Marking Time

I’ve finished my first week of the teaching course. It went pretty much as I expected. It was very intense, lots of lectures, teaching practice, and observation.

I was a lot more nervous then I thought I would be. The classes themselves were fine but just thinking about them the night before left me restless, sleepless and losing my appetite. This surprised me because I was well used to this sort of thing in my previous job - giving presentations and chairing meetings for example. I guess I’m too long away from the ‘real world’.

My 7 classmates are friendly and interesting which helps. I was a bit worried that the class would be full of wide-eyed and mindless kids just out of college but thankfully that hasn’t been the case.

3 more weeks to go.

In today’s issue of New Thinking Gerry McGovern writes:

Back during the days of dot com madness, ISPs got the idea that they were not really ISPs at all. Instead, they were lifestyle portals. They were going to give the consumer everything they needed on the Web.

About a year ago another techology guru wrote:

Back in the giddy days of the technology boom the internet portal was the big thing. Every consumer-oriented internet company was one or wanted to be one.

About time you caught on Gerry .

Finally finished. I got that little tingle of pleasure when the last twenty pieces started to slot themselves into place. That is, until I got to end and found two pieces missing. A moment of panic and then as I stood up one piece spilled from my lap and another revealed itself sitting camouflaged on top of a similiarly coloured part of the jigsaw. Whew!

Here it is in all its glory:

You can chart the progress here.

I was looking for a simple web-based website builder/CMS but I couldn’t find one. Everything I found was feature heavy and endlessly configurable but just too complicated for the simple things I wanted to do.

So I decided to build my own.

Siteman is a web-based website manager that allows you to edit and publish pages, templates and simple menus. It contains a WYSIWG editor which will work in IE5 or IE6.

You can download it here.