks will continue to grow, but have some serious pruning leaving some strong both in niche and non-niche markets.
2. Web 2.0 will stop being used and we’ll all just realise it is hype.
3. People who have blogs that say web 2.0 anything will have to change their names.
4. CSS will become the industry standard completely – this really isn’t so much a prediction as I see it is really occuring already. There will also be a lot of talk about dynamic css and other interesting techniques. If ie 7 does get released this year expect a lot of sites to break as not compatable to the CSS parsing.
5. Web professional will start to be used to describe web designers and web developers.
6. Web colours will intensify.
7. The use of large text will be refined rather than the copy nature it is happening at currently.
8. There will be a surge in the use of ajax – dear santa, please send me a ajax book.
9. If you aren’t using web standards you will be laughed at and made to stand in the corner.
10. Yahoo will continue to buy up everything – including digg.
11. E-shots will have a resurgence in use which seemed to flag this year slightly.
12. RSS will become main stream and the standard way of getting information such as news. More and more sites will start asking for RSS as standard as big and small companies catch onto it.
13. Del.icio.us will probably release a desktop application enabling access to your bookmarks from your desktop in windows.
14. Mobile web will continue to grow and infact with the new blackberry’s and other devices see a serious upturn in 2006.
15. Forums will become less and less as blogs create communities through commenting.
16. Flock will stop becoming the butt of everyone’s joke and actually become something a few people use once they get beyond the blog dissing.
17. More and more blogs will open and close in under a week.
CSS christmas
As of today I managed to rid the company I work from of templates. This might not seem like a major win in the scheme of christmas confusion. It is however a small victory for web standards and means along with that we now are a complete css web company. Suddenly, my christmas cheer is a raising and I can hear the jingling of the christmas sleigh bells.
Let it code, let it code
Last morning of real work bar the tomorrow annual desk tidying, today it snowed code in my world. There has been a lot I had to do and for some reason today it came in one dribble into php. Made me think how frustrating coding really is. You can spend days bashing your head against something and then you have those days like today. Those days when you write code as you would english and everything works first time. In under two hours I managed to get out a calendar script, news script and various bolt ons for my cms system.
Designing beyond images
I have always been of the opinion that design isn’t just about images. This might seem a rather obvious thing to state. The thing is everyone focuses on design in the visual sense and rarely realise that such areas as words, content and copy can also be an area of design. I personally know I suck at copy and have never really got the hang of it. I am not too bad on creative writing but find it hard to actually create copy. Couple with this all the spelling ability of a dead hamster and the proof reading skills of a child of 5 and you got a bit of a gap in my skill set.
