As ever i’m constantly pondering changes to this site to make it easier to update. Wordpress is great at what it does, although often it takes so much effort to shape and mould that i’ve no time left to actually post content. As such i’m wondering if it would be more useful to scrap Wordpress run this site using the content management system i’ve been developing at work, so that any effort in actually setting the site up is of benefit in future projects.
regeneration
So we moved into the new office last week, great space, more creative and professional feeling to it. It does unfortunately feel like a little bit of a novelty at the moment which does hinder productivity slightly.
That will hopefully die away when the phone line gets hooked up, which should be Tuesday. In the meantime we are bootlegging Internet from our neighbours (with their permission) and on our mobile phones to talk with clients.
More space in the office means we have room for a seperate meeting area as well as our desks. The meeting area has a board with all current projects (client and internal) which helps visually plan what work will be done and when.
So the kehorne office has undergone a regeneration, a lot of new exciting characteristics but envitably their are some hold overs from the old office, bad habits you’d hoped you’d left behind. I just need to figure out what they are.
sit-rep
It’s been ages since I posted anything on my blog and in fact anybody who stumbled upon it would think it was simply another place to see my tweets.
The reason for no posts lately is a mix of throwing myself into my job and not really being sure how much I can and should blog about work, and I’m actually still not sure, but I figure as long as I don’t spill any state secrets or break any NDAs I should be okay.
I’ve a pretty long way in the year or so since I got the job, most notably my php has gone from “what does that do?” to being the one my boss comes to when a client wants to know what the options for a project are, how easy they are to achieve and how long it will take.
Ofcourse anyone who knows anything about php will know there’s a lot to learn and a lot of possibilities, so in reality I’ve only gone from ignorant to competant (sp?), so there is still a lot more to learn which excites, scares and frustrates me all at the same time.
Besides an encourgaging growth in skills, I also feel I’m slowly becoming a voice inside the company whose opinion matters. Ofcourse if in a small company your opinion doesn’t matter after after 13 months your doing something wrong, but really that side of things has gone better than I could have hoped.
I would obviously be delighted to continue to add some of my personality into that of the company, although more importantly and more realistic is the hope that I may have a very real inpact on how the company approaches projects, since envitably with a small company, exactly how the company approaches projects is still very much influx.
a quick twitter
Right, the twitter page is back looking somewhere close to how it used to, although oddly now I feel like it’s a bit of a cheat to have twitter displaying through wordpress. Also visually jarring to have every section in a different “framework” except the blog and twitter. So i’ll probably look at pulling my tweets directly using the api and displaying them differently to how they are now.
site updates
So, i’ve finally gotten round to a few updates on the site, i’ve been rather easily distracted recently into not updating and maintaining the site because of work both Kehorne and a freelance project which has just gone live. But i’ve always known that I should have web designs projects outside of “work” because they can be unfocused where professional projects can’t be.
A new photos section is up, powered by “Gallery“, which is an addition i’ve been meaning to make for a long time, and it holds some of what I kindly call “my photography”, it’s real purpose is to encourage me to take more photos. The more photos I take the more often a good one pops up.
The “Work” section has disappeared temporarily whilst I come up with a format which is more easily updated.
Twitters have now disappeared from the front page of the blog, and are instead viewable from the twitter link in the top menu. Although the upgrade to wordpress 2.8.1 broke the plugin which applied nice neat formatting to my twitters. So that another thing on the list of things to fix.
sorkin back writing bartlet
OBAMA: What would you do?
BARTLET: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back … Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. … And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!
From an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times a few days ago, stuff like this is why I love the internet. Read the rest here
45 beautiful & creative wordpress designs
Linked incase I want to find it while i’m at work, need to come up with a better way of doing this though.
work update
It’s odd how you feel compelled to update a personal weblog every so often, which is probably not how it should be done, you should update when you’ve got something to say, and I do, but i’ve not felt compelled to say it until now for some reason. Work is going well, possibly not everything I expected it too be, then I can’t tell you exactly what I was expecting. It’s certainly not my “dream job”, my dream job is getting paid loads of money whilst being selective with the clients I take on and being flexible with the hours I work. Maybe I might get their someday.
I would say certain aspects are what i’d always had in mind for my perfect starting job. I’m working three days a week until the end of august for several very good reasons. For a professional point of view it gives me a chance to settle in. For more personal reasons i’ve got a backlog of freelance work to get done, also got a ton of other stuff to get done.
Anyway i’ve been at the new job for just over three weeks now, and i’m learning a shockingly large amount. It’s actually the hardest part of the job is having to switch off or ignore the demands of the design student in me since whenever I learn something new I need to know for a project I am easily destracted into learning a lot of (at that moment in time) useless stuff while a clock ticks on the project.
wordpress loyalty?
Apparently today is The Unofficial International Wordpress Day and the organisers are asking wordpress users to blog about wordpress. Fair enough, but what to talk about?, well one wordpress blogger decided to discuss “what makes you loyal to wordpress?“, and so that seems like a good question to try and answer.
Well for me my use of wordpress breaks down into two halfs. Firstly there is my own personal use, such as this blog & 24fans.com and such, for these uses I will continue to use Wordpress for as long as it remains up to date in features and continues to be a stable base and back end for modification. I thing I hate most about all Content Management Systems is how they all seem determined to scream their name at every site visitor, simply by the way they look and are layed out. Wordpress for me offers the best options for stripping that shouting away.I
Then we get on to my other usage of Wordpress, when a client asks for a weblog and I set them up with Wordpress. Well to be frank I have no ingrained loyalty to Wordpress in this situation, that would be unprofessional, I have to set clients up with whatever best meets their needs, budget and timescale. Obviously if a client starts dropping phrases like “whatever you can setup the quickest” then I’m gonna heavily lean towards Wordpress because that is what I can set up the quickest, and if Wordpress meets their needs while another system meets their needs also, but doesn’t offer anything extra, then it’ll be Wordpress again. I guess you could call that loyalty, but i’d simply call it logical.