It's a new year

Well... I woke up this morning to a new year. It doesn't feel much different to the last one tho:) I didn't really go out last night, I have too much happening in the way of web development, and I replaced all the image nav buttons with text-link ones on the main site. This makes the page load much faster, no preload images, and I think it looks a bit cleaner aswell. Someone even said that text links are given more relevance by Google, than graphic links, even on internal links, although I can't imagine the difference to be that great. Loading faster, less bandwidth, Im loving it already tho. In many ways, web design is going back to basics. People are realizing that making a page fast and efficient is much more important that making it visually striking. I loved the old ANSI BBS days, those graphics were so simple, and yet so functional, and used to be usable over a 9600bps connection.
Web surfers are unforgiving, fickle and critical, they will give your web page the flick in less than a second if it just doesn't suit them, and once they're gone, they're gone.
Mmmmmmm coffee.
Geez it's great not to have to go into the office for a few days. I have been working 6 days a week this year, and it's great to get a few days in a row to myself. I normally end up doing web pages anyway, from home, but it's totally different to having to go into work. I find I'm more creative aswell. It's easy to operate on the edge of burnout, and not realise your creativity is suffering. Designing web pages requires a good creative intuition, to come up with new ideas that are functional and look good, and are competitive. I'm going to work on not being so buggered all the time this year, I think the quality of work will impropve. Also to sort out this year is a decent car. I'm driving an old heap at the moment and can't wait to get into something a bit more fun. It's just a case of getting around to it. Im thinking a V8 Commodore station wagon, manual or something similar, just something big, powerful, and practical. I love sports cars, but I'll wait until I can afford to get one as a second car and take it out on weekends and race and things. After having one stolen, it's just not worth having one as a daily driver. As they say, nothing attracts dickheads like nice cars.
I watched the Sydney new year's eve celebrations on the Sydney harbour and fireworks on television last night. I thought it was great, I might try to get a hotel room in the city with a balcony overlooking the harbour for next year. The fireworks just get bigger and bigger each year. The mirrorball didn't seem to do much on TV, which was dissapointing, I love mirrorballs, I don't know why. The national anthem at the end wasn't as bad as the version they've been playing on the radio over the last couple of weeks. I don't know if they jazzed it up, or if the version that came out before was incomplete. I'm kinda surprised they still played it, they would have been better off not saying anything, and just playing the damn thing. The whole show all put togeather was absolutely magnificent as it is every year though.
Wishing you all happiness, healty, prosperity, and success for all your prusuits in 2005. I'ts going to be a hectic year for me I can see already. Hectic but good.

Happy New Year

Well it's that time of year again. I haven't got anything planned, it's just another day really. I have too much on this year to really take a break, if I were to take a break, Id be thinking about what a have to do. The mirrorball is up on the harbour bridge all ready to go, and that crappy version of the national anthem is ready to be played.
Just on that - the version of the national anthem they "developed" for the New Years Eve celebration. I didn't really think the idea was offensive, and it's not the first time someon'e had a go at something like that. And a dance version is something different. But it sounds lousy. I recon if they did one that actually sounded good, people wouldn't complain, but when that comes on the general reaction is "WTF is that?". It's just a crap rendition of the song, whichever way you look at it.
I'm sitting here wondering what internet retail traffic is like over new years. Probably not huge, but we'll wait and see. I've had an average day so far as far as unique visits go, but no sales. Well a few sales:)
Anyway, wishing you all a great New Year. Of course we should remember all the people affected by the Tsunami disaster who will be having a lousy new year, and those with the means please dig deep with donations for these people I don't remember a natural disaster of this magnitude.

First post - Gday Everyone

Hi and welcome to my blog. I live in Australia and work in I.T. Throughout the past six years I have persued various areas of the industry, basically taking what was available opportunities, learning from them, and making the most of them. Unlike many, I have never had trouble finding work in I.T. I have been very lucky.
From tech support, to PC sales, to hardware maintenance I have done a few different things (I started an apprenticeship as an engine reconditioner before that.) but I now find myself in the business of developing websites. Business on the web is a bit like playing the pokies, it's addictive, much easer to break even, but just as hard to get rich.
The addictive bit is what drives me:) every day, do a bit more, study the craft of making websites. There is more information online on web development than one can read in a lifetime (and some of it is contradictorty - there are many schools of thought in web design), and like other areas of I.T., it is constantly changing. But that's one of the things I love about the I.T. industry. nothing ever stagnates. If there is a hint of a better way, it will be tried immediately, and switched to if successful. And no one every REALLY knows whats going on, becasue it's all so new. Things have been tried and tested, but only a few of them, and those only a few times.
As web developers, our job is to put information on the web in a context and format that attracts traffic which will benefit from that site. I have started web developing at a point in the life of the internet where the number of sites is large, and although the number of users are growing, any area where there is money to be made is saturated with content - everybody having a go:) So the game is to find new ways of making money on the web, targeting new potential customers, and simply putting the most interesting sites togeather that people will like, use, re-visit, and most importantly, haven't been done to death. I don't mean "innovations" like pop-ups, exit windows and things like that - they were never a good thing, but new novel ideas for whole sites, new ways to use the internet. I think frames were a good thing, although we, and the web weren't ready for them. They added crippling complexities to a system that relies on it's simplicity (the web).
But yeah, sites that you can look at the traffic cams from work before driving home, sites that provide mobile phone services etc. Things like that. It's just like, if I you were going to do a forum, a dating site, a shopping site, or something like that, it would have to be a damn good site to even scrape in a bit of traffic, and tireless promotion, link swapping and submitting to creep up to the level of the established websites in those categories.