You think you know people and hang in the right circles but then mother nature comes up and whacks you upside your head. Anyways, spending some time with some “other” folks here at work after our big, ugly re-org (yeah, those are so productive to the work environment, not to mention the bodies it leaves in its wake) and lo and behold I discover other real live geeks in the same company. Yup, true honest geeks with websites and people that know about more technology than what they do at work every day (and willing to admit to). So hopefully I’ll be accepted into their geekly ranks and join up in their regular web content wars. The guys I hang around directly in my group haven’t grasped the concept of a blog yet and say “Bless you” when I mention it. Oh woe is me.
We had a good chuckle at lunch today after doing some ego searching with the geek squad. I have to say that I can now safely critisize some of these pals websites (although I probably need to be inducted into the official hall of shame after a few beers before I really qualify). I mean, we’re all IT professionals here and yet here we are with some pretty shoddy webmanship. I now know the extent of the web wars incidents we talked about and I’m certainly no prize winner when it comes to content or design as I change out the look of things as much as I change my underwear. Here’s the roundup so far of their websites, but I’ll let you be the judge of each.
John Paddington
John is a great guy but suffers from Matrixitis. I guess we need to smack him around a bit and tell him to stop trying to make his website look like a VMS terminal from 1968. His site does prod me to get my DVD collection online though (although I’m still not sure why anyone would care what I’m watching, unless you’re talking about the porn collection in which case Table Dances with Wolves and Catcher in the Rear come highly recommended). John is probably the only guy who’s got the architecture of his site posted and it’s slick (and data driven, 15 points to Griffindor). He has some other neat stuff and has discovered the wonderful world of .NET to create flair and excitement on his page backgrounds. And hey, you can learn some Japanese while you’re at it!
Tom Jones
No, not the infamous singer (whom I still think blows Frank Sinatra out of the water anyday) but good ol’ Tom is a developer (and I’ll use that term lightly) who worked at CP. He’s left CP now and off on his own to find out what he wants to be when he grows up. Unfortunately, Tom enjoys dancing around in his undies and posing for us and hasn’t really grasped the concept of the web just yet. His bastardization of dotNetNuke would have Linux Torvalds rolling in his grave but I do enjoy checking out his accident counter. At least he’s gone 73 days without injuring himself, which for Tom is quite a feat.
Rob Pearson
What can I say about Rob except he’s a straight shooter and doesn’t smash you in the face with his site (I do wonder why we have to call him “big” though?). Nice and simple site so not much to complain about. Looks like Rob is applying the Jakob Neilson school of web design but does need to learn how to page out his old info so we’re not scrolling through years of messages. There are some rules of content and maybe Rob voilates most of them, but I guess I should contact A&E; to get that episode done so he can get some content happening.
Kevin Ritchot
Kevin does what most of us Shaw residents did, string a series of free sites together to cash in the 10mb limit and create a mega site of stuff. He’s got cool pics (and pretty much that’s all, pictures but no text but he’s learning to type so give him time) of everything from baby in the outfield to renovating his house. Watch for his Bob Villa special coming soon to an overtaxed bandwidth site near you. I couldn’t get his hit counter to come up but then I could never figure out what those were for except to gloat about how popular you think you are. Maybe I’ll install one here because lord knows I need to know how many people I’ve suckered into consuming precious hard drive space in their browser cache with my dribble.