Mark Wong’s bit of the interweb

Ok, so I gave in and decided to just go with wordpress rather than pursuing with the home rolled blogging platform. The world doesn’ t need yet another blogging platform and I couldn’t really be arsed coding it. Another reason to switch was the amount of comment spam I was getting!

Lesson learned: Don’t roll your own when there’s stuff out there already that does it a whole lot better!

Wordpress isn’t brilliant but it gets the job done. It’s pretty easy and quick for someone to customise/hack it to the way you want it to look and work and is why it’s become so popular. Hacking it for this site wasn’t that hard as I’ve been customising a wordpress installation for work which has made it less painful.

The design’s still crap and have had to take things such as the flickr images and youtube videos off for the moment. I need to find/hack/write plugins that does exactly what the previous incarnation of wonkenstein did. Writing/hacking plugins for wordpress sounds a heck of a lot more fun and less overwhelming than trying to roll your own blogging platform. I want to get some of the fun-ness back into coding as it’s not been quite the same as it was.

Have done a bit more tweaking of the code so I’ve got a home rolled blogging type platform. It took longer than I thought and probably should have used some sort of framework type thing to make the development faster. It is re-inventing the wheel, but it’s kinda fun doing your own thing.

I’ve also come across Selenium, a test tool for web applications/sites, and have been playing with it in the past couple of days. It rocks!

Testing forms and websites is a laborious and extremely tedious process, but you can automate it using Selenium - repeatable tests that save you time and sanity! It’s a really sweet and impressive bit of software, watching the tests being run in the browser is fun.

What’s more the Selenium IDE firefox extension makes creating tests simple and intuitive. It can record your actions in the browser, or you can write the tests yourself. It’s most definitely better than alright!

2 roasts in 2 days! Both delicious! Once with mighty ‘jup jup’ gravy, the other was a freebie at The Queen B.

Went to Thorpe Park at the weekend which was a lot of fun and definitely better than ‘alright’!

Piccies on my Thorpe Park photoset

• Re-instated the pink link rollovers - thanks Stillers!
• Thinking about colour schemes, but will need to talk to a designer about this…
• I’m above Adam for a “Mark Wong” Google search now!