Big Andy's Blog

Sunday Morning

Good morning to all out there on this beautiful brilliantly cold ice-blue Sunday morning! On the stereo is Mercury Rev’s “All is But a Dream” and I’ve just finished a glass of delicious orange juice.

Recently I have been quite busy learning more about wordpress and how to customise it further. How to add custom javascript libraries, custom CSS. All that’s happening can be seen over at my test blog. I am using the starkers HTML5 theme as a starting point and also using the HTML5 boilerplate CSS reset so that I am working from a base-line so that any changes I make make it mine even more. Experimenting with CSS3 and also learning more about PHP and how PHP is implemented in wordpress. Yes I am having a great time!

Outside the air is cold and frost lies on the ground and inside I wonder if it’s now time to have some breakfast, time to get moving onwards with the day and then do some studying (I am revising for the final module of my Masters CIW course).

Monday Morning!

The weekend flew past and it’s Monday morning. Before I go to work I will tell you what’s been going on since last I wrote. I passed my penultimate CIW exam – CIW Site Designer – with 91%, went to London Web Standards (about accessibility), had my first ever IT job interview, to the (6th) annual Pidgeon Walking Weekend in (Herefordshire), and to my brother’s birthday drinks in London.
Otherwise I have been learning about the Typographic Grid (with help from Mark Boulton’s site, and Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop” book) and learning some PHP.

This week I am going away somewhere (either Bath or Brighton) to celebrate the three years that Marion and I have been going out together. Tonight I am going to London Web Standards which tonight is about HTML5 and Flash.

Weekend and Studying

Sunday afternoon and the birds are cheeping, otherwise it’s quiet and I am taking a break from studying. This week has been a busy one with my first ever Reading Geek Night with Mike Robinson talking about “HTML5 Today”, Mark Adams “Geeks are Gods”, Chris Alexander on “Darks arts of SEO” and Workhouse Coffee’s “Coffee Geeks”. Wednesday we went to see Foals play at the Academy in Oxford, preceded by an excellent meal in Coco on Cowley Road. Thursday night. Otherwise this week I have been studying and coding.

Coding

Currently on the coding side of things I am working on putting the top 3 (or 5) blog.big-andy.co.uk headlines, with a small summary, on the main page of my site big-andy.co.uk.
So far I have succeeded in getting information e.g. headline, summary on a page on my test site but that still needs some more work before it will go on my main site. Also I have been working on some JS and PHP.

Studying

This week has been intense. I have been doing lots of online mock exams as well as practising areas that I need to improve on. This morning and last night I took 3 online “Full Exam” exams and scored 93% then 96% respectively. I think I am ready for the proper exam and to move onwards.