On a train, writing a blog

I hit Facebook as well beat that. I'm working up in London at the moment on a 4-5 week contract for a big marketing firm. They deal wuth the end of year reports for a lot of very big companies (trust me you'd have heard of them) and my job, along with a few others, is to make sure the reports go from PDF to web without hitch.

Each report is around 170 pages with many, MANY tables and diagrams. we're working flat out and have 12 to do in a month.

I know this is heresy but I have never been more pleased to see the layout view in Dreamweaver in my life. Of course I don't use that view in DW any more, haven't done for 6 years and I've been doing this job 8. But what I'm dealing with is half formed HTML spat out by an XML to HTML via Print black box thingumy bob, and although it's better than doing it by hand the code is shoddy tosay the least, missing , table cells, rows, colgroups, headings,all sorts of things. I used Coda for the first week, things went well but a little too slow for the clients liking.... so out came old faithful :) The split code/design view is tremendously good fun to use for this.

Also I have been using a shiny new Imac 22" for this job and have become slighly enamoured with it. The only reason I got a Dell rather than a MacBook pro but as this contracting business is quite lucrative I might push the boat out and upgrade, the GF can buy this one and I might drop £2K on a new machine, hmm. Pricey. Questions to come.....

I'm in Starbucks, drinking a latte, writing my Blog

Can you get more web 1.0 than this I wonder?

Many projects on the go at the moment, one of which will see the light of day in some form or another, another which is part of a shop and one last weird one that no one will probably see for fear of the competition stealing it.

So first I'm building a signature generator for a PR company. They want a unified look and feel to the email signatures they send out, yet everyone is a bit different with different URLs, numbers, emails etc. What a perfect use for a bit of HTML laid up in the Hcard Microformat I hear you say!
And so it is. I shall make a form with all the options for the data, feed the result through some PHP and then deliver a small piece of HTML to the user and give them some install instructions. Luckily they all have Outlook 2000 so the instructions are all the same. I should be able to publish that, or atleast a similar one onto the web and see what people think of it.

The other two are a bit hush hush at the moment but one involves hooking into places like technorati etc. I've never dealt with APIs, certainly not the multi dimensional associative arrays that the API library is giving back to me... Think I have a handle on it however, exciting stuff.