People sometimes ask why I work so often for jewish institutions and the correct answer – I make a living working for paying customers – seems to leave them vaguely dissatisfied ( I work for shoa.de for free, but that’s not a jewish site). So these people might be glad to hear see their respective bias confirmed when they hear that this time I did something mostly “for the cause”.
The Berlin non-profit “Freunde der Habimah” (”Friends of the Habima“) is hosting a series of events in April 2008 to celebrate – and reflect upon – the 60 anniversary of the state of Israel. I did the programming work on the website “Begegnungen – 60 Jahre Israel in Berlin” (in german), the graphics design was done by friends and long-time partners kakoii.de.
Admittedly I myself am more interested in the politics than in the culture – I’m looking forward to the discussion panel that will include, among other participants, journalist Hermann L. Gremliza, Editor of the Konkret Magazine – it is possibly ironic and in any case typical that one of the most pronounced critics of german nationalism is one of the few people who have actually mastered the german language. German is not exactly a poetic language and fit for heroics only if you like wagnerian pathos, but is quite suitable for his kind of sharp-tongued political commentary. So apart from the substance of the discussion I guess this will be also fun to listen to.
Beco-Beermann is a medium sized business located in the city of Bad Salzuflen; they are specialized in swimming gear, water toys and their own line of what they call ‘Aqua Fitness’ (water sports) equipment. I built their website years ago and now it was time for a major update.
The site was running on a heavily patched and customized version of Mambo 4.5.1 with a Design provided by Matthias Pestel. I re-built it with Joomla 1.0.13, using Danel Ecers ‘extended menu’-Module and the indispensable Joomfish for multilingual support. Other than that (well, and the customized start page) I tried to stick as closely as possible to a plain vanilla installation of Joomla, because customizing makes updating really a pain in the lower backside (although I’m not quite sure if there actually will be any updates for the 1.0.xx versions). I just transferred the site from a staging server to the live server so there might be a few glitches to sort out, but most of the work is done.
I have to say I quite like this site; it has well withstood the test of time, it is eagerly maintained and updated and receives a fair share of visitors. Beco-Beermann is a thriving business that in the last years branched out into new product lines and has expanded well in the east european markets and I am actually a little proud that in a very small way I could assist them on their way to success.
I guess the people at Yahoo really do know what they are talking about. The Yahoo Developer Network has this nice page with Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site , a list with 14 rules (not all of which may apply to a website) to get your site to load faster. Usually I prefer maintanability over performance, but one sites I’m currently working on had so poor response times that I needed a significant improvement before the thing goes live.
So far I followed two suggestions from the site: I concatenated the multiple style sheets into one to reduce the number of http requests per site (I also removed comments and unnecessary whitespace) and I moved all javascript to the page bottom. I didn’t run a formal test, but then this wasn’t necessary – the HTML now almost renders immediately, only some of the eye candy that is applied via Javascript lags a little behind. I wonder if this will get even faster when I try the other rules that are applicable to my site. But I’m already very, very pleased with the results, these two minor changes really made some major difference.
No, this is not a misspelled request for Ms Tyler. “Where is Lviv” is an exhibition about the city of Lviv ( known in germany as Lemberg) that opened yesterday at the Centrum Judaicum here in Berlin. As it says on the homepage
On the threshold between East and West, the city was an important center of European Judaism, a sanctuary of refuge from anti-Semitic persecution; it also represented a departure from the narrowness of the Galician shtetl. A Jewish culture free from exclusion and ghettoization was able to develop in Lviv, until World War II and National Socialism brought a brutal end to the history of this unusually bustling city so full of joie de vivre.
[...]
An exhibition in the historical rooms of the New Synagogue in Berlin invites you to experience the fascinating past and present of a city in which visionary scientists, international stage stars, famous writers and many now forgotten artists once lived.
I did the programming work, the excellent graphics design was provided by Nina Höffken. If you happen to be in Berlin between now and Dec. 2nd you really should pay the exhibiton a visit – the Centrum Judacicum is located in Oranienburger Strasse 28-30, the exhibition opens Sunday to Friday at 10 am (closed on saturday and jewish high holidays). Url is http://www.lemberg-ausstellung.de/ .
Oh, and there is a little problem with the web hosting (out of my hands, I’m afraid), so sometimes you might get a timeout when you follow the link. Simply try again, it will work eventually.
Ronald Reagan allegedly said that, refering to his performances as an actor. My clients usually want good work, but sometimes speed matters even more.
Last week a client called to ask if I could do a website on short notice; this wednesday I finally received the graphics design, and apart from some finishing touches I completed the work by Friday (it’s due by tomorrow – it’s a site for an exhibiton that starts on sunday). The code is not bad, but I could have done better. It always hurts to have to admit that, which means I hurt a lot these days, but all in all I’m a lot more comfortable than I was at the beginning of my freelancing career, when I was constantly aiming for perfection and, most of the time, failing big time.
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Busy busy busy… apart from the usual business there are some projects that have to be pulled through in quite a hurry. Berlin DJ Zuckermann needs a new site by the end of the month plus a somewhat embarrassed staff member from the Centrum Judaicum (New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation) called to ask if I could do a small page for a new exhibition of theirs by the end of next week, which is a bit of short notice so to speak. So I won’t have much time for private stuff (only that I will still take the weekend off to visit the summer camp of the bike club Kuhle Wampe). But there are some things that shall not go unmentioned:
- Shuttle Endeavour has landed safely. There was a bit of worry about the heat shield that had been damaged in the launch but the damage had been investigated and NASA decided that repairs weren’t necessary. Obviously they were right. Go to the shuttle mission pages at nasa.gov and look at some images – the Shuttle is a magnificent craft and I’m sorry that it will soon be decomissioned.
- I finished Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Sequel to Forty Signs of Rain, and I still haven’t warmed up (global warming pun is accidental) to the series, partly because I still think it focuses to much on the private life of the characters but mostly because it reads more and more like a news report and less like science fiction. But please don’t let me detain you from reading it – both books are actually quite good, it’s more that at the moment I could rather do with something more escapist.
- If you’re into german science fiction: Jacob informs us that the second edition of the magazine Pandora is soon to hit the stores – he is one of the editors there, which gives him the opportuntiy to hang out with cool people like John Clute. Dang, I shouldn’t have given up on my writing career.
Now I going to burn some midnight oil to get some things off the desk. If you came to look for progress on the content item module for Joomla 1.5 I would urge you to download it and play around (not on production sites). I do not have much time to do testing on my own so I would be grateful for any comments.
