Right, I haven’t blogged for ages so here’s the f’shizzle:

I recently moved from Edinburgh back down to Sheffield, staying at Richey’s while I started my job and found somewhere for me and the girly thing to live… I’m working for School Trends doing 2nd Line Web Technical Support, basically fixing stuff that the customers (mainly schools) have problems with, in managing their websites. What’s cool about it is I can try my hand at pretty much anything that helps to make the software or customer experience better, which is quite liberating, although the requirements of the position will relegate my coding explorations to only a few hours a week. I’m still ultimately aiming to be able to do Web App development, so any R&D or general developmental experience at School Trends will be great and I’ll jump on any chance to make their software better and help with redesigning the UI.

The new abode will be in Ranmoor, which is particularly poncey – as is the flat :) It’s about 45-55min walk out of town, from what I can tell – which isn’t quite as close as I originally wanted but it’s an awesome area and the flat is seriously phat. It’s really hard to get decent flats in nice areas much closer to town. Hopefully I should have all my junk moved up from dearest mama’s by early January too.

This site hasn’t had much done on it at all recently besides finally fix the menu to a point where I’m actually rather pleased with it; I am however getting a lot more confident with PHP & MySQL so it should take less time to roll out things that I want put on the site. The quote generator test I did worked fine, which means that the random image generator will take only about 5min to do, given that the code is quite basic and pretty much the same thing. The main thing I will be working on before both of those are live is the login system, I need it to be as close to the LoginView .NET control as I can get it in terms of functionality. SEO is also a priority; I really need to get my Google listing sorted. Hopefully by the time I’ve got somewhere with those I’ll have some more content (I know, it’s crazy talk…actual content on my site!), and then I’ll probably do that AJAXy Photo viewer along with some Semantic Web stuff.

Edit:

Little did I know that being entirely responsible for the development of a CMS, as well as most technical support issues for over 200 customers, would completely demolish my appetite for spending time developing this site.  A few months ago, one of the Mozilla developers blogged about losing his interest in developing Firefox extensions due to spending most of his working day hacking on the ‘fox.  I totally empathise with this, although I don’t plan on giving up on this site just yet.  So:

  • Photos will happen eventually, although I’ll probably grab someone else’s viewer code and customise it a little.
  • Login system has been dropped as it was rather ambitious and probably would not have been used much anyway.
  • Changes to the design are now mainly restricted to CSS bug fixing.  If/when I get bored of the design, I will either make gradual changes or, if I want a fairly substantial change, will just pick a nice WP template.
  • I can’t be bothered to make this site work in IE6, I spend enough time doing that at work.  Anything to hasten it’s demise…
  • The GridView tutorial won’t be happening – I’m not in possession of it, I’ve tried numerous times to get my hands on it in some form but to no avail.  It is a pity as I spent ages on it and it would have been a great addition to the site, along with a good way to reacquaint myself with .NET, but ‘s been quite a while so I’ll just let it go now.  I have some other things in the pipeline to help flesh out the Downloads page.

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Listening to: Kayo Dot – The Antique

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