02/10: Lime Survey
I have found some great software for creating and managing complicated on-line surveys.
The software is called Lime Survey and is released as Open Source software under the GPL license.
The list of features is endless, it lets you create and manage multiple surveys with lists of question types and logic based jumps between threads in the survey. All the data is then held in a MySQl database for you to download as csv or excel or toq query and create reports.
Let me tell you what I did with it.
The software is called Lime Survey and is released as Open Source software under the GPL license.
The list of features is endless, it lets you create and manage multiple surveys with lists of question types and logic based jumps between threads in the survey. All the data is then held in a MySQl database for you to download as csv or excel or toq query and create reports.
Let me tell you what I did with it.
06/06: Jeopardy powerpoint
In case you didn't know I am a member of the BNI Ushers chapter based in Melksham.
BNI has been really good for me so far, and I try to put as much as I can in to the whole networking "thing".
As part of the membership, you get to do a ten minute presentation to help the other members understand more about you and your business.
Well, my business is website design and build. If I were to put together a presentation about the ins and outs of designing websites, I would probably lose 80% of my audience within about 2 minutes. Plus Fiona Davies from Flame Interiors had significantly upped the ante with her last presentation, where she wore a chefs hat and explained her interior design business in terms of a recipe for success.
So what did I do?
BNI has been really good for me so far, and I try to put as much as I can in to the whole networking "thing".
As part of the membership, you get to do a ten minute presentation to help the other members understand more about you and your business.
Well, my business is website design and build. If I were to put together a presentation about the ins and outs of designing websites, I would probably lose 80% of my audience within about 2 minutes. Plus Fiona Davies from Flame Interiors had significantly upped the ante with her last presentation, where she wore a chefs hat and explained her interior design business in terms of a recipe for success.
So what did I do?
I gave up using Outlook in January and set all my email up in Thunderbird with the Lightning extension for an events calendar. (I also gave up Office and went over to OpenOffice at that time).
Of course that stopped the one really useful thing that my Blackberry Pearl did: being able to synchronise my contacts and calendar.
It was always little bit of a pain. You had to find a spare USB cable and start up the Blackberry synchronisation software and it was always something that you had to remember to do when you got back to the office.
Unfortunately there is no Thunderbird extension for the Blackberry software and my Blackberry was left alone in the dark, not knowing who I was meeting and when.
Until now.
It was always little bit of a pain. You had to find a spare USB cable and start up the Blackberry synchronisation software and it was always something that you had to remember to do when you got back to the office.
Unfortunately there is no Thunderbird extension for the Blackberry software and my Blackberry was left alone in the dark, not knowing who I was meeting and when.
Until now.
31/03: Significant web design event
The BBC website, which I would consider one of the best websites in the world in terms of content accessibility and design, has increased the size of it's main table to a whopping 974 pixels. As far as I am concerned, the BBC are still the people to trust about these sort of decisions. I have already switched to a wider layout on some of my newer sites like Lane Air for instance. But I had a nagging doubt in the back of my head that I had gone slightly too early. The BBC following me has re-affirmed my decision. In fact I can now go even wider!!
"So what" you might say? Well this is a significant milestone. The BBC does not make decisions like this lightly, they would consider all the data and all their viewers before making a table this big. Every website depends on the operating system, browser and screen resolution of the viewer. A fixed table size means that if your screen resolution is too small, say 800 x 600px, the BBC website is going to poke off the right hand size of your screen.
The BBC deciding to longer cater for screen resolutions less than about 1024 x 768px means that there are so few people out there using screen resolutions that small, it is not worth them compromising their design by making their fixed table size to fit in that space. Their own page says that this is now less than 5% of their total web viewers.
Of course you can still view the BBC News website on a smaller monitor, the same way you can view it on your phone or PDA. It just won't all fit in at once. It's slightly different for a mobile device though. There they detect that you are connecting with a mobile device (or you tell them) and you get a cut down site to fit on your tiny screen. In the bad old days of web design, you used to have write two entirely different websites for the two major browsers. Nowadays, the browsers are closer together and (tongue in cheek) closer to the actual HTML standard and you don't have to do so much. In fact with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), you can now code a single website and change it with a CSS side file to display differently for different media, for instance you could display a website for screen, for print and for aural (intended for speech synthesisers).
So look forward to seeing some more wide boys from Godjira over the coming weeks!
10/03: PureEdit CMS
I have been using the PureEdit Content Management System (CMS) for the last few weeks to produce a new web site.
It's a brand new CMS system that allows the web developer to have pretty much complete control over the look and feel of the page. PureEdit itself *just* handles the back end and the creation of content.
I have used Joomla, Mambo, PHPNuke, Wordpress and indeed Nucleus before, but they always give you too much or start to dictate the way a site looks. Sometimes that's good. You can get a nice clean look and feel with only a little bit of effort, but like so much other software, once you start to try and get outside the box, you end up having to fight to achieve the effects you want.
With PureEdit, you do the site design and then drop in the content, which gives you so much more freedom. OK you don't get the enormous set of bells and whistles that you do with something like Joomla, but sometimes you just don't need them and sometimes they just get in the way.
On the site I am working on at the moment, we wanted a very clean and professional image to fit in with the nature of the business and to have that tied in with a "kewl" gallery script. ZenPhoto was my choice for the gallery script with a LightBox front end. I think I would have really struggled to achieve the clean and light look and feel with a more traditional CMS.
I am definitely going to be adding PureEdit to my toolkit. Lots of my customers express the desire to be able to edit their own news for instance and this is a good way of adding that functionality.
Lane Air (driven by PureEdit)
PureEdit
ZenPhoto
LightBox
It's a brand new CMS system that allows the web developer to have pretty much complete control over the look and feel of the page. PureEdit itself *just* handles the back end and the creation of content.
I have used Joomla, Mambo, PHPNuke, Wordpress and indeed Nucleus before, but they always give you too much or start to dictate the way a site looks. Sometimes that's good. You can get a nice clean look and feel with only a little bit of effort, but like so much other software, once you start to try and get outside the box, you end up having to fight to achieve the effects you want.
With PureEdit, you do the site design and then drop in the content, which gives you so much more freedom. OK you don't get the enormous set of bells and whistles that you do with something like Joomla, but sometimes you just don't need them and sometimes they just get in the way.
I am definitely going to be adding PureEdit to my toolkit. Lots of my customers express the desire to be able to edit their own news for instance and this is a good way of adding that functionality.
Lane Air (driven by PureEdit)
PureEdit
ZenPhoto
LightBox
06/03: Welcome to my blog
Well, I've finally bitten the bullet and joined the wide world of blogging.
So stick with me while I post my adventures on the Internet and elsewhere.
My name is John Dickens and I run Godjira websites . I have been developing websites and web applications for the last ten years or more. I have expertise in HTML, JavaScript, Perl and am now working my way through learning some PHP. I will try to keep you posted about any of the new exciting technologies, designs and marketing strategies I use as I build more and more websites.
I am particularly excited about getting in to more and more Web 2.0 technologies and will try and do something with Mootools at every given opportunity.
There will be more to come, I promise.
So stick with me while I post my adventures on the Internet and elsewhere.
My name is John Dickens and I run Godjira websites . I have been developing websites and web applications for the last ten years or more. I have expertise in HTML, JavaScript, Perl and am now working my way through learning some PHP. I will try to keep you posted about any of the new exciting technologies, designs and marketing strategies I use as I build more and more websites.
I am particularly excited about getting in to more and more Web 2.0 technologies and will try and do something with Mootools at every given opportunity.
There will be more to come, I promise.
