Archive for October, 2006

we launched Timex!

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Now it can be told.

For the last 5 months I’ve been working with the development team on the new Timex website. We launched on Tuesday afternoon [EDIT: October 24, 2006] at 4:00 pm Pacific time, and it was kind of cool being in the "war room" listening to people report in on the speakerphone as the DNS entries propagated quickly across the net. "It’s picked up on Guardster already." "E.U., I can see the site." "Arizona here, looks good." Kinda like WarGames.[1]

Ironically, amusingly, the only people who had trouble seeing the site initially were Timex back in Middlebury, Connecticut. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out how long it took for the changes to reach their corner of the world. Being a front-end guy, there wasn’t much for me to do after they flipped the switch and went live (it’s not as though their drop-down menus were going to suddenly blow up).

Anyway. I’m relieved, and happy with the end product. Obviously a lot of people deserve credit for the successful launch, but it’s nice to know that I’ve made my mark on the world.[2]

EDIT (20061220): If you don’t believe me, look at my comments in the CSS.

Footnotes:
  1. It wasn’t as tense, but that was just because there were no nukes involved. Fortunately Timex had only conventional weapons. ;-)
  2. No spray paint required! No fuss, no muss, no concentrating and inhaling of contents!

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More about CSS

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

I’ve changed my mind about the CSS on our site. It was explained to me that the move to CSS was such a major paradigm shift for our organization that everyone is to be congratulated on how well it turned out. I know the devs were basically starting from scratch and they all have a good working knowledge of CSS now. They, in a word, rock.

There, that feels better, now doesn’t it? :-)

EDIT (20061110): To clarify: we were using CSS before, certainly; but large portions of the markup are now tableless and pure CSS.

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Down in the Software Mines

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

So my dad, he sez, how’s it goin? And I’m like hmmm.
Haven’t updated the weblog in a while. We are launching a merchant site in about 2 weeks, so we’re doing all the typical last-minute bug fixes. Everyone seems to like my work, which is still somewhat of a shock. (Talented programmers seem to think they’re either at the top or bottom of the heap, and I’m not arrogant enough to choose the top ;-)
(Thanks to Dad for the post title.)

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