glennweb.net

Just finished the upgrade to Wordpress 1.5. Went very smoothly; backup, delete, upload, upgrade, create template from old style, upload, done. Nice.

I have the best intentions. I want to blog more. It was a very busy fall/winter which now has slowed (not that Jan. is ever a busy month), so I’ll make a better effort to blog (now with new, improved, ‘better intentions’). So it goes…

A nice article on Sitepoint (author: Susan Villecroze) with some useful and common-sense guidelines for choosing a web designer and/or developer. Susan makes a good point about freelancers in general: “Freelancers may also represent better value for money. With a freelancer, there are rarely any hidden fees, nor many complex contractual details to overcome before the project can begin. Freelancers may also be more readily available to go onsite if required.”

Check with a freelancer (ahem, Glennweb) for ‘your’ next web project.

This summer has been a flurry of project work with no time to talk about it. A quick overview:

• Launched the complete Champaign City Site with a new look/feel/cms
• Launched the Champaign City Property Tax Estimator
• Worked on a construction company site, Campanella & Sons, Inc.
• Did the tiniest bit of work on the Uillinois.edu homepage
• Launched many changes for the Saint Thomas More site (news, Saber Store, Golf Scramble, etc.)
• Launched Blogging at Saint Thomas More, a collection of 50 blogs for faculty, staff, and athletics
• Launched the UI Veterinary Medicine VEO site with a new shopping cart and online purchasing
• Working on the School of Music Admissions database project (soon to launch)
• Working on the School of Music CRIME site

Living in the sticks has it’s advantages, but broadband coveage isn’t one of them. After giving up waiting for Verizon to launch DSL over fiber here (fiber is just .5 miles away), I finally bit the bullet and bought a Direcway dw6000 system. Due to our tree-filled existance I also had to bite it over the aesthetics of a large (-er than I expected) dish squatting on my garage roof. It’s beginning to look like a CNN downlink site around here, but the broadband-ish speeds are definitely welcome (over the bad phone line dialup, best connection in the 40’s somewhere).

As long as I can keep the trees at bay (note the hole to allow the low azimuth dish to get a signal) all should be well. So far the link is fine but the actual connection (dependent on Direcway NOC) can be a bit dodgy, going up and down randomly during the day (for short periods). Download speeds have been pretty good overall but uploading is a trip (modem can be faster more often than not). So it goes.

Better we should reinvent the wheel everytime? In an industry where (nearly) every element is built on the shoulders of others work, this is a bit ironic really.

I don’t have a good answer for intellectual property protection but I do know it isn’t realistic to expect creative people to quit using proven techniques because they have used them at a previous place of employment.

Are developers stealing code? - ZDNet UK News

I am switching to Bloglines as an RSS Reader. I had been using Feed but the interface is pretty bad and I haven’t the time to improve it. So it goes. Bloglines works very well and is proving and easy and reliable switch.

Bloglines | My Blogs