{–JamieMcD–}

Yep, it’s definitely been a while since I graced my poor little blog with my presence and a nice little update.  I’ve been pretty busy with uni work recently, and even over the Christmas break I’ve not had a huge amount of time to sit down and work on the blog.  I’m really bored just now though, so the blog gets a wee update.

I was having a look through some old archives of files that I have to put together some of my old websites and get them back online as a bit of a portfolio of what I’ve done, but more as something to show how far I’ve come.  Sadly most of them are either lost forever or badly missing files and I really don’t have the time to resurrect them.  It’s a bit of a shame because I like to think I’ve built quite a few websites and for not one of them to be live at the moment is quite bad - I’d like to be able to show a few of them off to potential employers and other people like that.

I’d like to be busy making a new website or something just now, but I’m so busy with my final year project that going off on a tangent to do that would be really very bad for me!  The project is web-based though which keeps my creative juices flowing, although at the moment it isn’t inspiring me all that much - probably because of the Christmas season and wanting to be on holiday! - so it’s hard to keep working at it.  I think it’s looking pretty good though and hopefully once it’s done it will be good!

Speaking of the Christmas season, I hope everyone had a really good couple of weeks even though to me it didn’t feel much like the festive season - I couldn’t really get into the mood, probably because I was working hard right up until Christmas!

Things over at progtuts have also been pretty slow these past few months.  I had hoped to sort out a Christmas tutorial but never got round to it and it’s probably a bit late now.  I can’t really come up with ideas at the moment because I’m working on a load of OO PHP which probably goes into a bit much detail for progtuts.  Maybe I’ll make an OO version of my login tutorial to show the differences and benefits.  Hopefully if I do that the losers who don’t bother to read the tutorial before posting negative comments will actually read the sections where I say security is up to the reader and not me!

One last thing before I go.  I’m using a few icons and images in my web application at the moment and they’re all PNG formats.  I’ve been quite annoyed at the size of these and worried about how they’ll load on slower connections/computers, but tonight I found a nice little utility; PNGcrush.  I’ve used it on a few of my images and it’s cut them down to about 1/5th of the original size which I’m really pleased about!  Hopefully it can help the rest of you web devs out there who haven’t already got something to deal with the size of your images.

Anyways, I hope it won’t be too long until I return, maybe even with some useful links next time!

J

I really am a terrible blogger!

It’s only been a week but I’m already neglecting this poor blog.  I’ll try harder - promise!

So what have I been up to this week?  Not a lot to be honest!  I’ve kind of slowed down on working on my project this week - I have a lot of other commitments and projects and coursework to be doing and I don’t want to disadvantage myself on those because I’m building a fancy web application.  I started working on the code in the framework again though and I’m just taking a wee break from doing a bit of prototyping on different ways of structuring the views.  I really can’t decide whether I should be using templates because of the rendering hit it will take - the pages need to be parsed then shown, it just takes extra time and I prefer coding the variables in PHP without any silly templates.  But then, that’s just me and I have to think about maintenance once I’m gone!

I’m also having to turn my attention to a job hunt!  Time is flying by and I really need to get looking and applying for Graduate jobs!  (If you happen to be an employer looking for a Graduate next year to do web or software development - get in touch; my email address is on my profile page).  It seems that all the jobs around at the moment for Graduates next year are London-based and I don’t really want that at the moment.

Anyway, back to the grind of making helpers for the project.

J

A few weeks ago I finally got round to making a twitter account, and after the first couple of weeks not updating it because it was inconvenient to go to the twitter site all the time I have now installed the twitterfox firefox add-on.  Unfortunately I was using one of the iFox themes which twitterfox isn’t compatible with :(.  I decided that I preferred having twitter support than some safari-style theme so set about finding a new one.

What I ended up picking is the chromifox theme.  I’m currently using version 1 of it, but development has been taken over by someone else who is producing a version 2 which is currently experimental.  I can’t be bothered with bugs so I’ll just wait till it comes out properly.

All I can say is I’m glad I changed!  I really like working with the new theme and recommend it - it integrates really nicely and there aren’t any bits that seem a bit random.  The developers have done a really nice job on it!

Well, after about 2 months of ownership, jamiemcd.co.uk is now up and running.  I had been going to write a custom CMS to run on it but I’ve decided to - for this year at least - run it on wordpress.

I’m Jamie McDonald and I’m really bad at these introductions!  I’m a Computer Science student at Strathclyde University and I’m not in my final year so I’m busy getting stuck in to my final year project!  I would say I specialise more in actual Software Engineering/Software Development and I’m really keen on web design and programming in general.  I’ll be setting up a kind of online cv in a while to hopefully give you a better idea about what I can do!

I’m also a writer for ProgTuts although with uni work etc. I really don’t get all that much time to get tutorials written up!  We aim to provide good quality tutorials on all types of programming (although as is normal with a web-based tutorial site, we end up writing tutorials about web design quite alot…).  Head over there and see if there’s anything that takes your fancy - join the forum too…it’s currently a bit dead but we think it would be the best way to share our knowledge and really want it to kick off.

The aim of this blog isn’t to let you know everything I do…more to give me somewhere to share knowledge, post interesting links, tell funny stories and generally have a rant if the mood takes me!  I’ll also be adding a few more pages in the coming days/weeks to build it up to a proper site.

Oh, I’ve just set the theme to be the Elegant Grunge theme - I like it but hopefully I’ll get some time to deal with it and make my own.

Jamie