NOTE: see the comments for updates about how this went in the end.
I think I’ve unearthed a conspiracy. In the wonderful world of the world-wide web (that’s WWWWW for short), with so much information available, and so many companies selling online, surely there must be a collection of standard procedures for implementing an online shop, and reliable sources of information covering them? Apparently not. How else to explain this except an evil conspiracy? In particular, an evil conspiracy against web designers and developers.
This post is drawn from an e-mail that I sent to a tech savvy client, a small business owner. The email summarized their options for e-commerce, in the specific context of the UK, and it was the result … read on »
Archive for May, 2010…
Everyone a Philosopher King
There’s an old adage that wanting to become a politician should disqualify you from becoming one. I just found it in Plato’s Republic, Book 7 520-521. Perhaps that’s where it comes from?
The state whose rulers come to their duties with least enthusiasm is bound to have the best and most tranquil government, and the state whose rulers are eager to rule is worst.
For Plato this means that rulers must be philosophers: those who have attained the knowledge of the absolute Good, which resides in the heavenly realm of eternal fixed forms of which the so-called real world that we live in is but a poor reflection. These philosophers, as well as being more just, wise and good than others owing … read on »
CSS Abstracted
Half way through the development of my last site I decided to use PHP files for CSS. I had a few stylesheets, and I found I was constantly going from one to the other to copy and paste hex colour codes. And then later, if I wanted to change a colour, I’d have to change it in all those different places. That really is no way to work.
The answer to this, of course, is variables (or constants), so that you can define your colours in one place. Trouble is, CSS don’t got none. In fact, CSS is lacking in several important ways. What it boils down to is that we struggle to get around the fact that CSS doesn’t work … read on »
©2010 Alistair Robinson