Justin Nicholl Research and Learning & Research This Week
That's No Nice
Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to the Justin Nicholl briefing on Thursday thanks to my anually recurring chest infection. I've had to rely on a friend to provide me with a summary of the briefing and I was equally shocked and amused by how many aspects of the 'Pastaly' brand where ruled out by Justin in this session.
- The brand shouldn't have a national identity.
- The brand shouldn't be linked to Italy in anyway.
This rules out both of my logo ideas that revolved around the colours of the Italian national flag. Arguably it could also rule out the Pastaly brand name altogether since the last 4 letters are identical to those that appear in the name Italy.
However I don't think this is overly obvious. It'll be necessary to come up with a new tagline which will reflect some of the key information.
HTML 5
According to this article over on A List Apart, the natural successor to XHTML 1.1 seems to be HTML 5 which will be ready to be implemented within 10-15 years. 10-15 years!?!?! Will the Internet even exist in the same capacity as it does now, then. And what exactly happened to XHTML 2.0?
There are some interesting additions to the current HTML 5 specification, most notably the introduction of specialised tags for headers, sections and other common parts of an HTML document that are normally marked up inside an ID. This will definitely make life easier for screen readers and will discourage web designers from specifying their own naming conventions for site components. All in all, this should act as a welcome step towards the Structured Web (or Web 3.0 as some of the 'pundits' are calling it).
CSS Frameworks
I was recently introduced to the idea of CSS Frameworks by A List Apart. Essentially a CSS framework is a set of CSS rules that you apply to almost all of your designs, such as resetting browser defaults or changing the width of a container block. This stylesheet is stored on a remote server and is then included within any HTML document as desired. This subsequently cuts down on code replication.
The problem with this approach is that it can lead to all of your designs looking similar. It can also hinder page load times, especially if the current HTML document and base sheet are stored on two different servers.
The Facebook Platform
This week I've had a look at the Facebook Platform, which is essentially an API that allows developers to build in additional functionality into Facebook. I've spent much of today reading through the Developing with the Facebook Platform and PHP article over on Sitepoint.com, playing around with some ideas that might help give my major project an edge.
For example I could build in a religion quiz feature into the site where people ask their friends 'Are Your Religious Beliefs Compatible With Mine?'. Users could subsequentally embed this feature into their Facebook profile which could help give the site a bit of exposure.
Lift Pitch and Project Name
Ok, it's time to stop fannying around and actually decide upon a name for the project and then of course a lift pitch.
My idea is still too vague. It tries to do too much at once. This is why I've decided to scrap the "make your own religion" aspect out of it. I think it'd be too difficult to implement and it'd likely be overly controversial. I see the core structure of the site as a directory of beliefs.
Right, now I'm gonna boil the site down into its basics..
- Its a social networking website about belief.
- Its aim is to try to evolve religious belief by devolving power back to the people from the churches / state (that's an overly pretentious way of saying its user focused. All of the content will be user generated.)
Phew. Ok. Now names. I've had quite a few buzzing around in my head for a while but I've yet to actually sit down and have a proper brainstorming session. The key to this is to produce a name that's short, catchy, pronouncable and available as a .com domain.
Relphy it is
Hurray! I'm delighted with this name as it satisfies all of the criteria I outlined earlier. The only problem is that it sounds like a dog's name...
Why Relphy?
Well my project won't just be about religion. It'll cover all sorts of beliefs from the occult to love. It's as much about philosophy as it is about religion. The name is simply comprised of the first three letters of religion and the last three of philosophy
RELigion + PhilosoPHY
So yeah, what's the pitch?
"Relphy.com is an inclusive belief-based social networking website. Think Myspace meets 43things.com for the religious and irreligious alike. It'll provide a platform for people to create their own belief systems and share their own insights concerning the nature of reality whilst promoting constructive dialogue amongst all of its members."
Maybe a little pretentious.....but this is a design module! So fuck it!
Domain Registration and Setting Nameservers
The next step involved registering relphy.com and setting its nameservers to point to my VPS.
I registered the domain over at Dynadot.com for $7.50 for the year which was pretty cool and then setup the Name Servers like so.
Subversion?
On Placement last year I learnt a little bit about configuration management systems, mainly Subversion. As a team we used it to control the source code of the content management system that we were creating at the time. Unfortunately, I didn't really get to use it that much as I was sceptical that we even needed to use it for such a small project (which was actually a bit stupid because it's been used all the time out in industry and I could have added this to my CV).
I'd like to use it to control the source for my major project but I still don't understand how it works. Fortunately there are a number of Subversion tutorials on the web, namely this one from IBM.
Ubuntu
Today I re-installed Ubuntu in an attempt to improve my knowledge of Linux. I'm currently dual-booting it with Vista and things were going great until I tried to install a driver for my Nvidia Geforce 8800GS graphics card. This in turn completely banjaxed the X Window server meaning I had to download new drivers using the command line interpreter.
What fun that was! Kinda....
I spent approximately 6 hours trying to get to grips with surfing online from a CLI. Thank God for lynx and wget! Seriously though it was good using lynx just to see how my blog would appear to a search engine robot.
But yeah, I'm gonna try to work with Ubuntu as much as possible over the coming months. The experience will be invaluable when I start to apply for jobs at the end of the year.
