Website build underway

I'm back from my 5 night trip to Majorca, complete with a dose of "man flu". I have started building my website, with strict separation of content, presentation and behaviour. With most of my department not in the office this week, hopefully I can get a chance to get some serious design and behaviour stuff done, so I can spend the next couple of weeks adding content. I will send out a web address as soon as its in a state worthy of being shared.

I have been developing my own framework DLL alongside the development of my website, in order to help me avoid repeting common tasks during website development. This DLL also contains many useful functions, such as doctype declaration. I now use an asp.net literal control at the top of the page, and set its text property to "DocType.Xhtml1Point1Strict". This avoids me mis-spelling and head-scratching. This is still in early development, but I aim to release it as a free download in the near future.

Hopefully I will shift this cold soon too. Sniff sniff...

Holidays... and instantaneous email, delayed by a day

Last minute deals are great aren't they? I got a lovely holiday booked to Majorca for the equivalent of £380. I have to fly from Stuttgart, but InterCityExpress train travel to and from the airport was included in the price.

Things have been working well today, but I have learned how inefficient the email system used by our web application is. We have a dedicated server with an external company, which sends automated emails to an external mail provider of that company, which sends email via several relay servers until it reaches its destination. Oh, and this can take up to a day in the worst circumstances.

I guess external mail providers must think one day ahead...

Flexi-time - So flexible it can break apps

I am classed as "lucky" among my close friends as having a job with flexi-time hours. This essentially means, I can do my 40 hours per week when I like, providing I work at least 2 business hours per day.

The web application I work on decided to break today when it got updated, as a simple stylesheet change made generated html useless in email messages. Being the technical lead for the application, it was my duty to fix the problem.

When your boss is on travel and your project manager isn't at work, life can become difficult. This was especially true today, as there was no communication as to why the change to the stylsheet was made or what it impacted. It took me most of the day to drill down to the problem of why emails weren't displaying any images.

Take one of those plastic rulers from when you were at school. Bend it hard enough and it breaks...

It seems professionals sometimes lack at the fundametals

Today I decided to go through the markup code that is used with html emails sent from the web application I work on. A customer requested a change to an email template, and so I went on about honouring this change for them. The email templates were not created by myself, but rather an out-sourced company of "professionals". To put it short, I was shocked.

In the age of the web, standards compliance is now the bread and butter of a web developers job. I was shocked to see multiple uses of the same id on the same page, and the use of tables for layout. Have these guys ever heard of CSS? Apparently not. A 2 minute job turned out be be an afternoon of html formatting (and enforcing the use of classes) and CSS.

Next time you rest assured that simple tasks will be completed well by a "professional", think again..

Signing on..

Hello all and welcome to the first installment of hopefully a long line of blog entries.

As you may or may not know, I am a university student currently on work placement in Switzerland. I am working as a web applications programmer for a world wide Agri-Business. I'm currently living and working in Basel, which lies squeezed between germany, france and Switzerland.

I'm still waiting for summer...