Blogathon 28th July 2002

Jake Howlett, 11 August 2002

Category: Miscellaneous; Keywords:

Beacuse I had nowhere better to put it the transcript of the whole blogathon event is being kept in what would normally be used for an article.

The webcam shot on the right islive and updates every minute or so. If you have a request as to where you want it place let me know. Nothing rude!

Online Contacts:

JakeHowlett@hotmail.com
JakeHowlett@Yahoo.com
30696498
#codestore on IRCNet

Please don't mail me on any of the above addresses as I don't read them.

Time for a speach?

First I would like to thank all of you because without you I couldn't shouldn't wouldn't have have done this. We've raised a hell of a lot of cash for a very worthy cause. Also thanks to those of you who have kept me company for the past 24 hours. I don't think I was on my own for a single second. Thanks to those that provided input on the new design. Hopefully we've nearly arrived at some kind of compromise that we are happy with. Personally I am really pleased with it.

While doing this I have also made a decent start at what would have otherwise taken me weeks. It's nowhere near finished but the worst part of it is over. I feel good that I have made a move toward what has to be the future of the way we developer webpages. All I need to do now is wait for Lotus to catch up... I won't be holding my breath.

The chat is still going on in the IRC room as I write this. Some reunions and name-droppings happening I can see. Going to regret having to turn it off. Some of you asked if I plan to keep it open and the answers no, I have enough as it is. Don't forget that there is aleady the #Notes channel on Efnet. Have fun and cheers (Joe, that's both the thanking and glass-raising type of cheers).

I'm going to bed. Look at the state of me! Not even Photoshop can make that look pretty....

On the subject of sleep the same site has an article asking whether sleep deprivation is harming the web. In my case yes...

Apparently I should feel like I am drunk. Well, I'm not making much sense so there must be some truth in it.

Writing for writing's sake now. Thank god there are only three more blogs to go. This was fast turning in to "How to kill a blog in less than 24 hours..."

Al m o st th e rrrrrrrrrrrrr.....

Mike Golding's joke:

Q. Why did the Flash developer keep crossing the road?

A. Becasue he kept pressing the back button by mistake.

Ingo's version of my joke has an alternate answer: None. It's a hardware problem.

Anybody going to join Colin Williams as one of the converts to the CSS faith?

It comes to something when you're leaving message on the server console. Reminds me of the story my dad told me about the married couple who spent the last years of their lives not talking to each other. Instead they used a typewriter in the living room and a lot of paper. When they both died, their relatives found the whole conversation. Bizarre.

Starting to feel it now. Decided to stop making changes to the database. Not a good idea to work when you're in this state. I've started to forget what I am doing whilst I'm doing it!

Somebody suggested I tell a joke as part of a blog. This is the best I could come up with at such short notice.

Q. How many Notes developers does it take to change a light-bulb?

A. One. As long as they've got an account on LDD so they can ask somebody else.

Things I forgot I needed to do:

1. Re-write the About page. Wrote that ages ago and it's not as relevant anymore.

2. Re-write/move the FAQs page. I made most of them up anyway, thinking that they are what should be the most asked questions. In reality I don't get asked many questions over and over.

And of course I need to convert 8 months of blogs in to documents. That's ~240 cut & pastes. My poor wrists...

I hope at the end of this I am going to be able to remember the names of all the people who've dropped by to say hello, well done, congratulations. In trying to list all of you I will no doubt miss some and so I won't try. You know who you are.

It's been truly global so far. The IRC room has seen people go to bed, wake up, go surfing, go drinking and has had people from opposites ends of the world sharing nationals stereotypes with each other.

We've had, to name a few of those I can recall, America, Australia, Chile, Denmark, El Salvador, Holland, Germany, and of course the UK.

Going to have to use a trump card on this one. Busy elsewhere.

Logo on the right or on the left...? Whichever, here's the new version. I think I'm happy.

15.5 hours in and the new design is now completely devoid of all tables. Note that I say the design is tableless. They are still in the articles doing there job, holding data.

Do I feel better for it? Yes! I hope some of you have decided to give it a shot too. It's and enlightening experience.

With that finger so far up my nose I must have turned on the lights or something. See me glow:

Okay Bill, you caught me. I stick by my story though - I was scratching.

"Six o'clock in the morning and it's starting to get light..." Name that tune.

If you can't tell, I've run out of the tiny amount of inspiration required to blog. Having to do it every half hour is too much. There is barely time in between to do anything at all.

This message was brought to you by ClickInvites.com - Wedding invitations and wedding announcements.

Consumed so far - 3 cans of diet coke, 1 cup of coffee, 1 cup of tea, 2 Muller yogurts, 1 Terry's Chocolate Orange bar (it's not Terry's, it's mine!), 1 banana and a sqaure meal of sausage, patato, carrots, mange tout & gravy.

Is that normal?

Am I allowed to call Blogger's Block on this one? I am awake...

Unless something major happens it looks like I will win the prizes for most number of sponsors and most money raided (comical type I have left in for effect. I meant raised, obviously). One of these prizes is 20,000 Textads on MetaFilter.

These ads are of little use to me so if anybody wants to buy them then add the money to the MSF donations and let me know. Oops. I just looked and they are only $1 per 1,000 so the prize is only worth $20. Might as well keep them...

Thanks to Ian and Jamie for clearing up the GMT thing. Because we are in Summer Time it's now GMT+1. So wherever people aren't in Summer Time (everywhere else) they are BST minus 1. My mind is packing up on me.

No answer from Google yet. Alas, I have another question niggling me - listening to the BBC World Service to keep me company and wondering why they keep saying it's 03:00 GMT when I can see it's 04:00 GMT. Surely GMT is GMT!? Don't tell me I'm an hour out. Nooooo...

Special mention for Tom Rodriguez who managed to find the line from Zoolander in my blogs today.

Currently in the IRC room, Joe and Alex discuss which flag is the most original - Texas or Chile. The debate rages on...

One of my favourite blogs at the moment is the AULA Point of View. Not only because it is a thing of beauty in itself but because of the way a cross-section of people post there. This gives it a bit more variety than most.

Anyway, reason I mention it is that I see that on the 25^th jyri blogged from his mobile phone. If only I had planned ahead....

Can somebody give me a nudge in half an hour...

Ravi in San Diego asks if I am going to use tables to layout forms. Good question. No, I'm not. I will use the method described in this article.

One thing worth pointing out is that there may well be a table or two on the site somewhere. Mainly being used to layout data - the purpose for which they are intended.

It's 02:00 in London and it's 26^oC in my room. With the window open and the light on my room is beginning to fill up with strange flying things.... hope none of them bite me!

Hell, they're all at it. Web design gods 37Signals have redesigned in compliant XHTML and CSS as well. Nice

Of all my peeves with Domino my biggest is the fact that I can't have a site that I can validate as XHTML compliant. Sort it out Iris. Your attempts in R6 are pitiful and an insult to us Domino develpers who take our work seriously.

Listening to my Tom McRae CD at the moment. There's a great line in the song bloodless - "Trying to stay awake, you gave yourself a caffeine headache". How apt!

Sod that for a game of marbles. Couldn't even think of where to start. Instead I am going to try Google Answers. Here's my question. Chance of an answer....

Going to test the theory that you can find the answer to everything on the web. Something I've never understand is why "we" go to the Olympic as Great Britain and yet we go to the Commonwealth Games, World Cup etc as England, Scotland etc.

Will try and find out, because I know you're all just as curious. Shall I "Ask Jeeves ?"? Maybe not!

Curious about the logo on my t-shirt?

Well, before the version that is the version that I am currently replacing the site's logo looked like this [cringe]

And I went all inventive with some blobs as an icon:

As reported on the W3's message boards I am not the only one switching to CSS. Lycos Europe are planning it as well. You can see a mockup here.

For those not a part of the Commonwealth (1 in 4 people are) you might not know that the Games are on in Manchester at the moment. The thing I can't fathom is that a medal was won before the actual opening ceremony. If that's not strange enough consider that it was in solo sychronised swimming. Has the whole world gone mad? I feel like I'm taking crazy-pills .

When R5 came out I remember being (slightly) impressed that when you copied text from a webpage and pasted it in to Domino Designer it kept the formatting and the tables. Now it annoys the hell out of me. I always forget that I need to paste in to a text editor and re-copy it. That's the trouble with Domino - always trying to be clever.

Something I have trouble with is the concept of irony. For example - I am currently following the guidelines of the WASP project yet I just had to swat a wasp that was buzzing round my monitor and showing no signs of wanting to leave. Ironic? Probably not. How about that I am doing this to raise charity for the sick and needy yet I am killing living things? Forget it....

Domino and blogs don't really go together too well. At the moment the approach I use less than pretty. What would be far more elegant is to integrate Notes and a blogging API. This was discussed by James Snell in a blog earlier this year. Thanks to Stu Lancaster for the link.

As this site evolves in to more of a journal than anything else I can see myself using next year's blogathon to convert this Domino db in to PHP and MySQL. That should upset a few people ;-)

Got any CSS converts out there yet?

As I clean up all the tables that the site currently uses for its layout I can't help but wonder what I was thinking. What a mess! Compare the skeleton of a page now with the old one. This is not counting all the tables that are nested all over the shop. View source to see what I am talking about.

Pages should load a lot quicker. The browser no longer needs to load the whole page and render the table before you see it. You can watch the page download in "real-time". The CSS can be cached as well so all you really download is the content and not dozens of tables.

For anybody in any doubt that I am in England this shot should prove it. Hmmm, tea and biccies...

Should help with the following task list:

• Remove all tables from all views.
• Format all forms.
• Add a new form for blogs
• Convert 10 months of blogs in to documents.
• Write 36 more blogs!
• Things I've forgotten...

Better crack on...

Still not thought of anything to say.

If you get bored of me then why not look at what other bloggers are doing?

Sometimes I forget how powerful the web is. When I was a Boy Scout I remember the jamborees where I would be in awe that we could hear some faint voice from as far away as Denmark. Now I have people in Chile finding bugs in my website in real-time. Thanks Alex.

So as to keep the site resembling a blog here a link coutesy of Ben - anagram maker. Codestore redesign = DECREED TOE GROSS IN...

Has anybody seen four hours. I just lost them.

Got something to show for it now at least. A very rough looking replica of the template I am working on is now on the web...

The requests are coming in for shots on the webcam. No, I won't do a wet t-shirt shot. I have some standards Dom!

However for a pledge of $20 I will write customised messages on my notepad and show it to the camera while giving you a wave. Basically I am selling myself for a good cause.

I've taken mutli-tasking to a whole new level.

My flatmate just offered to pledge $30 if I bare my a$$ on the webcam. You owe us some money Tim! Don't worry if you missed it, it's not a pretty sight.

Damn it. It's red hot outside. Sod this I'm going for a wander soon. The 27.5 on the clock below is the temperature in degrees celcius. Yes, in England!

Should hopefully have a very rough version of the new site that I can post on the live server within the next hour or so.

Give me an hour or so to get my act together. Trying to do ten things at once at the moment.... here's something for you to reflect on.

We've lost Stu from the chatroom because he's going to see if he can't find himself a monster. Things can only get stranger from here on...

Don't worry. I have a plan as to how I am going to layout all the forms. Believe it or not the scribble above makes sense to me ;o)

Already my forms are about 500% lighter on the HTML. In fact they couldn't get any simpler if I tried.

A friend rang in the last half hour and asked what I was up to. I told him and he said "You're doing what!?". Some people just don't understand. He promises to call me regularly during the night to tell me what a great time they are having. Who needs enemies....

Must do some actual blogging in the next hour or so I suppose.

Blog 2 already. This is going to fly by I can tell. All I've done so far is go through 20 forms and make the same change to each. Wow.

Note that I am wearing a certain one-of-a-kind CodeStore t-shirt. Highest bidder (for same charity) can have it. I'll even send it unwashed if you like ;-)

Back to it. See you in 30..

Okay, let's go. I've been shopping and got lots of energy food and diet coke. The webcam works and there's almost a crowd of us in the IRC room #codestore on IRCNet.. better get some work done.

Copyright © 2000 - 2024 Jake Howlett of Rockall Design ltd. This article was printed from codestore.net