Dan Rooke’s Blog

I have now completed my final assignment and submitted it for marking. All I have left now is to complete my placement diary, my final appraisal and potentially another placement visit.

My replacement started two weeks ago and I have trained him up. He has been doing the job by himself for the last week, he’s doing well!

My placement officially ends 5th July but I have decided to stay on over the summer until September. I will be doing a different role however, this will involve working with our new ASP Senior Developer, Paddy, on the CCL Online website as well as the company intranet.
I have been working with Paddy for the last week now doing some ASP exercises and also an accessibility analysis on CCL Online. I come from a PHP background and so I’m having to adjust to ASP through doing a few exercises.

Our first little project will be to redevelop the company intranet as it is many years out of date! After the intranet has been redeveloped, we shall be working on further development of the CCL Online website. There is currently a very long list of work to be done, this is to be split between the external company who developed the site and the in-house team. I feel that some experience of ASP will work in favour in the future, however I still would like to stay in a PHP development environment.

I will be choosing my final year module options this week, they have to be in by Friday - I will keep you posted!

It has now been two weeks since I started work on my project for CCL. I feel that I’ve made good progress having completed the majority of the work. I have a few non-essential tasks to complete and then it will be a case of re-testing and rolling out to the live site. I guesstimate it’ll be finished in another week or so.

I have been so busy over the last few weeks, it’s been mad! And it’s all down to the new website.The site has taken up so much time recently trying to get all the content on there and we are still a way off completion. It is coming together slowly and the new site is now our primary site with the old site only taking a few orders.

I have been responsible for the optimisation of our weekly e-shot last week. I have discovered the wonders of XHTML and intend to use this for all current and future projects. The optimisation went well with a 10% reduction in size of the email and much tidier code! I have also done made alterations to the design and layout to improve appearance and reduce bounces due to the mail being classed as spam. I feel I have learnt a reasonable amount about email marketing.

I hope to be starting my price comparison project in ernest sometime this week. I shall be using PHP and PEAR with a Micorsoft SQL Server backend. This should prove an interesting project allowing me to gain more knowledge of file and data manipulation as well as dabbling with XML. I was perhaps thinking of using something similar to this as my final year project.

Phew that was a long one!

It’s been an interesting and very busy couple of weeks - the result has been the new website is up and running fairly well!We’ve put a lot of work into getting it working and the content up-to-scratch. I’ve been heavily involved with it. Many a meeting has been had and I’ve put quite a few good ideas in

I’ve got a project I’m working on as a sideline at work, creating a web app to generate data for price comparison sites. I’m just researching it and specifying it at the min. May invlove me going on an ASP course or I could do it in PHP. It’s something interesting to work on if nothing else!!

Well we had a nice relaxing break in France. Got back to find a flood in the hall but it’s nearly sorted now.

Coming up to two months now at CCL, will soon have my visit from Rob Lloyd-Owen. It’s going well and had some good comments from people so far. That reminds me, I need to re-register! Haven’t seen any sign of this off-campus registration yet - there was nothing about it in the letter about re-registering.

The students return in 3 weeks which should make town a bit more lively!