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Went to ‘Making IT happen’ – DISAG Showcase. Overall, it was a good event to begin to emerge blinking from behind our desks and get a wider view of what’s happening in IT across the University. The process of meeting people and straight out asking what someone did I found useful. There was an element of preaching to the choir, but I guess that the lesson there is that education and that dreaded nebulous word, ‘engagement’ are activities that need to take place over time. Rome wasn’t built in a day – certainly not using PRINCE2.

Hoping Fontcase will fix me

Finally bit the bullet and decided to buy a font management app. Billed as ‘iTunes for fonts’ Fontcase is working for me. I like to have a small set of fonts for daily use, but the option of lots os dingbat fonts and the ability to sort them out well. The real killer feature for me is the simplicity. The app stores all your fonts in one place unlike a mysterious process of ‘activating’ them , it just copies them to the appropriate folder when they are needed. This approach makes it really easy to keep them all in a remote folder and organise things across multiple machines. So even though it was more than a tightwad like me would normally pay, I’m glad I did.

Realised that i remembered more than I thought about creating a rails app, so created one and started writing cucumber features for the developers to build. Along the way we had an entertaining but pointless discussion about what to name our repository. Animals, Elements, Authors,Fish and Birds were among the sets of things we thought about. I stopped caring halfway through and we settled on capital cities.

Discovered that our microformats need some overhauling, since the technorati feed has stopped working for us. Microformats still feel like a geeky hobby, but it seems daft not to use them for the minimal effort that will be involved.

Swimming and Learning

Enjoyed Tim Ferris’ talk about learning things. Although he’s a pretty self regarding figure, he still manages to be interesting, and I will certainly try out his swimming tips. I think he massively underestimates how analytical he is and assumes that everyone else has those same skill. Maybe that’s his point.

Been wrangling styles that have been placed in content areas of ours sites are hence pretty unmanageable because of it.

A false dichotomy

Does make me think of the wider issue of the the grey area between content and code. I don’t think the proposition that is often made, that ‘content’ people can just get on with content, whilst the code people just provide the platform. From the content people’s perspective, understanding the technical requirements, limitations and strengths of the medium is central to creating engaging and useful websites. I guess it can be daunting for people who consider themselves non-technical to be faced with learning about things like document markup and semantics. Perhaps as a dev team we need to provide the carrot of help learning some of these things before we begin to use the stick of constraining a system to disallow poor practice.

In the same vein, as developers we work with and use an large number of sites, so over time we can’t help but form opinions on content ideas and approaches that work. Quite how we get those ideas into our sites is a challenge, because up to now we’ve been very clear that the authority for content rests with the content people. However, it seems a shame for (what we think are) good ideas not to be included into overall strategies. Quite what needs to change for this to happen I’m not sure. I just hope it does.