Saying this now basically dooms me to wandering once again into obscurity, but you might have noticed that I’m writing again more. These things usually come in cycles. I’ll go through a period where I don’t want to have anything to do with whatever else I’d do, and I’ll write instead, since the time is free. Writing is not a chore, it’s just something I don’t have time to do unless I toss other things aside. Still, there are other things that I’m doing, trying to keep relevant.
Recently I started throwing a project onto GitHub in an effort to catch up on git. This should be useful with my Drupal work, since Drupal is switching their source control over to git. Anything is an improvement over cvs, and while svn is still my scm of choice, git doesn’t seem too difficult to work with.
Anyway, this project I’ve put onto GitHub is kind of my starting point for new miscellaneous projects. I call it microsite. It’s good for just throwing a quick site online with some pages and no frills. It’s definitely not a full CMS and I don’t encourage anyone to run out and use it for anything. What it has helped with is rethinking some things that I’ve built elsewhere.
Michael Harris recently asked me what about Habari I might have done differently, looking back. The list is reasonably short, but each item is significant. I’ve been reviewing these things and trying to incorporate my thoughts into the microsite project.
One thing you’d see (and I expect to expand on this with a later post, perhaps over at RedAlt, since it’s more technical) is that templates are parsed and converted into custom DOM objects before they’re rendered. This will ultimately allow two things: First, it will allow the DOM to be rendered to different output targets - such as HTML, XHTML, or HTML5 - without the template itself being written with any of those specifically in its intent. Second, it will allow individual portions of the page content to be marked as cached and expired. So it will be possible to cache the page content, but mark a specific section of the output as cached and expirable. The system would be able to load the DOM from cache, look for components that expire based on specific criteria, and either expire the whole page based on a single component’s expiration or update only the expired component within the DOM (and re-cache it). You non-technical folks are probably like “yeah, ok, yawn”.
I’ve noticed a sort of stagnation in my own learning that seems dangerous. I picked up a new O’Reilly book over the weekend, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Whether we like it or not, the future is in going to consist largely of mobile apps and connecting them to the cloud. I like the idea, although I’m not personally in love with the current crop of devices.
One reason why I so fell in love with the Palm Pre is that the apps seems more integrated with each other and the cloud. After thousands of app releases for the Pre, it’s clear to me that everyone is releasing new apps that work just like the iPhone ones. They suck because they don’t work together. I’m not sure what the solution is for this, but I am dismayed by the situation. Either you have a very functional app that is trapped in the device (can’t export useful data to use elsewhere) or you have a barely functional app that relies entirely on cloud services (such that the app isn’t useful by itself or must also be used via the web to be useful). There are very few apps that span the gap well.
So I’m not saying that I’m adamant about building phone apps, but I think that developers seeking to remain relevant need to think about how their offerings will be made useful to the wavefront of mobile users that will soon overwhelm the market.
Yes, it make me want to turn to living as a simple farmer. Oh, I have a good story on the farming topic for later. But speaking of fallback professions…
I have my first voiceover class tonight. I’m looking forward to it. I need to set my expectations low, though, because I’m really excited about the prospect of doing this as a hobby, if not a full-on side job, and I want to love the class. It bothers me a lot that I’ve been studying and have passion for the work, and I talk about it all the time, yet I’m not a person people associate with doing voiceover. It’s weird. It’s not good for my confidence. Anyway, I hope to get something useful out of this class, take some more classes - including some more acting workshops - and build a good demo reel. Then I’ve got a small side business idea I’m going to launch, and I’ll see how that works out. Assuming I even have a chance at all.
But my sudden fear today is that I’ll be getting irrelevant. There are new technologies flowering and stagnation looming as a result of doing the same thing all the time. I think I’m losing my feel for development technology, and I need to get back into a community of developers and see what’s going on; what’s new. Hopefully it’s a good sign that I at least see this happening.
