iWeb Issues

So to continue my rant before on iWeb.

I have been a web developer for almost 4 years, and my least favorite activity is making the actual web pages. I really enjoy the designing and coding of the Java pieces involved, but the actual HTML/JSP code is what I hate the most. This is all going to change in my favor soon, but technically already has. I have accepted a promotion to the framework development team. My job responsibilities will not be pure developing of applications, but rather I will be developing, maintaining, and supporting the Java code and standards that all Java developers are required to follow. This also means that I will be evaluating new technologies and how they would or could apply to Dillards. If Dillards wants to pursue them, I will do the initial research followed by the design, implementation, and standards that we will follow. Its a great step for my career, and is more in the direction that I would like to do. I have been working under this new title for a few weeks now and I really enjoy it.

However, I think i have gotten off topic.

Like I was saying, I like to use templates for web development stuff whenever I can. I really love the UI of iWeb, despite it being slightly crippled. The only problem is that you cannot easily create custom templates. Templates are themes that carry through the entire "site" you are going to be building. That is to say, its not impossible to make custom stuff. You can easily take a template theme and in each of the types of pages (blogs, photo pages, movie page, about me, etc) you can manually edit the way the original template looks. The small problem of manually editing the pages is the headache of making sure all the pages match the same general design. The worst part is the fact that outside of changing basic things like colors and fonts, you really cannot rearrange page elements to much or modify page functions of certain things. The only other option for manually editing of templates is to break down the application resources - that is the various XML files. While I am not scared of this at all, the problem is that when you pull the XML files into an editor they are completely all on one line. Its so jumbled it would be terribly hard to edit. I may eventually look back into this, but for now, I thought I would try to use Blogger. So far, I am pretty happy. After a few hours of manual editing of this template, I have something that looks non-cheesy and a tad more original - I THINK ha.

Anyway, so my goal here is to talk about all sorts of things. I want to talk about pretty much anything, work and personal. If you are not careful, I will be back later tonight.