Yesterday, it seems that the site I spent about the last 4 months developing, The Farmshed, went live! The old disastrous site is thankfully gone, but the new site isn’t without it’s share of problems. The markup is quite semantic, but not totally pure. There is a single layout table used to achieve the 3 column layout, but I was forced to implement that for reasons beyond anyone’s control – Internet Exploder! Most of the site validates. In fact all of the pages I worked on while I was there do validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but sadly, several of the pages created after I left do not.

On one of the pages, he seems to have made one of the most bewildering errors I’ve ever seen. A mailto: link has been written like this.

<a mailto:customerservice@thefarmshed.com.au.invalid>Customer
    Service</a>

Obviously, it should be:

<a href="mailto:customerservice@thefarmshed.com.au.invalid">Customer
    Service</a>

However, it’s no-longer my problem, I just hope it gets fixed. (The e-mail was munged with .invalid to prevent spammers finding it)

Other than the bewildering validation errors, and some relatively minor UTF-8 encoding problems due to the configuration of the database (that will hopefully be fixed in the near future), the server has its own problems also. Visiting the URI, http://www.thefarmshed.com.au/, redirects to the IP address of the server. This is obviously a temporary measure until the DNS records are set up properly, but it’s the method of redirection that I find odd. The HTTP request and response headers contain the following:

http://www.thefarmshed.com.au/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.thefarmshed.com.au
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1 StumbleUpon/1.998
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-au,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 301 Error
Location: http://61.95.30.11/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 135

Notice the 301 response code! A 301 is supposed to be HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently. Firstly, I don’t understand why the poorly configured Microsoft IIS HTTP server is sending an invalid response, and secondly, I don’t understand why it would be trying to send a Moved Permanently response. Ideally, it should be sending a 302 Found (for HTTP 1.1), or at least the HTTP 1.0 name: 302 Moved Temporarily. Oh well, I guess that’s either the result of using an inferior Microsoft server, or the fact it has not been configured properly.

I think that’s enough problems that I need to point out, my purpose is not to criticise his mistakes, but to point out what needs to be looked into. Overall, I would have to say that I’m relatively proud of the work I did for The Farmshed, I certainly did make a difference towards the quality of the site. It is much better than the vast majority of the web, but it could be better. I never expected the site to be perfect as soon as it launced, though I did try my best to achieve that – there were, unfortunately, some factors beyond my control that prevented that.

Some of the good things in the site include the almost complete use of CSS for layout and presentation (except for the single table mentioned earlier). The whole menu is a pure CSS menu, backed up with an IE-only script. It works perfectly in Firefox and IE, but there seems to be some minor bugs with Opera, but it does work. I believe it does work in Safari, but neither Safari, nor sadly, Opera were tested in during development – just Firefox, and occasionally IE. There were originally skip-links at the top, but I was ordered to remove them, despite my objections. All the images have reasonable alt text and the site is fairly accessible to non-visual browsers. Unfortunatly, the whole site is locked up, you have to be a member to access anything. I objected, but it was a corporate/marketing decision I had to accept.

As I said once before, working at The Farmshed was a learning experience, and I certainly have gained some invaluable experience, both good a bad. I’m happy to have worked on creating such a high quality site, but I’m happier to be moving on to something better.

This week, I spent a somewhat relaxing time at home with my parents. After I got unjustly fired, I just needed to take a break from everything and think about what I really wanted to do. Like any unemployed person, I started looking for a suitable job, which is not easy for several reasons. I’ve been searching several job websites including Seek, My Career, CareerOne and Candle Recruit, but only came up with a handful of jobs that sound even remotely interesting.

I’m looking for a job as a web developer. I’m finding it hard because many of the jobs either want several years of commercial experience, which I don’t have; knowledge and experience with the disastrous .NET technologies, which I don’t want to touch; or don’t focus on, nor care about standards compliance, which is a requirement for any job that I will consider. I realise that may sound quite picky, but why should I bother trying to work with a company that I know I’m not going to be happy with?

Searching and applying for a job is as much about the company trying to impress me, as it is for me to impress them. Being as talented as I am, that is not so difficult, but as many of you know, only a handful of sites even come close to validation, and even fewer companies care about validation and standards compliance, so finding an impressive employer is big challenge. It is an unfortunate reality, but until I have the experience, knowledge and skill to start my own business, I have little choice but to work in the very corporate environment I am morally against.

My moral dillemma is that far too many decisions are based on marketing or financial reasons, rather than what is valid, and what is the right thing to do. I prefer to make decisions based on what is the most ethical, and valid reasons. I try to avoid making decisions based on personal gain. I’m in this to make a difference; to improve the quality, usability, and accessibility of the web as a whole – I am not in this for personal gain, as so many are, and I will not be corrupted. I realise how idealistic that sounds, and I have been told on many occasions that I have a lot to learn and that I must accept reality.

Having said that, I have managed to be called back for two jobs that I applied for, and I will most likely make it to the interview stage. One of the questions I asked on the phone was whether or not they focus on standards compliance, and I did receive a somewhat comforting yes, in reply. However, I was only speaking with their recruitment managers, and neither of their web sites validate. But one, at least, does use reasonably semantic HTML, and insisted, in the job advertisement, that candidates do not use tables for layout – that one looks the most promising for me!