I adore the words. I love the way they sing to me. I enchant them in return. We keep excellent time, the courtship is eternal and I never wander, lonely, as a talisman of text.
The words bemuse me, bewitch me. I live off the land of linguistics. And while I harvest its rich fruits, so I plant seeds, soliloquies I hope to one day blossom into bountiful vines of wisdom for others to share and indulge upon.
Story of my life set, you can imagine why developing a complex news website from scratch was perhaps the most challenging assignment of my career.
Writers habitually disregard the code, as coders eschew grammatical correctness. Rarely do the two disciplines fond bedfollows make.
A whole lotta work. Now can I get back to my writing and podcasting, please?!
The Me Manifesto was all about stretching myself for the betterment of others. So with a pitifully low quote proferred towards the client, my fate was sealed in a pledge of fulfillment.
It’s been a long, difficult and at times, hair-pulling process. I’ve learned more about CSS, MySQL, PHP and smush.it than is healthy for a man of prose. But I feel that the learning curve – akin to a hockey stick shape – has been worthwhile, in some ways.
The site plan begin without one. First mistake. The goalposts were moved, time and again, until we settled – perhaps uncomfortably – on a set of objectives.
My role moving forward will be to promote, pack and pledge the site to as many people and advertisers (the latter aren’t the former, in my experience) as is inhumanly possible. One of the main reasons I wanted to grow the site from the ground was to have an intimate understand of its nuances. I have. And the learning curve in many ways will continue to steepen, like a rock climber tackling an inverted wall.
But it’s all good. With one major caveat.
While committing all my time to tech, I’ve mislaid my aptitude for creating great content – it is this I aim to reclaim. It may take time, it’ll sure as heck take a lot of reading and sweeping of my mind attic to tidy things up and nurture my cerebral passages.
But I’ll be back. And the blog – you, my dear companion – will be all the better for it as a result.
Thanks for joining me on the ride. There are many more twists in the road yet to come – but I plan my life in milestones, and we’ve certainly reached one in the past 24 hours.
10 things I have learned about developing a site:
- Retrospectively changing the entire colourscape takes the patience of saints. I took this on as a brief exercise: I overcame it in a day. That’s a lot of hours. My God, I know CSS simplifies everything (and for sure it would have taken oodles longer otherwise) but there’s always a line somewhere in neon pink you didn’t expect. And you couldn’t find. For ages.
- Why was the code of the interwebs written in American? As a courtesy for stealing our language, them web founders should at least have used things like ‘centre’ instead of ‘center’. If you ever tried to align anything, you’ll know the implications of foregoing this relatively trivial-looking difference.
- Have a plan. Stick to it. Deviate only if you get paid more. Finish the job. Refine the job, but only on promise of more money. Or, in my experience, meekly agree to everything and drive yourself within centimetres of permanent residence in the ground.
- Understand there’s more to life. I spent a horde of 15-hour days Frankensteining this inanimate beast. I put my girlfriend through hell. Kind of. I kept missing things we said we’d do. Because when you take on a project of this ilk and you’re not 3-ified, things drag on. Know you’re human and don’t digress from that concept.
- Get some graph paper. I hear that CSSers of the finest calibre still use graph paper. This, despite there being no end of useful tools that can just about do this for you electronically. There’s no substitute for form. Remember this and you’ll save more hours than you could imagine on floating, applying margins and padding, and just generally getting hot on the Box Model.
- Find a distraction. Every hour, kick yourself off your PC. Because noone else will. If your fingers are ultra-reluctant to part from Miss QWERTY then go find something like creativecopychallenge.com and pit your wits against an altogether different, dextrous challenge. But better you go for a walk, listen to some music. Interact, dammit! There are real people out there! Or get some glasses.
- Don’t obsess about the small stuff. Think of the big picture – are they really gonna notice those two pixels you’re out? If so, just margin: auto. You’ll get out alive – even if it feels like the pixels are piranhas
- Yes, Google News will add a Redirect Notice to your RSS feeds the day before launch. No, there’s nothing you can do about it. At all. I suggest you go and mash some up using Yahoo Pipes, and add to it as you go along. Then you can control the feeds that are spewing into your site. You win, Google loses. As if they haven’t suffered enough with the miserable flops of recent months a la Buzz and Wave…
- The only person in the world still using IE6 is your client. But I found a neat solution – IETester. One app, any version of Internet Explorer you care to fail test your site on.
- Firebug will save your life. Then do it again. And again. I thought Dreamweaver was pretty snazzy when it came to developing for the web. Until I discovered Firefox, which helped by identifying all the media on your page. And then Firebug, which totally changed the way you code on the fly. Firebug is to code what vacuum pumps are to inconsequentially endowed, placebo believers.
If you want to find out more about how I went about developing the site as a stupid person, you only need ask. But you may be requested to contribute to therapy sessions. This is one baby I don’t want to rock.
It’s nearly the weekend. Sanity unfolds from here. Go enjoy this bonanza of life with which we have all been honoured. It truly feels wonderful to gaze out the window over garages and a Spar into the sunshine. But it makes it difficult to see for a while afterwards.
Writer, webbist, what next? What challenges have you set yourself this year? Tell the world and you’ll get them done – I promise!