Bookmarking and website progress

I have recently added my bookmarks onto ma.gnolia. Here you can find some great resources and blogs to aid any form of web design and devlopment, as well as general programming.

It also serves as a great place to get all of my bookmarks from when I leave Switzerland and go back to the UK, which is in about 3 weeks time.

A new version of my website will be available soon, and this includes my own blogging system, which will publish entries back to my blogger.com site when I have worked out how the ATOM api works.

Bis dann...

Website documentation... or lack of it!

A new student has started working in my office, due to the fact that he is taking over my position fully in 4 weeks (when I'll be dragged kicking and screaming from Switzerland). I was horrified to find that very little technical information there is about the web application I have devoted so much time to over the past year.

I now find myself having to teach the student with demonstrations and looking through the code together. I am trying to piece together a technical manual at the same time, to act as a reference for him when I leave.

It makes me wonder.. How many web sites or web applications actaully have a technical guide?

I'm not after a fancy class diagram either!

Ignorance and standards compliancy

Being a "Microsoft Partner", the company I work for employs Internet Explorer as the standard web browser for all of its users.

A new student has joined the company two days ago, and immediately "needs" Firefox installing on his computer. Here's the transcript of a conversation I had:

ME: "Why do you need Firefox. Standards within the organisation require you to have IE. I get to have all of the Browsers installed as my job is a Web Developer."

HIM: "Firefox is better."

ME: "No argument there. But that doesn't really provide a real need for it."

HIM: "I want to be able to read my Blog."

ME: "Surely you can just read it in IE."

HIM: "It only works in Firefox."

ME: "Why didn't you design for IE too?"

HIM: "It's standards compliant."

ME: "And?"

HIM: "Besides, I don't want people using IE to read it."

ME: "That is 85% of your potential viewers. Just because it's apparently standards compliant, you can't be ignorant and shut people out."

It frustrated me, how he came across as a purist, but then revealed that Firefox was the only browser he designed for. He's a Browser Targeting Developer, not a Web Developer.

New people are coming along claiming that they only develop with standards compliancy in mind. In truth, these people are designing for Firefox, because Firefox is a standards compliant browser. It's not the only browser, and certainly isn't the most popular yet. Even if Firefox had 85% of the Web Browser market, it still wouldn't stop me from developing for IE and Opera.

Constructive criticism

I'd just like to give my thanks to the people who have given me some great tips and improvements for my site so far. Your help has been brilliant and well received in helping me build my site.

Thanks go to: Steve Daniels, Nicola Carroll, David Purdom, Matt Dovey, and Mark Wraith.

I strongly believe that a website designer should welcome all comments, both good and bad inorder to make their site much better. If people hate the contact form, why do they? Hopefully I can be in a position some day soon to show my site as an example of usable feedback.

On a side note, I have recently aquired the domain name www.aaronallport.com. This should point to my site on the 9th July 2006 onwards.

Blog integration

I have finally integrated my blog into my website. It took a sunday morning, two cups of coffee and some toast with marmite, but its now there.

Blogging on aaronallport.co.uk

I have nearly finished aggregating this blog on my website. I have developed a lovely atom feed consumer which I've dropped right into my asp.net framework (which is still small, but continously being developed). I have to sort out the display slightly, but hopefully will have something to push tomorrow.

Live!

The big day has finally arrived... my website is now live!

Although there may be a lack of content on there at present, rest assured that there will be over the coming months. I also need to start creating some themes for the site, a nice content management system, and get that important Web Accessibility Guidelines "AAA" recommendation.

Here's the link: http://www.aaronallport.co.uk.

Please feel free to look around, and let me know your feedback. I allow anonymous comments on this blog now.

Cheers,

Aaron

Fraud tackling

As mentioned yesterday, I had successfully signed up for hosting. Trouble is, the hosting company I used get rather serious when it comes to ge-referencing your IP address when you sign up, in an effort to tackle fraud (which is a good thing).

My work computer goes through a proxy in the US, so instantly there is a problem as my home address is in the UK. On top of this, my working address is Switzerland, so I have had to write two rather lengthly emails already to clarify the situation.

This puts a bit of a hiccup in my pushing live plan, but hopefully it will get sorted soon.

Hosting Secured!

I finally got my hosting secured today. Very cheap and secured for 2 years. As soon as my setup details are through I can finally push my website! It seems a long time in the making, but I have probably spent more time sorting out hosting than actually doing the site.

I'll post the web address as soon as it's live, then its time to re-engineer the engine behind the site, validate xhtml/css/acessibility.... the list grows!

Ta ta for now..

Hosting...

Website front end is now fully complete. I am going to get the site "as is" up on the net soon, whilst I concentrate on the back end stuff to enable me to publish blog entries, CMS, etc. I am also stratching my head trying to get the site WAG certified. Its a mammoth document, but hopefully I'll get through it.

I aim to push next week once I have sorted out some hosting.

Bis dann...

Website almost done!

Its nearly done and its looking good so far, with fully valid XHTML 1.1 Strict and CSS 2.1. W3C Accessibility is in there too, and its all shaping up nicely with the XML/XSLT content management system I have developed.

Hopefully I will be able to push next week to let some of you see what I'm about!

Ciao

Tackling non-standards compliance in asp.net 1.1

A lot of large organisations still use .net 1.1 and subsequently asp.net 1.1 because of processes, software packaging etc.

In these rock 'n' roll standards compliant days of the web, a fundamental problem remains. Asp.net 1.1 likes to use proprietry attributes (such as script language="javascript" as opposed to type="text/javascript"). This means your asp.net 1.1 web application fails in some standards compliancy isuues, namely proprietry attributes in your markup.

Using some fancy DOM Scripting may be one way of removing unwanted attributes and inserting the right ones, but surely that's just holding your hand up and saying "I know its dirty markup, so I'm going to brush the dirt under the rug and pretend it was ok all along". Trouble is, with a little searching, clients can uncover the "dirt from beneath the rug".

How else are you going to remove the proprietry "language" attribute from the postback event?

Holiday Snaps

I have finally got some pictures from my holiday off my camera, and I thought I would share a few for your viewing pleasure...

This is Mark, clearing the beach as soon as he took his top off!














This is a view of our beach at sunset. The water was freezing, but nice and clear.













This is a view of the sea at sunset. You can just about make out Mark's head from the top of the rock.






Ciao for now...

XmlDocument woes

I have been making extensive use of .net's XmlDocument object within an asp.net application I am developing to generate XML files. I do love the ease of this object, but it takes such a large amount of code to do anything complex.

Maybe that's an idea for something to add to my framework library...

The website is nearly done, content being added all the time. Any time now...

Moving along, and why I still hate full-on CMS

The website is starting to move along nicely now. I have had time to finish all of the "vanilla" design, plus all basic behavior is there. I need to add that content now, and I can see this taking up a lot of my time.

This is where a CMS or Content Management System may prove useful. I ended up making a very basic version of a content management system for a customer website once, as the only functionality they needed was to alter the content, not alter the design or behavior.

The reason I made my own basic CMS for their website was because many CMS systems allows to user to create and manage complete websites. I designed a complete website for them, and used a "tag replacement" system with resource files that are used to replace the tag with the appropriate content. This is all managed from a secure part of the site, acessible only by the administrator of that site.

I see the benefit of CMS systems, but I still think they should be left to Content Management only, a web designer should be responsible for the web design.

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...