Web design & FOSS

It is easy to forget that the computer is just a tool, a means to an end. It might be fun, it might be interesting, heck, you might even scrape a living out of it. But the computer is just a tool.

Over the years I have helped numerous family members and friends to set up computers, for music, internet, word processing, all sorts of uses. One of the key phrases I hear time and time again is:

“I just want it to work.”

I believe that the interface for the program/operating system/web application should be as simple, intuitive and consistent as possible (see Google, Apple, Moo etc.).

In My Humble Opinion, this is why (Ubuntu) Linux has made such leaps and bounds, the fact that it now pretty much works out of the box on wide variety of platforms.

I recently finished my first proper bit of remote web building work as an independent web designer/builder! And here are the lessons I gleaned, with the help of the effervescent Mr A.:

1. Negotiate a price for the work before you start. Don’t quote an hourly rate for one-off jobs. Quote what the job is worth, ie what the client will pay.

2. Read the job spec thoroughly. Read it again so that you understand what it actually says.

3. Do your own time estimate for the job; don’t rely on somebody else’s. Be realistic. Obviously.

4. Check what format the files will be delivered in, and have the appropriate software installed to deal with them before the job starts.

5. Be careful about using CSS resetting default values, as I had some bother with IE6’s incorrect handling of the cascade on a background value.

6. Test in different browsers during the build process, so that you can more easily single out and fix browser (ie IE ;) bugs. This is similar to iterative testing in some programming methodologies.

7. Float the outer most container that can be floated, not just the content, otherwise there’ll be trouble ahead in IE.

And the icing on the cake, a genuine Mr A. quote:

“My skill is dealing with black box f**cked up stuff that other people can’t deal with.”

Hands up who didn’t read the spec properly :*). Foolish, schoolbory error. I have been working on a job and the design spec says “Assume the text size is fixed [my emphasis] in pixels”. With my old accessibility hat on, and years of making web sites with text zoomable in IE6 (ie using the ems or keyword methods), I duly blanked that part of the spec out my mind. (I’ve also noticed that these articles are dated 2001 and 2003!! Have a look at the more recent [How to size text in CSS] article 3. Using font-size keywords can be useful if you ever include content and stylesheets from other sites, as you’ll avoid problems with Inherited Shrinkage if there is a clash of the stylesheets using the ems method.)

After struggling with curvey corner backgrounds for a few hours, I emailed my woes to the project manager. Assume the text size is fixed!!! he hollered, via email and set the font size in pixels!!. Double doh. This means that users of Internet Explorer 6 can’t increase the size of the text. Hey, this is only roughly 30% of the browser market. But in IE7 and Firefox 3, the default is to zoom the whole page. So any background curvey corners are zoomed as well. As IE6 fades slowly into obscurity, pixel perfect layouts are becoming the norm, and my oh my, are they ever so much easier to build.

I was bemoaning the lack of a polished GUI text editor for Linux.

or

I was waxing lyrical about the elegantly finished open source GUI text editors on Windows, such as Notepad++ and Notepad2, and Smultron on the Mac.

So, I thought, how hard could it possibly be to choose an open source Linux text editor, learn the requisite programming language and dig in to help out? Bluefish is my text editor of choice on Linux. And I really appreciate the amount of work that has gone into it (a big thank you to Olivier Sessink et al). But I want more… (column select, easily editable syntax highlighting, customisable shortcut keys, joining lines, stripping blank lines, probably a plug-in architecture).

I’ll find out how hard it is and let you know ;)

My modest library of home movies in uncompressed AVI format have had to make way for proper work. This has meant backing up all my photos and movies, and then embarking upon a spot of synchronisation on my lusty, Ubuntu-driven ThinkPad X60s. I have started using grsync, which is a GUI front-end for rsync.

It’s pretty straightforward, you create new sessions for each of the folders that you want to synchronise, select a few options and away you go. So I have a 500GB hard disk sitting at The Cottage which I will be backing up to and synchronising with upon my return. That is until I can get the NAS box working properly, and then I’ll synch the NAS box with the external hard disk. Or something.