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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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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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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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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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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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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Dirty Harry meets Rain Man
More comic genius from xkcd.com
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TickTockDesign.com in 'worth something' shocker
Even though the graph suggests I've had no visitors to this site since June of this year, BizInformation.org.us reckons my domain name is worth over $38,000
You can get in touch if you like - serious offers only!
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Dark sky awards
Oh - I like this ... here in Fermanagh we sometimes have fabulously dark skies, and star gazing is a wonderful thing to do with my 6 year old son - he loves it. Winter time especially - when it's very dark before his bed time - is ripe for it.
So, I was delighted to read that there are such a thing as 'Dark Sky Parks and Galloway in Scotland has been designated as the first official Dark Sky Park in Great Britain. Good stuff - although they should come to Fermanagh some time, I'm sure our Dark Sky rating would be almost as high!
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Recent Reading
Have been out and about these past few weeks and am catching up on some reading / viewing over the weekend ... here's what I'll be diving into:
This is a topic that I'm getting more and more interested in, and having founc the fabulous website of Brain Traffic the other day, I was clicking around the subject a little more. It was also a point that Wilson Miner made at the recent Build Conference in Belfast. "When hiring a designer - hire the one who can write" - is an old saw, but none the less valid for that.
Another interesting recent topic. A couple of weeks ago I attended a one day training given by Paul Boag - a mood board evangelist, if you like - and for the first time took the prospect of mood boards seriously. And now, in one of those serendipitous moments, the good people at Forty Agency have put together this little video.
Which reminds me, Viget also produced a couple of recent articles on them too:
Lastly, this wonderfully typeset web-book 'Dive into HTML5'. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what it is - but it looks wonderful and what I've read so far seems an extremely useful primer (and more) on HTML5. There's a printed book you can pre-order too.
The typography really is exquisite - and made the more noteworthy because I believe they're using the recently used Type Kit to serve up accessible local fonts.
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Muhammad Ali wisdom
There was a little article in this weeks Observer newspaper - just some of the wit and wisdom of the great Muhammad Ali.
One that they missed though still resonates with me when I think about preparation and dedication - 2 things that often get lost in the desire to produce something quickly without the forethought and planning that is essential:
"The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights."
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Tech support cheat sheet
This, below, from the excellent xkcd.com
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First round up of the decade ...
Well, we knew it was coming ... in fact, I'm surprised I haven't seen more of these - it is August in the last year of the decade, after all.
This narrative is particularly interesting: click opera, via. A brief excerpt:
Copyright effectively died, overtaken, de facto, by events on the internet. Magazines and newspapers ended the decade looking very unhealthy indeed, although books seemed strong. Young people got a lot less interested in cars, leading some to label Japan a post-car society. Detroit pretty much collapsed. The polar ice caps melted rapidly; climate change is a fact. Banks -- having invented what they thought were clever ways to spread risk around, and play with planet-sized sums of entirely fictional money -- looked pretty shaky.
Fun stuff, with plenty more to come, no doubt.
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Is it cowardly to pray for rain?
4 years ago - the summer of 2005, I, along with most of the nation it seemed, followed England vs. Australia in the cricket with a fascination that bordered on obsession. Hell, it was obsession.
If I couldn't watch it on the telly (it was the last cricket ever shown live in the UK on terrestrial TV) I followed the Over By Over reports at work from The Guardian. The OBO became so popular that summer that they ended it by launching a book called 'Is it cowardly to pray for rain' - we all prayed for rain during the last test of the summer.
Anyway, here we are in 2009 and on the OBO this year, there has been a call for the Guardian to produce OBO t-shirts ... so, I volunteered. With the Guardian's blessing I designed a couple of t-shirt designs and put up a quick shop on Cafe Press - OBO T-shirts - with all proceeds going to the Laurie Engel Fund. It's an incredibly worthy cause - find out why here.
So, if you're in the least bit interested in following the cricket and supporting a good cause, head on over and grab a t-shirt, mug, mousepad ... or thong. You know you want to.
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RSS Feed now active
Okay - so I finally rolled myself an RSS feed for these notes - click on the friendly fella icon on the right hand side.
Did I draw that icon? Absolutely not, no - it's the work of the talented illustrator and comic book artist Matt Forsythe
He has a lot of lovely work in his gallery here and - not least because the icon looks a little bit (teeny bit) like me, I asked if I could use some of it on my site. The icon has a sister - they can both be found here but check first if you wish to use them.
Thanks Matt.
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Google caffeine - what it means for SEO
Okay - so, here's the new news: Google Search is getting an upgrade ...
Fair enough, the current google search is 10 years old, or thereabouts ... so, time for some new thinking.
Whilst the new version (code named Caffeine) is still in beta it's difficult to make recommendations for changing your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy - but the consensus seems to be that whilst semantic coding will still be very important, less emphasis will be placed on 'title' tags, heading tags and the like, and more will be placed on keyword strings in the text, links in to social media sites, diverse content - video etc. ... and so on.
Nothing concrete so far, but when I talk about 'the consensus' I guess I mean the following links:
So, what does it mean ... well, in a sense, nothing's changed ... if you're using 'white hat' SEO techniques then you shouldn't see much difference, so long as you're keeping up to date with other aspects of the web (social media - for want of a better term). Hopefully though, the link farms and other link spammers who currently benefit under the existing system, will be thwarted. Here's hoping.
You can try Google Caffeine here
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Everything's amazing and nobody's happy
Ah - great news ... a while ago I linked to this video on YouTube but they took it down ... now, it's back somewhere else ... via
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The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
We all know that I love me some Tom Waits. Oh boy. So to say 'I'm, looking forward' to the new movie: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, is to flirt with the very edges of the definition of 'understatement'.
The trailer is below is a nice little teaser - and this is a higher quality version of it from Yahoo!
It's a Tom Waits movie. He plays the devil. Need I say any more?
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The Specials
The Specials have a great looking website - who knew?! (via)
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Future of Web Design Tour
Future of web design roadshow ... coming to Belfast in September - and other places across the UK. But Belfast baby! NI is finally getting some good events - along with the Build Conference in November.
So, run, don't walk:
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Google Wave - video and explanation
There's been a lot written and talked about regarding Google Wave ... well, they've just put up an hour and twenty minute video of their developer preview. If you have the time, I can recommend this ... it really does look impressive. And explanation of google wave from the official blog is the best I've seen yet. In a word: impressive.
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The Vendor Client Relationship
Ha! - real world examples of that most delicate of things: The Vendor Client Relationship.
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Illustrated Spam
Ah - the always hilarious 'illustrating spam headlines' ... this is nicely done:
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Housekeeping, and site launch
Just a couple of little bits of housekeeping as much as anything ... I launched a new site for my wife's Physiotherapy Clinic the other week ... nice and simple. Also, have just been featured on WebDesignIre.com - a CSS Gallery for Web Designers and Websites from Ireland and Northern Ireland ... thanks guys!
New projects in the pipeline ... well, a nice site for a camper van rental company should be live by the end of the month - as well as a site for portable dance floors!
Other than that ... looking to get more involved with the digital community here in Northern Ireland, and so I've joined the Digital Circle and hope to go to some of their events each month. When we get a second car, that is.
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IE8 underwhelming launch
IE8 launched today with so little fanfare it's unbelievable. Perhaps they're embarrassed as they should be about their switcheroo regarding the web standards opt-in / opt-out debacle. Or perhaps it's just not that impressive (there are at least 3 faster browsers out there that I can think of off the top of my head). Either way, it might mean that I can finally ditch IE6 support.
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The Feltron Eight
I've been meaning to link to this for ages ... a great example of effective Information Design from Nicholas Felton, going through the things he was up to in 2008 ... via
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Websites cost less than $2,000,000 shocker!
Oh good god ... Wisconsin paid $2,000,000 for their website:
I particulary enjoyed this little breakdown:
(via)For example, PCC plans on 120 hours to write the project plan itself and develop a kickoff agenda. That’s three full weeks at 40 hours/week to develop the project plan and write an agenda for a single meeting. Planning takes time, but three entire weeks?
Another three weeks, 15 full days, to give the website the ability to download reports as a Microsoft Word document. Four weeks, 20 full days of development time at who knows what hourly rate, to upload Microsoft Word documents.
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Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy
I love Louis CK and it's a crying shame that we don't see more of him in this country. His latest appearance on Conan O'Brien was fantastic:
(via)
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More effective, useless
This came via Signal vs. Noise and is an excellent example of the devil being in the details:
... the 'more effective, useless' problem reminds me of other such mis-guided domain names as therapistfinder.com, speedofart.com and powergenitalia.com
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Family scrabble dilemma
This, from the excellent xkcd daily comic ...
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How to rob a bank
Okay, this little summary is not going to do the full magnitude of this story justice, but here goes:
Man wants to rob bank. Man dresses as construction worker. Man places ad on craigslist for actors to dress as construction workers. Actors paid to hang around scene of crime. Man robs bank. Police looking for construction worker. Man escapes down river on an inner tube. On an inner tube.
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Youtube Brilliance
Oh - this is brilliant. A version of A-ha's 'Take On Me' but the lyrics have been replaced with a literal explanation of what is happening.
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Digital Video Wonderment
Okay, so this is already all over the interwebs ... but check it out, the quality on this video is wonderful. Shot with a pre-production version of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR.
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Stop frame animation
You've gotta love stop motion animation - and this lovestory is classic. (via)
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