Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

jarkman reminded me of the Powermagic website which has been rotting for the last year or so since I had a decent brainstorming session. Now its time to revive it and turn it into a sensible tool for distribution of ideas.

For this I will need some help – is there anyone out there who can do any website design? I don’t want anything too exotic, just a bit of graphics and, perhaps, markup to go around them.

Also, anyone willing to throw around ideas, and get their hands dirty with some implementation (or prototyping) is welcome to mail the normal address.


Categories: Memories.

/ 8 Comments

8 comments

    • neilh

      Yes, lets throw around some ideas once I’m back in the UK – I’m interested in doing something with the cameras in phones, they have so much potential because they are always with you, contain a general purpose computer and a communications link, so if the local storage or processing power isn’t enough, services can live in the network. They are pretty much unused at the moment, people take pictures and send them to their friends but thats it. Theres so much more that could be done. My new phone here has a bar code reader, which is a step in the right direction, but isn’t really getting close to what is possible with these things.

      Reply
  2. neilh

    Graphics are the main problem – once I’ve got a few .gifs I can probably mark them up so they’re vaguely seeable, but I can’t draw….some feedback on my awful html would be appreciated, once I’ve got the update done.

    Reply
    • maluse

      Assuming you’ve got access to a Unix box of some kind, have a look at Website Meta Language. It’s a nice collection of macro languages and Perl that allows you to build page templates so that you can write purely content orientated page source (without this sort of thing, even with CSS, the HTML has to contain a lot of information about page layout for all but the most basic page designs – but that’s a rant for another day…) and have this translated into HTML automagically.

      Reply
      • neilh

        I’m not intending to write enough content just yet to make that kind of thing worthwhile. But I’m wholeheartedly into the idea of that kind of metalanguage….does website meta language do a better job for this kind of thing than docbook?

        (I keep seeing references to wml and parsing it as wireless markup language)

        Reply
        • maluse

          I’ve not used Docbook but WML should be a lot more flexible since it uses Perl as one of the macro passes, allowing you to do arbitrary computation when generating a page (a set of pages I’m building at the moment use Perl to generate a hierarchical menu down the side of the page when they’re generated).

          If you want some examples, look at my work web pages and replace “.html” with “.wml” to get the source of any page. The include files live here. The uni webserver unfortunately tags any “.wml” file as a WAP WML document so you may have to save the files to disk and look at them in a text editor.

          Reply
    • Anonymous

      What sort of graphics did you have in mind? I hope an ability to draw isn’t an essential prerequisite for doing website design, or I’m in big trouble ;-)
      Always happy to provide feedback on ‘awful html’, though I wouldn’t want to deprive Matti of the pleasure!

      Karen

      Reply
      • neilh

        Your feedback would be appreciated too….I’ve got a few ideas for graphics but I’m not sure I can make them work. The Powermagic name lends itself to an ellipse constructed from stars, but I think thats a little cheesy these days, since everyone else has their own interpretation of an ellipse….will see if I can figure out something else.

        Reply

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