26 September, 2003

The end of a project and none to follow (hopefully not a long term issue) mean I have some spare time. The office is very empty at the moment as the other occupant is contracting so I have decided to start seriously using the technology I keep selling and work remotely (ie. from home)…and it is working really well. It’s amazing what you can achieve with a 56k modem.

I have also spent some time sorting out some issues with the ZYPE sites (this one included) and, in my humble opinion, have done something pretty clever (for a Designer). The homepages both include a site summary which has been done using RSS which was embedded in the homepage XML file. I wanted it to be a separate file so it could be used for other things so I figured out, with some help from developer friends, how to combine two XML files on the fly. It worked so well that I moved on to another idea using the same technique.

The homepage of this site also includes the first item from the Word section. Originally I simply wrote the item in the Word XML file and copied it into the homepage XML but with the new technique the item I needed is taken automatically from the Word XML and included in the homepage XML. Suddenly my homepage is a collection of modular elements pulled from all sorts of places as the page is loaded and the Internet is interesting again.