Offshore Life

Ben Hammersley writes in the Guardianabout the idea of personal offshoring. On the one hand, this fills me with dread – it’s taking the skillset that I have developed over the years, and making it available for much, much cheaper that I can afford to be.

On the other hand, I could really, really use some design work doing on the cheap. Of course, I want it to be fully XHTML/CSS and standards-compliant and all that jazz, and I’m not confident that a third-world designer will be (or indeed, that they’ll be modern looking designs – all the ones I’ve seen on template sites look about three years out of date, to me.

Don’t suppose anyone reading this is a design professional with XHTML/CSS skills willing to work for the price of a few pints per site?

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Tools and Design

So I stumbled across Garrett Dimmon’s point making prank the other day, and it’s got me thinking about the way I present myself on the web.

The two sites I’ve put on-line most recently are this one, and my photography portfolio, and for both, I’ve just grabbed an out-of-the-box tool, and stuck with minor modifications to the default template. I do intend to make them into something fully custom at some point, but it’s not high on my priority list.

Given that I’m a professional web developer one might suggest that this doesn’t present the best image of my technical skills.

Or, of course, one might say that I see no need to spend weeks re-inventing the wheel, and that I know I’m not a professional designer, so if I can get something that looks good for now, that’s enough. Surely, if there’s an art to what I do, it’s in knowing how to communicate well for the minimum time investment. Just a thought…

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Web dev malaise

So, I’m sitting here in the office, bored out of my mind, attempting to upgrade someone else’s stinkingly poor spaghetti-logic code, to make it do something it was explictly designed not to do, and really, just wishing I had the sort of job where I was developing interesting shit, rather than crap for a company that’s too scared to do anything interesting with the internet, despite being perfectly placed to try to do cutting-edge things. And then I run across the summary for next year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and frankly, I just get more depressed at what I’m missing.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

On social software

Tom Coates writes as concise a definition of good social software as I’ve seen, and one I want to come back to for Londonlist:

*Every individual should derive value from their contributions
*Every contribution should provide value to their peers as well
*The site or organisation that hosts the service should be able to derive value from the aggregate of the data and should be able to expose that value back to individuals

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Lesscode.org

This looks like it might be worth keeping up with: lesscode.org, a multi person blog about, basically, producing applications that actaully get something done, rather than getting lost in ciomplexity. I particularly like this article, outlining the benefits of in-house code and the management process by which is doesn’t happen. I, of course, have never worked anywhere like that. No.

Never.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.