So it has been a full day in my own office and unfortunately I didn’t get much time to myself. The Publications team was gone to a conference so we moved all of their desks and computers to their new working space. I was only in my office for increments of 5 minutes to check mail and phone.
The photo attached is the office how I got it. Nothing of mine in there and nothing cleaned. Not at least my computer is in there, things are cleaned up and I have a whiteboard. I will post another picture when it is all done.
Having your own space is like being inside a bubble, I am use to working in a large room with eight or so people. If I had a question about something I could just ask it while still staring at my computer and working. Who ever knew the answer would shout it out and work would continue. Although my office is right next to the pit I cannot hear whats going on out there, I have to rely on alternative methods to communicate. IM mainly but typing is though on the wrists sometimes. I kinda wish everyone had an iSight and we would all just talk and see each other.. nevermind, creepy.
Anyone have any good suggestions on how to deal with communicating when isolated in your own office?
We made it! Well sorta, small steps… PHPSimpl made it to the Del.icio.us PHP popular list. Its a small step but hey any recognition is good recognition.
It have kinda fell off my radar, work has been crazy lately, my development time has been limited due to my new position and this is the perfect thing to kick start my development of it.
I am contemplating changing the name and am in the process of getting approval for the name on Google Code. It may or may not happen but if it does it will bring a true identity to this unknown framework.
BTW, version 0.8.3 is about to be released because of all this and it is the best so far, quite a bit more stable and a few added features.
If there is anything you would like to see added to the project or just want to check it out please feel free to do so. A few ways are:
Building for the lowest common denominator and then expanding upward. It sounds like a simple concept but most wed developers just can’t seem to grasp it. Not believing accessibility matters or being so inexperienced that building sites seems to just be a hack fest to make the “design” work in all browsers is the single largest issue with web design now a days.
One example off the top of my head is mtv.com which did a total redesign in flash and had all these crazy bells and whistles, integrated video, movement, etc. Well two months later guess what happened, they redesigned again this time into a fully xhtml compliant site which didn’t have all the movement but was 100x easier to use and you could actually get to it with a cell phone and actually search for text on the page.
Two simple things I always look for when going to sites, first since I don’t have a lot of time to read through pages for information I use the firefox built in find as you type and if it cannot jump right to the word i am looking for ill go someplace else.
The second I don’t use as much but I am sure other people do, phone browser support. I am not talking about iPhone safari support because that is not really developing for the lowest common denominator. I use either a WAP browser of Opera on my phone while out and about if I need to look up information quickly. If I cannot get to your page and get to the information I need I will leave your site and probably never return.
We have a CMS that we built at Wayne State and sometimes page updates need to happen right then. We built it for the lowest common denominator just for that reason. We can get to it on any WAP browser and update any page in the CMS as if we were on a full computer. Without it we would have to rush to a computer just to use some fancy ajax interface, it would be pretty but would it really be worth all the hassle? I think not.
Anthem: Speed > Features Simple > Complex Enhancement > Degradation
Recently I started using jQuery instead of Prototype for my web applications. When I first started using a javascript library I picked Prototype because to be honest jQuery intimidated me, there was a lot of mystery about it. Well I took another look at it a few days ago and I was floored, boy I was missing out. jQuery byte for byte in my opinion kicks prototypes butt.
Take for example attaching a function to the document load and adding an onclick action to a link.
Pototype:
// Initially set everything up init = function (){ // If there is an expand dom element if ($('expand')){ Event.observe($('expand'), 'click', ExpandMenu, false); } } // Attach the onload function Event.observe(window, 'load', init, false);
jQuery:
// Initially set everything up $(document).ready(function(){ // On click event $("#expand").click(function(){ // Function actions here }); });
It may not seem like a great deal of code reduction but scanning the code from top down (say if you were a developer brought in to fix a bug) shows how more fluid jQuery is in terms of execution flow. Prototype jumps all over the place…
First define the initializer function
Next find the element on the page
Set an observer on it and direct it yet another function
Last but not least attach the initializer to the document load
It seems that is the exact opposite order of its execution, jQuery on the other hand…
Create a function and attach it to the document ready state
Create a function and attach it to a dom element on click
So it has been a full day in my own office and unfortunately I didn’t get much time to myself. The Publications team was gone to a conference so we moved all of their desks and computers to their new working space. I was only in my office for increments of 5 minutes to check mail and phone.