Clockwise

My old friend the transparent GIF has come back in town. I was putting together some updates for Gough Homes home page. While it wasn’t the most extensive search, I settled on using 24 ways to impress your friends’ transparent PNGs in IE6 solution. Part of this solution was the introduction of a transparent GIF. Not ideal, but a worthwhile sacrifice for ease of development.

With that piece of the puzzle in figured out, I decided to switch over to the other major piece. It was a slideshow, which was to use JavaScript and not Flash. It needed to link to a popup showing home plans. Attempts to work within the system to add the onclick event led nowhere. So the simple solution of placing an invisible layer with the proper link above was used. It worked great and simplified things, though obviously not the most ideal solution. That is the chore of the web developer to balance between the ideal and the practical solution that gets the job done efficiently.

The final piece I added to the home page was a location map that had small hover layers when you placed the cursor over a community. The hover popups worked best as PNGs, and hence the search for a good way to use PNGs as transparently as possible to work in all browsers. This is where it got fun as IE7 will not do anchor tag hover if there is no text, even if it is a block level element. Transparent GIF was employed to give IE7 something to hover over and make the layers work.

So it isn’t the ideal solution, but then not all browsers are ideal. It was interesting to brush the dust off of something that used to be abused in the 90′s from the toolkit. However at the end of the day it’s all about, hopefully, providing all users of a website the best experience efficiently.

You can see the magic on the Gough Homes home page, the two additions are the locations and plans.

I picked up an iPhone on launch day. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with the sale in Sweden. The city I live in, Falun, has about 36,000 people and almost another 20,000 in surrounding area. Not very many people, but then the local market supports an authorized reseller, who also sells some PCs, that just became an authorized repair center. Plus the iPhone has more universal demand than to just Mac users. On Friday I got up and walked the dog through town and tried looking into the mall at the Telia store, but didn’t see anyone.

Back home to drop the dog off I took some time to message a friend who had been waiting in Arizona for a few hours already and still had hours to go. I walked over 5 to 10 minutes before the 10am open time and got in line. I ended up being 20th in line, the highest queue number I saw was 47 and there didn’t seem to be much worry that they were going to run out.

In Sweden you don’t pay for incoming texts or phone calls so I had survived my first year in Sweden with a 100 kroner (roughly $16) prepaid SIM card. Unfortunately I never registered the number as mine so they had to give me a new number then and make the transfer later on. The buying process was nice and short, about 5 minutes, though since once they had my person number they could instantly do the credit check, and pull my name and address up in the system.

While it’s tough to pass up on some of the Sony Ericsson phones, the iPhone has my heart. Plus I can dust off my Objective C and write applications for it. I wouldn’t ever care to subject myself to writing Java again. I was worried about how the developer program is setup with the app store, but then came the launch and the barrier to entry was obviously not high at all. That’s a good thing and a bad thing, good that I don’t have to worry about Apple turning me down on the merits of my applications, bad in that there is a lot of garbage to wade through.

Not long ago I converted from Mephisto to WordPress for my wife’s blog and a blog I keep for my family. At the time I couldn’t find any scripts to automate the process. I did find someone had written a controller to put into the Mephisto code to convert, but it was the controller only and didn’t include the models. I wanted something simpler to run anyway. I’ve put the rough code up on Pastie.

Some notes about how to use it. First off you’ll need to run it on a computer that can access your Mephisto MySQL server and your target WordPress. You’ll need a default WordPress database to point at, I suggest clearing out the “Hello World” type stuff first. It does Mysql.quote on some fields, but not all, these were the fields that caused problems not being quoted for the two test blogs. It uses REPLACE INTO so in case a problem arises you can fix the script to handle the exception and re-run without worrying about duplicate data.

For small companies and especially one-man shops there is a temptation to appear larger than you are. Much like the puffer fish it can be a useful show, but in the end you’re still a small fish. I think it’s important to consider if “we” really sells anything tangible over “I.”

The veil of we no matter how carefully constructed is generally easy to see through by anyone familiar enough. That is of course unless there is a diagnosable mental disorder in play, then it might get trickier. Eventually clients might see your office, or realize they’ve never spoken to anyone but you. Then your first impression is discovered for a farce, which could be worse than being truthful upfront. That isn’t to say you need to loudly advertise your company size, just let it be what it is and don’t mince words about it. Today you might be I, and tomorrow it might change to we, but there aren’t a lot of good reasons to jump the gun.

I’ll admit that sometimes it would be nice to be a we when there is only a me. It’s easier to have miscommunication problems with someone else. It’s also nice to spread the blame out across a group or partnership than to take it all yourself. There are even those who might feel safer entrusting their business with a larger entity. You might want to make it a point that hiring you includes your network of friends and colleagues. I have a network of friends that I can pull in to subcontract or are willing to take a look and give their professional opinion on the direction things are going.

On the other hand I think having realistic expectations makes for better working arrangements. I know of many clients that while of course they want their website done on time, they’d rather have a realistic expectation of where things are on the due date than a pipe dream. Clients/customers make their assumptions on that you are only one person, or a handful of people. It gets tiring to always hear about a scapegoat, and if he/she is so bad why haven’t they been fired already.

At the end of the day it’s not the number of people involved, their resumes or portfolios. Those can be indicators, but they can also be embellishments and sometimes lies. The most important things are results and you can get results from one person sometimes better than from a team. Certainly the client/customer relationship will be better if you don’t hide behind a lot of hot air.