The blog has started to fall to pieces on a standard wordpress template and a lack of interest on my part. I sit at a computer for in excess of 12 hours a day so I avoided any unnecessary contact outside of work. This drew all personal projects to a close including this one.

However I have finally got the blogging bug back and spent most of last night clicking the mouse in different positions in Photoshop until this layout appeared and managed to get it mostly coded up. It’s far from perfect… I’m not a designer and never wish to be but I do like my work to be my own. So this is it for the time being.

I have steered away from biting the HTML5 bullet because I do not wish to try to mash together a wordpress template together and battle with 3rd party plugins/update that will want me to tear my hair out.

You can expect over the coming months my ramblings on PHP, MySQL, Server Management, My new experience with the Magento platform and general rants of bad code, life and confusions.

When I first started off building websites I used to think of myself of a bit of a designer/developer and tried to get away with doing both the design and the development of the website. This is a trend you will see across the internet with people who are designers trying to build the backend of a website or developers that for some reason think they are capable of designing a corporate website.

It wasn’t long before I realised that it is a miracle to find someone that is both a inspirational designer and a proficient programmer. The two skill sets just don’t seem to mix if you are ever unlucky enough to come across one of the websites that I tried to design back in my early days you will see the point I am making. Some people do however have this rare combination of skills but one usually seems to suffer to allow for the other progress.

Don’t try to make yourself as a designer if you don’t have that design flare all good designers seem process you will only end up disappointing both yourself and the client you are working for. The same thing goes for designers trying to mackel together a backend system for a website or even worse an e-commerce system. This can have a more devastating effect when someone finds a security hole in your poorly written code and starts to harvest users credit card details.

Use your abilities to your advantage! Don’t let them suffer trying to be a jack of all trades.

I have now graduated university and feel a fresh start is required as I enter my working life. I am going to be slowly taking http://www.knowj.com out of action and replacing it with http://www.thisisjohn.co.uk.

My aim for this site is for it to be a place for me to post articals on the techniques and developments I come across,  sharing my knowledge of web development with the wider community.

I have always used my own blogging system but over the past few weeks I have been writing plugins and modding the wordpress system for the new Nzime Blog. After learning how adaptable and easy to use the wordpress system is from a development point of view it seems pointless using my own inferior system. We developers have a saying of “theres no point reinventing the wheel” especially if your trying to reinvent it with an inferior product.

The main focus of the blog will be on PHP, MySQL, xHTML, CSS and Javascript developments hopefully in an understandable and usable format.

this is john… ME!