At Home. Laptop purchased

Finally, i’m at home and with laptop purchased. Compaq Presario F715EO.

The same day i returned from Minsk and started installing the software i need for work on laptop - my old desktop pc died. SATA controllers, memory controller and my LCD monitor refused to continue working, so I assume laptop was purchased just in time. Right now finishing recovering my files from old HDDs and waiting for work.

Next purchase planned will be WiFi router or access point.

To be or not to be (valid)?

W3C standards. Should we consider them them to be a useful things when bulding HTML/XHTML code for website layouts? Personally, i don’t see any reason to make the code valid, since there are everyday issues we face every day when slicing layouts that nullify all what web standards stand for.

Somebody may say that keeping code valid will increase the quality of search engine indexing. Bah, who said this to you. Just keep code semantically clean and forget of validation. Search engines naturally spit on standards, when parsing the text from webpages and leaving your standards compliant tags behind.

Another thing that prevents everybody writing clean and standard compliant code is Internet Explorer. Versions 6 and 7. And while these versions are considered to be most popular and thereby - should be considered as visitors browser. Only for these 2 browsers webdesigners have to waste their time and twist their mind coding hacks and using non-W3C code to just make web layouts display OK in these browsers. Opera, Firefox and Safari will most likely have no problems displaying the layout with same accuracy and following the standards.

Another question is CSS validation. What for? Who needs it valid, when it doesn’t affect SE indexing? Especially keeping in mind IE browsers, which ones even with IE8 didn’t bother to fully support CSS3 like Opera browser starting from version 9.50.

My opinion - write your code and make sure it works, web standards are just for those freelancers who want to bill their client for more money…. making senseless work.

Coworking, colearning and codrinking

Yesterday I left Smorgon for 1 week (or more) to Misnk, where my friend and guru of Java and OOP developement lives to help me with the idea of my future startup, give me some lessons of Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails, and of course I am going to drink the beer in with him and his wife.

Didn’t have that much work last week because of resolving some issues related to my account on one of the freelance sites I work at. But right now i have plenty of time to work. By the way, writing this post not from my old PC, but from laptop my friend gave me. Somewhat unusual for me, but i like it. It’s like training before purchasing own one. I’m considering of buying budget level notebook instead of Dell Vostro 1500, since my income grows not that fast, and my desktop PC at home can “die” very quickly. IDE and SATA controllers are almost dead, power supply seems to be at same condition, memory stopped detecting Double Channel mode. Don’t want to meet the situation when my PC dies right in middle of work process, with lost of data, and without ability to quickly replace it.

Right now drinking mineral water and eating medicals because of insane pain… head hurts… Maybe because i’ve changed my usual scedule, going to bed at like 2am, and waking up at 8am. Instead of this i managed to get to bed only at 5am today, and wake up at 9am.

WordPress Curse

Last 2 days I’m only working either on administration, either on html conversion tasks. However, yesterday’s task added 7 hours of billed time to my oDesk account for making conversion of site layout to WordPress blog theme – liked the result and competent service buyer I was working for, actually a great pleasure to work for somebody who knows who he really wants.

Today morning had 2 hours of minor WordPress tasks and actually started thinking I’m doomed with WordPress curse. Just take a look on my latest projects on Scriptlance. See how many WordPress there?

Next project scheduled for today was to make one more Wordpress conversion and install WordPress on buyer’s site. Everything was clear… except hosting space was on IIS/Aspx/MSSQL. Definitely not for WordPress. So had to stop with this task and now waiting for buyer’s answer regarding my concerns if we should continue this project.

To be honest, I think WordPress is popular enough to have an upgrade featuring at least support of additional database types (like MSSQL, SQLite, Oracle). I think it’s possible (and from what I know – it was planned for old and not released 1.6 version long ago, but not released for some reason). How many whinners about this issue is required for WordPress.org to release a multi-database supporting version?

Dreamweaver and Frontpage – myth of being professional tools

Answering next portion of questions at “Yahoo! Answers” noticed one of answerers posted a reply of following text: “Use Adobe Dreamweaver to build your website. Its a profession web design app and its really good”. That made me remember some people were also answering other questions, recommending Microsoft Frontpage as web design app too. Then I found a lot of Indian webdesigners (yeah, they are too) are taking the “Frontpage” test at oDesk and also use this in their profile titles to say they’ve mastered this software… while staying below quality level of any webdesigner/webmaster who writes HTML manually.

Hail to the myths:

1. Adobe Dreamweaver is professional software, like Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Illustrator, or Adobe Flash. It is not. Dreamweaver and Flash (and some minor titles) were previously a software products made by Macromedia, before this company was acquired by Adobe. So it can not be compared with Photoshop or Illustrator just because it’s not native Adobe product.
2. Adobe Dreamweaver/Microsoft Frontpage speeds up web development. I agree with this. But it also lowers the quality level of it, because ease of use and WYSIWYG editor are making webmasters/webdesigners forget about such important things as cross browser compatibility, clean html and, sometimes, web standards, putting strange and unnecessary javascript snippets or metatags. People are just drag’and’dropping page elements forgetting about everything else. It’s not serious.
3. Microsoft Frontpage offers some features like Marquee, Web Counter, form processing routine. Yes, but they are done with technologies too outdated for today. Now the same result can be achieved with modern approach. Flash, Ajax, backend programming e.t.c
4. Service buyers at freelance websites put these tools as requirement for their projects. Of course, they will. If they would know these tools will not provide the best result they are looking for – they would do the design job themselves. But they are hiring us, so they don’t know, thereby their requirements for using Frontpage or Dreamweaver in design are just because of their incompetence in question of webdesign.
5. They are affordable. They never will be even close to be called “affordable”. Frontpage comes with Microsoft Office (you all know crazy prices of Microsoft products) and Dreamweaver costs $399 which is too expensive. Purchasing software which won’t be that famous will cost you less. If it won’t have a WYSIWYG (look at myth 2) – even better. Using Webuilder 2008 (Personal License) of just $49.85 and it has everything that real webdesigner needs.

So, are you still sure that Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage are best friends for professional webdesigner? I hope you are not.

P.S. Have taken Frontpage test at oDesk just for seducing service buyers mentioned in myth 4, will do the same for Dreamweaver shortly. You know – some peoples never change, so let them see I know these tools, but will code HTML manually anyway.

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