Pete as a newspaper

If you’re like me, you’re still learning. You’ve read a ton about web development, web project management, freelance business management, and a shit ton of Garfield comics.

You might know that when planning a project, that there should be what’s essentially a ‘hand-off plan’. In the absence of such a plan, both you and the client will suffer from the lack of direction, and the project will linger and torture you and everyone you love.

This was a fun one.

Our content management vendor doesn’t have an out-of-the-box solution to web site navigation. When it came time for a site navigation, we were told that a javascript-based solution was all that they would allow.

The part I played in this adventure was to build the code that would spit out a navigation that changed depending on where we were in the site. Pretty simple, eh? Well, with jQuery, it was.

You’re sitting at your desk, and you have a snazzy idea. You want to share this idea w/the guy next to you, and your excitement takes over. Too much information comes out. His eyes glaze over.

You have failed at sharing this nugget of excitement.

I’ve spent the better part of a few days going through the Django guide, following along closely, and executing their code examples as I proceeded.

Predictably, things haven’t been smooth.

This post is about tools in the web developer’s toolbox. This post is the sort of post that I wish I’d seen when I first got into web development. This post is meant to describe the tools in your toolbox, and their use within the context of the web.

The Yahoo! Weather API is just swell. We get current temp, atmosphere, et cetera for any area of the US and a forecast for tomorrow all for free. In a similar bout of awesomeness, PHP5 contains the SimpleXML class.

I don’t think I’m alone here.

I work in a corporate environment; multiple projects going on at once; they need to be done yesterday; they need to serve everyone; me and my computer are the only resources.

A CRM, a CMS; They need to combine social networking with a forum and a classifieds ad model. They like what MSNBC is doing with news, but wants to add UGC and an SMS feature. They want a glorified FTP (you know, FTP but with this and this and this and this…).

Examine a prank.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been at the head of a web site redesign project for GateHouse Media.

The site is our hub for accepting and distributing content across our media network, and so is a core element of our information systems. I’ll hereby refer to this division of GateHouse Media as the client.