Bear with me here.

Let’s put to bed finally that hoary old chestnut ‘Elvis is King of Rock and Roll’. It’s rubbish as any student of the genre will tell you. He was a rocker in the very early days until Col. Tom Parker turned him into a tame lounge singer. He couldn’t play a guitar and he couldn’t write a song lyric to save his life. He could sing and of that there is no doubt. But, as an all-rounder, forget it.

There are a couple of other options - Eddie Cochran is a much forgotten rocker who could play, write and sing - ‘Summertime Blues’ for example. His life was cut short in a car accident during an English tour in 1960. Buddy Holly was a true originator - the first to use overdubbing, the first to use strings in a rock and roll song (True Love Ways) and the first to use the bass, drums, rhythm and lead quartet configuration. He was stitched up by his loathsome manager, had to do a winter tour to make ends meet and died in an aircraft accident with the Big Bopper and Richie Valens in 1959 (’The Day the Music Died’ by Don McLean).

There can be only one King and that is Chuck Berry. John Lennon famously said that if you had to call Rock and Roll by another name, it would be Chuck Berry. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones recorded many of his songs on their early LPs. You can hear his riffs on early Beach Boys songs. He was widely copied by thousands of aspiring rock guitarists and was an inspiration to many more. Keith Richard says with some pride that Chuck Berry is the only person who has punched him that he didn’t get his own back on.

If you want to use the word ‘icon’ with any meaning, it has to refer to Chuck Berry because he was a true pioneer, a seminal figure in the art form. He was one of six kids in a middle class family in St Louis. HIs father was a carpenter and a church deacon. Chuck worked as a carpenter and then as an auto worker.

He has had three prison stints, the first for stealing a car as a teenager, the second for transporting a minor across state lines and the last for a run-in with the IRS. His time wasn’t wasted and he put himself through high school and then got a business management and an accounting qualification.

He worked on the weekends with the Johnny Johnson trio which he hijacked and called the Chuck Berry trio. He moved up through Cleveland where he decided to take up music full time and then to recording contracts. He doesn’t take credit for his guitar style, which he calls ‘boogie woogie’ and instead acknowledges sources such as Louis Jordan’s guitarist, Carl Hogan and others. He was 29 before he had a hit (Maybellene’) in 1955.

He is a hugely competent guitar picker with most of his songs having a relentless, driving beat. His real talent is song writing. The metre on his songs is very complicated, the lyrics are saturated with descriptive allusion and they all tell a story.

As a pioneer who could write brilliant lyrics, an accomplished guitar player who invented the Rock and Roll artform and as a performer, he is absolutely without equal.

The other side of Chuck Berry is not so bright - but it’s still who he is. He is the most cantankerous, mean individual in Rock’s 50 year history! His talent to write descriptive poetry (that he put to music) is unchallenged.

He will be 83 on October 18th and still performs at Blueberry Hills in St. Louis on one Wednesday a month.

To honour this occasion (and as an excuse to treat myself) I bought ‘Hail Hail Rock ‘n Roll’. It’s a 4 DVD set that covers the making of a film to honour the man. Keith Richard was the engine behind it and includes Eric Clapton, Etta James and Linda Ronstadt. Part of the set is the making of the film and the trouble they had with Chuck, who demanded being paid in cash in the morning before every day’s shoot.

There are interviews with contemporaries Little Richard, Bo Diddley, the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison as well as those invloved in the making of the film. I thoroughly recommend it for R500.

Hail Chuck Berry!

WIth a little digging, I see that there is general outrage regarding this hugely suspicious deal.  Feedback here is, with a single exception unanimous in its condemnation of this deal. The single supporter asserts that this is the beginning of a great new portal which contains cutting edge technology and claims the media published an “uninformed conclusion’. A webcam, cutting edge?

Another bunch of comments here, and here.

There are questions for which there are currently no answers:

1. What were the competing bids and why are they not forthcoming?
2. What were the specs from Durban and why are they not forthcoming?
3. Who were the competing bids from?
4. Was there any analysis of previous costs (of other durban.gov websites)?
5. What were the specs from AdaptIT?
6. Is there any business connection between Durban Municipality and AdaptIT?
7. Cape Town’s website for 2010 cost R300,000 - is this R6,200,000 better?
8. Where was the tender advertised and exactly how did it read?
9. How many Mercs were bought by the people involved?
10. Why is the site, after the official launch still not CSS compliant and unable to be viewed in Safari?
11. The website email address is:2010websmaster@adaptit.co.za - IT DOES NOT EXIST. They can’t even get that right.
12. The META title and description are the same (The Official Durban 2010 FIFA World Cup™ Host City Website). They should never be the same.
13. Keywords:<meta name=”keywords” content=”durban, 2010, world cup, fifa, ethekwini, south africa, kzn, kwa-zulu natal, soccer, football” /> - hopeless for obvious reasons.
14. Validation of the home page comes up with 64 errors and 52 warnings.
15. Whoever put this together doesn’t understand that for a ‘loose’ DTD, you can’t use ‘/>’ as a tag closer.

The article also failed to mention that the site was developed using local Durban based IT and design skills, and some of those skills are in incredible demand in South Africa and worldwide — it’s about creating high value skills in in-demand technologies in support of eThekwini’s goal of developing sustainable IT skills in the municipality. What you see today is only the first release, and there are many exiting and forward looking features on tap for roll out between now and the games, all designed and delivered using local talent.

And again, not reported, Julie-May Ellingson explained to the media that the R 6.5m investment is for high availability server hardware, hosting, software, development and support over a two year period – this is a long term project and there is much, much more to come. ”

Still,

Are You F******g kidding?

I tell you what - I’l do you a real ten minute Manager’s Special for R6,200.000 - come on now, can’t say fairer than that.

I have been meaning to write about this but chose to repeat verbatim this mail, forwarded to me by my pal Patrick. It demonstrates quite vividly but concisely the endemic incompetence and corruption that pervades all aspects of the municipality here in Durban.

Can you believe this government of ours? They fire all the doctors in South Africa for striking, but the labour court says they cannot make 1500 bus drivers redundant because the bus company has gone broke.

So now the ratepayers will pay them for the 4 months they say it will take to get the service running again. The best is, in the beginning, Durban’s local government sold the bus service to a private company, Remnant Alton, as they said that under the new Constitution, it was unlawful for the state to own public transport.

They sold it for R70 million, but then within 1.5 years lent the owner R30 million, for operating costs. In effect, after the loans, he had only paid R40 million. He then declared bankruptcy and they bought the company back, which was by now absolutely useless, for R450 million, using ratepayers money.

The interesting thing is,that they buy it back, but according to themselves this is illegal. Now comes the good bit, With R 410 mil profit in his pocket, the local government hand over the running of the bus service back to him!!!!! It now has come to light that he should never have been able to buy it in the first place as he has been convicted of fraud. ” Which nobody knew about.”

Now the ratepayers of Durban have to walk around on filthy, crime ridden streets with names that nobody knows or can even pronounce while our city manager, Mike Sutcliffe, drives around with bodyguards and goes home, to his flat (valued at more than R1 million) at the point waterfront, with wonderful clean streets, which by the way has been declared a rates free zone till 2014.

Here we are, the official Durban 2010 website. Other towns adapted their original sites to take on 2010. Not Durbs my friend.

This bunch of pathological egotists and terminal twerps had to have a separate website such are the manifold virtues of this patch of real estate, to confirm for us all once more that they have completely lost touch with reality.

Go to www.fifaworldcup.durban.gov.za and luxuriate in it courtesy of AdaptIT. Take your time, soak up the ambience, the eloquence, artistic superlatives, technical brilliance. Spare no hyperbole in your assessment.

No? Doesn’t grab you? Anything special? No?

Well, there should be. This thing cost the ratepayers of Durban, currently weathering adverse economic conditions like the rest of the world a staggering R6.5 MILLION RANDS!

May I repeat that?

Thank you.

SIX MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND RANDS!

Where the hell did that figure come from? What were they smoking when that was dreamt up? I have been in website design since 1996 and wouldn’t have the b****s to come up with a tenth of that - nay, a fiftieth.

Apparently, those in the know have estimated a max of R200,000 for this website and I wouldn’t disagree, in fact, it’s a little generous. But let’s be fair, they’re dealing with a massive bureaucracy here that’s known for wastage on a cosmic scale. Who will miss a little cash? No wonder the DA is raising the matter in Council.

Who are AdaptIT? Their website is exceedingly average. I can name 20 website design websites in Durban that are better. Who gave these people the tender? What were the other tenders? Were there any other tenders? Why did these people get the tender? Who is on the board of AdaptIT and are there connections with Ethekwini Municipality.

This municipality, under the manic hand of Mr. Michael Sutcliffe is a sick joke.

Every so often there is an enquiry that fills one with hope and causes a surge of optimism in one’s breast.

When further enquiries are made, the respondent informs you that they would love you to ‘partner’ with them.

Ahem, that means either pay cash (usually several thousands) to get on their directory or it means ‘do lots of work for us for nothing’ on their website. Sorry, there is a rate for the job.

On another matter, I was talking to a local trader today who informed me that, over two years ago, he had forked out R8,000 as a deposit for a Joomla website to one of the local web designer yokels. As of this morning, nothing. It turned out fairly early on that whoever it was who said that they could put a Joomla website together disappeared off to Oz. Instead of refunding the client if there was no way of getting his job done, they have clammed up. Talk about giving website designers a bad name.

I think that we all deserve it.

A TV crew came around last week to film an insert for the teen programme HackShack which, apparently has some IT component. This shoot was about the job of a website designer.

Trouble is, all I had was sixty seconds and much though I would like to abbreviate what I do, 60s was far too short. The other 60 seconds was ‘how to put a website together’ and, quick though it can be done, 60 seconds is still cutting it fine. The final ‘result’ is at warthog.co.za/hackshack.

For what it’s worth, the programme is being shown on August 6th and 16.30 - real prime time TV! However, it gave me the opportunity to add a ‘AS SEEN ON TV!’ panel to the website!

I wandered into the ‘website design’ area of Google to be met with a map of other designers and some short links. I knew that Google was going for a ‘local Google’ but naively thought that this was an ‘opt in’.

Also, what has happened to google.co.za? Disappeared with the advent of the map pins? I thought that it was very handy. I can call up the co.nz and co.uk versions of Google so why can I not call up the local version instead of a redirect to the com?

Everybody works hard to get to the top of Google and now I see what appears to be a list of paid links at the top of the SERP. If they’re Adwords links on the right, fair enough but not directly on top of those sites who have worked hard (or their webmasters have worked hard) to get to the top.

I can only hope that visitors to Google will find that although there are operations that are local, they are not necessarily going to be what they want. And, that there are plenty of other ‘local’ operations that are not part of what seems to be an exclusive list and which have got to the top of the list by virtue of the search optimization of their sites. Now, I don’t know whether the list is dynamically generated or paid for but Google’s job is to produce search results relevant to the search terms.

If there was a local component, then that was catered for in the search results but now, competitors are at the top of the list that quite possibly have thrown a website together.

This is a pic from a previous life - a scanning electron microscopy micrograph of a common object, magnification about 100x.

Those of you who come straight to this page will not have seen the changes to the DWD website.

Having gone through my ‘deep blue’ period, I was not happy with the final result. There were a number of things that were wrong. I thought the deep blue - still on the blog - lent an oppressive feel to the website. I don’t normally go in for such strong colours but - hey, I can only give it a try.

The deep blue has been replaced by an unsaturated beige and green (my beige & green period) and the whole header graphic replaced. I liked the web page jumble but it lent an untidy look to the rest of the page content. If you produce web pages then why not use them right at the top of the page to advertise your wares? So, I will use them again but in a tidier arrangement.

Instead, I have used the Firefox toolbar as the header, trying to include functionality in that space. At the very top is an XP style bar running the width of the page

The general aim w.r.t. the home page was to reduce its length - far too long - without reducing the amount of information. So I added some functionality to the header graphic, firstly some keywords on the XP bar. Then, modifying the FF menu items to suit the site. The ‘durban-website-designers’ is real text. The search box works via Google and where there is a select list, I added a Javascript tooltip (basically) that will enable visitors to access any page on the website. I may keep it, I may not because as the mouse goes over it, the thing suddenly appears so there may be an irritation factor.

The top and Right menus are pretty well as they were but the home page content has been changed a lot. The middle section uses CSS to use one space to display 8 lots of text. Even the default area is used to advertise a special. The text stays on the screen until another item is clicked or the link is clicked again and it disappears, leaving the default text.

I quite like the idea. I’ve used the CSS ‘hidden text’ on some of the other pages but this is a little more compact.

Below this are some tabs as a variant of the ‘page within a page’ CSS that I have used on the website-designers.co.za website. The difference in this case is that there is no content visible under the tabs unless one is clicked. Anything can go into the tab area.

All the text on thepage, hidden or not is visible to search engines. Whether they classify it as a devious ploy I don’t know.

I’ve still kept the ‘20 seconds’ link because I think it’s important to give visitors the alternative of a rapid run-through. The ‘utility bar’ at the top of the content allows visitors to email me, to print a printer friendly page, to send a mail to a friend and to change the text size.

The overall appearance I think is less oppressive than the dark blue. I have also made use of includes in this version to make the task of maintenance easier.

What took time is getting MSIE to display the page properly. Instead of using a javascript browser sniffer, I have started to use MSIE conditional comments so there is a base stylesheet that caters for everything except anything that absolutely has to go into a separate MSIE stylesheet. Unfortunately, that’s still too much and on the home page, there was a lot of jiggerypokery to be done.

What I will also do when the loose ends are tied up is to validate the code with the W3C validator.