Will Morgan

If you’re a Facebook user, no doubt you’ve come across the new redesign. At first glance when I saw it on reddit, I kind of liked it.

I’ll openly admit to jumping on the “we hate the new redesign” of Facebook’s 2nd generation design (the one they just scrapped that worked perfectly fine), but I think what they’ve done now is slightly counter-productive.

Let’s take your news feed for starters: “what the hell, this look likes twitter” is the first thing on my mind. Only the difference between twitter and Facebook on the homepage front is now:

Twitter: @willmorgan
Facebook: > (Will Morgan)

Twi.. I mean, Facebook, has now also changed all “fan pages” into profile looking equivalents. Seems a bit like MySpace for me in the sense that everything looks the same, and I’m undecided as to whether this is a good thing or not.

On the plus side, we’ve got interactivity between the product/service/person’s fans, and it/themself. But isn’t that a tarted up version of something Twitter offers? I would have to say so.

Overall, with this latest update, Facebook has thrown visual differentiation right out of the window and has made some pretty bad changes. My events page = gone. Relationship status updates to fuel my social voyeurism = gone.

Again though, on the plus side, at least they moved the pokes section to the bottom..

Will Uncategorized facebook, myspace, redesigns, twitter

Just an update on my opinions on ASP.NET: it’s not bad. Or rather, it’s being coded horribly and it clashes with my front end. I’ve heard so many good things about it, and it provides so many things PHP does not. However the way my colleagues are coding the application pisses on my work in the process, essentially.

As my contract has been extended I hope to work with a different team, maybe with ColdFusion for future projects.

In the meantime I’m giving CakePHP a go. Failing that I’m seriously considering learning Rails, or Python.

Will Uncategorized

I’ve been helping out with a bit of redecoration in the house lately, so I decided it would only be fitting to sort out the harsh looking theme and correctly tag and categorise everything that needed doing so. I hope it helps.. along the way I dug up a few posts I made when I was in school: it was interesting to see how rebellious I was back then, and even more surprising that I wouldn’t consider myself any different today

I’ll post some pictures of the redecoration job some time soon by the way (once we have a new sofa on which to perch our arses), though you won’t have the joy of having a before and after comparison.. as to be frank, the “before” photo would have made you puke up.

I have a few ideas for titles of posts in the future: the bodies of which will be populated as time goes by. I plan on taking a deeper look at ASP and giving an honest, fair comparison to PHP. I’m planning to write a series of posts that aim to give people like myself, who feel they have mastered CSS, ideas on what to build on next.

I’ll also be focussing on post production webmastering, which will be tailored more towards what you can do on the front end to optimise user experience instead of the same old “you should optimise your queries and load balance your servers!” crap which we’ve all heard before.

Finally, I will be slapping Google Analytics onto this website to get a real idea of who my audience is, if any!

Will Web Development

Tomorrow I will be travelling to the Oxford office of the company I work for to meet the people coding the back office processes for the application that’s being designed.

Sorry for being so vague by the way. This is because I’m working for the company on a contractor basis, and have also read all sorts of nasty articles about how employees have been rapped on the knuckles for mentioning, or divulging, corporate information on a personal blog, so I’m not out to upset anyone. I’ll detail what it’s all about soon if anyone is interested (hint: comments can indicate this)

So after reading up on ASP and watching a developer build things with Visual Studio yesterday, what should I be worried about?

1. My work so far has been called clean and precise. Given that ASP likes to give random IDs to links, we can only look to MySpace to see the tragedy (and unnecessary output) of ASP’s dynamic IDs, along the lines of: “ct_298233fm_blahblah”. I’ll be pushing for things like this to be configured to be turned off.
2. According to several articles, ASP “WebForms” like to spew out hordes of JavaScript, and erroneous JavaScript at that. I’m hoping to write my own form validation processes with jQuery which are user friendly, scalable and configurable.. but most of all, aren’t full of disgusting errors and bloated code.
3. Microsoft isn’t a web company. As much as some people might hate to hear it, it’s true, and I have a feeling this might be reflected in the way the back end impacts the front end in terms of performance and accessibility.

These are but a few problems I have screaming at the back of my mind right now, however as a born and bred PHP coder porting part of his skill set to a new language, I think it’s a sound reaction. What would your thoughts be, and would you even be comfortable taking on a contract working with ASP?

I must say I’ve taken a lot of lessons from the latest scrutiny from ASP since it’s been in the limelight with its use on Obama’s rebranded whitehouse.gov. Here’s the article in question.

I’ll be keeping my mind open in the mean time, wish me luck and a good journey!

Will Work asp, backend, front end, javascript, obama

In reference to a recent post, here’s an example of what I’m getting tired of. I won’t name names: maybe one day they’ll step out of the bubble and wake up out of their delusion!

Hello, let me just re-introduce myself for the 49th time on this blog. My name is John “entrepreneur” Smith and I’m an amazing up and coming entrepreneurial self motivated uber super duper web developer. My experience involves skinning Wordpress, posting things impulsively on Wordpress, Photoshop (and how to use it with Wordpress) and autobiography. I am also studying how to write a blog post with the same amount of intellectual clout and passion that could be attained by a graduate from the University of Dullness who has just passed the “Let’s Use The F-Word As Punctuation” with distinction.

My blog will hopefully cover blogging in general, my assertion of godly knowledge after a mere six days on the super-blogging scene, why what I did on Saturday night at 4am is vaguely relevant to web development, and my sub-par photography skills. Let’s not forget my bi-monthly posts on yet another totally rad theme I made for my blog that you can buy now for the totally-not-over-inflated-price of £75!

Feel free to browse my entrepreneurial network of websites I have released, such as the website that allows you to browse MySpace or naughty photos when at school or college, that is currently under construction! I’ll keep you informed with boring updates that outline the total lack of progress that quite frankly you’d be stupid not to not care about.

Well, that’s all folks. I’m going to go and abuse Twitter now to get everyone to read my fruitful post!

Will Satire blogging, don't quit your day job, posers, proxy owners

The contract will initially last for 2 months, but during this time I hope to meet other developers and get to trade skills with them all.

I’ll be workng in a ColdFusion environment, which is something that is new for me, and a stark contrast from working with PHP.

Wish me luck!

Will Work

After putting up with quite a lot of this crap over the past few years, a short 2 week phase of delusion where I thought it was a cool idea, and then my swift realisation that a lot of posers are out there, I think this list pretty much says it all.

The bottom line is this: if you match the below criteria, you are a poser and you should really stop blogging as your blog is fail. Perhaps you should focus your time on actually staying with the cutting edge? By the way, if you’re still stuck in the age of proxy networks, I’ll bring you up to speed: HTML5 and full CSS3 is just round the corner.

So without further bitching, here goes:

1. You post more often than you work on a website, be it your client’s or your own.
2. You know how to work with WordPress, but when it comes to any other content management system or building one yourself, you’re pretty much clueless.
3. Sometimes, you forget why you’re even making a blog post and decide to include an off topic YouTube video instead.
4. The only articles you can pump out are the articles that everyone has done before.
5. Popular topics include: “yet another amazing text editor for Macs” or “why does nobody comment my entries anymore :(”

In summary: if you don’t have anything useful to say on your web development blog that you honestly believe would benefit other devs, shut the hell up and get off my internet.

Yours soberly,

Will Morgan.

Will Rants, Web Development blame the kids, blogging, posers, Web Development

I recently stumbled upon the lovely bunch of guys and girls at www.webetalk.com. It’s really for entrepreneurs, which is something I once looked at trying to do. I stick around and take a look at what people like me are coming up with and developing. Beats DigitalPoint these days I tell you…

Will Web Development digital point sucks, entrepreneur, irc, webetalk

You can check it out at www.mattwainwright.com. Browse in IE6 and tell me what you think. You need JavaScript enabled, which switches your style over to “accessible” mode and then gives you a short message telling you that you have to upgrade. If you choose not to, it says “Your loss.”

For the source, check out www.mattwainwright.com/script/ie6handler.js. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

Will Web Development browsers, ie6, upgrading

But it’s true. Say your client wants a ton of quotes for testimonials around the header section of the page, and you reluctantly agree with his proposition and start figuring out how to do this.

You could:

• a) Use CSS positioning to source order the quotes at the expense of using positioning and other elements that would bork if the user changed his or her text size.
• b) Hard code the quotes in and use PHP or another language to dynamically serve up a random quote every time the user reloaded his or her page.
• c) Use jQuery and an anchor element in the header to load the content dynamically into the DOM, then use a kickass slide function to enhance the page.

I chose c. Here’s my working demo, and here’s why I did it:

1. I really need to use JavaScript more often.
2. The slider functionality allows a few quotes to appear while the user views the rest of the page.
3. Hardcoding in the quotes would really screw my clients’ SEO.

Now, I know JavaScript and SEO don’t really go together hand in hand. However in this instance it’s quite useful to cut out some of the fat from the page and prevent screen readers getting bombarded with information that is, in my opinion, pretty superfluous.

The setup is pretty basic:

1. Put all your quotes in a separate file that is loaded with AJAX into the DOM on load.
2. Add your anchor element into the header section: <ul id="quoteHolder"></ul>
3. Include jQuery and the cycle plugin in the header section of your page.
4. Run this code, that loads the content into the element and then uses the cycle function as a callback: $(document).ready(function() {
$('#quoteHolder').load('script/quotes.html li', function() {
$(this).cycle({
timeout: 10000, delay: 3000, random: 1,
fx: 'custom',
cleartype: 1,
cssFirst: { top: 0, opacity: 1, zIndex: 1 },
cssBefore: { top: -180, right: 0, bottom: 0, left: 0, opacity: 1, zIndex: 1, display: 'block' },
animIn: { top: 0, opacity: 1 },
animOut: { top: 180, opacity: 0 },
cssAfter: { top: 0, zIndex: 0, display: 'none' }
});
});
});
5. Enjoy!

For those of you interested in the use of the handy load function, here’s the documentation page.

Will Web Development