Yesterday evening I had my first of eight physiotherapy classes to help sort out my back. It was a surprisingly exhausting affair which amounted to a supervised round-robin type gym session with some awful group therapy tacked on at the end. Some embarrassingly novel experiences: working out in public, trying out an exercise bike and a treadmill. I feel like going to a real gym would be less of a big (read: unknown and scary) step now. After that I felt a little braindead so just whiled away an hour or two playing flash games. A spectacular waste of time to be sure, but arguably not more so than games like Mass Effect 2 or back-to-back Star Trek: Enterprise episodes.
Today I spent at the Future of Web Design conference (London 2010). I went in '06 and '07 too, though in those days it was a smaller event, and MUCH cheaper. It's scary numbers now, but thankfully the company I work with are sending me, providing I can cobble together some learnings to spread among the tech and creative departments in a presentation or two. There's a lot to take on board, plus a couple of key talks I missed due to a clash that I'll have to stream when they put it online, and there's another whole day of it tomorrow! MY POOR HEAD. I'M NOT EVEN A DESIGNER. But then again the main subjects were HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, which is exactly what a Front-End codemonkey like me should be learning, perhaps I am a designer. It's confusing.
In any case "dossing around with flash games" + "new experiences" + "inspiring talks from luminaries" = "thoughts". Though I'll have to reflect more carefully on the speakers and the subjects when I digest them for the MRM London audience, there were a few small easily-forgettable things I wanted to jot down before they're buried under the wisdom of tomorrow's speakers, mostly under the theme of "Keeping Score", by which I mean a sort of IRL-metagaming: staying goal oriented in order to keep productive, fresh, enthused, interested and interesting. I'm fighting the temptation to over-analyse but as that's just the adult equivalent of colouring in your revision plan I'm going to try and avoid well-meaning procrastination, skip the theory and just take stock.
Fresh: Change is a good thing to keep score on, and new sources of info. One that's gone stale is blogs, I just don't read them any more! My google-reader goes unnoticed and the things I do read tend to be list articles. I need to unsubscribe from 90% of them and start again. Similar story - though not as severe - with ipod tracks; they need a good pruning. Quality not quantity! Tangentially, I should look at grabbing podcasts or audiobooks for Thameside walks at lunch.
Fitness: I've relapsed into old eating habits in the past couple of weeks which is perhaps regrettable, and I've stopped walking at lunch which might be fixed with more interesting reading material, but as workouts are going fairly well I'm not too cut up about it.
Funtimes: I've no ambition to cut games books and sci-fi out of my life, but there are other non-productive things with are much more self-evidently a total waste of time, usually when I'm bored. I need to learn to recognise and avoid these troughs as they happen.
Social: As I've stopped using a couple of social-networking sites I feel a little isolated sometimes, which could be fixed by going out more than the once or twice a week I do now, but again it's not a disaster. Keeping busier would help too.
Website: It's going well. Light at the end of the tunnel, etc. A few of the talks today provided some good insights into nift of the UX or jQuery variety that I will definitely follow up.
- Tone: Jocular? The cv section is a little informal which might be ok, but it still needs way more work. Giving my penchant for editing to the nth degree I probably won't be totally satisfied with it for weeks so I need to shortcut to the next stage.
- Typography: Vertical spacing/gridwork is a mystery to me, I need to find out about that. Finding non-standard fonts to showcase would be excellent if I can find a monospace pretty enough.
- jQuery: Fade out the "working" gifs, then get rid. Condense the "tips" section, and bring in the html from another page to reduce clutter and also demo another bit of pseudo ajaxyness (does that count as ajax? Find out). Have the "previous" tip fade out faster than the "next" fades in to give the impression of more whitespace.
- UX: fade in the dangovan logo onload as a cue to the user that things change. Introduce some more "discovery", perhaps more graphically rewarding on mouseovers? If that can be done without losing the simplicity.
- Portfolio section: title at the top, on mouseover the year slides down from top, the blurb slides up from bottom and the left/right button slides in from sides. Some possible sections: pride stuff, HTML email, localisation, design work, ITM3, big names, etc. Include link to live?
- Design: #999 background on the last.fm pics? Make top-border thinner? Work on a me-pic, similar to obama/hope but in red/grey/white and dashed.
- Nice-to-haves: Mobile version? Yoink simple tools I use anyway?