My first half marathon ...
Right - this is it ... my first post in a long long time ... and it's to ask for money.
I'm running a half marathon next month in aid of the Afghan Connection - a charity building schools and cricket pitches in Afghanistan.
I've put up a Just Giving page which has more details ... check it out and please donate:
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Today's Guardian ... brilliance
Today's Guardian is an exceptional example of what can happen when big media companies open up to the outside world.
The Guardian opened up it's Content API allowing people to "Select and collect content from the Guardian for reuse. Get access to over 1M articles going back over 10 years in addition to today's content, the Guardian's tagging information architecture, picture galleries, podcasts and video ". Wow.
So, Phil Gyford went to work and created this immensely readable online version of the current day's newspaper. It's brilliant.
Take a look at Today's Guardian and read about the process / thoughts behind it all.
Superb.
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The ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference (EECI2010) - roundup
So, the The ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference (EECI2010) happened at the beginning of the month ... I don't go to many conferences, and I didn't go to this one either but I wish I had been able to - if only to see Simon Collison give this presentation on subconscious design.
Simon set up and ran Erskine Design which is one of my 'hero' agencies. He recently left though - but he still has a lovely website and is clearly still doing great work.
A collection of articles from EECI2010 can be found on the EE blog here.
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Our minds need to go on a diet ... Alain de Botton
A lovely short piece from Alain de Botton on how our capacity to concentrate on anything at all has diminished dramatically.
One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything.
I've become so conscious of this as I continue to read around the subject of web design in particular. Every new development is pitched to give you the impression that it's vital we all turn our attention to it now. NOW. It's tiring.
(via)
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Flickr web design inspiration
For anyone who's interested, I keep an ongoing Flickr inspiration stream of websites I've found that, for one reason or another, I've found inspiring. You can find it here: Flickr inspiration.
Site Launch - Hannula & Halom attorneys goes live ...
Really pleased to release this one into the wild ... it's a neat looking corporate site for Duluth Attorneys Hannula Halom. I was really pleased to get the opportunity to work on this ... sometimes it's nice to have a clean corporate project rather than anything a little more funky!
Build Conference coming back to Belfast
This was a good event last year with Tim Van Damme, Mark Boulton, Wilson Miner and, of course, Eric Meyer speaking ... this years event looks to be just as strong, and early bird tix have just gone on sale ...
Divvy for OSX, and great HTML5 readiness chart
If you've ever spent about 15 minutes resizing and positioning windows in OSX so that you can get the optimal screen set up for the next several hours of your working day ... then it's time to automate it all with Divvy - this great little app for only $14 allows you to select a working window and then quickly assign it to a position and area of screenspace. Okay, no, I'm not explaining it very well, but they have a video on their website which explains it all nicely. Well worth the $14.
And then, this handy little interface which shows you which browsers support which features of HTML5 - which is a great little resource (the website, not HTML5). We can start building with this now - we really can - we just need to provide an alternative for those more 'challenged' browsers. Ahem.
Google's font API
A crazy amount of font related good news this morning ... Typekit and Google announce their open source collaboration which is hugely exciting - and then, Typekit are supporting Google's open source font collection to make switching between the services super easy.
Embedding the new google open source fonts is as easy as adding two lines of code ... it's that simple. And as Typekit say:
Using real fonts on the web is no longer something to look forward to – the technology is ready, the industry has responded, and designers are building sites with them every day.
Great stuff. Expect to see a slew of websites sporting Tangerine within days ...
Google predicting the future
As if google didn't know enough about you, me and everything else, it is now investing in a firm that predicts the future. We're screwed.
On a lighter note: here's 8 websites you should stop building now. 2, 5 and 7 people ... you know who you are.
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Facebook's Backlash
A couple of interesting articles concerning facebook lately ... first, this nice interactive infographic (trying saying that after too many glasses of Shiraz) detailing the eroding privacy of your facebook information. It starts with the relatively inocuous in 2005 ... but click through the years to the present day. Your privacy is practically non-existent.
Secondly, and I guess a follow up of sorts, this article from Wired magazine argues that Facebook has grown out of control - " ... drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination." It's a compelling argument - but his calls for an open alternative are far fetched - and, as someone pointed out in the article comments - the link to the 'Facebook Like' button at the bottom is the ultimate irony.
There are genuine concerns here - the erosion of privacy, largely by stealth, is a huge worry and Zuckerberg's attitude to our privacy is cavalier at best and probably just downright irresponsible. He's ignoring our fears by painting them as old fashioned.
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Elements of Twitter Style
First of all ... who knew that the whole of William Strunk Jr.'s classic guide from 1918, The Elements of Style, was available online?
Secondly, check out the marginally more modern - but only possibly more relevant - 'Elements of Twitter Style.
It's a well thought out piece.
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Mobile Web Design ... think about it now
Here's a topic I'll be returning to more and more over the coming weeks and months: Mobile Web Design
A few things are sticking out for me at the moment - having just finished reading Cameron Moll's excellent Mobile Web Design book - in terms of what questions we need to ask ourselves before deciding on a mobile web design strategy:
- What % of my users would access the web on a mobile device?
Well, the simple answer is 'more and more'. Globally there are more web enabled mobile devices than credit cards right now - and it's not going to go down. Even if your audience doesn't currently access your site through their phone (or iPad or whatever) the chances are that they will some day.
- What is the most appropriate approach for my business?
I guess that there are a couple of main approaches that you can take - with differing impacts for the work surrounding your website. Firstly, 'Do Nothing'. There, that sounds appealing doesn't it - and in a lot of cases it's perfectly valid. The argument is that mobile devices are getting more and more capable browsers - ever used the iPhone?, it's practically identical in it's browsing capabilities as a regular computer. Certainly, in a lot of cases, if you're talking about the iPhone, then you may not have to do anything.
However, the iPhone is not the mobile web. It's a great part of it, but it's still a minority part. We need to consider other devices too.
So, what to do for them ... well, from here, there are probably 2 separate approaches that are worth mentioning. One, scale down the amount of images, re-format the layout of the page, generally make your web page lighter so that it loads up quickly. You're basically creating the mobile equivalent of a 'print only' version.
The second approach would be to build a dedicated mobile website - like the BBC. If you view this site on a regular computer you can see that the content is greatly reduced, it fits into a much smaller area and the focus is on taking people quickly through to other pages. Those destination pages (e.g. this one) are then much lighter in their images and the text is formatted very simply.
Perfect.
So, what's right for you depends on your audience and the devices that they'll be using. But we should all be thinking about doing something - and soon.
Resources:
High Definition TV Reality Check
From the always excellent xkcd.com
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Lost vs. Saul Bass
Love Lost? Love Saul Bass? Wondering what it would look like if Saul Bass did the opening sequence for Lost? Wonder no more: (via)
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Times newspaper to start charging for content online
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out:
Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June
My gut feeling is that it's a sensible thing to do ... you're running a business, increasingly that business is done online, and you need to find a way to monetise that. Fair enough.
My worry though is that of course people won't pay for it (or, most people who currently read the news on the Times Online website, won't pay for it) and will then turn to less credible news sources.
Much has been made of 'citizen journalism' and 'user generated content' over the past couple of years, but if unregulated news becomes the most common source of information then that leaves people exposed to all sorts of non-credible, non-verifiable, sources. And that is a worry.
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Photoshop - content aware fill
I don't really use photoshop - I'm much more of a Fireworks man (everything's a vector people. Everything!) but this is the sort of thing that I would love to be able to do in Fireworks. The 'content aware fill' option allows you to remove stuff that you'd normally fiddle around with for ages, really simply. At around 2mins 42secs of this video, prepare to be amazed as the tree in the photo just disappears:
CannyBill redesign by Andy Clarke
Andy Clarke is one of those web designers who lets it all hang out ... in the nicest possible way. He often blogs about the process of his projects, which is always entertaining and informative ... and here he wraps up his series of articles about the Canny Bill redesign.
Nice work.
A couple of worthy notes
Following on from google's highly publicised decision to stop supporting IE6 it looks like Amazon is following suit - this image from their seller account pages. (via)
Slowly, we're getting there. I was reviewing browser stats for a client yesterday, and for the month of February 2010, 16% of page views were served via IE6 - compared to 26% for February 2009. It's a hotel - so it's mostly consumer, rather than business, facing so I'm taking this as really encouraging.
Who knows, by Feb 2011 I may no longer need to have the conversation about supporting IE6 ...
Also, found this morning, this nice little method for keeping in mind that the audience should be at the forefront of the web design process - Mental Notes is a little card deck of 50 insights from psychology that you can use in the development of your website or web app. Nice.
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Site Launch: Donegal Cottage Holidays
This site launched at the beginning of the month - Donegal Cottage Holidays. It's a complete revamp from a static hand coded website to a fully database driven effort which allows both user and admin access.
Should you ever need self catering accommodation in Donegal, you know where to look!
Bits and pieces from around and about
A few things I've liked this week:
- Uniform - a great looking jquery plugin for making form fields that bit sexier (I know - aren't they just sexy enough already? Umm. No.)
- 10 features in Wordpress 3.0 - Wordpress 3.0 is out in the next month or two and this article goes through a few of the changes that see this version of WP shape up more like a Content Management System than ever before. Multi site management - Custom Post Types - Custom Taxonomies - Menu Management ... it all looks incredibly worthwhile. Huge.
- Lemonstand eCommerce - have been following this promising shopping cart for a while, but it seems to be firming up for an 'out of beta' release soon enough. Have signed up for the public beta though and will be taking a good look through.
- Web Design Criticism - a How To is a very comprehensive article on how to give (and receive) web design criticism ... along the same lines, there was this article from Brain Traffic yesterday, with a focus on copy writing and how to deal with bad (not necessarily negative, just badly constructed) criticism
And I think that's it for now ...
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The end of publishing
This is simply genius. What started as an internal video for Dk Publishing ended up as an external video which is the smartest bit of copy writing I think I've ever seen. You need to watch until at least half way through ...
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What Changed?
Timely article here from Chris Coyer - What Changed?
I get this all the time ... a clients website has suddenly 'stopped working', and we have to figure out why ... Chris presents a useful checklist.
For me, the most common reasons for a client suddenly seeing an error on their site that wasn't there yesterday:
- The browser of choice has changed ... something on the screen has shifted, or security settings may be different, presenting some small runtime errors etc.
- a client side plugin - skype or google toolbar are favourites - is throwing something out of whack
- the hosting account is full ... POP(3) email accounts, typically, fill up as the desktop email client is not set to trash emails on a regular basis
- an external javascript call is taking too long and timing out ... (I'm looking at you AddThis)
- the domain name has expired ... I'm constantly surprised by the number of people who are not on top of when their domain name is going to expire. I think that reminder emails are too easily dismissed as spam.
Genuinely exciting: IE9 Preview
File this under genuinely exciting ... I think.
It's not often I get excited about the release of a new browser - especially if it's part of the Internet Explorer dysfunctional family - BUT - IE9 is starting to look promising - and it's preview is available now
They're talking about HTML5, SVG support, and even at least a nod to CSS3 - all good stuff that can be found here.
They're still on the IE rendering engine - which doesn't make sense to me - why not just switch to Webkit and be done with it? - but hey, progress is progress.
Considering that we were stuck with IE6 for the better part of a decade, it's nice that we've been introduced to 7, 8 and now 9 in the last 3-4 years or so.
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