andrew-kirkpatrick

I seem to be spending most of my time at the moment reading course material or books, revising for exams, taking exams or generally focusing on professional development. Whilst when I started this it all seemed like a good idea, I do wonder if I'm starting to get a bit lost in it... I mean for example I've still not gotten round to building a template for my own website yet (although I did at least manage to composition it in Illustrator)

It's coming up to a couple months now that I have been working for the Open University, and in comparison to my last place of work it's actually been pretty plain sailing! I'm working in a media division of an e-learning department, whereby most of the teams are akin to design agency teams in a sense with their own editors, designers, artists, project managers and developers.

Finally, after weeks of torture, I've finally managed to get a release of the web application that I've been working on to the client. Admittedly I've had a while to do it, but with two job changes, moving and a new city, plus trying to make new friends, sort out hobbies both old and new, and keep in touch, it's all been a bit too much. 80 hours this last week proves that much. On one hand I'm happy that I've managed to finally build an entire application by myself, which stands out from anything I've done before as possibly being worthwhile (although is far from finished)

After many months of plodding through a series of content updates, all of the sites below went live last week. Since the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology site was the only addition (the other two were redesigns) it took a while for the academics within the school to take a look at the demo sites and propose changes. Putting them together from the original content only took just over a month, but to ensure everybody was happy I worked with the IT Officer there for another two or three.

I've just finished some work I was doing for Oxford University's Department of Continuing Education a couple days ago. It was just some quick scripting for a rank-based search engine algorithm, rather than alphabetical. Part of their development team was on holiday so I stepped in to do some work in the meantime, although they've come across problems with their database, indexing I'd imagine based on the performance I was getting whilst developing it.

Almost forgot about the site I'd worked on a few weeks back for a colleague at my workplace; Accessing and Storing Knowledge. The tool itself was developed between the UHI Millenium Institute and Oxford University Computing Services as a federated search tool for academic resources (not entirely sure what kind of content it current indexes but I've been reassured it's quite flexible)

After a relatively short career in web design and development, I thought it was time that I setup my own website, just as somewhere to showcase my work and as a collection of resources that I could keep track of.

For the moment this blog is all I have time to set up, as I'm in middle of releasing a couple projects at work whilst doing some freelance design for a JISC project over the next few weeks. Once they're all finished I should be able to bash out a nice design for everything and get some content online.