20 Feb 2007
Either I have supremely bad timing when it comes to trying to access their website, or their reliability sucks of late. I normally pop in to view or upload photos every fortnight or month, and of the last four times I’ve tried to access it (counting uploading/tagging session as one “access”), it’s been unavailable “having a massage” twice.
I am slightly more grumpy (only slightly) about this because I pay for it. Obviously it’s a system wide thing, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Blogger just dropping off the radar like that multiple times in a couple of months. LiveJournal has been known to, but their community give them enough crap about it they know people are unimpressed. (And, yes, MySpace does this all the time, but anyone using it as a benchmark of technical excellence should be taken out and shot.)
It just all came back online & it was fascinating watching as different parts of the site slowly came back together (presumably the caching servers were all flushed and slowly filling up again from the content servers via load balancers stopping the whole thing falling over again… so much geekage…)
Shrug, I’ll probably renew when it’s time, just coz it’s so good to be able to dump a couple of GB of photos up there whenever I want, and tag & search them easily later on. Plus it’s cheap storage (potentially cheaper than BingoDisk, even, though obviously more limited in scope) which is always a good thing to have around.
20 Feb 2007
And that’s just what it’ll do.
I made the mistake of ordering an affogato at about 8 this evening, thinking that between going out with some friends after & general geeking out when I got home after, I’d be in bed by a fairly reasonable time (like 1am or thereabouts).
Clearly, I was wrong. Ah well… It’s been a good several hours! I don’t drink coffee often, as evidenced by the fact that a single shot of espresso can keep me up til 3 in the morning! On the plus side, I started learning InDesign by designing a timetable! It’s a sufficiently unpolished beast (as is Illlustrator) on PC when compared against Photoshop (and, to a lesser extent, Premiere Pro), but it feels far simpler than Illustrator.
I’ve recently subscribed to Before & After magazine and they’ve got some articles around using Illustrator, and when I see how it’s done things do just click, but I still feel a very long way from anything vaguely resembling proficiency with the app.
If you’d care to know what I consider “proficiency”, basically I just mean being able to sit with a client and have Illustrator in front of you and use it without embarrassment. I’m inches away from that goal with Photoshop, and Premiere Pro has always felt like something I can just guess at and get right 95% of the time, but for the rest of Creative Suite/Production Studio… not so much.
16 Feb 2007
I stumbled across this PHP5 CMS today (via a WSG member post) and it looks pretty good. I’m a little concerned about the (very)-AJAX admin side of things, but didn’t spend much time digging into it so it might gracefully degrade (maybe).
It’s almost frustrating to find such good and mature CMS products on the market and not have any need to use them for CYIADA… I spent the last week mostly trying to shape fairly simple data models for different aspects of the website and it’s rapidly becoming clear just how structurally complex multi-tiered community/community generated content sites are. At least in terms of relational DB complexity, yes, this is bigger than MySpace.
Anyway, SilverStripe looks worth a look for simpler endevours.
The complexity is mostly introduced where users become authors, which defies traditional CMS workflow altogether. It’s also far more structured than Wiki systems are, and far more private. Privacy is being balanced against flexibility which is being balanced against community and all of these are being met with time/cost concerns.
But I like to keep telling myself I don’t really know what I’m talking about and getting a programmer will solve all these dilemmas … yeah, right.
I’ve got sick of sitting on my hands and just want to be a web practitioner again. I know the product inside out, it’s been planned to the hilt, stakeholders are universally intrigued/waiting for it, and I’m being impatient and feeling generally like charging forwards. Which is, in all probability, not the best way to be approaching things.
These two consultants came in a week ago and we explained the project to them and (what I heard was) they said “we want flowcharts and scope documents”. I’ve killed a few trees in my time, but the next person to help me in that isn’t going to be a consultant telling me to rehash (yet again — I’ve written documents in so many forms, website copy so many times, etc.) what I’ve got without any further input. I’m in this weird place now where waiting for a programmer is nearly required for further planning action, and everyone but me appears to want more planning before action… meanwhile, I’m writing models for Django and scaring myself with the complexity and learning Adobe products better and generally landing squarely back in front-end territory, which is where I’ve comfortably been for the last two or so years. Well, with the exception of Adobe products, which I only finally caved to last year… whatever :P
16 Feb 2007
I love it. It (sometimes) pulls ancient posts out that just haven’t seen the light of day for years, and sticks them in front of your nose all over again. I just re-discovered SQL Designer and it’s still just as awesome. It needs an export method to generate Django models ;-)
Oh… and, in case you were wondering, I still deleted the spam comment (it was one of the rare ones that sneaks past Akismet).
16 Feb 2007
I just downloaded something on my phone faster than through the proxy here at work. That’s both an indictment on the speed of the proxy and praise of UTMS HSDPA! I’m somewhat appalled it was faster than the proxy, though. This is why I prefer to work from home :P