On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

About three months ago I posted on my blog this:

http://www.sunshinesista.plus.com/worthing_test/sortables.html

I was pretty pleased with it, I had after all programmed the majority of that in a weekend, a very damp wet weekend and I was on a roll with finally getting closer to relaunching a website that I had been working on for at the time 8-9 months.

That code whilst not original in its scope (e.g. Facebook, BBC and London Borough of Redbridge) was written utterly from scratch by yours truly. I dread to even think what it would be like to actually understand some of the code behind the above examples (I looked for inspiration, not to plagiarise and anyone looking at my code will realise this!)

Step forward two and a half months and Lily or A Lily For The Spectre as the project rapidly became known as has been completed — the new Worthing Borough Council website.

The sidebar and gadgets platform is pretty mature now. There are some gaps to fill in (there is on the whole site, but one person only can do so much, right?) and the sidebar/gadgets ‘thing’ has 2 or 3:

• Vista/Mac gadget/widget download — an on-line converter that strips down my gadget format into a Vista or Mac gadget ‘bundle’ for use on their desktops.
• Linked location — this isn’t essential right now as only one gadget takes a location and keeps hold of it, the waste collection gadget. In the future though more gadgets will make use of location and it will be good to get them to share a location unless they are unlinked. E.g. the waste collection gadget probably 95% of the time is the location you also want for Where Is My Nearest for example so why type it in five times when once will do?
• Sidebar resize

The latter I will hope to implement if not this week then next as there are a handful of people who will prefer on the content pages to have no gadgets but instead to use the space for content instead; and I can see their point.

This shouldn’t be too difficult, we will likely create another cookie (I’m actually getting stressed writing this blog as the trackpoint on my ThinkPad just will NOT turn off the press to select functionality, and my cursor keeps on getting knocked onto lines above… damn thing) which holds the width of the sidebar (255-5px) and whether that relates to the content or the homepage. Virtually everyone keeps gadgets on the homepage but the content sees about 1 in 20 wish to not have them.

See, I do listen All people need to do is to suggest and criticise in a constructive manner. Not send me e-mails saying ‘dis is shit man fok off.’  I’d rather be told “I would really prefer not to have the gadgets on the content pages, they get in the way. Can I get rid of the sidebar on them?”

And that’s exactly what will happen.

Now I’m off to find out what the hell is driving me crazy with this trackpoint thinking I’m clicking if I so much as brush up against it, ooh err.

This is just utterly beautiful. Been in love with GPal’s productions since I discovered his remix of Loudeast’s Sonido Profundo a couple of years back…

Chris Nemmo Reflections (GPal Edit)