Posts Tagged “work”
Stephanie • 18th Jun 2007 • webdesign • busy, nervous, todo, uh-oh, work
June 12: I decide I’m not taking any more free lance work on this summer. I have two donated time projects I’ve been wanting to finish, three web aps I’d like to write for myself and two blogs to skin.
June 14: One of my regulars calls and asks me just to “put up an under construction notice” and re-do their site.
June 17: One of my other regulars emails to let me know they’re flying someone in to ‘revisit’ their site.
June 18: I ask for an extra week of vacation from my full time day job and consider raising my hourly rate.
Stephanie • 24th May 2007 • webdesign • accomplishment, bcit, CADE, Catt-Trax2, conference, hockey, presentation, Terry, travel, work
I was in Winnipeg speaking at the CADE/AMTECH Conference last week. The weather was beautiful and I saw an excellent hockey game in which the Manitoba Moose (the Vancouver Canucks’ farm team) played spectacularly only to to be knocked out of the AHL playoffs in a very Canucks way (up 2-0 at the end of the first, lost 2-3 in OT).
As part of the Technology Enabled Knowledge (TEK) initiative at BCIT Danny Catt, one of the faculty, was sponsored to take a trip around South America and Antarctica studying local research and responses to sustainability and environmental issues. Throughout the journey he used blogging, digital photography, virtual lecture software, shared file storage space, and of course e-mail to keep in touch which his students and communicate with the world.
Terry Fuller, the instructional development coordinator that was helping Danny with the project submitted a paper to CADE to talk about “Using the Internet to make Meaningful Global Connections in the Classroom.” I was involved in creating the web page and blog that was the highlight of the project and Terry asked me to talk about the “technical” side of designing the website.
Rather than boring the crowd with PHP, HTML, CSS, CMS and other TLAs. I talked about the rest of the stuff that goes into the design process: user needs, site objectives, functional specifications, content requirements, information architecture, navigation design, visual design, and all that good stuff but for those of you who care the site was driven by Drupal and included a XML driven flash photo gallery, a Google map mashup, and some video and audio recordings, though not as many as we’d hoped – apparently it’s tough to upload media files from the middle of the Amazon – who knew?
The project was a lot of fun and very different my usual daily duties. I’ll post a summary and the slides soon.
Stephanie • 7th May 2007 • webdesign • busy, CADE, conference, css, excited, metablogging, nervous, presentation, work
I have lots to say but trouble finding the time and words to say it.
Blog posts I hope to make in the next two weeks:
- Taking credit where credit is due – in response to a discussion about women in IT at zeldman.com.
- My thoughts on the hiring process and the job market and why I do what I do where I do for the pay I get.
- Some of the steps we’re taking to convert our templates from tables within tables within tables to just… one table, well it’s an improvement.
- Highlights of our presentation at CADE and my thoughts on the rest of the conference.
Until then, if you think of yourself as a web designer – go take A List Apart’s Web Designer survey.
Stephanie • 30th Apr 2007 • webdesign • accomplishment, bcit, work
Part of my job at BCIT is providing technical support to our content publishing community. These are the people who provide the text to fill the templates we make and keep that text up to date. Most of them aren’t web developers and are a little intimidated by the idea of working on the website.
Forty percent of our job is providing encouragement. “Don’t worry, it won’t go up on the website until we release it so you can play around all you want.” “We can always undo the changes if you think you’ve made a mistake.” I get my best compliments from these kinds of support calls.
This morning on of our clients told me, “You’ve made me feel so much better about all this now, I’m so glad you called. What a great way to start a Monday.”
What a great way to start a Monday :)
Stephanie • 24th Apr 2007 • webdesign • bcit, bored, fun, work
Or hardly working?
When the network goes down the whole department starts acting like school kids when the power goes out. We sit around waiting for the power to come back on or the teachers to tell us to go home and the longer it’s out the more trouble we contemplate causing ;)
Stephanie • 23rd Apr 2007 • webdesign • bcit, code, css, guidelines, html, learning, nervous, web standards, work
I’ve been wanting to seriously redo some of the HTML and CSS behind the BCIT site since I came on board here almost a year ago.
Well, I get my wish. We’re going to take some baby steps towards semantic HTML and CSS (POSH if you like) and despite my aversion to being in charge, I’m leading the project.
As a first step I’m trying to write a CSS coding style guide. I can’t necessarily clean up the current mess but I can try to stop any new ones from being made ;)
What I want to do is develop guidelines for:
- if and how style definitions should be divided between multiple style sheets
- what order style definitions should be listed in (I currently put all my tag definitions at the top of documents and then place my id and class definitions beneath them in the order they’re anticipated to appear on the page)
- naming conventions for ids and classes
- commenting conventions
- what order properties should be arranged within definitions
- if and when we should use shorthand properties
- formatting guidelines
So far my research has turned up very few examples to help me with the development. This somewhat out dated post is the best I’ve found so far. Part of my problem is that searching for a style guide for CSS is just coming up with guides to styling with CSS.
Do you work with a CSS coding style guide or know any good resources for developing one?
Stephanie • 4th Apr 2007 • webdesign • ajax, bcit, big picture, learning, microformats, ux, WDN, web standards, work
I thought I’d post my summary of Web Directions North that I distributed to the department a month or so after the conference. I’ve been wanting to write a more technical and personal review of it but it’s pretty clear to me that if I haven’t done it by now, I’m not going to get around to doing it :)
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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?)
