Web Development by Alistair Robinson

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Goodbye and Good Riddance to Word Processors: A Better Way To Write Proposals

January 24th, 2012 2 Comments
A few days ago I tweeted: “Writing a proposal. Oh boy do I hate word processors. There must be a better way.” It turns out there is, though I ended up forging my own path to suit my skills and working methods. A little background… I need to produce decent looking proposals for web development projects. Normally I bite the bullet and suffer the awkwardness of Word or OpenOffice or LibreOffice or something, and then export to PDF. It’s all very clever: it took some great minds to produce this software. But it really goes against the grain. It feels so wrong. I like plain old text, and as a web developer I’m used to defining the style of documents by hand, in CSS, … read on »

CSS Abstracted

May 1st, 2010 2 Comments

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 »

Web Development and Chopping Garlic

December 2nd, 2009 1 Comment

For this post it was a toss-up between:
1. My observations on Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (boiling down to my realization that I’m a tangle of complexes, but also that I’m actually doing alright and won’t be running to an analyst any time soon)
2. A vague and geeky ramble over the broken, scarred and unstable terrain of web development.
Since moving this blog over to my website, I’m conscious I may be losing those who enjoyed such posts as Sweaty Rectangle and My 25-year-old Earworm, but the geeky ramble won out this time. Bear with me though: I am large, I contain multitudes.
Though I’ve been doing web development off and on for ten years, I’ve never been as enthusiastic about it … read on »


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