Small projects are always a breath of fresh air, specially when in the midst of a major, time consuming (and sometimes often frustrating) project. I had the opportunity to tackle 3 of them over the last few weeks, and it was great to be able to flex some neurons on sites that take a few days to about 2 weeks to complete.
SHABA
SHABA (Sacred Heart Alumni Basketball Association) is the official site of the first alumni basketball league in Cebu. Their season this year was getting underway and they needed a site up within 2 weeks. Unfortunately we had to scale down the site’s features due to several constraints, we originally planned to have team and player stats, as well as an alumni business directory (we can still implement these later though). But the most important features are still there, including a media gallery, file downloads, ads for sponsors, and the blog that should make posting updates a lot quicker and more convenient. The site was conceptualized, and implemented in approximately 10 days , although the content is still lacking, the features are complete.
Oh, and go Batch 98!
no3m1
Noemi decided it was time to do a design reboot on her Multiply site, . She took care of the initial concept, layout ideas, and colors, while I fleshed out the general design, made the header, and then implemented it (She then finished it off by doing all the awesome “photo covers” for her products). Making the design was painless and came naturally, but impelementing it using Multiply was a huge pain in the ass. Shoehorning CSS into Multiply’s (or Friendster’s / Myspace’s) templates is an exercise in frustration. The overlapping classes, inconsistent naming, and various CSS bugs added up to 9 hours of cursing, banging on the keyboard, and trying every trick under the sun in trying to override the naughty html elements into behaving. It boils down to not having total control of the template’s CSS. The social networks don’t want you abusing the layouts by removing the ads or logos, and there isn’t really any documentation or standards regarding these templates, these lead up to a lot of hours wasted figuring shit out. Bah, everytime I’m made to customize layouts for these social sites I swear to stay away from doing so when completing it. But I always end up doing it again in hopes that things have improved.
Diving with Chocolat
The smallest project of the lot, which basically amounts to one page using image maps and a video. Heck, the text is even embedded on the main image (yeah, I should probably burn in XHTML/CSS hell for that). Still it was fun doing this layout in Photoshop, and adding little things like the Jquery lightbox for the images, and extending the horizon and shore for the background.
The near instant gratification that you get with these small projects are great, I’d definitely take on some more, so long as I’m sure I can make time for them. 
Via Chronnus -.