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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.

As ever, I enjoyed the insight onto his working method that Andy Clarke demonstrated with his talk about a new project and how he’s doing it . It’s the simple and pragmatic hands-on post that I really appreciate. He explains how to go about using advanced styles in a way that encourages one to go off and try them out. For me, the thing that is making me slightly tardy in beginning the process at work is the palaver of supporting Internet Explorer (ain’t it always the way).

Mark made his extensive notes from the FOWA in London available, and I thought they were very good. He seemed enthused and bored in equal measure, but he’s already got work on some of the things in there. You can read them in full. From the same conference I watched the video of Gary Vaynechuk, who made an impassioned plea for people running sites to really, actually care about the people visiting the site. He was a very robust and entertaining speaker delivering some unvarnished truths.

Glow is the BBC’s Javascript Library which seems like it will be the next Javascript library to amaze and baffle me. I was looking at this one since we have started to play with it, and thought I should have at least a little knowledge of it.

I learnt a nice little photoshop selection trick using ‘color range’ from this tutorial

Whilst looking at a collection of free fonts I showed some restraint in not getting anymore; it would just add to my already ridiculous and ongoing indecision about managing my fonts. I want a nice short font list , but seem unable to bring myself to get rid of any.

Finished a really great book this week. The Language of things by Deyan Sudjic

A fascinating book. The author whilst obviously deeply thoughtful and educated about the cultural significance of the objects that surround us he wears his knowledge lightly and makes it very easy to follow.

Joe Clark wrote a great review, which is what made me pick it up. I agree with his assertion that it’s full of great points that then get pushed out of one’s head to make way for the next one. Really enjoyed the chapter on Fashion, which educated me about what a huge and voracious industry the fashion business is, and how it consumes so many other cultural activities. The chapter on Luxury was equally thought provoking.

Not a piece in praise of Hasselhoff’s 80s magmun opus, or indeed some depraved nocturnal activity, but a short tale of riding a scooter on country roads at night.

On leaving the Heath hospital in Cardiff after visiting a friend, I had the dilemma of which route to take home. On my trusty Honda Dylan I have to weigh up whether I want the convenience of the faster and scarier A470 or the slower , but more interesting smaller roads. I normally do a little stretch on the A470 where the limit is 50mph and then peel off before I get too much hassle from larger and faster vehicles. Last night I decided to explore, not really being to sure that the A470 at night is best suited to being seen.

So I thought I’d go over the mountain, up Rhiwbina hill and then home. It was quite nerve-wracking going up the hill with the headlights on full beam, but with the contours of the country road making large shadows. Nevertheless it was my first time on a small road in the dark, and probably safer than in the day when cars come racing down that hill.

When I reached the top of Caerphilly mountain I managed to take the wrong turn(like I always do there) and ended up in the town centre. Riding out of town, I again chose to go up over the mountain for home and this road was narrower and bumpier. It was still great fun to stop and see the great views of the lights stretching out across Pontypridd and the surroundings.

Bumping across the top of Eglywsilan reminscent of Steve McQueen at the end of the great escape – in my mind at least – I eventually came down the steepest bit of road I know into civilisation.

It was a great little adventure.

Almost as good as cycling up there.