Blogging, Life and jQuery

Soooo, it’s been a bit quiet here lately, eh.

Well as per always, life got in the way. Between work, family and life in general, there just haven’t been much time for anything else. However as things are slowly calming down, I’m now hoping to get back into the swing of things with the blog!

The title says “Blogging, life and jQuery”, what’s that all about? Well firstly I thought I’d talk a bit about that changes I’m wanting to make to this blog. Then as part of of those changes, I’ll talk a bit about what’s been going on in my world in general.

Blogging

I’ve decided to try and make some changes to this blog. When I started  blogging, I tried to make my posts very focused, “professional” and tutorial like. However that style of posts require lots and lots of time and effort to produce. I would still like to post tutorials every now and then but they wont be very frequent.  
So instead to get some more life into the blog I’ll try to make more frequent posts reflecting what ever is on my mind at the time, a little bit like the later posts before “the big silence”.

Life

Well as a father of two, a three and half year old and a 6months old. I can tell you one thing for certain, the people who say that once you have one child, you might as well have two, because there’s not much difference in the effort involved looking after them, they’re lying! That said I wouldn’t change a thing!
However having a young family, means there’s not much time for extra curricular activities and take a way time for some sports activities to keep me at least reasonably fit, I’m afraid the old computing passion has had to go on the back burner to some extent.

jQuery

Ok time to get something web dev related in this post. I was recently fortunate enough, to be on a project which involved developing a product/plan recommendation engine/app, for one of our clients. The fortunate thing about this was that it was to be done all in jQuery.

Not having worked with jQuery before, it was quite a learning curve. However seeing as there’s been a alot of talk about jQuery lately with the announcement of it being endorsed by Microsoft and everything. I was looking forward to getting a chance to having a look at it.

Basically it took me and another developer a couple of weeks to get our heads around it but in the end we got the job done and it’s now up and running, you can check it out here: http://www.iinet.com.au/needhelp/

Silverlight

What about Silverlight? The blog has up until now been very focused on Silverlight, will this change? Not really, as I mentioned earlier I’m hoping to getting some more general content in here, but Silverlight is still very much one of my main interest when it comes to web development.

And that being the case I’m exited to announce that the Perth .Net User Groups’ February presentation will be on Silverlight 2 and it will be presented by no ne less then myself and Stephen Price. We’ve still not locked down 100%, what we’ll cover etc. but it should be a good evening. So if you’re in or around Perth make sure you come and check it out :)

Cheers,
Ola