A friend of mine works for a company in London doing cool Ruby on Rails stuff, and they need more developers.

[Tags: ruby rails job london]

Technical people don't like their non-technical managers making technical decisions in specifications.
Managerial people don't like their non-managerial reports making business decisions in code.

Technical people don't like the extra maintenance caused by rushing out incomplete, buggy and untested products.
Managerial people don't like the costs and lost revenue of delayed product launches and missed deadlines.

Technical people don't like business issues limiting technical implementation.
Managerial people don't like technical issues limiting commercial activity.

Technical people know they could do a better job than their management, but would miss doing the technical work.
Managerial people know they could do a better job if they weren't so busy managing things.

I've finally upgraded harriyott.com to .NET 2.0. There were a couple of dicey moments where I thought that I wouldn't be able to get it working, and I'd already burnt my bridges with version 1.1.

I've had a bit of a tidy up, used a master page instead of user controls, and made the CSS a whole lot better. The HTML is now valid, if you don't count adsense, and the occasional ampersand in URLs that I forgot.

I've removed some of the poor-performing nonsense from the side-bar, and moved the archives to the bottom, as they're getting rather long now.

All in all, I feel a lot cleaner. I can now start on changing the CSS to make the site a whole lot nicer looking, and start writing those little apps that I wanted to host here.

[Tags: .net css html]

The Sussex Geek Dinner event with Glenn Jones speaking on Microformats was last night.


[Glenn Jones at the Sussex Geek Dinner]

Glenn delivered an excellent presentation on microformats last night. I've used them a couple of times before, but Glenn covered areas I hadn't come across, and got me all excited about them again. Glenn also covered using URLs as APIs, which was really inspiring.

Although Joh kindly says that I organised the event single-handedly, I actually had some help this time, from Joh, who found and collected a PA system. Although Glenn (quite understandably) didn't like having a hand-held mic, it really did help the people at the back, so thanks Joh!

Numbers were down on last time - quite a few people who signed up didn't turn up, which must be annoying for the people who couldn't sign up that would have been there otherwise. Maybe I should over-book to allow for this next time, airline-styley.

As for the next one, the venue is unavailable in May, so it will probably be June.

[Tags: sussexgeekdinner geekdinner upcoming:event=151497 glennjones johhunt microformats]

I think it was meant merely as an observation, but I took it as a compliment. The guy who writes the spec I'm working from said that I look at the website "from a user's viewpoint". I'm really pleased he said that, as I have been working on that recently.

Update: Hugh's got some thoughts on the matter.



I've recently made some usability suggestions, which work really well: firstly, the link that opens a popup window starts off as a link to a normal page, and then with unobtrusive JavaScript (which I learnt about from Jeremy Keith's excellent DOM Scripting book) adds an onclick event that, when clicked, opens the popup window. If JavaScript is disabled, the link still works, and opens the page normally. I've also dispensed with the "printer-friendly" page, instead using the @media print CSS thing to hide the navigation, search box, banner ads etc. so the printed version is much cleaner. Just how the printer-friendly version would look, in fact, but much quicker to write.

Something else I used from Jeremy 's book is the image gallery. There was an image gallery in the spec, and there was one in his book. Thanks Jeremy! This again returns to the server if JavaScript is disabled or the browser doesn't support it, but dynamically changes the images if it can.

I guess I spend a fair bit of time being annoyed by hard-to-use websites, or even just little things on generally good websites, so I try to spot things that would annoy me if I was the user.

[Tags: usability jeremykeith domscripting unobtrusivejavascript]