The Cult of Userism…

Mon Mar 21

I was a little shocked to read this article from Mr Zeldman regarding how web designers and developers go about building a system. He says that the question “what do users want?” isn’t asked enough. While I would agree with that, to a certain extent, I don’t believe it to be typical at all. After all, who are we building these systems for? The people that pay the bills, of course, but also the end users.

I couldn’t possibly dream of writing a system without putting myself in the driving seat, as it were. Designing for designings sake is nothing more than graphical masturbation, and developing for developings sake is … well, it’s just sad. Mind you, I shouldn’t be too surprised about Zeldman saying what he said in that article - he is known for having a cynical attitude towards design in general.

In other news… I had an interesting conversation with someone called Dave (I think) who I bumped into at my local bookshop. We (la inamorata and I) had just finished our very large and very fattening coffees, and I decided to look for a book about advanced DOM scripting. Dave was sat on the floor in front of the shelf I need to look at, and we got chatting. It turned out that he is a graphic designer with a particular passion for typography, who is starting to get into web design. Like a good web standards evangelist I encouraged him to learn about CSS, and gave him my card with a few useful web addresses that would help him. Hopefully he’ll be in touch, as I’m very interested in getting to know more designers/developers in the local area. Perhaps there’s a nearby group which I could join?

Anyway, because that’s yet another time I’ve passed on the same links to yet another person just getting into web design, I thought I’d put all these links into a useful reference page. So when my new website goes live - which shouldn’t be too long now - I’ll add a link here.

I think this may have worked……

Wed Mar 16

Enter text here… darn it… and again…

Edited at March 16, 2005, 11:44 pm by geektimes
Edited at March 16, 2005, 11:45 pm by geektimes

SXSW…

Mon Mar 14

South by Southwest festival is under way, and while seeing people such as Mavis Staples and Robert Plant waffle on about music, the thing that really makes me want to be there is the interactive conference. Featuring their prestigious web awards, the web and blog world glitterati are there in their droves. All listening to techy highbrows such as Molly Holzschlag, Jeffry Zeldman, Andy Budd, Eric Meyer and Cameron Moll. In fact there are more web geeks there than you can shake a stick at.

So, to everyone there, have a good time. Maybe one day I’ll make it.

Form help…

Thu Mar 3

You know sometimes you have a big form on a page and you want to save all the details into the database/file using a receiving page? It’s a pain to go through and check you’ve got every variable sent from the form in the receiving page. Well, no more!

for each itemname in request.Form
response.write itemname & ” = request.form(”"” & itemname & “”")
“
next
response.end
%>

Just paste that ASP/VBScript code snippet into the top of the receiving page and it will show all the form variables in a neat list in the browser, ready for copying and pasting into the source code. Just modify it to get the GET variables, or add a function (such as protectDB() or something).

It just saved me 10+ minutes of painful copying and pasting :0)

Web world snapshots…

Thu Mar 3

This is a great idea for a blog post from Cameron. It seems like every designer in the world is doing better stuff than me. But, now is not the time to get depressed - now is the time to work hard. Thanks to Daniel for the link.