Time To Check In

What happens to time these days? Huh..? Can you tell me? I sure don't know where it all goes.

I know what I have been busy doing, but I still am amazed when I check the calendar and note just how many days have been swallowed up. Just as well I'm enjoying myself.

So what have I been doing? Well, it's like I said last time, I've been developing another website.

The one I mentioned last post was a blog. It is a WordPress blog and my time was consumed developing a suitable three-column flexible screen template. I solved that need by combining the work of a few other developers to make an entirely new design to suit my needs. Isn't Open Source and Community Commons wonderful.

Now, notice I didn't actually say that I have posted the blog. I haven't. But it is almost ready so I have shelved it temporarily while I develop a related website.

Web development sure is fun. Well, ok, it has its moments like anything else, but I enjoy it most of the time. What tends to take a long time, apart from writing quality content (no, not this stuff - this is just my "woffle" remember?) is engineering the requirements of truely standards compliant sites. That can present a few challenges.

However, I think the time and effort required to develop code that meets appropriate W3C standards is worthwhile. The more I develop the good-stuff the greater my dislike (yes, even disdain) for non-compliant code. I am beginning to become less irritated by those people who deliberately decide to produce websites that only bother catering to fully standards compliant browsers (which means none of Micrsoft's Internet Explorer range). Hmmm... I wonder what this means...

Well, enough of this light relief: it's back to work I go.

Blog Layouts and Themes

Maybe this is not the best place to mention my current activity. After all, this blog is provided for free by the good folk from Google at Blogger.com. But too bad, I just have to woffle on a bit.

I'm in the process of setting up a blog for a new site. Yes, it's one of the ones I've mentioned here before. I've decided to install a WordPress based system and that's just fine, no problems at all.

Well, except for just this one thing - I can't find a decent theme.

No, don't think I'm just a complete duffer. I do know there are hundreds of themes available for free on the net. I know only too well as I've just examined virtually all of them!

The trouble is I'm a bit strange when it comes to screen space, or screen real estate as some call it. I just can't accept the ridiculous waste of space perpetrated by people who make web pages occupy just a fixed portion of the screen while ignoring the rest.

Well yes, I know not everyone "ignores" it completely. Mostly they do colour it, sometimes with grotesque colour or background graphics. But my point is, their real content is confined to a limited amount of space.

I know the reasons given for this. I've been there too. But I'm tired of all of the excuses. The best way to go, in my opinion, is to use flexible designs that allow your content to appropriately fill whatever size screen happens to be used to view it. That way we waste nothing.

But try finding a flexible, 3 column WordPress theme. They are around, but they are rare. Quite rare. And the ones I've found so far are all deficient.

You see I'm just a bit demanding. I also expect the design to be engineered by CSS so that the main content is actually rendered high on the served web pages (in the source code) and not buried beneath countless lines of code for navigation and assorted other distractions and trivia.

It's not really a lot to ask. Not really. But it's pretty darned hard to find, that's for sure.

Well, That's My Excuse

Between my last two posts (yes, the ones prior to this one) a full week had elapsed and I was shocked at how much time had flown past while I was busy rebuilding after a nasty virus and trojan attack. Now I see that almost twice as long has passed up to this post. Not good really, not good at all.

But that's life in the fast lane. Yes, I'm joking. How can a woffler be in the fast lane? Ha!

The fact is I have been sitting right here for most of the two weeks since my last post. I've been quite preoccupied with website development, of all things, which seems quite ironic. Too busy building a website and writing content to build this one at all.

Part of my problem is that I am multi-skilled and currently disinclined to delegate. So I've been developing the site myself. This has included the technical and content development sides of the process. Some of the time has been spent installing suitable PERL scripts to run things like site search, list management for newsletter subscription, list merge to send out the newsletters, and so on.

I've also been exploring some of the finer points of WordPress blogging and content management software. It's quite good stuff, if a little rough on some edges. One virtue is that plenty of capable people make significant contributions to adjust and extend the basic product. I'm sure it will evolve some more yet.

The site development is coming along quite well, if a little slowly. At least it will be a unique and valuable site, offering worthwhile information to the world, and not just one of those junk filled quick-and-dirty automatic sites that seem to be cluttering up the search engines these days. The sooner they are cleaned up or cleared out, the better.

Oh well, time to get back to work. Hopefully it won't take so long for my bext post to appear.