On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Ahhh what a weekend it was at Barcamp London 3, held at Google’s UK offices in Buckingham Palace Road. It was good fun and very informative. I’ve learnt a lot, more in some areas than others such as jQuery, Caja/Open Social, more on the semantic web, the future BBC homepage and more still. I also did three sessions. Sort of. I talked about Liberating the Writer and The Art of Self Publishing. I feel a bit of an imposter talking about anything as I am very quick to self deprecate and devalue the worth of my knowledge. That said, I think I do the latter things very well and I was very comfortable talking about them. Liberating the Writer particularly was a more impassioned piece as I really was in the mood for extolling the virtue of content when much of Barcamps are (and as they should be) are about presentation and the technical underpinnings of what delivers content.

The third was the geek quiz which started off as being about Linux but soon encompassed all manner of geekery. We did it like QI, although I only came up with some questions but we had buzzers that were the Mac startup chime, AOL’s ‘You Got Mail‘ sound, ‘Fucking Windows 98‘ from South Park and Steve Ballmer’s ‘Developers! Developers! Developers!‘ We also had the stupid answer sound and flashing text. Awesome stuff. It was a lot of fun.

I’m in the middle in case you can’t tell With my trusty beat T40

Apart from that mind (and the slides will be online soon) I met up with some friends and had a wicked time. I mean Google’s offices are cool; a bit more snazzy than the average employer. I mean they had Ben & Jerry Ice Cream Sandwiches; and they were just there in the fridge for the taking. Seriously! If I worked for Google (and I wouldn’t want to) I’d be 350lbs in no time; not good. But the food aside (and it was just fabulous, Thanksgiving Dinner was spectacular) the place was cool. Games room with a billiards table, giant jenga, table tennis, consoles and an arcade machine running something like MAME–it had just about every arcade game ever.

I also got a chance to ride a Segway and crashed it. Repeatedly. Again and again. It was funny and I couldn’t stop laughing.

There was lots more too, from lots of free beer and wine, very intelligent talk and more drinking beer afterwards. And getting progressively hammered to the state that by the time I left Victoria station I had drunk some six pints of lager and was paying heavily for it. Not drunk that much in a long time! It was a lot of fun though.

I’ll write some more about it soon but I’m tired and I just want to go to bed now and read my book.

Me at Google London, Smooth

Yeahhaay Barcamp London 3 is here! Keep checking back for the cool happenings here!

Oh whatever can she mean? Has she in fact held hostage a talented and qualified web designer under her desk whilst passing off the work as her own? Or is she in fact stealing all of her designs from somewhere else? Maybe she has only been making websites since 2000 and not 1995?

Well none of those are the case. My first web sites were developed and tested using NCSA Mosaic on my Amiga in 1995, and all of my work is my own (except for the snippets of fixes that I occasionally need for Internet Explorer 6…)

My secret is in fact that very reason I have used a blog as my main website. I rarely come home these days and sit on my computers to do further website development. I get my quota at work 5 days a week. That’s not to say I am not interested in it really, far from the truth. I think the web is just about the most fabulous thing in the world. (Just think how different out lives are in the past decade because of the Internet and specifically the web.)

You don’t need a moving eulogy to the web though. What I mean is that since mid 2006 I have not maintained my own website, I use the blog as good way to get my work out on the web with minimal effort. I don’t run a CMS system (it’s only me after all, bit overkill) and I don’t run a web server.

Shadowplay Design Specification

Anyway I have knocked together my website over this weekend using a killer style that I have developed which I am going to be putting to good use elsewhere. This is my so-called Shadowplay design. It uses a number of things that I have wanted to achieve:

• Accessible design: First and foremost navigable easily with mouse, keyboard and other input devices.
• ‘Scalable’ in two senses:
  • Just as suitable for small sites and large sites alike
  • Increasing/Decreasing the font size yields a gracefully shrinking/enlarging ‘zoom’ as found in IE 7 and Opera and soon Firefox 3.  (NB: This is based on my flex CSS design idea but this is slowly becoming redundant with the majority of browsers having page magnification instead of vanilla text size increase. This is a back of a fag packet calculation that ~40% of users use IE7 and soon 15% of the public will use Firefox 3.)
• Little to no CSS ‘hacks’: I detest with a passion CSS hacks using commenting side effects. I respect these were once needed if you wanted your site to work on Gecko based browsers (Firefox/Netscape 6+), IE 5 (Mac and PC) and IE 6 but these days–no need if you know what you’re doing and your target is:
  • Internet Explorer 6+, Safari 2.0/Konqueror, Firefox (Gecko based browsers) and Opera.

  That is pretty much 99.9% of the web browsing platforms in use today (according my statistics.) The only ‘hacking’ is PNG transparency for IE6 via Javascript and the DirectX filter, and a couple of selective comments for IE6. That’s it.

  This is good because it means the core CSS file for screen output is clean and when IE 6 dies (hopefully a slow painful choking death…) I won’t be batting my CSS styles into shape with drastic surgery removing obscene looking CSS comment hacks that I will have long forgotten their function.

  That said I am still catering for IE6 as it’s the most modern Internet Explorer browser that can be run on Windows 98, 2000 and NT 4 (Of which cumulatively makes up ~10% of the browsing market) although I’m really hoping it’ll start to dwindle into 2008 allowing me to leave some of the slight IE6 glitches ‘unfixed’ as I think there needs to be an element of carrot in front of the horse here.

• Modern design that leverages the best of CSS based design, contemporary web design trends (the dreaded 2.0 aesthetic which on the whole is downright gorgeous in my book) and using ‘progressive Javascript’ that doesn’t break the site in its absence but subtly improves things without interfering with accessibility. (jQuery)
• Be a design that doesn’t shout about how good it is, but subtle and something you just appreciate its aesthetic without necessarily consciously acknowledging it as such. The same could be said about the commodity value of Helvetica as a beautiful design that’s just there.
• Small nimble size: How does 90KB in its vanilla form sound including jQuery! This includes all the graphics including gorgeous transparent PNGs.
• Valid XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1 and up to WCAG 1.0 AA (Priority 2) spec.

As you can see the design brief was quite a tight one. And I am glad to say that I have met all the things I wanted to with this design.

Open Source

The other great aspect is that I developed it using open source free software. Virtually everything worked as well as it has done on proprietary systems in fact in most respects it was better as my humble T40 just soldiered through the work without missing a heartbeat. Whereas I would usually use Notepad, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I used GEdit, Gimp 2.4 and Inkscape. Apart from one minor skirmish which infuriated me in Gimp it worked a treat. In fact I do have virtually whole hearted praise to the Gimp team as 2.4 is such a vast improvement in my book as a Photoshop user that it’s just not funny. It’s like using a new program with all the annoying as hell bits ripped out of it. The new design uses graphics generated solely with Inkscape and Gimp.

GEdit does some funny things though on occassion, pasting doesn’t always happen at the cursor insertion point but I just kept an eye on this and I was fine. I don’t know whether this is a bug or not?

Summary

Anyway I’m going to quit jabbering on and I’m going to upload my new website (which will be a companion to this blog, the blog remaining my main area of concentration online) and post the link here and then you can decide for yourself

The other good thing is I have a website of my own to brandish at Barcamp London 3 next weekend Fancy that, was I the only web developer at Barcamp Brighton without my own personal website that I had designed?

Note, this is a long heartfelt blog post. It’s not the usual web evangelism angle but a unique one. Whether you give it the time of day is neither here or there but the matter remains–what I’ve written here means a lot to me.

Interesting is how I would call the past couple of months or so. I don’t tend to write personal stuff on this blog because I don’t think this is the place. That said that wasn’t the case even just a couple of months ago when I wrote far too much personal stuff which has now been channelled into Memoirs of a Time:

I finished as soon as I could in the service station [Knutsford on the M6] and dashed back out into the rain to fumble with my keys getting them into the door lock, jumping into my steel cocoon and just sat cowering. Everywhere I went there was a superlative in human form to compare myself to. The end result was a lasting impression of inferiority. The Lakes were my dearest hope that peace to quell the thunder in my heart would come. I just needed to calm down; inhale the crystalline air and listen to platitude; feel clear sparkling water run through my thoughts, that would cleanse and quench my thirst and resolve my war.

from Memoirs of a Time “Northern Links” by Victoria J.K. Lamburn

The thunder was quelled and since then I have really got back on track with so many things. One of those is really taking a good hard look at what’s happening in the world of web development and ultimately the career I absolutely love with a passion.

This isn’t an exercise in bragging though; rather an explanation in my words of something I have ‘hit’ that has been a part as much as anything in digging myself out of the rut I had got into this year up until mid July.

I was talking to Cotia (one of my best mates) the other night over what soon ended up almost three bottles of wine between us (didn’t feel drunk at all, quite odd, felt very tired the next day and still paying…) and we were talking about when we started University in 2002; by which point I got really excited because that is exactly what I wrote about (although about September 2007 rather than October 2002) is that Autumnal air that we all feel press down on our shoulders, like a familiar face leaning over your shoulder radiating a perverse warmth in the cold biting air.

I am a very reflective person, I value halcyon, I harbour the past with me even when I look forward half of me looks over my shoulder with a smile. I’ll always be like this, and I like being like it. I look back on that innocuous and mundane time of waiting for a train at Moulsecoomb station in Brighton in October, in the afternoon of a dawning winter with the perfectness of fading light. So what is it that I’ve hit?

Nothing bad but something to look forward to. Earlier this month I went to the Barcamp in Brighton which was a real eye opener. Not so much on the technical front which was just phenomenal some of things that are being done with the web a mere 12 years after I got into creating my first web page. (In 1995, things were primitive and in my case it was an Amiga 1200 running AMosaic in 640×512 resolution. Yes, not the first but I was there in the days of NCSA Mosaic. *takes a geeky bow*)

The thing that took me aback was actually how much of a community circuit seems to revolve in the web development game and how deeply collaborative it can be. I’m very much a share and share alike person (there are reasons aside from price to be an exclusive Linux user) and I was impressed by this. In fact the collaborative nature of the beast wasn’t purely one upmanship but seemingly the product of passion. When you use a website, have you considered whether the people/person behind it was thinking, “I really want them to enjoy this site, I hope they like it.” Passion, flair, creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, exactitude and dynamism is what drives the web economy and its this marvelous afterglow that makes the Dotcom burst of 2000/2001 seem not a surprise but an inevitability of naievty in the market at that time. Now there seems something so much more soulful behind the motivation of the true pioneers. (I’m not one of those, I follow once the path is well trod–I suppose I’m the Slackware of web developers!)

Notice I am hesitant to say ‘Web 2.0′ as it’s become almost a joke in itself but when you cut through the hype and increasingly nonsensical descriptions, I personally can see the marked difference in the web of today to that of even 3 years ago. In three years time? That’s the buzz, that’s the excitement. What other industry is on the cutting edge of enterprise like that of the web developer?

I’ve hit that realisation that whilst I don’t hope to really create the next killer web app, or killer web site, it’s reinvigorated an enthusiasm inside of me that is just sitting there with me when I write that first line…

<!DOCTYPE html...

Isn’t that a wonderful feeling!

I suppose there is only one thing more that I love more than designing and coding websites, and that’s writing:

At the same time with the flowing patience was a lowered tone in my subvocal thoughts that enunciated my conviction’s brevity to every syllable. That dreadful Monday night changed from the most terrifying of storm clouds to the gentle drifting wisps in the sky whose shadows did not leave me in the shade. Because soon whichever way fate played it, I knew at last I could be free of everything that had raged inside of me, all of that which has brought me down at the slightest faltering step.

from Memoirs of a Time “Elysium” by Victoria J.K. Lamburn