Category: Uncategorized

While this blog is usually confined to techno-babble and “professional” stuff, it used to have a more personal tone. This post is all about me and is part of a meme called seven things, after Jon Tan deemed me interesting enough to join in!

1. Most of my teens and my early twenties I spent obsessing about being a rock star. I spent hours every day playing my bass guitar. I found it impossible to listen to music without dreaming up a scenario where I would end up in the band I was listening to – “no way – the Smiths are reforming, but Andy Rourke has lost an arm!! There’s only one option, and that is to ask Rick Hurst to join the band“. The peak of my music “career” was being dropped from a band on the advice of famous songwriter Guy Chambers. I’ve been to his house. He made me a cup of tea.

2. I only ended up with a career in web development by accident. I actually have a degree in environmental science, and tried for years to get a job in that field, but couldn’t get my foot in the door due to lack of experience. A friend suggested I put my cv on the “internet”, so I bought a dial-up modem and a copy of HTML for dummies, and six months later I was a professional web designer (it was the dot com boom – HTMLers were thin on the ground).

3. In 1997 I spent six months living in a van traveling around spain. I camped in the Andalucian mountains, in the woods and in urban streets, and lived like a king on about £15 a week. I supported myself by busking (mostly radiohead and oasis songs) to English tourists. With time on my hands I also wrote about fifty songs of my own, which later turned out to mostly the same, and a bit rubbish.

4. Most of my childhood I had a lazy eye and regularly used to have to wear an eye patch over the non-lazy one to encourage me to use the other one. I still find it difficult to look through both at once, but at least they now both point in the same direction. As a result i’m rubbish at ball sports, catching and 3D pictures/ films don’t work. Or those magic eye pictures.

5. I only met Jon Tangerine in bristol a couple of years ago, but our paths must have crossed on a regular basis in the early 90’s when he ran an acid jazz club night called “stump juice” at the connaught hotel in wolverhampton, where I was a student. I’ve never really been into clubbing, but that was a regular for me and my housemates, and considered a legendary night amongst wolverhamptonites with a vintage clothing habit.

6. I grew up in the East Anglian fens, and it nearly all ended there when I was 17. I was a passenger in a nasty car accident which resulted in myself and four other people crawling from the wreckage of a ford granada upside down in a ditch. Miraculously we all escaped with minor cuts and bruises. Although I’m a confident driver, I’m a really nervous passenger, and can’t stand being in a car with an erratic or risk-taking driver.

7. I got married in Las Vegas in 2001. The wedding cost 175 dollars, then we hired a convertible pontiac firebird and went on a road trip around nevada and california for our honeymoon, courtesy of egg. Hopefully we’ll go back one day and renew our vows, and take our kid on a US road trip – maybe in a winnebago this time!

Ok, thats my ego indulged, so now according to the rules I have to “tag” seven people. For this to work, they need to be people who have a blog. While I know some interesting people who happily document their lives in the walled garden of facebook et al, they have decided that blogging isn’t for them, and hence rules them out in this occasion!

Keeping it in the family:

James Hurst – my cousin – talented web developer, musician, owner of River Rat Records and thoroughly nice bloke.

Some locals:

Iain Claridge – netsight/freelance designer and my barometer on what is cool and stylish

Skateboarders

Whether you are interested in skateboarding or not, most of the skaters I know are creative in some way. There is a tendency for skateboarders to document themselves and their friends – photos, videos and blogs – skateboarders are all over it. I did actually intend to only tag skaters for this, but the people I had in mind have either let their blogs die or have already been tagged.

Mark Mapstone – I internet stalked Mark before I met him when I discovered he was a blogging skateboarder like myself. He can fly through the air like a bird on or off a skateboard and is a very entertaining writer.

Gavin Strange – aka jamfactory The most creatively prolific person i’ve met. He skates (occasionally!), designs boards, and takes photos and video of people riding them. and rides one of those bikes that don’t let you freewheel.

Bob Lands – Although the boblands site is no more, he’s gone all arty, bought an old camera from a charity shop and now blogs at surf or pie. He will be embarrassed by this, but it will get him back for encouraging random strangers to hug me in public (long story).

Whip – I’ve only met him a couple of times, but he’s got a cool popemobile van

For those i’ve tagged, and can’t resist the urge to ignore me:-

1. Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

I went to a really interesting skillswap last night thanks to the nameless crew – “When Content Management goes bad”. Thanks to all involved.

It’s now just over a year since I went freelance, so I thought i’d share my experiences. First of all i’ll recap why I decided to make the move in the first place – mainly because of a business venture opportunity (olivewood – a web applications company, with products for servicing e-commerce and e-procurement), but also because I liked the idea of trying freelance full time, having been “moonlancing” for some time in addition to my day web developer job.

Since I made the move, I’ve been wearing two hats – that of freelance web monkey (or front end web developer) and that of Technical Director of Olivewood Data Technologies. The idea is that I would pay the bills by working short contracts as a freelancer, leaving spare time to work on web applications for Olivewood to sell. From day one it went straight off track! In addition to a few days a week working as a freelance resource for various web design agencies, I was offered a number of larger projects, which I took on under the Olivewood banner. After only a few weeks in I was juggling these larger projects with the on-site freelance work and soon had to start declining the on-site work, to make time for the larger projects.

Even dedicating all my time to the larger projects I was struggling so started to employ freelancers myself to delegate the workload. For a while this worked out, and it looked for a while like Olivewood might itself become a web design agency, using freelancers where needed, and starting to look into permanent employees. Some of the projects went really well, but it was getting difficult to manage the projects and find time to do any actual coding myself. So before I knew it I had become a project manager, albeit one who still tried to code and fulfill every other role in a snowballing company.

Meanwhile, very little progress was being made with the Olivewood products, so I was soon completely losing site of my original goals. I was also having other issues with finding and managing resources. I think one of the reasons I was offered so many projects in the first place is that I have a very diverse web development skillset (nb. i’ve started to refer to this as “swiss army knife” rather than the more negative “jack of all trades”!), so I ended up with projects spanning plone, front end web build, php, drupal, asp and asp.net. Finding local, available, freelancers with a similar skillset isn’t easy, and the time it takes to brief and manage remote freelancers made it extremely difficult to turn projects around on time and with a profit. Even so, it was still working, albeit only with me working most evenings and weekends – something I wanted to get away from by going full-time self employed.

Then I met my nemesis – a project I vastly underestimated, with a tight deadline and a tighter budget. Deadlines were missed and all the budget was spent on additional resources. Out of pride/stubbornness/professional integrity/stupidity I carried on, starting to decline other work, and push back other ongoing projects to make time to get the project finished, working ridiculously long hours throughout, and surviving on the profits of previous successful projects. This was a painful lesson in being careful what I agree to take on. It also forced me to re-evaluate the direction I was going in, and was fundamental in me getting back on track with the original goals.

So here I am now one year in, older, greyer and hopefully a bit wiser and on the verge of clearing my backlog of work to start afresh with a goal of keeping a balance on the work I need to take on to pay the bills and finding time to work on my future business goals. I recently had to decline a project that would have kept me busy for another month or so, which was painful but necessary. Turning down work is difficult, but the experience of the last twelve months has shown me that it is vital to be realistic.

In summary, it’s been a mixed bag – i’ve really enjoyed the freedom and excitement of being freelance, but I haven’t enjoyed the extra project management/ resourcing/ admin needed to run my own show. I’ve also learned the hard way about biting off more than I can chew. I’m still positive about it all – I see the difficult aspects as vital learning experiences that I needed to go through to get onto the next stage of my adventure.

I’ve been working so much recently, clearing a huge backlog of work that i’ve got into a habit of mobile working again, as a way of varying the endless hours sat staring at a screen. Despite having some lovely studio space, I find it helps my productivity to wander off and work in a few different places. The 3 mobile broadband has made this even more of a possibility now, not having to stick to places with free wifi, although I did fail to connect from the back of one cafe up in clifton. I’ve also been making the most of the weather with a bit of garden working 🙂

I attended the relaunched Bristol Skillswap last night at Goldbrick House in Bristol. The new format is called “Talking Points” – five chairs in a circle, one of which is always empty. Someone starts a (web related) subject to discuss with the other seated people, when someone in the room wants to join in, they claim the empty chair and someone else has to leave. When this was being explained by organise Laura Francis, I was initially worried that this was all a bit musical chairs, and end up with four people sat there trying to persuade people to join them. In reality it worked straight away, and there was always people ready to jump in and claim the empty chair. If anyone needed proof that geeks can have the same arguments in real life that they do on a mailing list or forum – this was it!
The first session was kicked off by Andy Budd – “Are standards still relevant?”, followed by Elliot Jay Stocks (Carsonified), followed by Matt Jones (Dopplr). Matts session was more of a traditional talk format – but the relaxed atmosphere and free beer ensured plenty of audience participation in the form of heckling.

more pics

I’m a couple of days into the Plone snow sprint 2006. Before we arrived at the sprint location, the netsight contingent took a couple of days snowboarding. After half a day of falling on my backside, I just about have basic control of the board now, at least I can carve down the slope quite comfortably if the run is wide enough – there were a few hairy moments on a narrow forest road where I couldn’t quite make the turns quick enough and wiped out at least one skier (luckily I don’t speak enough German to understand what they were shouting at me!). I’d definitely like to snowboard again, though it is an expensive hobby.

We then attended the opening party for the newly formed lovely systems in Dornbirn. Free bar, Live band, games involving hammers, ’nuff said.

I’ll be working on a few plone multimedia projects during the sprint. Myself and Tom Lazaar [Broken link removed] will be trying to sort out some kind of solution for blogging in plone. Currently we are examining the available options to see whether we are better off cherrypicking the best features from each and putting the together into something new, to “finish” one the existing ones off, or whether to work on a set of adapters (xml-rpc, trackback) and products to enable plone itself to be used as a blog application (using, say, news items instead of blog entries, and having a customisation policy to set a plone instance up as a blog).

I will also hopefully be working (or at least shadowing someone else working on) a flash media player (a bit like google video thing), including server-side video transcoding. This should be useful for the online skate zine i’m working on!

Hopefully I can also finish off what I started for ATAudio, tidying up the templates ready for a release, using so called “five views”.

which is why I walked to work today.

If you are reading this upside down then chances are you are looking for information on how to get your display to appear the right way up. I had this problem the other day when one of my cats was wandering around on my laptop keyboard, and suddenly the display was upside down.

This won’t work for all displays as it is driver dependent, but CTRL – ALT and either the up or down arrows flips the display over on mine.

I’m sitting here with my arm in plaster. some people are being sympathetic, most aren’t. after all, I am too old to skate

Article over at Digital Web Magazine discussing the "Behaviour Layer" of a website.

In summary, a typical web page has three layers: Content, Presentation and Behaviour. In this context, XHTML is the content Layer, CSS is the presentation layer and Javascript is the behaviour layer. The article argues that it is important that the site functions with various combinations of these e.g (content + presentation + behaviour), (content + presentation) or (content + behaviour). Essential behaviour such as form validation that has been added client-side using Javascript should also be replicated server-side ("belt and braces")..