不知道 i don’t know

In response to a comment made by Claire in the Lab presentation last week, I’ve added a map to the sidebar to show where the visitors to this site are visiting from. This is a first step to paying more attention to my audience, something that I’ve been reticent to do in the past.

Shi also commented that this blog is really very closed off towards the visitor. I’m really using it to talk to myself, with a very controlling hand over the impression that I put across.

To be honest, I’ve never really been too interested in the visitor – I don’t really think I have anything interesting to say to people, it’s more the activity of saying something that’s important to me. I don’t really ask anything of the visitor except their time and patience, they can take or leave this blog as they wish. I’m mainly using it as an archive of data and events that are relevant to me.

However, in the presentation I was stressing the activity of presenting as an end in itself, either in person in front of a group, or on the blog (or elsewhere). Well, that’s all well and good for me, but why should anyone else care?

The Content-Producing Game (CPG) — The Movies

This is somewhat irrelevant to the subject of the piece, otherwise I would have added it as a comment, but this section triggered a memory:

Can you imagine the design equivalent?

What if Photoshop began with a rock and a stone and you had to wait millennia for the first quill to be used or writing to be developed? What if your word processor began with just one font and only released more fonts if you typed a certain number of documents. Or if your letters started to decay the longer you used the program without upgrading?

This reminded about a story I heard about the Mac’s crayon colour picker (one of a number of ways of choosing colours in OSX), apparently over time the crayons wear down, which struck me as a nice incorporation of time into a seemingly static interface.

I believe that someone changed their system clock to sometime in the future to check this – although I wouldn’t recommend doing this as it might confuse your system. I can’t find any reference to this now, so it may be a myth. Ho hum.

I’ve set up a new subdomain for this blog: blog.escdotdot.com

All traffic to the old address (http://www.escdotdot.com/blog/) will be redirected to the new address.

I’m quite proud of the site I’ve just coded for the Cambridge Folk Festival (client: Cambridge City Council). This work was done as part of my day job at Cambridge University Press.

The original branding is done by Adrenaline Creative. Based on this, I created the website design for last year’s Festival but kept it quite basic as I only had a week from brief to hand-over. This year I had a slightly longer period to update the site to follow the new poster design and incorporate some other changes requested by the client.

The most obvious change was to convert the navigation from a static vertical list to a horizontal drop-down menu system. This was based on the excellent Suckerfish Dropdowns menu by Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb at A List Apart. Behind the scenes the code had a complete overhaul to ensure it validated as XHTML Strict (validates as of 25/3/06) (all my sites are coded to this standard nowadays). It was also an opportunity to apply everything I’ve learnt about CSS and XHTML in the year since I last coded the site.

One of the requests from the client was to make the site easier to maintain, so I’ve placed greater emphasis on re-useable code in this version. Each page is made of five basic areas, four of which are the same on every page, so are pulled out of the code as separate files (Server Side Includes). This means that every page on the site can be updated just by editing a single file. The header, navigation bar, sponsor’s list and footer are all saved as these Includes.

One concern I had was that the navigation would be difficult for some people to use, so in the body of the Website Map page I used the same Include file used for the navigation, but added some new CSS rules to style it in a more straightforward way. I think this demonstrates the power of combining Includes and CSS.