April Accomplishments

Training

I continued my ASP.NET 2.0 training, and have gotten through five chapters in my book, the most recent about theming. Based on this, I gave a presentation to the office titled .NET 101, which just gave a brief overview of what .NET is and isn’t, and an really short demo of how to use Visual Studio 2005. I spent too much time preparing for that, though, and didn’t get to cover the original topic Andrew assigned me, talking about themes and skinning in .NET 2.0 – I’ll probably pick that up sometime this month.

SelecTrucks

During April, I completed the next two SelecTrucks sites, for Los Angeles and Grand Rapids, and spent an alarming amount of time doing bugfixes and upgrades on Massachusetts and Chicago. Although they were production complete in March, we had a process change that had us putting the sites up on a temporary IP address instead of a staging URL, and some hassles came with that.

Production time went up, instead of down, which I’m irritated about. Los Angeles especially was a really complicated design, with a ton of absolutely positioned layers, and resulting complicated bugfixes.

I’m trying to pick up the production speed this month, but I’ve got a lot of other production work on my plate, too, so that’s slowing me down. Thankfully, there’s talk around the office of bringing a contractor in to help with the QA process, which should save me a lot of time.

Detroit Diesel

I spent a lot of time doing CSS templates for the DDC redesign. I’m very happy with the work I’ve done, and I’ve learned a lot about the processes we’re using, and the best practices I should be using. The design is great, which makes my job a lot easier.

We’re also doing some really cool stuff with transparent PNGs which is letting us keep a lot of the great truck and engine imagery inline, so non-CSS users can still enjoy the graphics.

Template production work was nearly complete last month, but IE compatability took longer than I expected, and I only just finished them up last week.