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Development tip: color coding UI by deployment platform
2009-02-16 13:50:00 For anybody who’s working in web development, there often comes the situation where you have multiple deployments of an application. I my case the normal situation is to have a local working copy, a staging environment and a live environment. I’m sure I’m not alone in having been in situations where I’ve made an update and ... More About: Web Development , Color , Development , Coding , Platform
Social Media Data Mining with FriendFeed
2009-02-05 15:24:00 FriendFeed have just launched an advanced search feature, Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb has written an interesting article on how these options can be harnessed to assist with cross-network monitoring and data mining. The nice thing is that all of the advanced search functions are available via the FriendFeed API, making it possible for developers to ... More About: News , Social , Media , Mining , Data
Win a BRAND NEW Dell Netbook and 3G Subscription
2009-02-02 12:52:00 My good friend Paul Fabretti is giving away a Dell Netbook with a Vodafone 3G subscription. All you need to do is follow @paulfabretti retweet the message about the competition and bookmark his blog post. What have you got to lose? go to it! More About: News , Brand
Tagged by Fabretti
2009-01-29 10:00:00 Paul Fabretti chose to tag me in one of these tag-the-blogger excercises so in the interests of not letting anybody down, I’ll continue the chain. If you are tagged you should: (a) republish these rules Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. Share seven facts about yourself in the post. Tag seven people at the end ... More About: Tagged
A new idea to hasten the demise of IE6
2009-01-26 23:43:00 Last year I was discussing the idea that as web designers and developers are the poeple who suffer most from IE6’s continued usage, we are responsible for doing what we can to educate users into upgrading. 37 Signals also announced that they would no longer actively support IE6, a step in the right direction but it ... More About: Opinion , Idea , Web developer
Social Notworking?
2009-01-18 04:11:00 The phrase “social notworking” I heard from Justin Davies, however, the question posed by my employer is: “Where is the value in staff twittering in company time?” I would argue that if your work involves social media, especially if you are pitching the use of social media as a marketing and PR tool then it is vital that ... More About: Social , Steve Jobs , Opinion , Stephen Fry
Google shutting down services
2009-01-15 10:43:00 Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land writes: Google ?s announced they?re closing or ceasing development of a variety of products as part of analready continuing move to keep efforts focused on other products with greater usage. These include an end to video uploads to Google Video , closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor. The closure of ... More About: News , Services , Twitter
A chat about Basecamp
2009-01-13 01:43:00 I had an interesting IM chat with my friend Jon Ward, a project manager with whom I recently worked. We were discussing the calendar functionality in Backpack and Jon brought up one of his pet bugbears – the lack of time-spanned events in Basecamp . Jon likes Basecamp but as a project manager he wants to be ... More About: Chat
MehWorld Expo
2009-01-07 17:31:00 I just don’t get all of the excitement over the Mac World Expo Keynote, OK, so Apple does produce some great products but the fanboy hype around the event seems a little too much. Probably the most exciting thing was the speculation about Steve Jobs ’ health. He’ll be okay though, “he’s like a god who knows ...
What I learned from writing the ?Web Advent? Series
2008-12-28 14:00:00 When I set myself the challenge of posting every day for 24 days, it was a spur-of-the-moment idea without any real consideration of what was involved. Having successfully completed the entire run of 24 posts containing 300 web resources of one kind or another, There are a few things that I’ve learned. Daily posting is not ... More About: Writing , Series , Learned , Advent
It?s Chriiiistmaaaas!
2008-12-25 11:00:00 Merry Christmas everybody, after 24 daily posts featuring 300 things I hope that in each post there was at least one thing of interest if not some value. Thanks to everybody who got in touch to say they were enjoying my web advent series. If you missed them here’s the full list: Web Advent Day 1 – ...
Microblogging
2008-06-03 02:53:00 Here I go again with another Twitter post, I know it's getting a bit repetitive but it's an interesting phenomena. Why are we so hooked on microblogging? Elliot Jay Stocks, in his Blessay about Twitter points out five things that Twitter is (to him at least): An ice-breaker A purveyor of ‘ambient intimacy’ A broadcasting / marketing tool A fount of knowledge A social network Read the rest of his post to get the full explanation. What are the other options? Twitter is currently suffering serious technical issues, where do we go to get our 140 character slices of life? In no particular order we have: Friendfeed Jaiku Pownce Tumblr Hellotxt There's also beemood which seems to be the microblogging equivalent of a sleazy singles bar, at least it did when I looked at it. And for non-english speakers there is gozub - Spanish Meemi - Italian Numpa - Dutch FanFou - Chinese and the slightly scatological sounding Feecle - Japanese (puts a whole new spin on ...
Scoutle, great in principle but lacking something
2008-06-01 02:26:00 I decided to try out Scoutle after reading about it a while back. The concept is "automatic social networking" something that was appealing in principle and seemed worth a try. The way it works is that you create a Scout - a virtual representation of your blog, website or social network profile. You then install a small stage somewhere on your website - this acts both as a tracker for website activity and somewhere on which other related scouts can appear - promoting other relevant websites. Scoutle are trying to build a network of sites ranked by relevance and usefulness, it's a grand target to aim at and I can only guess at the the way they are ranking each scout. It appears to be some form of input/output analysis model similar to Google's pagerank in that your rank is affected by the rank of the scouts with which you have made a connection. Where the system starts to fall down for me is that it's not very automatic, I need to login to the site periodically to check the meeti... More About: Great
Links for 2008-05-30 [del.icio.us]
2008-05-31 07:00:00 TiltViewer - About Cornerz - Bullet Proof Curved Corners using Canvas/VML Nadia Alramli's Blog | jQuery Confirm Plugin More About: Links , 2008
Scoble does Twitter
2008-05-31 00:42:00 Robert Scoble has just interviewed the founders of Twitter , given the technical problems which Twitter has been experiencing they seem to be understandably stressed - although playing down the problems as much as possible. The problems mostly seem to stem from the rapid growth of Twitter plus the traffic generated by having an easy to use plus fairly unrestricted API . It's understandable for a software house not to worry too much about massive scalability when starting out, that's time-consuming work for an application that may not take off, however I wish Scoble had asked more about whether they had made any plans to scale up in the early stages of building the application. It would be interesting from a sort of forensic development point of view to know what they had expected to do and what the realities were, once the scaling solution proved inadequate. The technical problems with Twitter are magnified by the real-time nature of the application, when you expect updates every ...
Video camera ponderings
2008-05-30 15:17:00 I've recently been thinking about how little I use my video camera, it's an old Hitachi DVD cam and it's quite bulky. The main problem is that it's too big to carry around for general purposes so I only end up recording things like family events and kids school plays etc. I was quite intrigued by the Aiptek HD camcoders which I saw on Firebox.com I'm not sure that HD but no image stabilisation would suit me, the size is ideal though. One of my colleagues recommended looking at this little Panasonic camera and again it seemed to be an ideal solution. I seem to choose hardware based on size as a base requirement these days, hence the fact that I'm still using a Motorola SLVR mobile phone. Whilst browsing for video cameras, I came across a video taken buy a guy running a half marathon. He was using a new Flip Video camera and the fact that he carried it for the entire run was a good indication that it was small enough for me, looking into it further I was impressed to see the vid... More About: Camera , Video Camera
Links for 2008-05-29 [del.icio.us]
2008-05-30 07:00:00 Memetic Selection Criteria adventures2134A.jpg (JPEG Image, 2184x1969 pixels) - Scaled (39%) Hugh MacLeod gets to the crux of the matter More About: Links , 2008
Links for 2008-05-28 [del.icio.us]
2008-05-29 07:00:00 Web 2.0 is…-- bub.blicio.us More About: Links , 2008
Links for 2008-05-27 [del.icio.us]
2008-05-28 07:00:00 AJAX Libraries API - Google Code More About: Links , 2008
Eric Meyer's Emerging Craftsman
2008-05-28 02:09:00 Eric Meyer's keynote at MinneWebCon last month covered the topic of craftsmanship in web design. The idea that a good web designer should be right at home using a simple text editor to make changes is one which I completely agree with. It may be down to the fact that my first web pages were built in windows notepad and tested in Mosaic that I still don't fully trust WYSIWYG editors and always end up in the HTML view for final checking if not most of the editing. To be honest, I'm guilty of resorting to Textpad for everything from HTML to JavaScript to C#. The reason I picked up on this presentation is on slide 28 which feature a quote taken from this very blog. Read this doc on Scribd: Eric Meyer: The Emerging Craftsman It's nice when that someone who's work I admire, feels that something I wrote is worth sharing with others. Technorati Tags: webdesign,craftsmanship
I refuse to become part of the echo chamber so don't talk to me about posti
2008-05-25 02:31:00 I recently received an invitation to join socialspark, a blogging community project which I thought could be interesting. So I signed up, filled out my profile, submitted my blog, installed the tracking code - everything that it asked me to do. a few days later I received an email saying that my blog couldn't be approved because I don't post frequently enough. Feeling slightly incensed about this I had a fit of pique and decided to cancel my account. This doesn't appear to be an option so I guess I'm expected to hang around on the fringes of the community until I can reliably fill socialspark's quota of acceptable posting frequency. After twittering my intention to post a rant about this, I was contacted by one of socialspark's investors who explained that post frequency is an automated method for sorting the huge volume of submissions which they receive. I can understand this is something of a necessity but maybe they should introduce an appeal system whereby you can request ... More About: Talk , The Echo , Part , Posti
Big Chip 10
2008-05-25 01:31:00 Thursday night saw our yearly company excursion to the Big Chip Awards in Manchester. Always a decent night out allowing all of us in the northwest digital industries to do a bit of backslapping and catch up with old friends and colleagues. Not having entered, let alone been shortlisted in any award category, we were free to have a nice meal and plenty of drinks. The preponderance of geekery in the room didn't extend to laptops used in anger, but handheld devices kept us entertained with at least one example of a twitter message expressing disgust at two people twittering each other on the same table and some incisive commentary on the evening's host Terry Christian. It was good to meet up with Jim Campbell who I've not seen in years, a really nice guy and his work is excellent. I also got to meet Matt Booth who picked up an award for Flashtemple - I've admired most of his work over the past year due to always seeming to surprise with something slightly more creative than you...
Links for 2008-05-23 [del.icio.us]
2008-05-24 07:00:00 Many Eyes Beyond Blogs Why ExpressionEngine Should Be Your Next CMS — Ryan Irelan Elliot Jay Stocks » A blessay about Twitter More About: Links , 2008
Links for 2008-05-20 [del.icio.us]
2008-05-21 07:00:00 A List Apart: Articles: The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome More About: Links , 2008
Links for 2008-05-19 [del.icio.us]
2008-05-20 07:00:00 pr2essentials.pdf (application/pdf Object) More About: Links , 2008
Semantic blog template
2008-05-19 11:43:00 I finally finished writing up my semantic blog template experiment in the lab. There is still some work to be done in order to apply the template to this blog and I think that in order to make the process easier, I'll be switching to a simpler design when I re-template the blog. I hope to add further design ideas at a later date much in the way that Jeremy Keith has done. Interestingly, I've been able to use almost exactly the same process in defining the templates for Social Media Releases, a current work project. Together with with my colleague Richard Clark, we have been able to run through a series of short discussions to examine the content to be marked up and decide on the most appropriate tag structure and find places where microformats could be used to further enhance the context of the markup. It's partly thanks to the fact that our senior management understand the impact of optimising the markup in this way that we have the freedom to follow this practice. Hopefully tim... More About: Blog , Template
Experiment #2 - Semantic Blog Template - Part 3
2008-05-19 03:47:00 Part 1 - Defining the structure Part 2 - Adding Content and refining the markup In this final part of the experiment, I'm going to look at applying CSS to the finished markup. Rather than start a new design from scratch, I've decided to use an existing design - partly because I already have the images handy and also because it presents sufficient challenges to make a good example. Structuring the CSS I've taken a few hints from the likes of Jina Bolton and split the stylesheet into key sections. For most of the elements I apply the layout, text and theme sections. This means that there are multiple style declarations for many elements but I can easily manage changes to colour or images in the theme section or spacing and margins in the layout section. I created additional sections for specific elements such as the navigation menu and logo. Layout The first step I've taken is to use a set of CSS reset styles, the ones I've used are from Yahoo's YUI library, but there are other... More About: Blog , Experiment , Template , Part , Part 3
Twitter is the new Facebook
2008-05-12 18:15:00 Despite the fact that not many of my actual friends use Twitter , I prefer it as a means of keeping up to date with what people are doing. I find that these days, I only check facebook once or twice a day whereas, thanks to third party apps such as Digsby, I get a constant stream of updates from Twitter throughout the day. So far on Twitter, nobody has invited me to "start biting chumps" or compare myself to anybody else, or find out what car, rock star or cartoon character I'm most like. Nobody posts year-old viral videos onto my wall. Granted, the majority of Twitter users(Twitterers, Tweeters?) are online professionals, so there is a fair amount of web-centric chatter. Not that this is a bad thing, for me it's like being at a constant web convention where I can overhear conversations going on about a number of subjects, occasionally hearing something that I absolutely need to find out more about. Often the tweets are a nice condensed form of entertainment, whether industry relat... More About: Facebook
CSS 3 - what the future might hold
2008-05-08 03:18:00 I flicked through this presentation by Jina Bolton recently and now I'm torn between the excitement of what CSS 3 could bring to the party and the certain knowledge that by the time there is enough browser support to really make use of it, the shine will have worn off. The normal state of play would be years of buggy and incomplete CSS 3 implementations forcing us to use complex hacks and workarounds in order to use any of the new features commercially. Microsoft will probably have working CSS 3 support by IE12. For now, enjoy the feeling that something exciting is coming along and try to ignore the inevitable pain and suffering it's going to cause. | View | Upload your own Technorati Tags: CSS,CSS3,presentation,jina bolton More About: Future , The Future , Hold
Web Typography in CSS 3
More articles from this author:2008-04-30 17:16:00 If you're a typography nut, you might be interested in adding your thoughts to the discussion around the CSS 3 specification. Jason Cranford Teague has put out a call for feedback on some of the draft CSS 3 modules, specifically the Fonts and Web Fonts modules. So, what’s the difference between CSS Fonts and CSS Web Fonts except for the word “Web”? Let me tell you about them: The CSS Fonts module defines how type is displayed on the page; which font is used, it’s size, and how it is styled (bold, italics, small-caps, etc…). Font styles effect how the individual glyphs are displayed whereas text styles (such as underline) and applied evenly across all glyphs. The CSS Web Fonts module details how you download a font file for use in a Web page, just like you would download images. It also includes the ability to better match fonts for your design with those that are available to the end-user or even synthesize them on the fly. Go and have your say n... More About: Typography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 |
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