All Launched Out
Yesterday I spent a very long day in front of Taco HTML Editor, in combination with Firebug and Transmit FTP, putting together the final coding touches to a new clients website. All up it was an 11 hour session, I’ve not seriously coded for that long in a single day before however as we were aiming to launch the site this morning it was a necessity.
So anyway, after a long day, and a very early start this morning, the re-development of SNOBs.com.au was completed.
The basic requirements for the SNOBs re-development was to convert the existing WordPress installation from a ‘hierarchal 3 column design’ to a ‘magazine’ style theme. If you’ve read / viewed this website anytime in the past 6 months you’d know I’m a bit of a fan of magazine style themes and have played with a number of them here.
Some of the other things that Carlee, SNOBS owner, wanted for the re-development were;
- a way to feature competitions and certain content entries
- the ability to put polls in articles
- the ability to sell off numerous advertising spaces, and automate the delivery of them
- an overall neater and cleaner ‘feel’ to the site
This morning when we launched SNOBS Carlee seemed pretty happy, or possibly delirious from lack of sleep (sorry about that…haha..). And so far the traffic stats and time on site stats are looking good as well.
There’s still a handful of features that will be going live over the next couple of weeks, some really cool and very ’social’ and others that will make some of the daily site maintenance and operation easier.
Anyway, here’s a quick screen capture of the site, or you can go directly to SNOBS.com.au and see it in action.
A cleaner, slower internet for all
It’s Friday, time for a Mat Rant.
For some time now the Australian Government has been talking about filtering the internet at ISP level here in Australia with a supposed ‘black list’ of websites with what is termed ‘illegal content’, I’ve even discussed it on this website before here and here.
Well there has been some amendments made to the original proposal and now the Australian Government has decided that there is no ‘opt out’ of the filter, all ISPs will be forced to comply with this legislation.
The filter will be a two-tiered system, the top tier will be always on whilst the second-tier will be opt-out. At this stage there is no full confirmation on what the top-tier filter will actually stop, or what websites will be on the blacklist, however one thing is for sure that it will restrict what we are allowed to see online and it is going to slow down our already crap-tacular internet speeds in Australia, not to mention the $44.2 million dollars that will come out of tax payers pockets to fund this.
I’m all for protecting children from pornography, violent videos, and all of the other crap that can be found on the internet however I really don’t think this is the best way to approach this, oh and by the way this filtering system wont be applied to email, peer to peer networks, or even bit-torrents, coz you know kids don’t use those technologies at all.
If this system is to work and not negatively effect how many of us work on the internet, bloggers, freelance website designers, etc. then it needs to be an opt-in service. How hard would it be to ask people when they sign up for a plan “Would you like your internet access filtered to stop certain types of ‘offensive’ materials being available on your computer?”. It’s really not that hard, shoot even Foxtel allows me to put a ‘parent barring code’ on certain channels.
C’mon Senator Conroy, wake up to yourself. This legislation will hurt Australians, it will hurt businesses, it will make us look like a pack of idiots who need protection from the ‘big bad internets’. Ohs nos!
Andrew Beeston says it best here.
Raining
The last couple of days it’s been raining it’s butt off in Newcastle, seriously solid downpours. Yesterday afternoon I got trapped in my car for about 5 minutes because it was raining so hard and I really didn’t feel like getting drenched.
Anyway, busy day ahead. Got a couple of websites to finish off, both are in the final code clean-up stage and then I can get to testing them both. After that I think it’ll be client training time, then bill them both out and hopefully there won’t be too much support to do as I’ve made them as user friendly as possible.
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