ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

You might remember that there’s a lad I work with who accidentally sent a semi-nude photo of himself to his boss. Remember him? You know, the chap who dated the con-artist. Remember him now?

Well, he’s been getting some unusual phone calls at work lately. When I say “unusual”, I don’t mean “pervy”, I just mean unusual. Bear in mind I work in IT. So does he. And over the last two months, people have come through to his telephone, asking the following things:

• I’ve had a letter saying my Dad’s headstone is unsafe — what do you want me to do about it?
• Can I register for an athletics event?
• What do I need to do to repatriate a dead body from abroad?
• Is it legal to light a fire in your back garden?
• (and my personal favourite) … What? Who the bloody hell are you?

And bless him, he’s always done his bit to try and pass the messages on to the right people. But it could only be him who would get such a wide range of queries that have absolutely nothing to do with his areas of expertise — drinking and eating bacon sandwiches — and also nothing to do with the fields he’s paid to work in.

Read: The Return Of Colleague-Man »

As you’ll be likely to know, assuming this isn’t the first post you’ve ever read on my site, I’m currently in the process of redesigning my site. The design is still very much a work in progress and no bits are actually finished yet, but I’m starting to get further on down the line with the colour scheme and the images that I want to use. After that, it’s just (hopefully) a case of plugging it all together and away we go.

Obviously, it won’t be that easy, but that’s the theory.

Anyway, I had a problem. I wanted a picture of a Bunsen burner on my site (as I’m sticking with the “web chemist” theme, just changing the images). The question was where to source one from?

I scoured Google image search, various free photo sites such as Stock.XCHNG without much luck. Sure, I could find pictures of Bunsen burners, but none were quite right. What I was after was a side on view of a bunsen, showing the purple/blue flame, and with the rubber tubing visible to the side, ideally running off to the left. A simple, straight-forward iconic image of a Bunsen burner.

And could I find one anywhere? Could I heck (or words to that effect).

Read: If in doubt, ask a teacher… »

… but let’s get it right: I’m a web developer and/or designer. You could also refer to me as a systems or a database developer or designer. You could also refer to me as a IT Projects Manager. All of these things I do.

What I do not do, what I have never done, and I have no intention of ever doing is the thing that seemingly e veryone who knows to me refers to me as doing:

Jack? Oh, he works in computersEveryone I know

Now I could just about live with “in computing”, okay. In computers? I think not. It makes me sound like some sort of tiny little creature who will scuttle to the back of the disk drive in order to clean the fluff out.

On behalf of all of my colleagues across the world who work “in computers” then, I’d like to put some hypothetical questions to you all (by all means, point your relatives at this site)…

Read: Web Development: It’s hardly rocket science »

Just for anyone at work who checks my blog over the weekend, I’ll let you know now that we didn’t win the £66 million EuroMillions jackpot tonight. In fact, we won bugger-all, which is about as well as we normally do…

Read: Euromillions »

Okay, so I’ve decided to build myself a Wordpress theme. Great. The first question is how, precisely, do I go about doing this?

Step 1: Take an existing wordpress theme. Dismantle it. Work out the bits you want, put them together in the order you want. When I’ve got it approximately right, then I can start tweaking around with the more in-depth bits. Yes, I do have permission to be doing this to someone’s theme. I asked nicely (you’ll find out what it started out as in due course).

Indeed, it may end up being more accurate to say I just changed the design of an existing theme. I just don’t know. It depends how down and dirty I get with the code, doesn’t it?

Well, in order to answer that question, there are a number of other questions I need to ask myself first:

• What is the purpose of the site?
• What is actually going to be on the site?
• What sort of layout do I want?
• How am I expected to write a WordPress theme in PHP when I’ve never coded anything in PHP before?
• What sort of theme or ‘flavour’ is the new site going to have?

Read: A New Site Design »

I see it’s the England — Spain friendly tonight.

Sigh. I find it really hard to have any motivation or interest in England friendlies these days, probably because:

• Friendlies are invariably crap.
• England friendlies in particular are invariably dull, dull, dull, games
• England — now with added “Wembley” — will be reverting to being a Southern team again, rather than a national one.
• England appointed a manager who has achieved virtually nothing within football, had a style of play at his previous club that I loathed and produced boring football, appears to be doing pretty much the same with England, and on top of that he’s a manager I don’t rate particularly highly.
• On top of that, it’s a friendly and is therefore utterly, utterly meaningless.

Obviously, I’m going to watch it anyway but you can maybe see why I’m not looking forward to it that much…

Read: England, My England »

Two of the sites I have an interest in, Accessites and Revish have undergone some changes recently. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m one of the site graders for Accessites. At times, this has meant quite a significant investment of time from all of the graders, and because we do have other lives to lead — as well as the day job, many of us have children, many of us want to be able to have a social life and so on, so we decided to tweak a number of the ways we do things.

Initially, the way the gradings were based probably favoured sites which were technically very sound irrespective of the quality of the design — although obviously nice designs would score slightly higher! However, as what we were seeking to do was to provide a showcase for stunningly designed accessible sites, that wasn’t quite what we were aiming for. We wanted to emphasise that they have to have a nice design.

After some discussion we therefore decided to drop the formal grading sheets, revise our criteria, and discuss site submissions as a group before deciding at what level (if any) a site should be awarded. The theory is that each site will have less formal work, but input from more of the Accessites members.

Oh, and by the way, I’m not claiming any credit for the new design, the changes to the site infrastructure and so on — I’ve done precisely bugger-all to help with that, so this is just an opportunity for me to record my public thanks to those team members who did spend a lot of time contributing to this.

Well done, you lot. This is really just a very brief talk about what we’ve done, so if you haven’t already, why not go and read the article A New Tool, A New Look, A New Method on the all-new, improved, shifts even the most stubborn stains and kills 99% of all known germs Accessites site?

Meanwhile, the Revish team (or “Dan”, as he’s more commonly known, since he’s done something like 99% of the work on it to date) have been hard at work building the interfaces and APIs and moving to a more formal and wide ranging beta test. To be honest, apart from writing some of the wording here and there, my role in the Revish Team to date has been mostly to act as a sounding board to Dan, testing stuff for him and throwing an idea at him every now and again.

To be honest, I’m happy doing pretty much whatever I’m asked to do here: Dan’s a mate, the site is a great idea and I want to be involved in it, so I’m more than happy to help in any way I can — it’s just that sometimes I don’t really feel I’ve earned my “Team Revish” badge (although on the other hand, the Team Revish badge is one of the things I did do).

There’s still nothing much to see “live” as yet — although do check out the Revish blog to find out what’s been going on — but we’ve certainly reached the stage whereby we’re firming up (or, as I say, Dan’s firming up) what’s on the site, how it’s going to work and so on — which is part of the point of the testing that is underway at the moment.

I’m really looking forward to this, since a lot of the people I know ‘online’ have written book reviews on their sites, they seem to be interested in books and I’m hoping that this can be a great success.

So, keep your eyes open for this. It’s coming soon — probably in March.

Read: Accessites and Revish »

You know, that’s the thing I like about WordPress. Upgrading is easy. Okay, sometimes it may be time-consuming when you’re making backups and copying files, but there’s not much in the way of complexity or instructions that are difficult to follow. It’s just “make a backup”, “copy these files”, “run this”, and you’re sorted. Thanks again, Wordpress.

Read: Upgrading WordPress »

I bought some cheap shoes last weekend. I wouldn’t normally have mentioned it, as it’s not really the sort of thing you tend to brag about:

Hey everyone! Look at me! I’ve bought some cheap shoes because I’m a miserly skinflint!Bragging about cheap shoes

…but on the other hand I did mention it to a few of my colleagues and discovered that I’m not the only one who deliberately targets inexpensive footwear — for the same reasons I do — and so I thought I’d ask you lot where you stand on shoes. Or rather in shoes.

Read: Cheap Shoes »

I’ve been thinking about redesigning my site for some time. It first appeared on the net in the back end of 2005, with a nice, blocky white-and-one-other colour feel to it. Not something that by any standards that could be described as a nice site design, but then I wasn’t a site designer, I was a developer.

And then after a few months — probably around January 2006, I launched the “badly-drawn-cat” version of the website, which was styled to look like a desk, with post-it notes, and scraps of paper making up the site. This was better — it looked like it had been designed by an enthusiastic amateur web designer, but it still didn’t really have a professional feel to it.

I had quite an attachment to the badly-drawn-cat, both as a kind of a site logo, and also in terms of the overall design. It was the first real design I’d done myself. Sure, it was far from perfect, but it was also a hell of a lot better than the previous version.

Read: Word Press Themes, CSS and a request for help »