• Part I (MP3, 26 minutes): Women in Development I
• Part II (MP3, 20 minutes): Women in Development II

My apologies. It just didn't cross my mind to post about the Women in Development podcast when it first came out. I had a lot in my plate right after the conference. I was mostly trying to catch up with tasks at work since I'm acting as Lead Developer at PWIM for the time being.

Anyhow, in these podcasts you will hear the views of women on the absence decline of women in development and absence during conferences. Desi shares her vision and goals about where she wants devChix to be. devChix is a collective group of women with backgrounds in Computer Science and Computing. It was so immensely uplifting to be in the company of such great women that day. I enjoyed participating in the discussion. I was more nervous than anything else during the entire podcast session. Mind you, I was sitting two feet away from Geoffrey Grosenbach. Cool, right?

After hearing the podcast again, I think it's time to live up to my nickname "multi-talented". Oh the pressure mounts!

I am no Mac Developer but I may know a few here and there. Cough cough cough. I think ;p

Seth Dillingham, a real cool guy, is trying to reach the $6,600 goal for the cancer-care-and-treatment charity. It's a great cause. Read the details over at his site.

Image Credit: - me, I have no mac app ;p

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Update:
2008 Pan-Mass Challenge Auction

It's quite the month. I'm just glad for the wide range of cool stuff to be done. There's some major re-designs, additional features to an existing coldfusion coded site, online catalog launches; I was able to implement javascript framework (prototype and scriptaculous) to some free-lance projects. Ah SMS in the mix too.

NDA's == :(

When it's lifted I can talk about certain projects more.

This leaves me little time to give my own site the loving it needs.

I am happy when I am busy though. ;p

I've been getting my hands dirty with some contributing work for DevChix.

After a day of designing the template in photoshop then getting the wonderful talented group to approve the theme, I went and rolled my sleeves to make the CSS and XHTML version of the photoshop mock up. The DevChix's site is currently using wordpress so I'd have to wire it up according to Word Press specs.

Last Friday night, I started doing the css framework to get the look into actual code. It took about 3 hours. Then Saturday from between 5p.m. to 1a.m and while playing WoW and a few breaks here and there, I was also coding and going back and forth reading the Word Press documentation for wordpress tags, I finally got the goal. Take a peek at devchix.com.

I wouldn't consider the task of transposition as final . Every site to me is a living dynamic entity. I'll be prepared for the things that needs enhancements and tweaks as per usability, glitches and quirks galore beckons. I hope the design serves the group for sometime till the next project.

Back to other things , I'd be going back to my original plan to move forward with this site by next weekend

To do this week:

1. site footer
2. dive more into Yahoo!UI

If you happen to stumble upon my site and it looks un-finished, well then the answer is simply that. It has but one page as of today. I work in blocks and it goes live like so. It's not a big deal for me if you see my site in this condition. Unfortunately, that's how it is going to be for a little while. Progress reports/posts will come with screen shots for tracking purposes of course.

What was the first block?
It would have to be the header area since it is going to sit on all pages of the site. The header block is 30% complete.

How is the site working right now?
It is semi-static. There's a db and the code for the photoroll is in PHP. I also like the fact that I can use ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); with the LAMP environment. That was the necessary evil for the Photoroll. I will eventually add the content (points to this Hello! post) to the db and hopefully soon. This site has no back-end Admin Interface yet. It's all via ftp then using Tunnelier to log into the server and using SQLYog to connect and update the MySql db.

What is working?
LAYOUT -- The layout is from a PSD that I created and transposed into XHTML Strict , CSS and with semantic "smantic" mark up. The entire design layout is not all live at this time. Although, the theme is inspired by the LG Chocolate "Lime". I am realizing as I type this that Lime Green is a bit much on the eyes after a while. I'll be tweaking the layout to resolve the eye strain issue.

HEADINGS USING sIFR -- I was able to sit down and sift through the sIFR documention. The multi-colored sFIR version looked sweet too. I've yet to dabble more on that. Yippee, headings 1-6 were configured and now functional with sFIR with a few tweaks planned in the horizon. The sIFR issues: it doesn't seem to work consistently in IE7 & the adb+ tabs on FF is a bit of an eye sore.

PHOTOROLL -- The photoroll is powered by a simple php script that I did which grabs random images on page refresh. It's so old school. I've retouched 95% of the images from the Photoroll in Photoshop. Most of these images came from SXC. Looking ahead, I may switch the engine to Flash or DHTML OR maybe have my little green alien friend stay by your comp while hovering on his mini red circle spacecraft and swish his neptune-ish wand to do the effects you want on demand. That's going to cost you!

CSS & MARK UP -- The global items are in the initial set up stage for the css. Setting up the body, a, form, list type declarations, etc has spurred the idea of a CSS Framework. Why not? Next, the goal for the mark up was for it to look fabulous and dignified in my FF Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool extension. It's all a working progress but passed both css and html validation tests.

What no web framework?
Not yet. It's been a personal debate. It boils down to what my webhost can offer and what I can do quickly on a two day weekend without much hassle to start it up. A2Hosting offers PHP, Ruby/Rails and alot of the one-click 3rd Party scripts ready to roll out under Fantastico on CPanel. I want to do everything by myself. Given the resoures, PHP was the quickest way. Coldfusion would have been another easy way but not under my current web host. After I do my entire site in PHP, I'll migrate it to Rails and make a Django version then wait for the new Coldfusion release. Wow! Really? No.

To End
I have one page up yet there was so much documentation reading involved to get started and to have the site up at this point. I am not complaining. I am glad they have documentation now for almost everything. Some are better than others. I visited, read/re-read documentions for Django, Rails, Yahoo!UI, Scriptaculous, Prototype and revisited the W3C's site for the umpteenth time. I got side tracked reading photoshop tutorials and most of which weren't as informative as I wish they could be. This brings me to a rant with google searches. Why can't I sort my searches via latest articles versus old outdated pages with high page ranks without having to use the advance search? Instead of the "I'm feeling lucky" button, I would rather have two radio options for Popular and Latest.

-- END.

To do this week:

1. sFIR Issues with IE7 and AdBlock Plus (or no sFIR hmm...)
2. The batch task after the header which is most likely the navigation sets
3. H1 - H4 layouts
4. Continue with content layout and planning
5. More CSS
6. A plan to enrich the photoroll with Yahoo! UI
7. Oh! I am still missing my footer