So while I’m waiting to hear back from a few people I’m talking to about full time jobs I’ve been spending my time freelancing and working on my own stuff. One thing I’ve tried to put a lot of effort into lately is blogging. I was listening to a terrific podcast about web design called Boag World where they talked about what they (two guys who run a fairly popular web firm in the UK) look for in potential employees, and one of the things they said was that seeing a applicant with an active blog where they talked about things that they are tinkering with in web development and just digging deeper into web development concepts is more important then a bachelors degree. This made a lot of sense to me.
It worked out well to make a blog since I’ve been looking for an excuse to use Ruby on Rails for a real project now that I spent so long trying to get it working on my server. But I was able to finish up and get my blog online at http://bmdev.org I was also able to make a little “API” for my self by using JSONP to expose my friends and links to who ever wanted them in JSON. I used this “API” on my other web site http://www.benmillsdesigns.com/about so that I could be consistent across sites.
I think API’s are becoming a very important aspect about web design especially for someone like me doing smaller scale sites where the more I can cut down on development costs the better. Everyone wants to be able to add photos, videos, and text to their web site, they basically want the a full CMS (content management system) but the problem with that is you either need to spend time learning about a premade CMS and learn how to make templates for it and use plugins to create the exact experience that works for your project or you have to create one from scratch.
The problem with the first view is that you have to force your client into a slot that is pre-defined by a CMS, so almost always you have to make some type of compromise. I don’t like this because your letting technology dictate functionally and that is wrong, technology should always be just the means. But on the flip side building a full custom CMS for the most part is going to take way to long. So my solution is the heavy use of APIs.
I’m doing a site for a DJ company right now and they want to upload pictures of past shows and have an interactive gallery on the site that gets updated with new photos and also have a photo reel on the home page as well. I was thinking about cooking up a simple photo manager using cakePHP since its worked well in the past for me doing quick CMSs but this time I thought it might be better to just use Flickr to host the images since they already knew how to use it and I could just use Flickr’s extensive API to create all the functionality I need. This way you get the flexibility that I think is required in these type of sites but with out the extra development time.
