So anyway, here’s to the last ten years. Things have changed a lot eh.

Well no, not for this one. The fact is, since I opted to take a year out from contracting at the tail-end of 2010, preferring to focus on pure freelance work, the job has gone bonkers (in a good way). Multiple projects are at the forefront of everything I do. Most evenings are spent working, with bits at the weekend too. Whilst I’m a firm believer in the saying “Make hay whilst the sun shines”, this can go too far. I love what I do, and I love learning about our craft. It would be terrible to end up resenting the coder’s life—that would never do!

I reckon that there will be a little more activity here in the coming months as things calm down a little. I’ve got lots to write about, but some of the posts will be pretty technical, and will require a lot of thinking and drafting. There shall be HTML5, CSS3, Java, JavaScript, and who knows what else. Hopefully some people remain to read it ;-)

Music

I loves my music I does, and 2011 was another corking year. Far from the madd(en)ing crowd, there’s always plenty of good stuff out there being made and re-discovered. The year started off with my continued rediscovery of Frank Zappa (one of my early music loves), and a special new liking for the 1981 album, You Are What You Is, which is as good an introduction to his music as any I reckon. Album of the year? I have two, both of which came out towards the end of 2011: 50 Words For Snow from my all-time favourite Kate Bush, and Grace For Drowning, a wonderful double album from Steven Wilson. About a month after Wilson’s album came out, I got to see him and his band live in London, and will be seeing him again in 2012: an absolutely stunning show—go and see him if you get the chance! Finally, honourable mention again for Kate Bush, this time with her May release (yes, two albums in 2011), Director’s Cut.

Work

Funny old year. In November 2010 I finished a long-term assignment in London, and decided not to jump back on the contract wagon straight away. Instead I opted for the freelance life for the next eleven months, working on all manner of projects and technologies. This has been absolutely fantastic in many regards: lots of mobile web development, some work with IBM Connections, and so on. There was some XPages action, but 2011 was really the year that Domino dropped off the radar for me, with a lot of Java, PHP, HTML5, Javascript and Ruby instead. I am now working on another contract assignment, this time in MediaCityUK, doing lots of new (and high profile) stuff, which has been a tremendous learning experience thus far.

This site

The aforementioned work events have thus left me with a wee dilemma when it comes to this site; I’m not really sure in which direction to take it. Earlier in the year I experimented with some Ruby-themed posts, and also some HTML5 and Javascript how-tos, but neither “series” made much of an impression. I guess I still get a lot of Domino people here maybe ;-) Anyway, I have a back-log of tech stuff to write about, some of which should be of interest to the yellow world, so stay tuned!

Enough navel-gazing. I wish you and yours all the very best for 2012: here’s hoping it’s better than 2011 for all of us (it’s already looking good, as Daniel Lieske has released the next chapter of his Wormworld Saga!)

Almost three weeks ago I started a new full-time contract, unusual for me in that it is based miles away from home in Manchester (MediaCityUK to be precise). I’m working as a mobile web developer, using technologies such as HTML, CSS3, Javascript, Linux and PHP (Zend framework, amongst other things). All very interesting, and with a very pleasant team in delightful offices. The downside of the job is that I’m away from home Monday - Friday, spend a lot of time on trains, and eat peculiar meals at strange times of the day :-).

So, more content as and when, but I felt I owed some sort of explanation for my absence here!

• Big-ish project customising IdeaJam for a major global financial customer. Gave me a chance to really dig in to Matt White’s code and find out that, you know, it’s good.
• Two projects for some smaller companies, dealing with greenfield IBM Connections / Domino integration for one, and modernising some exceptionally well-coded Lotusscript for another.
• Dealing with many many recruitment agents (sad face).
• A six day contract building an HTML5 iPad application from excellent Photoshop designs. The main challenge with this project (aside from time) was building an HTML / Javascript-rendered 360° model which needed to rotate when swiped, but which also needed to have an overlay of links (twelve in total) which appeared/ disappeared as the model rotated through 75 frames. The rotation came courtesy of Petr Vostřel and his jQuery Reel plug-in. The links overlay took some actual work ;-)
• Coding some bits n pieces for the upcoming MyMusicRX app, which Bruce describes in more detail here. Good fun!

Who knows what October will bring?

As mentioned in my previous post, it’s pretty busy at Poole towers at the moment. My current work is all wrapped up with HTML5 development, specifically for mobile devices. I am having way too much fun working with oodles of Javascript, offline storage, WebKit, HTML5 forms, and so on—even some XPages, web agent style. Now, given that my recent Ruby series went down like a fart in a spacesuit, I shall try again:

If anyone would like some techie posts about HTML5, offline applications and the like, let me know in the comments!

Come now, get a grip. Everyone knows that proper developers (and, more importantly, their managers) measure productivity in lines of code.

I wouldn’t. It just looks really ploppy if your article is re-tweeted ad infinitum!

The re-design was originally done in HTML5, just to see if I could. Worked pretty nicely, but I didn’t have time to burp Domino through all the edge cases, so maybe that version will be reinstated in time. For now though, the site is rendered in (usually) valid XHTML thanks to Domino’s $$HtmlFrontMatter and $$HtmlTagAttributes fields. I’ve also kept some of the CSS3 doo-dads for those browsers that can cope. If you’re viewing this site in Internet Explorer, it will render OK (well, I only tested in IE7 and IE8), but you don’t get some of the extras. If you’re in a proper browser (I tested in Firefox, Safari and Chrome), you will see the eye candy like opacity, shadows, rounded corners etc.—but there’s also a bit of “responsive design” going on.

Eh?

The term “responsive design” is fancy talk for an approach to web design whereby page content adapts to the device from which it is viewed. If you’re using a decent browser, you can see simple responsive design in action right now: make your browser window pretty narrow. You will now see some changes which comprise the typical use-case for so-called “media queries”: the site will render a smaller banner at the top, overall font sizes will adjust, and the side bar currently to the right of the layout will drop down beneath the main content. In addition, some post images will scale down, as will any embedded video clips from Youtube. Nifty eh?

I still have some work to do, but it’s been fun learning about this stuff. I recommend the Alistapart article, Responsive Web Design. The crux to all this is the aforementioned and new-fangled “media query malarkey”. Media queries are directives embedded in mark-up (or within CSS itself, as is the case on my site) which tweak a site’s styles, based on a variety of attributes about the user agent. Typically they are used to serve up mobile-friendly apps, vs. full-screen browser experiences, but you can tailor your rendering according to the following attributes (I’ve linked the last two for further explanation, as it’s not immediately obvious what they do):

• width & device-width
• height & device-height
• orientation
• aspect-ratio & device-aspect-ratio
• color, monochrome & color-index (these relate to the number of bits per colour component—or not—in the viewing device)
• resolution
• scan
• grid

A media query, at its simplest, contains two components: media type, and the query itself, with an attribute and value pairing. For example:

<link rel="stylesheet" 
	type="text/css" 
	media="screen and (min-device-width: 1920px)" 
	href="ivor-biggun.css" />

This is telling the user agent that it should link to the ivor-biggun stylesheet when asked to display the current page on a particularly large screen. You can also mix attributes and values in a single directive like so (something for smaller screens):

<link rel="stylesheet" 
	type="text/css" 
	media="handheld and (max-width: 480px), screen and (max-device-width: 480px), 
	screen and (max-width: 600px)" 
	href="perfectly-formed.css" />

I’m linking to specific CSS resources from with mark-up here, but you can also use @import statements in the same way, or as I do with this very site, you can use media queries within your CSS itself, like so:

/* Mobile devices / small screens */
@media handheld and (max-width: 480px), 
	screen and (max-device-width: 480px), 
	screen and (max-width: 600px)
{
	body {font-size: 110%}
	#content {float: none}
}

Simple!

BTW, if you’re looking to target iOS devices in your media queries, the Apple Developer site has some useful information, including how to render custom application icons, how to make use of the <meta name="viewport"… tag, and so forth.

1. I’m lazy
2. I’ve only written forty-six posts this year (not including this one): less than one a week!
3. It’s been a bit of a strange year, with a lot of doom ’n’ gloom in the wider world

However, during the course of migrating this site I ended up doing some data clean-up, tagging old content and so forth, and it made me realise what a nifty thing it is to have one’s own weblog. Purely from a selfish (and self-centred) point of view, it’s fascinating to see how my opinions have changed, how my focus—technically or otherwise—has shifted, and what this on-line presence has done for me. (I realise this isn’t fitting seeing as the new decade has already started, but there it is).

So, I’ll keep it brief. Looking back at the posts for 2010, this site was mainly about Amazon Web Services, our lovely London Developer Co-op, Notes / Domino (blah blah ;-)) and music. Not a bad mix at all.

Going back further, and reviewing posts from 2002 onwards, personal highlights include:

1. The relationships one fosters via a site like this
2. The MacBook 4 Ben episode thanks to Mother vowe (I can’t tell you what a difference that made to my life, and what changes it helped bring about)
3. The visibility and learning opportunities having this site has given me

Thanks for continuing to come by. Here’s to 2011 (and more blog posts!)