it’s been a while

Well, it’s taken me a while to get to posting….exams have been interesting, two down, two to go. Been doing a LOT of work on one of my sites, and it’s all good to go. Just sorting out domain registration and hosting today and tomorrow; then spend the next few days hammering the site to make sure it doesn’t break. Then announce it to the world!! It’s been a bit of a journey, but this one has come form scratch in little under a month; which I don’t think is too bad given I conceptualised, planned and implemented it while still knocking out assignments and tests, as well as these exams. Oh, yeah, two assignments 100%, one assignment 99.5%, one assignment 90%. The 90%-er had a class average of 57% so I’m happy there, however the 99.5%-er I’m a little miffed about, but they haven’t given marking schedule back yet and we can’t ask for it at present because of “no contact” rules due to exams.

I’m looking forward to exams all being over though, as by then I’ll have the site launched and doing its thing, so I’ll have to relax in Brisbane. I’ll be typing up some tutorials here and there while I’m away, so I can post them all up rapidly when I get back. Once I’m back, the other site will get some focus, and hopefully come together pretty quickly with all I’ve taught myself on the current one. I’ve got some great JavaScript stuff pulled together for it now, so I’ll be highlighting some MooTools and other script sources (LightBox2 is also great!!). I’ve been finding some great inspirations online, and pulling some things into composite in (what I think is) some intriguing ways. Chances are I’m just reinventing the wheel, but I like it anyway.

I need to highlight this for everybody. I got it through Time on twitter, but it is serious. I know there’s a lot of people getting damaged in Tehran and Iran at present, and I don’t want to demean the lives of the rest of them, however this does bring it that bit closer to home for all of us. One of LIFE magazine‘s Iranian photojournalists has “disappeared” (link is here) while reporting.

Here’s a great vid to tide you over too (found through the guys at dailyfailblog.com):

I have not heard anyting further from Google Adsense regarding my disabled account (original blog post here), so I am just going to see what happens by Wednesday this week. Once I launch the site, I will register with one of the myriad of AdSense alternatives and get some ads pumping that way. I’m not expecting to retire off the ad revenue from this, but it would be nice to fund the hosting and domain registration so that it doesn’t cost me. I’m happy either way with costs though, because I don’t want to charge for the use of the site, even though it is a service (and I’ve endeavoured to make it a worthwhile, and exceed expectations – a lot of the recent work has been to make the GUI side of it pleasing, and not just functional), because I firmly believe the internet should be free as a principle.

I’ll talk about the site some more once it launches, because there’s a lot of credit needs to be given to various other sites for inspiration and resources (especially for the GUI side of it all). Social iconsets are a dime-a-dozen out there, however finding a decent set ahich is actually useful and is up to date in terms of content is not so easy. A lot of sets have most social network/bookmark site logos minus one or two, but they always seem to be missing one of the more important ones (I found one set that didn’t do facebook!!). I’ve been working a lot more in gimp and PhotoShop too – my skills are way down the scale in terms of what is achievable, but it’s better than nothing, and I’m expecting to be well upskilled over the few weeks after exams – so that I could get the graphics on the site being real graphics, and not just HTML/css tricks with background/opacity etc.

Anyway, back to the study now, but I’ll post a bit more consistently this week, and hopefully reasonably well in the following week while I’m overseas.

Ciao.