Rory Franklin

It seems like a bit of a resurgence of blogging at The Planet recently! It’s been a very long time since I last blogged, mainly because I hate the layout of this blog… I’ll get around to redesigning it after I finish my placement year… maybe! Super quick recap before more detail:

I’ve been very busy with work, lots of things happening at the company and i’ve been learning lots of new things.

I’ve also been having an amazing time outside of work. A group of us had a weekend trip to Bournemouth and there was also the Easter weekend. Random nights out have proved good fun and basically the year is coming to an end far too soon!

Work has been very busy recently with a new product launch (I do a lot of work on the product .co.uk websites, like putting on content etc. The design is all created by the US and we localise the content and images [the legal process is different between the US and other territories - it's all rather interesting but I won't go into many specifics, plus i'm not sure what i'm allowed to say due to the nature of what my company does]). I’ve also been doing more ASP work migrating a site from a Microsoft Access database with various text-file databases over to SQL Server 2000. This has basically meant a re-write of the site because a lot of the existing code was using text file databases (the Access-driven pages weren’t so bad because it basically meant a few changes to SQL and not much else).

I had a small amount of design-based work recently, but the site had to use some glaring pink’s and yellow’s. I was very happy with the result, as was the user - which is the most important one! Generally speaking though, the work I do is back-end with a small amount of front-end stuff.

I also have to prepare, along with the two other guys I work with, a CSS and xHTML training session for the new placement students in July. Basically the current intranet is mainly table-based designs. We’ve endevoured to do as much work as we can using compliant, CSS-styled pages to make the mark-up clearer for the developers when they come in to make changes to pages. I’ve had many times when i’ve looked at a page and struggled to know what was going on because of all the tables-within-tables making things confusing. This means we have to get our CSS knowledge up-to-scratch to provide a good enough training so that they’ll be able to work with the stuff we’ve made and hopefully continue to use that method of design. I’m not sure how much they’ve used CSS with xHTML before, which could make things difficult - before we started work at the company i’d done lots of CSS and one of the other guys had done a fair amount too. We both helped each other and helped teach the third guy how to do things (who now is quite proficient at it).

Onto the social side of things…

Last weekend I had an amazing trip to Bournemouth. Absolutely amazing. 6 of us took the friday off work and went to Thorpe Park (it’s a theme park) for the day. The weather was good and there were barely any queues! Couldn’t really ask for much more! Then we drove down to Bournemouth arriving at about 7pm. We stayed at one of the girls’ from work’s house in Poole, which was really, really nice and after a bite to eat and getting ready, we went into town. It was a really good night out in the Yates’ and Walkabouts there. Plenty of photo’s and good memories from that night!

On the saturday, we slept off the hangover and then wandered down to the beach. The weather was clear blue skies and very warm, which was perfect! We walked all along the beach to Bournemouth town center (about a 30 min walk) and went around town for a bit. My friends all got a Shake-away (which is basically a milkshake that you can have nearly anything in! they had some crazy combinations) and I bought a pair of trainers (wanted to buy three pairs, but they only had one in my size ).

We went back to the beach and had fun and games there for a while and then went back to the house to get ready to go out. That night we went back to Yates and then onto a club called Elements. Elements was absolutely rubbish!!! Still had a great night though, and the hangover on sunday proved it!

After a casual drive back to Hertfordshire on sunday i proceeded to pass out and catch up on all the lost sleep from that weekend! I didn’t get much on friday and saturday night!

Other than that we’ve just had random nights out. I’ve got exams coming up in May (first one next wednesday ) and then after that i’m back on the social scene. We’ve already got Pub Golf/Lunge Hoddesdon planned with hopefully a Super Heroes and Villains night too!

Tags: CSS, Merck, SQL