I’m currently on my morning break from my summer job. I’m part of a team of around thirty people busy transferring Cardiff University’s website from one content management system to another, which I find rather more interesting than working in Somerfield! One advantage is that you don’t get in trouble for shouting at computers, whereas it doesn’t go down too well if you do that to customers.
Unfortunately, the new system is still in the process of being created, and so several important functions aren’t yet working. The whole idea of the new system is that it recognises different types of contact and so can do fancy tricks with it. So rather than just having webpages, you can, for example, create a Contact entry for a particular person with all their details. Each webpage that mentions that person is then linked to this one Contact file, and draws its information from there. When it comes to updating that information, you just do it in that one Contact entry, and every page automatically updates, rather than having to be updated individually. Neat, eh? Except that we can’t actually link in any Contacts or any other elements, because that feature hasn’t been implemented yet. Which makes rebuilding the website to take advantage of all this rather difficult. Oh well, I’m not complaining – I’m being paid by the hour, and pretty well, too, for a temporary summer job!
But since I’m working on computers all day, it makes me less inclined to rush online in my lesuire time, hence my updates to this blog still being fairly occasional. I’m pretty busy – tomorrow I’m leaving Cardiff Central train station at 6:55am in the morning(!) to get to the Contagious training day in Lapworth. It’ll be good to find out about what we’ll be doing at this year’s Contagious, and even better to see various people again, but it’ll be a long day. And it’ll be the third Saturday running where I’ve had to record Doctor Who. What a shock! I’ve still not seen The Satan Pit because my video recording didn’t work, but hopefully I’ll get hold of a recording soon.