John Lampard and disassociated.com

John Lampard

Sydney based, and sometimes residing, former web designer and standards abiding interface coder, turned content producer, and general jack of all trades.

I was part of the first crew who set up the Australian INfront in 1999, have had my work mentioned in Desktop Magazine and the long-gone Internet.AU magazine.

I’ve also made the semi-finals of the also long-gone Australian Financial Review/Telstra Australian Internet Awards, and have been profiled at Design is Kinky.

From time to time, when I can get motivated, I write freelance articles for the likes of Desktop Magazine, Next, some in-house publications, and also produce the presently defunct OnVoiceOver.

In another life I am an exhibitionist (can’t you tell?), undercover private investigator, and wanna-be rock star. My therapist recommends I don’t discuss these aspects of my life too much further however.

disassociated.com[.au]

Has been my webspace in one form or another since 1997. I set it up way back in the day to teach myself web design.

The very first inception of disassociated was a self-parodying (ironically written by a friend, not myself) episodic fiction (yes, that’s what they called it) series titled Is That The Time? which was published monthly from August 1997 until August 1999.

It was a very scary, and very pathetic, expose into the life of a freelance web designer living in Sydney’s eastern suburbs who didn’t really do much work, but still somehow managed to make a living.

disassociated has also been an online journal, and portfolio, where for a couple of years I used it to showcase my design skills rather than examples of my work… if that makes sense.

I usually refer to disassociated as a personal website, or webspace, rather than a blog, as it has gone through all sorts of inceptions during its 11 year history.

At the moment it closely mimics a blog, but I receive the occasional letter of complaint informing me that “I’m not doing things properly”.

It’s not all bad though, those letters make damn fine fire starters when we have barbecues. :)

the {SubSet} culture

That’s my way of saying anything goes here. All sorts of things can be placed inside a subset (I think, I sucked at maths actually), including the empty set, so it all works out quite well really.

disassociated is a personal website, which I do for fun. Except for the standards compliance part. That I take very seriously. And so should you.

But back to the fun, I was doing this stuff before Google, SEO, Pagerank, Alexa (only just), niche blogging, themes, and even the word blog, for fark’s sake.

The current obsession with doing everything by the book, plus the fear a certain search engine will come on thy like a ton-of-bricks if you don’t, sounds like some sort of sub plot from The Emperor’s New Clothes. Or something. Sorry.

design and back end

disassociated has been powered by the fantastic WordPress Content Management System (or CMS) since June 2007.

Prior to that the entire site was hand coded using NotePad, which I still use when I want to try my hand at crafting PHP files.

Interface design (and it is design, not a “theme” ;) is a basic two column CSS layout that I threw together. In 2004. Seriously. I’ve been using the same two column stylesheet for years.