Archive for March, 2007
Stephanie • 30th Mar 2007 • personal, webdesign • accomplishment, bcit, big picture, career, code, HOPE, microformats, podcasts, self-taught, sociology
I just finished my first micoformatted page! When I was writing the information page for HOPE’s spring dinners I coded all the dinners as events and the organizers as hcards :) I did work with Brandon to re-do the BCIT Contacts application to use microformats but he did most of the coding on that project. This is the first time I’ve done it myself.
I didn’t actually tell anyone at HOPE that I’d done it that way since it doesn’t effect the way the page looks and I figure they’ll discover it for themselves if it’s useful to them. However, my friend thinks I should tell them so they recognize just how good a job I’m doing for them.
I don’t really feel like I did anything other than my job. Isn’t it my job to do a good job?
In the last two weeks of February, CBC’s IDEAS aired a couple programs on the ideas of Richard Sennett, a sociologist and author who has studied the organization of work. Among other things he suggests the Western world is obsessed not with the idea of craftsmanship but with productivity. In other words: it doesn’t matter how well you do you job – just how quickly.
The speaker at my graduation ceremony spoke at length encouraging us to “strive for excellence
” in everything we do. Not just in the work we do but also in our interactions as part of our daily lives. From answering a client’s e-mail to cooking dinner, he urged us to do our best.
Is doing a good job something society has to be told to do now?
Stephanie • 27th Mar 2007 • webdesign • addon, bookmarks, browsers, browsing, delicious, firefox, handy
I keep up on my favorite blogs and web comics by book marking them all in Firefox and then using the “open all in tabs” option that FireFox so nicely includes to open all the book marks at once. That way I can keep track of which ones I’ve read by closing them once I’m done :) Yeah, it’s lazy I know.
I’ve been wanting to have access to my bookmarks when I’m away from my home computer (who doesn’t) so I jumped on the del.icio.us band wagon a few days ago.
I hunted around for an add-on of some sort that would let me open all my delicious bookmarks in new tabs without much success. Turns out I was being too specific. Snap Links is a great add on that will let you select links on your screen by dragging the mouse over them, sort of the same way you’d select icons on your desktop. And it’s smart enough to only open the first link down in the HTML hierarchy, so with delicious you don’t open all the edit / delete links and with search engines you don’t open all the cached / similar pages links.
Edit: It kind of interferes with my mouse gestures if I’m not careful but it’s not that hard to avoid.
Stephanie • 25th Mar 2007 • Uncategorized • code, html, learning, oops, self-taught
So apparently we’re supposed to be encoding ampersands when we write them in the href part of anchor tags.
<a href="http://stephaniehobson.ca/file.php »
?fire=hot&beer=foamy">link</a>
Stephanie • 21st Mar 2007 • personal • environment, global warming, green, quote
Mocking global warming deniers, Gore said, “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, well I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem. If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action. The planet has a fever.”
Stephanie • 20th Mar 2007 • personal, webdesign • accomplishment, bcit, CADE, career, Catt-Trax2, excited, nervous, presentation, Terry, Winnepeg
One of the projects I’ve worked on at BCIT is Catt-Trax2. The website is for Danny Catt who is traveling through South America and Antarctica exploring conservation and sustainability issues and talking to the people in those regions working with those issues daily. He’s taking photos, video, and sound clips of this journey and blogging about his experiences. I helped architect the website and did some design and implementation work on it. We have fun stuff like a Google Maps mashup showing his route too.
The project manager for the project is an Instructional Development Coordinator named Terry Fuller who has done an excellent job pushing the team to give their most while restraining Danny’s overwhelming enthusiasm to keep the project in scope.
She’s asked me to co-present about the project at a conference for distance educators that is happening in Winnipeg in May. I’ve applied for funding to go with her. Our names are already on the website, so I hope I get the funding :)
Stephanie • 14th Mar 2007 • personal, webdesign • bcit, big picture, career, future, learning, vivian
Vivian is such a great motivator. I’m still sorry to see her go.
I just came out of a performance review where Vivian simultaneously told me what a great job I’m doing and laid out the changes I need to make to my life to have the world laid out at my feet by the time I’m fourty.
She said to me that in IT there are kind of two main career paths; one which is super specialized with one specific area of technology and one that sees the big picture and manages.
She thinks I should, and told me I have the right skills and thought processes to, be a manager.
I’m not sure I agree with where she wants me to go but she sure made me feel like I could get there if that’s where I wanted to go :)
Which begs the question, where do I want to go?
Stephanie • 8th Mar 2007 • webdesign • cgi, grr, learning, oops
All I did was copy the cgi file and change the file name and now it’s not encrypting the e-mails it sends any more.
Hm.
Edit: Yup, the problem was that I changed the name.
Edit 07-03-26: I’ve also discovered that cgi files are not encoded using windows text format so opening them in notepad and saving them again is enough to destroy all functionality.
Stephanie • 6th Mar 2007 • webdesign • code, css, handy, html, learning, self-taught, WDN
I am, for the most part, self taught when it comes to HTML and CSS. I’ve take a few courses to get a piece of paper that says I can do what I say I can do but learned very little from them.
I spotted this little CSS tidbit in a presenter’s code at the Web Directions North conference a few weeks ago and now I’m wondering if this is the sort of thing I missed out on by being self taught:
table
{
border-collapse: collapse;
}
There are quite a few tables I’ve designed where this would have been very useful.
Stephanie • 5th Mar 2007 • webdesign • about, busy, todo, work
Well, outside of my day job I’m:
- making my Mum a website
- moving hosting servers for digitalphoenix.ca
- learning cgi so I can create an auto generated thank you message for HOPE’s donors
- taking Mandarin (what was I thinking?)
Stephanie • 5th Mar 2007 • personal, webdesign • metablogging
I’ve been wanting a professional blog for a while now. It’s funny how there’s somethings you can tell complete strangers and there’s some things you can’t.
