Don’t say it can’t be done

My last big client had no idea how stuff worked.Fine It isn’t his job to know.But he knew what he wanted.I went and looked at some page examples he sent me and that made me expand my abilities almost 200%.

I listened to what he described and I made it happen without at all pushing my own tastes or outright saying it couldn’t be done.

He is a jewelry designer and a really good one,too, so it makes sense he had a strong design sensibility.

This job was my biggest design challenge and one that forced me to “make it happen”

simranjewelry.com
lineska.com the cms is by doop

It’s Been Awhile…

I pretty much stopped the blogging tear I was on because I began this “job” redesigning a website from top to bottom for a person who posted an ad on Craigslist… I thought it was going to be just another page redesign romp, but oh no, they wanted to keep their CMS.
They had the temerity and the tenacity to want to be able to edit their own content..gasp gasp. Luckily I wasn’t totally ignorant of the concept of a CMS because I’d been rooting about for ages for such a thing for myself.Because me likey.
Anyway-don’t you love it when the client  asks  for stuff and has no idea what they are asking for? I do. I mean ,they haven’t got the slightest glimmer of a clue of how web development/webdesign works. But they’ve been lusting for a site like such and such and so and so and they send you links to these awesome sites and ask you to make one like that.I was all like “ok I can”(right) until he said but I want to be able to edit the content and change pictures,too.
I think I almost fell over. I knew enough about CMS’s to know that they all are like totally married to MYSQL and I’ve not yet had a first date with MYsql, myself.That’s ok I have the poor man’s version of a database the old text file flat file method.Not that I quite know how all that fopen fclose fread stuff works but I know a little.A little knowledge is not so dangerous in this case.Also I am aware of safety. I know that’s why everyone uses MYsql to store data because it takes an automatic login to get in,ehem. But there’ve been flatfiles since the dawn so there are also folks making safe flatfile CMS.They have logins that get encrypted.And hopefully the host the site is on will have safety measures of it’s own. Ok, so I found a thing called doop.It’s small and friendly and brand new, having been only released this year(it’s only February,too).
The upside to all this newness is that they are really into developing it,and it’s getting upgraded all the time.The downside is that it’s so new that hardly anyone uses it so the forum is skimpily populated and there isn’t much support.Personally I’d be lost without it because it’s exactly what my client wanted. He had a mysql connected CMS but it was making certain parts of his content unwritable(read only)

so certain things couldn’t be edited.I was writing to the guy’s webmaster and he was really accomodating.He even set up a brand new wordpress because I was going to use that as a new CMS.But it turned out to be way too much power after all.We don’t need all those bells and whistles! doop works off of just one file.It does everything after installation.It lets you make as many pages as you want.And you can automatically create links to these pages with a tag like <?menu null()?>. It was a bit of a bitch to figure out how all of this worked because all the while designing and plotting the layout I had to keep in mind that it had to be edited by mr client later on.So I couldn’t go too crazy.
I ended up with the new site
his old site
Which is nicer? His old site has a cool collapsible vertical menu
with subpages. Doop hasn’t gotten around to subpages yet.Although, there was a girl in their forum offering to send people her modified version of doop with subpages built-in but when I wrote to her and asked for it she never wrote back.And she hasn’t come back to the forum since.
oh well.

Laundry

The holidays really messed up my laundry schedule this past week.
The laundromat insisted on closing New Year’s day. See? they do not care about me!Thanks to their selfishness I had to wait another whole day–with 2 more sets of dirty clothes to wash added.

I didn’t do anything on that day.Anyone sensible gets their freak on the night before and wakes up around four pm with an over driving desire to do that laundry…that embarrassing pile stacked at the foot of one’s bed and by stacked I mean you have just enough foot room to navigate from bed to door.

Did you have New Year’s eve sex? No? Yes? Me neither. I was in the hut,
banished from possibly cursing my boyfriends spear and making him liable to miss that vital shot at dinner…if I touched it when I had my period.Trust me, there is no spear touching going on when I have my dot. I guess we all have our hang ups and a ban on sex when the little lady is having “women’s troubles” is my b.f’s.

So yesterday was my chance to haul all eighty pounds of our combined clothes(most of it comprised of my man’s socks) to The Wash Cycle 340 Myrtle ave.

A pre-laundry haul scavenger hunt turned up a tidy stack of quarters which cut down on the expenditure of actual folding money thereby enabling me to purchase some seventy nine cent bags of Lender’s bagels.
I haven’t been so poor since I lived alone in Manhattan desperately clinging to my $1,110 a month apartment!
And while I expect some money to come in any day now, it hasn’t come yet and I need it.My one good bottle of wine policy is being flouted.I have 2 mediocre bottles.One of the caliber of deli wine and the other brought to me from Israel, which in Israel costs about 7 dollars but here in NYC costs around 27 if you can find it…so I am sort of saving it. *authors note: I drank it.
All anyone needs in order to enjoy some good old fashioned manual labor is 3 hours of sleep and cramps.It’s great.
My laundromat is not fancy.You do not have to purchase their little plastic card,then go through a twenty minute tutorial on how to put money on the card then guess how to use their machines,then go put more money on the card…you get the idea.
I live in the ghetto. I can only say this about the proprietors: a never ending supply of quarters(extremely rare, you know) plus hell hot dryers paired with lots and lots colorful folks from my neighbourhood=an awesome adventure! Apparently –on the day when I am absolutely forced to gather up my dirty clothes because I am down to wearing strange outfit combinations around the house because all my lounge wear is soiled– is also the day when 20 (7) member families have decided to take a family picnic…in the laundromat. I know I love to fix a 3 course meal and take my people to the mat in order to really enjoy it.All those tables! So what if they are for folding clean, dry clothes? They make such handy lunch counters.
When I am sort of in pain and haven’t had enough sleep I become alarmingly jovial if not witty.And my wry observations usually take place only inside my head . Last night roommaty thing D. who is as laundry inclined as I am, accompanied me so I was able to pass the grueling hours a little more pleasantly than usual.

Although D was sort of reeling from a marathon of dirty sex and partying(euphemism totally implied here) and the walk up Carlton gave him the cold sweats, we had a fine time listening to the obese woman with a skin condition berate her obese daughter for not noticing when another customer began to remove their clothes from the dryer—

Obviously a man who paid attention to details like numbered dryers and not to the fact that these weren’t his clothes.His terrified reaction to mother’s truculant “wtf are you touching my clothes for?!” , “this is dryer number 4! squeak! My clothes were here…” squeak! They’d been removed earlier and he was tardy.
I did my folding and packing we got the hell out of there.