onenaught.com

Posted on: Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 10:59 am

What is this site about?

Various ramblings on web development-related topics, focusing on areas such as web standards, accessibility, usability, xslt, css, javascript, etc.

Who am I? What do I do?

My name is Anup Shah, and I am a senior consultant for a small/medium sized company in the west of London. We work with a number of leading high street retailing companies (one of them being amongst the largest in the world), and I am often involved in various web development related projects, including architecture, design and development of multi-tiered systems. I also deliver training courses on such topics, too.

I have been doing software/web development for over 10 years, but really got into web standards around mid-2003. For many years, I have also done a lot of XSLT-based web development, and I find it to be quite a natural fit to generate standards-compliant output. (One of the reasons for starting this blog is to explain that better.)

I worked in the US for just under four years, eventually leading the web development for a dot com. It was really interesting stuff we were doing there; we developed what we called the XML API, around 2000. It was basically XML-based services before SOAP, REST and other things came out. We had implemented the ability to define what the XML inputs and outputs would look like using some XML configuration files. These files were also converted (via XSLT) into middle tier and presentation tier code to process the data (interestingly, I thought that code would just be proxies and stub code — turned out it rarely needed modifying!)

Mid 2001, I moved back to London, and after a break, towards the end of 2001, I joined the company I am still at. At this company, as well as working on large scale projects (including some of the largest online retailers in the UK, even the world), I deliver training courses on varied topics from web standards/accessibility, XSLT, to .NET/C# and introduction of ecommerce for non-technical people.

Of course, in the ideal world, this blog itself would be developed by myself with some custom code to demonstrate the potential of an XSLT-driven site and how it can work. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time (at the moment) and Word Press is quite convenient. That being said, each time I modify some Word Press template, I can’t help but think XSLT would be so useful. So hopefully I will start blogging about this sooner, rather than later!

What’s with the site’s name?

The name of the site, “one naught”, came from my wife! If ever we talk about web development related things, there comes a point where it gets too technical or boring, and she lets me know by using a hand puppet gesture and saying “one naught, one naught, one naught!”

What’s with the photos in the header?

Some people have asked how the photos in the header applies to the theme and logo, but in fact it is just a random set of photos I have taken in the past of some scenery somewhere (would like to say the room from my house, but that would be lying and I wouldn’t be here writing this stuff!) Refresh the page a few times and the picture will change randomly (there aren’t that many photos yet!)

Other notes

I have actually been meaning to start this blog for over two or three years, but never had enough spare time. (Actually I still don’t, but figured I’d have even less in the future, so started this anyway.)

After attending a number of excellent @media conferences, I kept getting the urge to start blogging, as my work colleagues and I were doing many things these conferences were talking about. The @media07 conference finally gave me enough of a push to start this!

This blog is driven by WordPress. While it is a neat blogging app, its templating system feels a tiny bit inconsistent; some tags write out content, others return strings which you can write out. Of course, it is all open source, and it can be modified, but the further back into the system I make changes, the harder upgrades become. Ultimately my impression of the template system, as I have created this theme, has been that an XSLT-based template system would be much easier — the subject of a future post! Writing about my ideas behind using XSLT to help generate web site content is also a major reason for starting this blog. Posts on that topic will eventually surface!