Personal — Page 24

Radio silence is golden

January 29, 2001 by Michael Boyle

. I was away and offline for the weekend, which was even more appreciated in this time of resume chucking and general wonder that every email I receive might be a really cool proposition. I haven’t swung into high gear on my job search yet, preferring to take some time and concentrate on some personal projects that I want to do for the joy of them. But I have received some very exciting nibbles – even though many of the emails I have sent to people were of the “less than 1% chance” variety.

In contrast, the offline-ness of the past few days has been great – and even more, no one I was with really works in the web world, or not primarily anyhow (not many can escape it in some form at work).

Just learned from Heather

January 25, 2001 by Michael Boyle

that Dan Gallagher died yesterday. I don’t have such personal memories of him and his work, but I remember that particular heyday of Canadian music well (the late 80s-early 90s, back when John “JD” Roberts from CBS was a VJ) and he was a real standup guy for friends of mine in bands (as I recall).

Tom makes a great

January 20, 2001 by Michael Boyle

point today at plasticbag.org. I enjoy using Blogger, but as a point of principle it’s important to have a variety of tools available for content management.

Personally, I don’t think it’s viable to ever do a site, even a small site, without integrating a means to manage the writing (at least) without messing with the raw html files. I’ve done lots of small sites for people who haven’t made a big commitment to a web strategy – they just want a little website.

When I do a site like that I am available to make updates – but those sites have usually been done as a favour, for free. I don’t always have the time to maintain them fully. So I generally try and download most or all of the update responsibility for updates to my “client” – usually a friend or someone like that. And they always mess them up.

So for me, it’s really important that there are options available for content management, that the tools are being developed.

I’m starting to put this idea to the test today, when I (finally) have my first real meeting with the nice people at Santropol Roulant, for whom I’m putting together a small team to build a site as a donation. The idea is to do a well-designed, professional quality site for the organization – an important meals on wheels service here in Montreal. So we’re going to start to define the project today, and implicit in the project definition will be to include content management tools so they can “own” the daily management of their own site.

There was more on the privacy front

December 14, 2000 by Michael Boyle

in Canada today. Jen Ditchburn (who I knew when she lived here in Montreal) reports that the privacy of personal data is to become a right that will be protected by law. The new law will apply pretty broadly too, it seems. Good news.

To continue with

November 23, 2000 by Michael Boyle

the Montreal theme of today’s entries, it turns out that The Old Brewery Mission has a website.

For more than 110 years, the Old Brewery Mission has cared for those suffering the greatest need in the City of Montreal. In times of economic decline and in times of relative prosperity, the Old Brewery Mission has provided safe shelter, nourishing meals and personal contact for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to care for themselves and have nowhere else to go.

If you live in Montreal and are looking for a worthy cause to support, take a look at the Old Brewery.