Spring cleaning
Flex 3 projects and news coming soon: I have a list of useful resources for beginners, a few sample projects of my own to show and a short progress report on my own RIA in a post for next week.
For now, just another clean up project…mostly a running list and reminder to myself, so I know which sites have been touched and which ones have not. This week it was BJ Angus.
Cleaning up Sydenstricker
Sydenstricker has multiple needs, but for now I focused on organizing files, deleting unused files and cleaning up old code. It still won’t validate, but it’s cleaner than it was before.
One of the major changes was adding the automatically updating pedigree tag to the animal pages, replacing the static pedigrees. The pedigree and EPD tags are Coldfusion includes, which generate the most recent info and builds the HTML for the page. Also, a little CSS brushed up the look and kept it from breaking the site design.
A short set of before and after snapshots:
Working with Flex 3
Predictable as ever, requests for updates to our clients’ sites are picking up as everyone gears up for the Spring Sale season. It’s comforting to see that demand hasn’t slowed, despite the media’s constant attention on lost jobs and drooping sales.
From 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., I do updates. It’s dull work, but I’m grateful nonetheless. It’s become dull because there are only 15 sites left that need migrated from GoLive to Dreamweaver and 5 of them won’t count, since I plan on rebuilding them anyway. I stick to the daily grind because of an agreement with Rich: if I want to work on projects during busy season, I have to do updates during regular hours and the fun projects during overtime hours. I have to admit, it’s a nice managerial trick to keeping me focused and motivated to do what I have to do.
So why do I look forward to after hours work? Because we just bought Flex Builder 3
and four
Moving on, I’m another step closer to creating a web-based Flash Media Encoder. Currently it’s a free app available from Adobe for Windows XP/Vista only – with no Mac support, which is why I am building my own. I have built a small receiver, so users can watch a live stream that we broadcast out. It’s for learning and testing purposes only, so there aren’t any regular live streams happening. Next I’ll be working on building the broadcaster. Just getting the broadcaster to RUN is my first goal. Beyond that, I’ll work on auto-detecting bandwidth levels, error/exception handling, and handling multiple requests for the live stream.
The main goal is to have a functional prototype ready to use during the National Junior Angus Show. So my first big project due date is Sunday, July 19. I hope I can meet the deadline!
Reinterpreting Wardens Farm
Wardens Farm is a new client with an existing web site – what we call “takeover sites.” Built in Front Page 5.0, it was my responsibility to reinterpret their old site into something a little more palatable. I was instructed to keep the color palette the same and “clean up” the design. Here you can see their original look:
complete with a snapshot of the scary code Front Page generates:
We had a clean version of the Wardens Farm logo on file, so I plugged it into PhotoShop and created a design file. Here is the reinterpreted design:
Although I still don’t consider myself a web designer, I do push my limitations and improve my design skills as often as possible. I focused on the typography, since my color palette and design element choices were pretty limited. As for the code, Dreamweaver does a much better job generating clean HTML (well, compared to Front Page anyway):
This was of the fastest and most enjoyable clean-up projects I have worked on in a while.
