Week 13 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 2nd MAY

BAAAAAANK HOLIDAY!!!!!

the literal interpretation

TUESDAY 3rd MAY

Today i was formally introduced to a wireframing software called, Balsamiq, check it out, it completely rocks, you can get it for a free 7 day trial right here: BOOOM!!!

I mean look at that; on their home page they dont shy away fromt he fact that they know their software is awesome, check that h1 title:
SO FREAKING GOOD… like what a fat man thinks while eating chocolate covered pizza.

The other thing i like about this software is that they provide some pretty excellent tutorials, so that you can fine tune your wire framing… btw: second year web design BALSAMIQ >>>>>>>> visio. Seriously! Visio! what a waste of my life that was” and now to draw an effective wireframe; by making it as complex as possible to understand”

Rants aside, I spent a good while rooting through the tutorials, in case you’re not sure as to what exactly is meant by wire framing it just drawing out a skeleton of how you want a program to work, like you’d draw on paper, only this doesnt look terrible

Example: recognise this???

If you show that to a client, even if they dont know how to turn a computer on, they’ll understnad what your trying to design, cus its all there, and it is soo easy to use, it even uses the same shortcuts as photoshop (in general)

So after all my research the brief was given and i got to work, just needed about six or seven wirframe windows.

WEDNESDAY 4th MAY
Today i finsihed off, tested and refined the wireframes, when all the frames were combined and compiled i added a little copywright notice onto the bottom and shipped off to the boss to present to the client.

After that i began testing the drupal site which i had uploaded to the company server, LIVE!!! hurray, so i had a meeting with the graphic designewr and he designed a phyiscal look and feel for the sight, Im ready to apply the theme, I want to do it even! Just to complete the project, but we have to wait until the client gets back and says yay or neigh.

I could never do that, graphic design, i mean i can obviosuly tell if sometihng looks good or crap, buit i dont know how to group the itemes together, if ever i were to design sometihng, it’d be composed of individually cool items which fail violently when combined.

Jaysis! that exams is getting close. i really must study.

THURSDAY 5th MAY
Thursday! and the mood is right! with all the projects setup in India, and all the waiting for client responses, there literally wasn’t really anything to be doing in work, Bu i made the most of it, Spending the entire day working away quietly on my Awful awful Project management project, the guys pitched in their advice, which was pretty much spot on, considering the project is based around web development and these lads are all about the web development.

So i worked away quietly for the whole day, i did not take a break such was my desire to finish the project and be rid of it forever…. (i hate reports)
FRIDAY 6th MAY
Today was virtually identical to yesterday, with every project hanging in transition it was just time for me to practice any interesting web techniques and to finish my damnable report. So i worked away, again foolishly skipping break in favor of nailing this report down, this probably hindered my progress more than anything because by the end of the day i was wrecked. I finished later than usual today because the boss invited us all out for drinks after works so i finished at about 6:15 and then we all headed to an extremely hip pub called the Bernard Shaw, it was good craic…

guess ill have to wait till the weekend to go home and finish that bloody report.

Week 12 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 25th APRIL
Easter Monday? EASTER FUN DAY!!!! no work, 4 day weekend!!!!
TUESDAY 26th APRIL
Today i was working on a new project, or a re hash of an old project i should say, a client got back to us with specifications and content for a newsletter i had developed earlier in my intern ship, so now it was time to put eh newsletter to use.

We had a super team meeting to discuss what needed to be done, and i set off with my tasks, i had to add all the new content and specifications into the newsletter and remove the unnecessary stuff, It was back to grinding through tables, but i guess since I’ve spent so much time looking at html through the Haze of php, its not such a big deal any more.

WEDNESDAY 27th APRIL

Today i added all the neccessary content and i formatted it so that it didnt look entirely terrible, however difficulty aroswe in the obvious need for code or more experienced web development when i discovered that i’d need to add a read more link like this …Read More Having a read more that links to any part of any page is a piece of cake…. but i’ve absolutely no idea how to get a read more to display and hide content on the same page the way CMS websites do (wordpress, Drupal, joomla)

and now! to investigate that link i posted up there!

hmmm after much trials and tribulation it seems i may not have had to go through so complex a path…. my read mor elinks needed only to link to an external website page… thats pathetically easy!

THURSDAY 28th APRIL
So lots of work went into the newsletter, changing virtually everything but the skeloton of the page, totally refreshed my memory for html and all the rules you’re not supposed to use in polite internet society, but you know what? they work, and they work better than any external style sheet ever did, the only issue is if someone wanted to re use it and change things around that have to go through a massive amount of effort like i did.

I had to change around images add a footer, refine every link, style about a trillion elements and constantly update the content, then it was onto a software designed to launch email newsletter campaigns for refinement and testing, i added in specific links to the page that the software new how to use, and these added extra Script based functionality to the newsletter.

then the testing began…

FRIDAY 29th APRIL
Oh the testing, the testing!!!! after several hours on it yesterday after getting emails coming up all over the shop in various email clients… you know the ones! type in the most notorious email clients into google and you’ll get it! so these two particular email clients were a complete disaster, the issue persisted so we had to call in the big boys are web design experts in india had a look at the files and went to work straight away, after no time at all the newsletter returned, visibly no different from before, but when added into a web client it displayed perfectly…. the mystery of this success is lost to time,

and before anyone chastizes me for not finding out what the hell fixed the design. just look up email newsletter clients, Outlook for instance uses WORD as its html processeor… fail. Speaking of fail, screenshots of windows 8 came out, win 7 was a step forward but the interface of win8 is three steps back, taking chromiums appealing minimalist view and completely ignoring it win 8 is back with the chunkiest dorkiest windows ever OBSERVE:

nice! the window is obnoxiously huge AND reminiscent of the fail of office 2007

Anyway tangents aside, email clients are very difficult to write html for, because they aren’t working off updated html rules, it sthe equivalent of the browser wars, when IE4 and netscape had all their own html that only worked for there exact settings and for some reason in 2011, none of the Notorious email clients have seen fit to change there ways. Thank you thunderbird, for being a real email client! i was also surprised to see hotmail is pretty damn reliable… whereas outlook really really isn’t.

So we were able to ship out and monitor the newsletter campaign and then it was off to enjoy the weekend!

Week 11 Monsoon Consulting

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK 11

MONDAY 18TH APRIL

Summer is soooooooooo close!!! my only trepidation now is those contemptable exams! damn you exams! why can’t it be in a subject i care about! project management! i don’t want to be a project manager! in truth thats not it at all, i just dont want to do this bloody exam… or any exam………study is boring, and if there’s anything my leaving certificate told me… its completely unnecessary, I’m far more than capable of doing whatever task is set out….. as long as it matters too me… stupid exams! the one are of fail on the journey to summers complete awesomeness.

Today i finally was able to procure some assistance i was guided to installing modules like nice menu and mega menu for drupal. However there was an issue, these modules only affect areas of the page called blocks. Blocks are predefined spaces that can be moved around, turned off and edited through drupal itself. However, they are predefined, so if one doesn’t exist where you would like one to exist, then you have to create a region to house that block, this sounded complex but following this tutorial was quite simple. afterwards i move on and installed the mods an dfound th correct location to install my new menu block. it took a while to get it up and running but eventually irt was all in place i copied styles which i had created previously and added them to the new block menu, however, the menu was all over the shop… Perhpas tomorrow i’d be able to sort it out

TUESDAY 19TH APRIL
So first we shifted some furniture round the office and then i was straight back into styling this mother! i cracked out the CSS and through rigourous trial and error got something resembling something i wouldnt be entirely embarassed of, it looks about 80% like the original template, i’ve had to edit styles for every single element of the page to get it there, but some of the finer details are difficult to understand.

Its actually quite fun now that im able to do it, skill unlocked! drupal theming! its entirely doable, just takes a while to get a grip on. over summer im going to learn me some code.

WEDNESDAY 20TH APRIL
Today i was testing cross browser compatibility for the project…Internet explorer 8!!!!!
I confess, that i foolishly assumed that building a website in drupal, and thus in php would alleviate any of the usual html formatting confusion. This was not the case, there were a few slight differences between browsers, nothing really bad, but internet explorer had to be a giant stink as usual.

Xp doesn’t run IE 9 which i assume would’ve displayed the website fine like all the other browsers,
but considering about 90% of the world is on Internet explorer 8 and below, i’ll have to give this proper attention. stupid browser… if windows wasn’t so stupid and allowed xp users to use internet explorer 9 they could simply pull support from IE 8 and put IE 9 in one of the automatic updates, i don’t understand why 9 doesn’t work on XP, Firefox 4 and Chrome’s latest work fine.

anyways, I ran a few tests on the compatibility, the real issue here is that its much harder to define which elements your html affects, its like a lot of the html is pre generated by the code, so I don’t really know how to reference it. the issue this leads ot is me having to use the pre determined reference names, and inadvertently styling more than the element i wanted to style.

damn this is confusing
THURSDAY 21TH APRIL
Today i spent most of my time trying to get the Drupal site i was developing up to standard, i tried a few things to make it more compatible with IE8, including completely deleting the H1 header, because IE8 kept displaying it incorrectly, I also completely changed which element i had chosen to style my links with, because it was having the horrible side affect of applying the same style to EVERYTHING, so that took a while but i got it up and running, and not to shabby looking either.

I uploaded the files to our live server, and kept updating it throughout the day, I’m still waiting for one of the other members of the team to provide some content for a complex code library thinger.

FRIDAY 22TH APRIL
Good friday? Great friday! no work!!! yeah1!!!!

Week 10 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 11th 2011
So it was straight back into drupal cus there was lots to do, i mean at the start of today the site looked like a wreck, its been a few hours and i’ve gotten it up to mediocre, that’s a win. The site should be up and running in no time… probably.
There’s definitely still a lot of work that needs doing but i did make a lot of progress today, i managed to:

• Populate the content
• added the css to the links
• addedstyles to blocks
• removed old logo and replaced it with one i made in photohop
• removed images that were cluttering the page
• and i made the sites name transparent cus it was causing all sorts of foulery… thats what i’d call a work around certainly not a fix

So i made a good bit of progress on it today, but more importantly i got a greater understanding for it.

TUESDAY 12th 2011

Hmm was stuck with a ton of issues today,
had top re install drupal again on accoint of foolish errors, i had moderate success editing th eHtml within the php but i feel like a blind man stumblin round in the dark, even if i find th elight switch i won’t see the difference, ther’e probably been numerous occassion where i’ve done the right thing, but had NO visual indication of it. Blasted code, its a total mystery to me, hmtl is so much more understandable!

WEDNESDAY 13th 2011
So today was all about creating this visual look in one of the drupal blocks, it involved three images forming together into one seamless image, but it wasn’t all that simple,l i had to search through divs within divs within wrappers to identify what i was looking for, the only way o could find what i was looking for was using chrome’s excellent inspect element property, the issue i then had was that i knew which the html was controlling the elemnts i was looking at, but i couldn’t find where that html was being referenced in the php, mainly because html looks crazy when you throw html into it. But eventually i found what i was looking for and i got it up and running…. i could’ve done the same thing using pure html in under an hour, Bah! i suck at this.

THURSDAY 14th 2011
So i was on a high after successfully creating those images yesterday, but disaster struck, drop down disaster, my understanding of drop down menus is this

1. write out html
2. find jquery plugin
3. insert or make refernce to jquery plugin
4. sit back
5. Drink lemonade, the end

but the reality when drupal and php coding is involved is different, its hard to know whats referencing what and from where, see how confusing that sentence is, well thats exactly how confused i am. I need some kind of visual indicator that the references im using are in the right place, cus right now im referencing referenced items which may not even have the correct reference themselves, Jaysis!!!
So i tried lookin up myself how to implement this stuff.. all greek! and then whenever i felt i was on to something i seemed to end up with the same resulkt, no hint of a drop down menu…. confusing!!!! Hopefully someone will be free to assisrt me tomorrow with it.

FRIDAY 15th 2011
FRIIIIDAY!!!! escape to victory… yeuck that film was terrible. why would sylvestore stallone be in goals? couldnt we jsut give him a machine gun and watch him kill all the nazis’ instead…

Anyways today was a complete nightmare, everyone wqas super busy so couldn’t get any assistance with this drop down menu issue, i went to drupal to look up a few tutorials but it was no use, it was all greek to me, so i went back to the grind and tried to figure out what the hell was going on, it took hours, but eventually i realised that i’d achieved notihn and that the day was over, Yaaargh. that wasn’t part of our Deal drop down…. that wasn’t paaaaart! Hopefully monday will prove more fruitful and less frustrating… learning! its fantastic

Week 9 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 4th 2011

Damn you monday, i am tired!
Today my task was to download, install and configure two softwares, namely Drupal and Team viewer.
Teamviewer is a remote desktop and virtual private network tool
, In case you don’t what a remote desktop is, it lets you activate one computers controls from another computer, so i can view whatever’s on my laptop in work, while sitting at my desktop at home.
Virtual private network is a way of “simulating” a network on line, almost like creating the illusion that all the computers are physically connected to each other through cables or a local area network or l.a.n.
Hamachi is a program i’ve used to do this before, makes it easy to play Multi-player games without much hassle.

So i spent hours installing everything and making sure it was all configured correctly, Drupal didn’t pose any initial problems but Xammp did, with its crazy ways, i had to troubleshoot for a while before i could even install Drupal properly, I still don’t know what the big differences between drupal 7 and 6 are, But then again im not exactly an avid user.

TUESDAY 4th 2011

Today my task was to cut up webslices using photoshop and piece them topgether into a working website, slicesa re aweosme. I was designing the content for an email newsletter so it didnt matter whether the text was text or just part of the imagery, cutting the images up and putting them together was no big thing. editing th css so that it worked across four major email clients was! It took the best part of two and a half hours to make any actual progress.

I had these annoying clipping issues with my images where they were either overlapping each other or they were leaving great big gaps in between waht were suppossed to be seamless images, I discovered that i had to reomve any uneccessary white space in between my actual html code and i had to set a style rule for the img tags : img{display:block;} thank you random forum quesiton answerer. It took a little longer than expected but all the dtails were ironed out in the end. Today is meeting day, should be interesting. Havent seen anyone form college since this thing started!

WEDNESDAY 4th 2011
ah the tiredest day ever, i literally felt my brain melting i need to stop stayin up so late, and watching awful awful films, like Caligula withi; malcolm macDowell and Peter O toole, that film would’ve made the makers of the passions of Saint Tibulus Blush. only shocking. Anyways on wednesday iwas back on QA, i had a large QA to do and it took a million years, but it was mainly down to my inability to work quickly. I completed the QA then tried getting Xammp to work.. it worked before, why it has stopped now i’ll never know, i spent the remainder of the day trying to figure out what the hell apaches’ problem was, its I hope its nothin to do with changing ports again, because that only seemed to half work last time.

THURSDAY 4th 2011
Today was busy from the start, had to rush in to work cus my alarm failed, once in work i was given my first task: to gather images for one of our website sand purchase them, and send them on. That was handy, Still havne;t had coffee… sleep attacking brain. My next task was to use the program Teamviewer to allow another member of the company top access and control my laptop.. from India!

It was just to ensure my drupal installation was working and up to date, Led me to discover that Skype sometime uses Port 80, the same Port as apache, so it has to have that option turned off or changed. So we went though all the settings in Drupal and in PhpMYAdmin, and then i downloaded several recommended modules, Ctools, Views, and webform, because they’re essential for building Web Content.

The reason we were setting it all up in the first place was to begin the redesign of an entire website in Drupal, This is the largest project i’ve had to work on so far, lets hope it al;l goes smoothly, My next step was to read the brief and get to work.

FRIDAY 4th 2011
So today i was getting to grips with drupal by myself, it is Tough to recall, even the most basic things so its slow going, but sure, its goin at least. It took me a while to sort through all the jargon involved with some fairly simple module installations, I had to download a set theme for the site and then i realized that the theme was only compatible with older versions of drupal, so i had to install drupal 6.somthing or other and i had to re configure everytihng again.. then i was foolish and took a risk with a certian edit… and destroyed my whole website, so i had to install drupal again create a new database and all tha tjazz, so i finished installing drupal 6 and the modulkes and the theme and then i had a look…. and it looked nothing like it was suppossed to it was like the guy gave us everything we needed to build the theme, but no the theme itself. kind’ve like when a sculptor gives you a giant chunk a marble, and expects you to carve it out yourself:)

heh, that may be a exaggeration, but its what if feels like, I’m basically piecing this theme together piece by piece, what i imagined was going to happen was i would install the theme and then tweak it a bit… that is not the case.

Week 8 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 28th MARCH
Hurray, my return key is workin in Hmtl view again, thank you for heeding
my minor criticsim WordPress you are a true.. thing.

So MONDAAAAAAAAAAAY! would be way more awesome if it was lou Gramm singing it
(Look him up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Gramm)

Began like any other day, and also progressed and will more than likely end like any other day. I set to work on Completing
the table i was developing, i’d sent it off and received it agian witha few iterations, So i spent most of the day working on that, After ward i began compiling a short manual of all the things i’ve picked up since working here, and its going to be large!

I’ve also decided im going to start writing blog stuff more regularly, its refresshin being able to yell all your opinions all over the internet, Of course its roughly the equivalent of standing in a room shouting your opinions at yourself, buthen again, who doesn’t like their own opinions, @i have to say, i agree with everytihng i ahve to say, and i can’t really say that about anyone else. …ah Schizophrenia… must’ve been that chicken roll i ate, too many peppers. Apparently ther is in fact two or three large projects coming up, and i may be put to task on all of them, ha! i will destory these projects… by fulfilling all their reuirements too an adequate degree! Prepare to be completed!

and now foreigner:

TUESDAY 29th MARCH
Tuesday saw the return of the dread QA sheet. I had to go through a list of supposedly fixed bugs and validate them. Many were not fixed! randomly certain areas that were unrelated to each other were fully up to date. After i burned throught the first list of corrections, i opened a second Much larger list and began on that too, When i had finished the two lists i complied what was needed to be done into one giant Excell sheet…

I have tiredness…

WEDNESDAY 30th MARCH
Almost slept in today, Blasted alarm phone! Thankfully, today my task was more design oriented than yesterdays, I had to take a footer for a website were developing, and re design so that it was streamlined and 53xY. I began by taking a screenshot of the site and bringing it in to photoshop to mess around with, first i decided on the dimensions, i had already been told which colour scheme to follow, and i had a rough idea of what design type to use, after one or two iteration i settled on a 3 tab design, which was wide and short(height) After i finished my mockup i handed it up to move onto the next step.. codint more micro managing than i had originally perceived, i was shown quicker ways of doing things tho.

And i realised that for a float element to work as you ‘d expect the element above it has top have a float value too.
I got the rough Code layout done by the end of the day.

THURSDAY 31st MARCH
I spent all of today working on the coding, I’ve been haviong the same crazy formatting issues for a million years. I just dont’t see whhere i’m going wrong, I had the design nailed in iE8 but i should’ve known in mfirefox and chrome it was all over the shop. I kept having this recurring issue woth padding, padding that shouldn’t exist, it was pushing elements over, and i couldn’t find out what was conrtrolling the padding. I tried everytihng, i tried starting from scratch and writing it diofferent ways, i even tried to put it in a table, but kept getting the same mysetery padding issue, hopefully my supervisor will be able to shed some light on things tomorrrow

FRIDAY 1st APRIL

April fools! i was caught out twice alredy! blasted prank monkeys
Good god im tired, its a good thing its friday because otherwise i think i might not make it… ah delicious weekend, its gonna be great, going home, sitting down, doing nothin. Victory.

Today my task was to correct the awful formatting issue that plagued me all day yesterday, my supervisor gave ema big hand in solving the issue, so i just had to focus on editing the nitty gritty of the page, it took along time to get everything perfcet, i went through another five iterations before the day was through. But at least thats over, no i just haev to hhope the company doesn’t find any problems with it.

Week 7 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 21st MARCH
Today my task was to map out the actual image map that the company are going to use in their website, its a snap with adobe image ready, which comes with adobe 7 which i got free and legally! Boom! So image mapping with image ready is somply a case of using the polygon tool to map out the coordinates that you want your image map to follow, and then you can easily export the map through image ready’s menu. so i started on the image map it was a map of dubin and a map of ireland and I pure powered through it!

And then i sent it off,
completely unaware that now Both Office Outlook and Mozilla thunderbird were no longer functioning for wahtever reason, i dont understand anything about network or protoocls really so when i ot error messages it was like trying to translate swahili, i ended up just using old reliable hotmail to send the files… hotmail never fails!..except when it does that weird display error where the top of the page is just whitespace and eveerytihng in the body is compressed and weird.. but not today! and therofore a small victory on my part.

It was time to get cracking on the web design for their site again.
TUESDAY 22nd MARCH
Its my second day of hammering away at this website design, and its a constant iterative cycle, Its interesting though, learning lots about the quirks of web browsers, Today i had to deisgn the second page of the site, whihc nvolved a lot more details, i also had to add a few new images to the image map template i created, Mixing code into your html totally rocks, if you know waht it does it can make things so easy for you, like when we used Jquery in our html web projects, to create a rudiementry but fully functioning multimedia website.

So i had to use a combination of Aptana web studio Adobe Image ready, photoshop and Firefox: king of browsers for Web developing, Although chrome is very good…. who knows IE9 may also be good when its community develops, i’ve only heard good things about it so far… then again i only ever hear good things about apple too… fail.

So i was working away using The excellent Firebug for Firefox to edit the actual html in the browser and using the excellent extension : Lightshot to capture the results with its screen capture ability. I then used these captured screens as templates and copied their design into photoshop.

Then i arranged all the elements in proper order and sent it off for its first itteration it came back with tons of stuff for me to fix, so i corrected any issues and sent it off again, It came back with much less issues. but it still had a few so
i ironed them out and sent if off along with the revised map i had been working on.

Lets hope its all good.

WEDNESDAY 23rd MARCH

Firefox 4 came out today, Its fast and shiny, bu8t also isnt currently compatibale with some really essential add ons, For example Firebug and measure it, crucial to a web developer, AND even though i specifically installed it in a seperate folder, it still overwrote my firefox 3.6, i wanted to use both damn you! So a bit of a shaky start there for the new king of Browsers… we shall see, For the moment im still standing with Chrome.

My task to day was to fully finish the web page template i’d been working on for the past few days, and send it off to the client… who’ll probably have lots of other improvements or tweaks that they want to implement. Hmm perhaps if i was a better web designer i would not have so much back and forth, Oh well. So i altered tonnes of details with the deo template i emailed yesterday, stuff like positioning, Link heading, font format, Content allignment and many more, Im on about the 5 or 6 rendition of my final version. lets hope the client also belives it to be a final version.

THURSDAY 24th MARCH
Today i got word from the client themselves regarding the mockup, they had a few subtle alterations to suggest and i spent the remainder of the day carrying out any of the changes they suggessted so i was on version 8 of my original document before it got the green light, Finally ! success! yesterday one of my projects went live! huzzah, i contributed to the world!

I should also mention that at the start of the day i spent the first while proof reading a 45 page manual…which is incredibly boring! but i got it done! and if i was getting paid for this job, then i would’ve earned that fictional income!
FRIDAY 25th MARCH

Today my task was to take the mockup i’ve been working on and put it into html code, havent done any code in a while so flew into it! i was designing tables within tables and implementing all the completely unaccepted methods of web design muhuhahaha.  The thing is, although those same techniques are forwned upon, they’re easy to implement and they illicit powerful contorl over the html. So far i have the rough template for my mockup completely down, ill send it off for  itteration in a minute, open the gates of hell! Im quite happy with the mockup at the moment , im sure that more because im surprised i got this much of it done at all, as opposed to it being amazing

yo wordpress! what gives my return key doesnt work in hmtl post mode! i shake fist!

Week 6 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 14th March

Today, my task was to Evaluate a holiday home website, paying particular attention to spelling and grammar errors and to Complete the image map i started on friday. The website had a handful of spelling mistakes but nothing to major, Now that i’d discovered the mystery of image mapping it had become a routine and it was really boring finishing the rest of it, but the results are pretty cool, and i definitely learned something useful and new…. just need to think of somewhere i can actually apply this knowledge in my own web projects….

Image mapping software Totally blows tho, Image ready with adobe is okay, but i wonder if there’s anything more modern and aweosome for mapping out images cus as it stands right now it’s a pain!

TUESDAY 15th March
Hurray almost paddy’s day!
Today my task was to add some changes and apply a few fixes to Monsoon’s company site, It was cool, its a drupal site so it was very reminiscent of the Web design project i did last semester… ah last semester seems so long ago now, …sniff. So i explored some more of the features and applied all the necessary changes, After that my task was to review another website which is due to go live, It was a website based around medical products and the likes. I complied anything i found into an excell form and emailed it off for analysis.

WEDNESDAY 16th March

Hurray Paddy’s day 2moro!
time to go whack some snakes,
Today my task was to re design the layout of a clients webpage, Re order the elements of the pages and insert new content into them. I have til friday to get some results, I can’t stress how handy the web developer extension is for things like this, Its the best extension for any browser. I started ,my project by using a screenshot of the webpage to plan out the look and feel of the content I was adding to it. I had to change the headings, re shape the pages and of course add another image map, luckily i wont have to do the images map again til friday.
good aul paddy’s day will give me time to recover in between.

I also had to go over two more websites to ensure they were up to scratch

THURSDAY 17th March

Paddy’s Day no work for me muhahahahaha

FRIDAY 18th March
awww paddy’s day has ended, Work must once again be commenced.
Today my task was to work on a basic template design for a new websites image map, and i had to re design the layout of the websites primary pages too. I started with the page re deisgn because i assumed that would take longest, i took all the details and changes form the brief and implememnted them into the new deisgn, then i sent it for itteration but it seems i had missed some deataisl so i went back to work to iron out any other imperfections. It wa getting late in the day before i was finished so i decided to give the Image map template a whack, I got it finished and sent it off along with the design work i had completed so far.. the day pure flew in! WEEKEND!!!!!!!

Week 5 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 07th MAR 2011

Today my task was to test a specific function of a website and make sure it worked perfectly, and that it was clear to understand and that any accompanying messages were well worded and concise. Afterwards, i was given another website to test, and i had to test both the frontend for users and the backend for admin, i had six major features to examine thoroughly:

1. the order and structure of an image banner on several differnet pages
2. The ability to add metatags to a page through a user interface
3. whether or not external links opened in a new window or not.
4. The updated structure of the urls, the layout of all the forms
5. whether or not backgorund images can be uploaded even if they’ve spaces in their titles.
6. whether or not some relative url’s were working correctly.

Much to my shock everything above was totally complete, and was completely error free: rendering all my work completely pointless!

TUESDAY 08th MAR 2011
Today i was doing another quality assessment on a revised version of a site i had tested previously, although this time i had full administrator access and the site was live, which meant i could test the frontend and the backend of the site. There wasn’t much wrong with the site itself, just a few bits and pieces that needed tweaking, I also took the manual for the site and re wrote it so that it was more concise.

lastly i focused my efforts and printing a screenshot for the webpage/emauil newsletter i was building, I was trying to find a free way to convert it to pdf, but everytime i exported it directly into pdf from the web browser the format would get jumbled up, so i went for screenshot instead and converted that into a pdf with photoshoop. I used an awesome plugin/add on for IE8 to capture the screen, it captures the entire web page not just what you can see on screen.

WEDNESDAY 09th MAR 2011
man i cant wait til the weekend, i am so not built for mornings, Im the perfect candidate for winning the lotto, which is why i foolishly bought a ticket, I don’t consider it a four euro investment in my future i consider it me losing four euro, god damnit; I want that 8 million, just so i can NOT have to wake up early in the morning for any job, Its just not natural! I can’t wait til they synthesize sleep into a refreshing beverage supplement, then i’ll be able to stay up forever, thus completely avoiding the fiasco of having to wake up early.

anyways today i reviewed the specific features of another website, namely its log in functionality, i had to test bothe the frontend and the backend, I created an account on the site which i then had to verify, i did this by logging into the site as an admin and verifying my user account, It all worked as intended, Again i took a look at the sites manual and chopped and changed a few things, i added in some missing instructions and screenshots

Lastly i was introduced to the concepts of image mapping and image sprites which i’ll explore in detail 2moro, as it realtes to my latest task.

THURSDAY 10th MAR 2011

Well after much trials and tribulation i learned some valuable things about image mapping in conjunction with images sprites… they aren’t compatible! you can use one, or the other!
Image sprites are when you have a use a single background image for multiple things. For example your navbar. in your navbar you may which to have one background image for your primary links default state, an image for its Hover state and for its active and visited states.

With image sprites you simply use one image with all the different images you want combined in it, You just edit the css so that only the part of the image you want visible is visible at the right time.
The visual result of this is completely unnoticeable, but the benefit of the effect is your site only needs to load one image instead of many, this saves on your pages load time.

So.. on to image mapping, image mapping is when you use the map tag in html to plot a course or image map around the exact dimensions of the image you wish to affect, the best example i can think of is the project i was given to work on : a map. Obviously countries have irregular and weird shapes, so if you want to turn every county on a map into a style link you need to be able to plot exact co ordinates for the area your link needs to affect.

So how do you get these two commands to work in unison? you can’t and it took me all of today to figure that out. Image maps affect foreground images while sp;rite maps affect background images.

FRIDAY 11th MAR 2011

so i decided to make due with having to pick one or the other when it cam to image maps and image sprites, with image sprites i was able to achieve moderate success, but the problem was i wasn’t able to create links around irregular shapes, i was restricted to using a rectangular shape, so it was far from perfect.

I decided to give image maps another go, and after taking millions of years, and trying loads of workarounds, i tried some code on it, and it totally worked, I used the command “Onmousedown” and i was able to change the state of the image when a user hovered, now that i had the method tho the real horror had begun, i had to image map the entire map and add my own overlay images from photoshop, it works really well, I’ll get me some code knowledge in future…. possibly.
I got through about half the map before it was time to head home. WEEKEND!!!! YAY!!!!

Week 4 Monsoon Consulting

MONDAY 28th FEB 2011

Well, that was an interesting weekend, tried making some pancakes almost burned the house down, victory, good thing it was only a practice run for pancake Tuesday. I brought my work laptop home and me and a friend tried to network using it, and another identical laptop.. there was only one issue, only one charger… and a battery life of three minutes without charging! So we decided the only thing to do was some DIY electrician work, make our own charger!

We took two unused charger’s cut them up and tape their connections together, Boom! home made frankencharger. And to our credit it worked solidly for about forty minutes until the laptop had a power surge and shut its self down. my work laptop that is, the on I use for work.. dead.

The only thing I could do was another frankenstein job, I took all the functioning parts from my work laptop and stuck them in the identical laptop, which is now my new work laptop! crisis averted!

R.I.P.
~Work laptop one~
2006 – 26th Febuary 2011

Anyway! my task today was to add any final adjustments to the newsletter and to gather some suitable imagery for a new project on http://www.istockphoto.com/ I also decided it was time to see what the new drupal was like, as my company primarily build websites in drupal, bouncing between the three tasks throughout the day was actually fun and the day flew by, it did take me 4000 years to get Xampp and drupal to stop fighting but i got there in the end, the new drupal is… sparse!
I have yet to see what the awesome new features are!

TUESDAY 01st MAR 2011

Today i received feedback on the newsletter and my task was to work on the suggestions made by my peers, I created a header for the Site using photoshop and i found an appropriate font using Identifont, which is a pretty handy little tool, then i downloaded Opera , sure what the hell i’ve got all the other major browsers might as well test in opera too, I dont seem to get to many problems except with Crazy old IE, it’s ridiculous, the Newsletter looked virtually identical in every other browser,

But IE8 just has to be different, Elements were slightly displaced or smaller through my IE8 browser, It wouldnt be so bad except 90% of the world is on IE8, If it was a product in any other field it’s relative shoddiness would land it at the bottom of the loser barrel, But this here, is the internet and if there’s one thing the internet does its; “do everything as backwards and as stupid as possible” sure IE is fine for the basic user, but it only just fulfils the needs of most internet users. What these other loser browsers need is some advertising, I mean windows Computers COME with ie up and running, the standard user isnt going to think of changing.

Firefox should launch a smear campaign against IE, America style.

bwahahahahaa, as it turns out ie was the only browser Obeying the rules in this instance! i mixed up padding with margin,
fuh fuh fuh Fail! now i have to move onto testing the Newsletter in each Email client which is apparently Totally different! Noooo!

WEDNESDAY 2nd MAR 2011

So today my task was cleaning up any incorrect syntax on the newsletter and testing the final product using Campaign Monitor. Campaign monitor is a software that among other things allows you to create email ad/newsletter campaigns and to manage them rather effectively.

I uploaded my newsletter template to Campaign monitor and i began testing it out on the different email clients, Campaign monitor has a resource that allows you to test your leatter and a million different email clients and browsers at once…. but it costs $5! Five dollars! what am i , rich? so instead i went through each email client i had individually making notes of any changes, Mozilla thunderbird definitely kicked the crap out of every other client for Obeying the rules, It displayed perfectly in thunderbird… and had varying degrees of imperfection in the other browsers.

I only have a few e ails so i signed up for a couple more, in the end i tested Gmail, Outlook, Aol, yahoo, Ovi, hotmail and thunderbird. And then my boss was like, Ireland are beating England in Cricket, so we need to watch this, so for the last twenty minutes of my day i watched Ireland defeat England comfortably in a sport i had no understanding of whatsoever. AND STILL it was more exciting then watching the mind numbing shitness of the irish football team playing.

THURSDAY 3rd MAR 2011

I spent the first part of Thursday trying to resolve some of the issues affecting my perfect newsletters ability to display correctly in Email clients. It was entirely redundant, Its as if email clients have their own code,
and are determined to wrong foot you no matter what you do.

Gladly there was a reprieve my supervisor gave me a new task to work on, and this one involved photoshop,
victory. My new task was to open a companies PDF manuals and Harvest its images for use on their website, I had to take all of these images and create a large and thumbnail size photo for them…
Sadly photoshop 7 doesn’t have the spectacularly awesome scripts function, specifically the function that allows you to
export every layer of your photoshop file as an image all at once.

the lack of this facility meant i had to export each image one at a time…. it took time!

FRIDAY 4th MAR 2011

I finished the large images exporting yesterday and realized that if i had to do the same thing
with all the smaller images I was going to kill myself. There was only one solution, the solution to all lifes problems,
the internet! I had a thorough search and saw that scripts hadn’t been added to photoshop til CS1 came out, but i know nerds and if there’s one thing nerds love to do its design NEW functions for their beloved OLD technologies.

After many dead ends i found the script i was looking for, some guy wrote it out himself, nerd victory. WHICH meant that i could export all the resized smaller photos at once, POW!!! perfect pixellized png’s.

Jaysis i have a gig today, which i should really have learned those lyrics and songs for….
oh well