My Web Design Business

I just launched my web design business based in Lethbridge. This is something I’ve wanted to do since high school.

There’s two types of people in the world: dreamers and doers. I’ve been (and still am to an extent) a dreamer. Dreamers are people with ideas. They’ll tell you about these ideas until the cows come home (I wonder where that expression comes from. Cows don’t graze on their own, but I heard goats do! Maybe it should be “until the goats come home”). Often these ideas are great and if executed properly could turn out to be BIG. However, that’s just it, they don’t execute and let their ideas rot. I’m moving away from being a dreamer to being a doer. Doers execute in rapid succession. While dreamers talk about the awesome they’re going to make, doers are already doing it (and maybe failing and trying again!).

I’ve dreamt of having a web design business since high school. I’ve even got mockups to prove it! I took forever to pick and name then didn’t like it. Took forever to pick another one, registered a domain name. It went stale and I didn’t like that one too. Rinse and repeat. That’s until now. I pray to God that I start becoming more of a doer as dreaming alone leaves you immobile.

Why Google is the BEST

Google has something called Google Webmaster Tools. As the name suggests, they are meant to help webmasters help google discover their websites. I used it, it worked!

That same google page, kindly enough, mentioned that Bing and Yahoo! also have their version of webmaster tools. I tried both of them with nothing but problems! That’s why google is the best. I didn’t think the Google tools were special because they just worked, as expected. This was until I tried Bing and Yahoo! where the tools failed miserably. Especially Bing’s.

Google is just being humble by calling one of the latest projects Google Wave, I think Google Tsunami would be a better fit.

This technology, I believe has potential to be the next facebook. Often times when a new, brilliant, idea is introduced, you think “why didn’t I think of that” or “I should have seen that coming”. Well, I think this is one of those moments.

I think what’s imperative to Google Wave is how open Google plans to make it. This is just !

I started attending the University of Lethbridge in September 2004. In my first year I took some courses, and I only managed to find one used textbook–by luck–in the bulletin boards.

Can’t find textbooks!

After that first semester, I haven’t really been able to find cheap, or used textbooks. The reason is that the bulletin boards are chaotic at best and ‘searching’ for information in them is, well, madness.

Covered up

Textbook Revolution?!!!

That’s right, textbook revolution . So, after sitting and doing absolutely nothing about this issue (except for complain about book prices), I decided to do something about it.

I was taking a database class and it had a project component. I proposed the idea of a book exchange site to the professor and he seemed to like it. For the next couple of months I went to work creating mockups and then the back end and of course, what’s a site without animation these days–who wants to look amateur!

The deadline came looming and the site, well, wasn’t where I wanted it to be, therefore I only got 13/15 on the project. Not to worry as I wasn’t really doing this for the class…the marks were a bonus! I kept working and working and on January 08, 2009, I release the first ‘version’ of the site which became ulethbooks.ca.

After introducing this idea to the university community and friends, feedback was phenomenal and it got me excited! Then I went working on GizmoBooks.com — The Textbook Revolution! I wanted to have this easy to use site accessable to students across North America and, although not sure about the concept, even outside North America!

Anyway, that’s my little story of how The Textbook Revolution came to be and I would love to hear from you with your ideas, feedback and comments.

Until next post!

Compete with that!

I just finished listening (actually still not finished but just watching the question period ) to this DjangoCon talk by James Bennet. Found it very motivating and useful. There are a lot of apps out there! Before you start to write some feature for a django site, ensure that you’re not rewriting something that someone already wrote. Here are a few site to look at:

• djangosnippets
• djangoplugables
• Django Applications

I was playing around with an Amazon API and needed a way to indent the XML it was returning in order to make any sense of it.

A google search came up with this awesome tool. A great thanks goes to Jon Aquino .

I spent about half an hour trying to figure out why this code wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do, which is just create a div element and position it at a specific coordinate in the page:

var contactInfoDiv = document.createElement('div');
m = $(linkStr).positionedOffset();
contactInfoDiv.style.cssText = "background-image: url('{{MEDIA_URL}}images/nav_pointer.png'); width: 29px; height: 16px;"
contactInfoDiv.style.cssText += "position: abolute; top: " + (m.top - 70) + "px; left: " + (m.left - 85) + "px;";

document.body.appendChild(contactInfoDiv);


Don’t know if you caught it or not, but position: abolute is actually supposed to be position: absolute.

Don’t you wish the browser was a bit more unforgiving? So, instead of having my code kinda-work, it would have choked telling me that abolute is not a recognized position, and it would have taken me 5 seconds to resolve the issue, instead of half an hour.

Or maybe, just maybe, I can learn to spell—yeah, not happening.

I came across and incredible piece on MVC and web development:

it should be abundantly clear that the traditional “MVC” is back with a vengeance: the blurred lines between which bits of code are responsible for “Model business logic” validation are gone, and the blurred lines regarding which bits of code are responsible for generation of the “View” are also gone – but not completely. It’s up to the developer to decide how far they want to deviate from the traditional ‘HTML’ style of display / information rendering. Not everybody is comfortable with the use of Widgets that are executed as Javascript to do the job that HTML used to do (even if it’s behind a javascript framework such as mochikit, extjs or prototype), and fortunately, both the GWT and the Pyjamas frameworks do an extremely good job of supporting and interacting with straight HTML (investigate the HTMLPanel widget, for example, for details).

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to replace Javascript as the only way to manipulate the DOM in browsers. Wouldn’t it be cool if instead of Javascript you could throw Java, python, into an HTML document! Let the dreams begin.

pyjamas is a new way to create web applications. Unlike the traditional method of creating an HTML page, adding CSS to it, spicing things up with javascript, pyjamas has a different way of doing things. You build your HTML page, by using only javascript (expect in this case python which compiles into javascript). This is totally different and something that will take a bit of time to get used to it; seems promising though (assuming that performance doesn’t take a huge hit).

pyjamas diagram

Programming with pyjamas needs a little bit of rethinking about the way that you do Web application development. Primarily, you need to forget virtually everything you’ve ever learned and come to expect Web development to be. The reason for this is very simple: Pyjamas is pure javascript. Although written in python, not javascript, it is essential to bear in mind that virtually 100% of your web application will be javascript – not HTML. The programming style you may be accustomed to for HTML programming involves placing as much HTML into one page as you can stand, and making the minimum number of exceptions and allowances for dynamic content that you can manage, without making the HTML page “too complicated” to be readable.

Pyjamas makes it possible for you to break pages down into concepts. classes. widgets. maybe some CSS styling is added, almost as an afterthought, on top of the “real” functionality. In other words, Pyjamas is actually more like Desktop application development than it is Web development.

That’s pretty exciting and I intend to try it, after I finish my current project.

In order to keep track of my thoughts on different things I’m working on, I use Google Notebook. So today wanting to jot down some ideas, I logged into notebook and I was greeted with a new note–one that I haven’t written myself. Sure enough, it was advertising! I was totally appalled by this. Google took the liberty to add an ad as a note. Is this any different than SPAM?

Has Google Gone Too Far

The question we have to ask ourselves as we keep moving our data to the cloud is how much are we losing? Is the gain worth the loss of freedom? Also, what’s next from Google? Are they going to start creating messages SPAM in our Gmail accounts on behalf of advertisers. Are they going to start just SPAMMING?! 

I hope my fears are unjustified.