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New site is up
Tuesday, 24 June 2008 14:13
OK, it took a couple of days to do this, but I think it was worth it. I have now ported my site from old Joomla 1.0.13 to Joomla 1.5.3, transferred all the content (including portfolio). For you who are not users of this eminent open source project, let me just give you a little background as to WHY I chose to do this when I got more prospective clients and employers looking at my site.
As you may or may not know, Joomla! is closely related to the Mambo CMS. A couple of years back, the company behind Mambo wanted to do such extensive changes to their usage policy that the developers collectively resigned - taking their code with them. Mambo continued on their own, and Joomla! was born out of the disgruntled developers. So far everything was nice and lovely in CMS-land, but slowly and surely (by version 0.9.5) the developers got tired of the bugs that they inherited from Mambo and decided to do a complete code rewrite. Unfortunately there was not a lot of time and they went ahead with 1.0 of Joomla! (have I bored you to tears yet?).
Joomla! 1.0.+ was embraced by many developers who supported the views of the developers, and many new users sprang to life as well - exporting their sites from Mambo to Joomla left, right and center.
The code changes between 1.0 and 1.5 were so big that simply converting the content was impossible for many site owners, myself included. The template system had changed (for the better), leaks and security issues had been plugged, that finally I could not resist and decided to move everything over, just to take advantage of many of the new features.
OK, I still kept the layout, but everything in the background has changed.Also the new version of the portfolio system is a lot more customisable which I will make use of later on. For now it is a lot of "just get it in there", so I hope you will excuse any spelling mistakes, and the few bugs I know are lurking around the corner, and if you do run in to any, please drop me a line.
Unemployment bring full time job
Monday, 02 June 2008 10:07
Well, who ever said that unemployed people just sit there, they have surely never met me. At the moment I have 5 projects on the go.
- First I need to get Blondy & Blacky website updated.
- Second, I need to update my website so it will sell my services in a better way.
GT - Good Technology
Thursday, 03 April 2008 14:47
Started:2008/04/02
Ended: 2008/04/17
Title: Site Builder
Was hired as a freelance coder to mainly work on the Xbox Newsletter for Microsoft for the upcoming months (17 languages and used in 13 countries) and templates for the new ASDA.co.uk website. Working on existing code can be excruciating but managed to create a pretty good replica of the Xbox Newsletter that worked in all email readers and browsers - Yes that includes Google Mail, the most un-standard of browser email-clients. Was not able to test for Office 2007 and its new restrictionson HTML emails, but I hope I avoided most of the pits in the sand.
The ASDA.co.uk website was a hodge-podge of inherited code on a project that started back in early 2007. Needless to say, I was not the first coder to work on it, but defenitely one of the better ones. (My predecessor appearantly came in, sat down, looked at the code and promptly resigned) We were a team of 4 talented freelancers working on the site at any given time, fighting bugfixes with bugfixes. I seriously think we would have been better off completely revamping the code from scratch, because that way it could have been finished in one week instead of three.
But as it were, the team were already halfway through bugfixing and checking for compliance with IE6,IE7,IE8b,FF1,FF2, FF3b, Safari and Opera, as well as W3C standards. All you could do was spit in your hands and dig in. And you know what? We did it on time and on budget.
