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March 29, 2006
Irony
Am I the only person who finds it funny that modern web design and development is heading toward leaner web pages, improved accessibility and portability (XHTML and CSS), reduced traffic to and from the server (AJAX) and syndication (RSS). All these technologies were a necessity back in the day.
Instead we had to deal with image heavy (all those padding GIF's!!), code heavy (n-n-n-n-n-n-nested tables anyone?), innaccessible and non-portable (printer friendly pages, text only versions, netscape and IE versions - what?). Not only all that overhead but we had to drip these huge hairballs of crap through dial-up.
Thank god I work in the 'digital hub of Europe'. Yes, I am talking about Ireland. Our glorious leader famously claimed in a press conference that that was just what we were. This at a time when there was NO broadband in the country.
Having gotten over being the laughing stock of Europe if not the World. We are now in a good situation. Slowly but surely people are beginning to cop on to the fact that there are earnest people out there who do care about what a customers website looks like and also cares about how it is coded and built.
I think clients are actually becoming switched on to our way of thinking. They realise that we are not out to make a quick buck and if they open up and trust us and work with us that wonderful things happen.
I think that if anything is the core message of 'Web 2.0' (sorry I cant type that without adding the quotes) - trust, community. The real challenge now is to find a way to translate all the great advances made with all the community websites into something that the private sector can use.
I can see there being two tracks though - those who trust and are openm and those who dont and are not. There is space for everybody at the through so lets get on with it! Here's to the next bubble!
Posted by dottie at 2:21 PM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2006
Ruby on Rails
I have been keeping an eye on the developments with Ruby on Rails. Last year when I was looking at it there were too many issues on winodws to allow me to use it, most specifically not allowing FastCGI thus meaning any application I wrote would run dog slow on my Windows Server and I wasnt prepared to shell out more money for a Linux box.
I'm happy to say that the situation is sorted out. FastCGI now runs beautifully (at leats it does so on my development machine) with minimal configuration. Also I am happy with MySQL 5 which is a real MS SQL killer in my book - stored procedures anyone?
I am reading through Agile Web Development with Rails and Programming Ruby - both from the very wonderful and helpful Pragmatic Programmers
Once I have finished grokking some toy applications and drank some of the depth of the tool from the books I will be setting off to recode a major application that I shelved for a while and I will be tackling a few new ones with a view to providing easily cusotomisable services for clients.
The watchword for the next year for me is to keep things simple. Instead of writing complex CMS systems myself I am using MoveableType (OK, I couldnt resist writing some plugins for it....). Instead of jumping into learning ASP.NET with VB (yeuch - my brain aches in rememberance) I hope to be able to make my living from learning a clean platform like Rails with a lovely OO based language Ruby. Fantastic - the future looks bright!
Now all I need are some clients...
Posted by dottie at 4:13 PM