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Building a multilingual CMS
2009-08-31 17:21:00
One of my clients has a requirement for a multilingual, content managed site. I’ve produced one before, but this will be my first with Django. Notice: If you’re not a developer, and/or have no interest in multilingual sites, this is probably not the right post for you; it’s long, techy and is pretty dry. Maybe useful for some though. Any Django developer worth his salt will probably tell you that Django supports translation out of the box, through its various i18n add-ons. Now that’s great if you want a site that displays in the visitor’s own language, but what if you ran a translation business and you wanted to show off your skills? Here it’s not as simple as installing a translation plugin and letting it do the work, especially when you’re dealing with content that’s likely to change. So when developing a content managed site that needs to support different languages but still be relatively easy for the client to use, there is a jou...
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“Showing the American right” through microblogging
2009-08-13 11:20:00
Interesting excercise in social politics or swing and a miss? The #welovethenhs hashtag and twibbon is an attempt to “show the world (and the American right) that we’ve got a great healthcare system”. But is it just shouting in the dark? What? Mark using his blog for a polemical argument? Surely not! Well, it just makes me think. Obama won the Presidential election - did you hear? - partly through maximising an audience that traditionally, the American right are ignoring. The Web. That doesn’t follow over here, however. The Conservative party has been making increasing inroads in social media, but our right-wing friends across the pond are really doing what Labour are doing in the UK, putting their hand up and shouting “me too!” I always find these Twitter campaigns a little strange, and if I’m completely honest, pointless. While recent “events” (and I hate to use that word to describe something so soul destroying) in Iran have ...

Formatting is not the domain of the writer
2009-07-20 20:51:00
If you’re a writer, you probably format your copy in a way you think looks best. If you write on the Web, those rules are already set out for you, and breaking them only inconveniences the reader. In a plain text system like a tweet, the title of a blog post or the subject of an email, the most common and most primitive form of formatting is capitalisation. Some think that writing their headlines in ALL CAPS means it can be separated from the body, however that’s not your responsibility: that’s the responsibility of the user interface designer. For example, there’s no need to use all caps on email subject lines because they usually appear in a different font, size or weight to the rest of the copy. If a recipient’s email software doesn’t do that, that’s a limitation which is their responsibility to fix or ignore. Similarly on a blog, the choice to use upper-, lower-, sentence- or titlecase in the title is down to the theme designer. If you ...
More About: Domain , Writer , The Writer

What I’m up to
2009-07-12 02:17:00
When it appears that I’m too busy to write blog posts, I find it interesting to look at what is taking up that blogging time. As I’ve a few spare minutes, why don’t we catch up? Well, I’ve been working on a multilingual site for a lovely client in London and building some smaller, but no less important sites for other clients around Birmingham. I’ve been taking clippings of stories to put in issue 2 of my newsletter, and remembering what it’s like to have a weekend to myself. During all this I’ve been working on the next version of the Rhubarb Radio website. I’m very fortunate to be in the position I’m in, being involved at virtually the ground level with a station that’s growing day by day. We’ve got exciting things in the pipeline, and I feel like I’m back in September ’08 again, using up loads of spare time and getting giddy about new techniques and code libraries. What I’m not doing however, is ...

Putting Mozcamp lessons into action
2009-07-06 14:00:00
On 28th June 2009, Moseley Barcamp saw some of Birmingham’s most digitally-inclined folk assemble. But what have we learned from it? On a personal note, I learned that I maybe shouldn’t be so nervous about public speaking, as my talk on coding from scratch went better than I thought it would, from the kind comments I’ve received (thanks, kind commenters). I took some valuable professional lessons away too, and have started putting them into practice. Thanks to Tom Martin’s talk, entitled “Why your blog is slow”, I finally got round to enabling gzip compression on my site, which made the homepage 80% smaller in filesize, therefore effectively making it much quicker to load. I also shoved all my JavaScript to the bottom of my page (where possible) so as to speed up the rendering of each page. Matt Machell’s talk finally got me to sign up on the Multipack forum, where I received a lovely welcome for my trouble. I learned that Jon Bounds has b...
More About: Action , Putting , Lessons

Blogroll video #2: Paul Hadley
2009-07-01 00:45:00
Paul Hadley, a relative newcomer to the blogging scene is probably best known for his work with Rhubarb Radio, but I sat him down and asked him about blogging in general, and what he’d do with all the world’s data. Thanks be to Paul for giving up his time, and for being new, and therefore interesting. I look forward to reading more of his blog. And speaking of such, here’s where you can find the illustrious gent: justblogging.co.uk @hadleypaul on Twitter
More About: Video , Blogroll , Paul

We don’t need no tweducation
2009-06-27 18:08:00
When a Twitter user is caught spelling incorrectly, using colloquialisms or lolcat lingo, they call in the @SpellingSquad. Thank God, we can all rest easy. You might think you’re free to say what you like on Twitter without being condescended to by someone you don’t follow. Wrong, as was proven to me today when I sent this tweet: View marksteadman’s tweet and found this reply when I got home: View SpellingSquad’s tweet My somewhat vitriolic reply of “fuck you @spellingsquad, fuck you” (thanks to Phill & Phil for that lovely piece of phraseology) was met with what can only be described as a small barrage of abuse from someone who, judging by the tone of his or her tweets is in no place to patronise. View SpellingSquad’s tweet ...and then 3 minutes later: View SpellingSquad’s tweet ...and finally View SpellingSquad’s tweet I’ve written before about the importance I place on “good English”, but have also state...

“Twitter is pointless”; should I be worried?
2009-06-24 08:25:00
Google the phrase “twitter is pointless” and you’ll find I’m listed number 4 in the results, at least in the UK. Should I be worried? Obviously this isn’t a view I hold, so if you Google phrase with quote marks I won’t appear anywhere, but even more bizarre is that the two articles above are in praise of the microblogging platform. The offending post on my site was a reaction to Twitter’s stopping of outgoing SMS in the UK, but it’s one of the most popular pages on my site. This shows two things, one of which we already know: There is a lot of bad feeling towards Twitter. I find most of this is centred in the US, with talk show hosts like Jon Stewart and the like railing against the site, presumably because their researcher’s seen a comedy video online that says it’s nothing more than a platform for telling the world what each one of us has had for breakfast [sigh]. Semantic search means more than reading microformats. Su...

Blogroll video #1: Jon Bounds
2009-06-23 08:09:00
A blogroll is a list of peers whose opinions you share or whom you like to debate with. Adding a person to your blogroll shows you respect their opinions. So I thought “why not actually converse with the people in my blogroll?” That won’t be possible in every instance, but where it is possible I think it’s of value to find out what others’ opinions are on the topics that are kty to my website. Jon Bounds , “Internet expert” is first up, telling us what social media can and can’t do, and saying something very important about kittens. Thanks to Jon for taking the time out to chat to me. You can find him all over the place: Birmingham: It’s Not Shit The Bounder jonbounds.co.uk @bounder on Twitter He also co-presents a Saturday morning show with Julia Gilbert on Rhubarb Radio, called The Big Paws. It’s ace. You can expect loads more from the video blogroll: not just a disparate bunch of posts, when the site relaunches in Jul...
More About: Video , Blogroll

At your fingertips, literally
2009-06-22 11:30:00
I just bought a Roberts Stream 202 Internet, DAB and FM radio for the office, not the bedroom. Why? Because sometimes it’s good to touch things. I sit at my PC for most of the day, and it has a good sound card and a decent set of 2.1 stereo speakers. I can of course receive any freely available Internet radio station, which basically means every national station that broadcasts digitally (ie: most, if not all DAB stations also broadcast online). So why pay over the odds for a radio that can’t do everything your computer can? The answer’s simple. When I get up and stumble into the living room where I have my office setup, the first thing I want to do is fill the silence. What I don’t want to do is wait for my PC to boot up, login, open up iTunes and select some music or head over to an online station for a listen, click the link and wait for the player to open. Having a computer that can do everything, doesn’t mean it has to do everything. Plus, what fe...
More About: Literally

Personal dictionaries
2008-06-04 23:10:00
Many of us - especially those who work in the wishy-washy world of social media - use words which are cobbled together from others and which we have either ourselves made up or are dreamed up by our peers and contemporaries. I’m often surprised at what words don’t make it in to common spell checkers: words like blogging, podcasting and even the universally accepted online (as apposed to the original hyphenated version). When I use a new piece of software that comes bundled with its own spell checker, I don’t get very far before I’m adding lots of words into the software’s dictionary (even after changing the language from American to English and replacing all the auto-corrected Zs with Ss). I’m finding recently that I let a lot more words slip through the net when faced with the choice to add or ignore an ostensive misspelling, so words like Stef’s gobbledygeek or Stephen Fry’s blessay are being added and accepted into my own personal lexicon. You can have a lot of ...
More About: Personal , Dictionaries

The pound shop website
2008-05-30 09:10:00
Just to clarify for non-UK readers, by “pound shop” I mean a shop where every item costs £1. I went for an interview with a firm based in Broad Street last week. Professional decency prevents me from revealing the company’s name or website, but they’re a technology business who own, amongst other things an Indian TV station and a price comparison site. The website I was to be working on should I have accepted the post was a social networking site, but to compare this site with the likes of MySpace or Facebook would be like comparing a £1 lightbulb to the lighting rig for a prog rock show. This kind of “knock-off” website is the result of a passionectamy. At some stage someone has sucked the passion for the web out of the decission makers in the company, and left them with no soul but one hand permenantly aloft and a little voice saying “me too”. In short, these guys give jumping on the bandwagon a bad name! The company that built the site does not care about so...
More About: Website , Shop , Pound

Sounds of Selly Oak
2008-05-10 01:42:00
Today my shiny new Zoom H2 arrived. It’s a pint-sized solution to the problem of mobile podcasting: a quadraphonic microphone, MP3 recorder, guitar tuner and analogue-to-digital device. I think this might be the best thing I’ve ever bought…ever. Stef Lewandowski uses one when he records various bits of audio, and I knew that for the re-launch of my podcast this would be the piece of kit enabling me to be truly mobile. I’ve been carrying it around in its box all day today, showing it off to various people and just itching for a chance to try it out. So after an extremely enjoyable bout of alcoholism with Danny Smith, Kevin Rapley et al, I turned it on, plugged my headphones in and rode the bus from Selly Oak back to my flat in…sort of Selly Oak, sort of Bournville, sort of Weoley Castle. And here is the resulting audio. And by way of proving that nothing is perfect, I’ve had to convert this from the original WAV to MP3 on my PC because the unit’s conversion g...
More About: Sounds

Beware the underdog
2008-05-03 17:36:00
Whilst watching the replay of Ronnie O’Sullivan vs Stephen Hendry today I was reminded of a conversation I’d had with Kevin Rapley, Daniel Davies and Danny Smith at the last Birmingham blogmeet. Cor, name-dropper me. Dan Davies (who, to lessen confusion shall henceforth be known by his web-name as Danux) was quizzing me over a post I’d written about open source web technologies, upon which he’d already commented. At this point I was set upon by both Daniels and accosted. Danny Smith wanted to know why I couldn’t get behind the open source ethos and posited the theory that it’s all about the underdog, a concept we Brits love. (I can hear the Great Escape theme in my head as I type.) This was a viewpoint I could understand, and it was the first time anyone had tried to intelligently explain why open source has value, apart from the financial benefits of not having to pay for your software. This helped me understand why I have the utmost respect for the open source etho...
More About: Underdog , Beware

Byron’s first stumbling block
2008-05-03 12:57:00
On Thursday I started work on my new content management system for ASP.NET, called Byron. I wanted to make it both flexible and efficient and in doing so I’ve had my first setback, and it’s all to do with data. ASP.NET has a great model for creating flexible applications that can be configured very easily and without having to write too much unnecessary code. The Provider module means that you can put all the logic for a set of functionality in one place, and worry about the nuts and bolts later. For example, I started off with a DataProvider system. I created a base class with a load of functions for accessing information about users and their roles, so that I could build a login system for the admin area later down the road. I then built a MySqlDataProvider which inherited from the DataProvider class and which would actually handle the instructions that the DataProvider was being given. So basically the user system says “reset this user’s password” and the DataProvider...
More About: Block , Stumbling

Say hello to Byron
2008-05-01 22:32:00
A few conversations, be they online or offline have lead me to think about whether I should be demonstrating my .NET skills through my own CMS. My priorities have shifted since I setup this site on WordPress, and now I think demonstration is more important than procrastinating. My mate Kevin is already using version 2.0 of Bluemilkshake.ContentManagement on his site DigiKev, but it doesn’t give him everything a blogger needs. Yes he gets the basics: he can add new posts, add links, images, metadata and so on. But it doesn’t ping any servers when he updates his blog, and it doesn’t notify any posts to which he has linked. Plus the system is not necessarily the most efficient. It was built on a module basis (a little like WordPress widgets, except those widgets don’t have to be stuck in a sidebar: they actually form the makeup of each post), so each block of text is one module, and an accompanying image is another. It’s because of the issue above that I thought, rather than ...

Your browser is not a blogging platform
2008-04-27 00:26:00
In a recent post, Lee Robertson of Epiblogger gave us seven reasons for why Firefox is better for blogging than Internet Explorer. Actually it’s got nothing to do with Firefox at all, but more to do with the add-ons that are available for it. Why Firefox should have such a glut of add-ons in comparison to IE I’m not sure - and please don’t mention it’s because it’s open source: Firefox is cool because it’s written by nice people who make their code available for everyone to break, and IE is horrible because it’s written by Microsoft who are all fascists. I digress. I do that sometimes. I really like Lee and Rhett’s work: Rhett has critiqued my friend Kev’s blog and is a regular listener to, and critic of my podcast. They’re both good writers with good ideas, and this latest post by Lee is no exception: i just don’t agree with the argument. To demonstrate that, I thought I’d look into each of Lee’s points and try to rebut them, if only for the sake of balan...
More About: Blogging , Browser , Platform

Count me in!
2008-04-19 18:33:00
I’ve just added my name to the list of attendees at WordCamp UK, a big bloggy love-in for all fans of the amazing blogging platform that powers this site, amongst many thousands of others. If all goes well it will be taking place between the 19th and 20th of July, at a place (in Birmingham) yet to be decided. Stef has been busy putting a logo together and suggesting ideas for venues, and a tagging system has already been put in place to group all related posts together (see the wordcampuk tag below). At the moment details are sketchy but a potential crowd of 200 could be expected. Lots of people have been putting their hands up to offer help and services - myself included - so we’ll see who gets to do what.
More About: Count

Are computers really technical anymore?
2008-04-18 23:42:00
I find the excuse “I’m just not technical” a little strange. This phrase was hammered home ad nausium on last week’s episode of The Apprentice by the almost totally ineffectual Lucinda, and I’m not sure I really buy it anymore. Even Nick Hewer pointed out that the actions being performed in the latest task - copying some images from a digital camera to a PC - were really not complex. The problem of being “non-technical” has nothing to do with technology in my opinion, but has almost everything to do with listening. Because people feel left behind by an industry that is a) moving incredibly fast and b) runs just about every aspect of their lives, I think they switch off and become unable to follow instructions. I think it has a lot to do with fear: of the unknown, of the damage they might do if they click the wrong thing, but computers are very good at coping with that and just as pencils have rubbers so do computers have undo options and recovery functions. I do ha...
More About: Computers , Technical

Something old, something new
2008-04-18 22:34:00
Two new album purchases today from 7digital, in the form of Passenger’s album Wicked Man’s Rest and an album by a band I’ve been meaning to listen to for years…wait for it…Ben Folds Five, by Ben Folds Five. My friend Kev has what we in the office have Christened a “music server”. It’s really nothing of the sort, just a 250 gig USB hard drive crammed full of tracks nicked from the real music server at his last place of work. Brilliant idea, one of which has spawned the seldom-played but wonderfully random iTunes game, which simply involves picking a word at random, typing it into the media library software and playing the results. Kev was off ill yesterday and, getting bored of the meagre collection of albums I haveon my iPod - about 260, but even that amount gets samey after a while - Dave suggested we have a change, and rifling through the list of artists on Kev’s machine I came across Ben Folds Five. Obviously I’d heard of them and could vaguely reco...

Named and shamed: me
2008-04-17 20:23:00
Let’s get one thing straight: I’m a passionate guy. I care a lot about the Web and I like to see things done properly, and get annoyed when people don’t fully take the time to understand their industry. But passion doesn’t always need to be public. In an earlier blog post I completely slated a web designer. I deliberately chose not to critique the site for reasons I won’t go into, and instead wrote passionately and with emotion. Although I stand by my comments and my right to publish my opinions within my own space, I don’t think it was perhaps the most professional course of action. I talk a lot with colleagues about “web ethics”, but what I would consider ethical behaviour spreads wider and has a deeper impact than what’s on the screen, and although I believe my comments were valid, the way I chose to make them was unethical. Lesson learned.

Adventures in browserland
2008-04-15 00:12:00
I’m a sucker for change. I like to shake things up, and I get bored very easily, so I’m always interested by new browsers, search engines, social networking sites, gadgets and other assorted whatnots. Now Flock is hardly new: I tried it back in 2005 and enjoyed the experience, but it was pretty much useless if you weren’t using del.icio.us… which I wasn’t. However, something spurred me to try it again and see how far it’d come. But first, to give you a bit of background: Flock is a web browser based on Firefox, but with a much more attractive interface and a whole raft of social features. In fact it is this feature set that fuels its marketing as a “social web browser”. Now let me get one thing straight. I’ve never liked Firefox, and I don’t like the assertion that it is God’s gift to web browsing. Certainly there’s a hell of a lot to be said for the Gecko engine on which it’s built, but the interface is dull and unfriendly and it’s less flexible tha...
More About: Adventures

Named and shamed: designerprint.net
2008-04-10 17:30:00
I’m starting a new series of blog posts in which I point out some websites whose developers haven’t yet heaved their monolithic bodies from the primeval swamps of Web c1999. First up on the list is designerprint.net, guilty not only of having a site consisting entirely of JPEGs with absolutely no HTML text, but also of failing to close their tags properly, as you can see if you glance at the bottom-right hand corner of the page, just after the Copyright statement. Oh and also for having a hideously designed site and no consistency in navigation. Well done lads. Props to Dave for shouting up the site, and to Kev for pointing out their HTML-inpetitude. Designer Print, your ass just got served!

eBay wields the clunking fist of monopoly…again
2008-04-10 14:32:00
Last year when Google Checkout was setup, eBay prohibited its use throughout its entire global network: strike one for anti-competitiveness, now it’s piloting a scheme which makes paying via PayPal mandatory. Strike two. Now I’ve not used Google Checkout (yet) and I’m quite a fan of PayPal: I find it quick, convenient and fairly hassle-free for both buying and selling, however I have more than a few concerns with its coupling with eBay. Primarily my issue with PayPal and its owner eBay rears its head when I want to sell my stuff, because I get charged first to list the product on eBay whether it sells or not - a policy that Amazon.co.uk Marketplace have been sensible enough to scrap - then a second time if my buyer decides to pay through PayPal; and since I can’t choose my own gateway I’m locked into the service. But at least I had the option to offer another form of payment, even if that meant eBay covered their ears and went “la la la, not listening” because ...
More About: Ebay , Monopoly

What’s the Persian for “blog?”
2008-04-09 14:26:00
Corporal Lachlan MacNeil of the 16 Air Brigade is taking part in a unique project run by the Guardian. He’ll be blogging his way through the next six months via text and video, mainly to give us “back home” the chance to see what life is like for a British squaddy in in Afghanistan, but also to give a voice to some of his troops so they can communicate - albeit one way - with their loved ones. I’m more than a little intrigued to see how it pans out over the coming weeks and months. Other than a headcam I’m not entirely sure what the Guardian have kitted him out with, nor how the pressures of life under fire will affect the regularity of his posts, but if nothing else it should prove an interesting experiment. I doubt we’ll see other social media tools put to great use in the Army: the idea of troops twittering their current location is probably unlikely.
More About: Persian

Phorm, the freemium model and targeted advertising
2008-04-04 16:53:00
Social media websites need to make money to live. Facebook does it by showing you targeted ads based on keywords of interest, but Phorm, the new centre for unmitigated digital evil want to explode that model and use it across the Web so that targeted advertising follows you everywhere. The Guardian say they won’t use it, but beyond what some are referring to as an illegal invasion of privacy, could a system like this work on an opt-in basis? Attendees of the Birmingham SXSWi brain dump discussed the merits of Amazon’s recommendations, of which I’m a big fan, and to which my bank balance has fallen prey on many occasions. So how about a single website where all the buying decisions you want to make public can be discovered by others? What if, when you sign up for a new ecommerce website you tick a box to say “share my buying decisions with x” (where x is a cool name for such an app), and when you buy your product, the site talks to the x API which records the sale and adds ...
More About: Advertising , Model

Birmingham bloggers: we need you!
2008-04-01 21:09:00
With yesterday’s words of inspiration brought about by the latest Birmingham bloggers meetup still ringing in my ears I decided to go live with a project that’s been gestating for a while now. I wanted a central place where bloggers could practice their art easily and freely, so I setup bloggingbrum.com, a collaborative blog where anyone - well, as long as they’ve got some kind of blogging pedigree - can write about anything Birmingham-related. It’s a simple, modest project and not necessary to everyone’s taste (some people have very comprehensive blogs whilst others may come across stories that they have a vested interest in but are not suited for their own site), but I think worthwhile nonetheless. There are some well-made aggregators of Brummie content - not least Jon Bounds’ creation UpYerBrum - but I wanted to collect original content that had been written specifically for this site. I’m a big believer in the power of the collective, especially when like-minded pe...
More About: Bloggers

Your mum isn’t on Twitter
2008-03-29 16:43:00
A SXSW brain dump via Bambuser threw up an interesting concept for me when Stef Lewandowski asked the question “is your mum on Twitter ?” That simple rhetorical question for me encapsulates the state of the Social Internet as it is. We have a whole raft of great apps available to us for free, but we as early adopters seem, in my opinion to have difficulty bridging the gap between what is a “cool application” and what an average web user can gain from it in his/her day-to-day life. I was in the pub with a mate who’s a student at Leeds University. After listening to some of his tales of drunken misdeeds I quickly found myself evangelising tools like Twitter. Here I thought was a prime example of how an app such as this can be used to great effect, for one thing by the University itself. What is a lecture was cancelled? What if students needed a quick reminder that an important project was due? What if the local Rock Soc had organised a pissup somewhere? This is all fairly obv...

The cost of anonymity
2008-03-27 20:26:00
I’m sure this is a sore fact for many web developers, but websites don’t always work. CAPTCHA images are often badly compiled so that meaningless symbols look like legitimate characters, or verification emails fail to reach the registrant’s inbox. As someone who likes to try out lots of different social media sites (among many others) this can become an increasing source of frustration, because web developers are making their lives easier by making users’ lives harder. But this isn’t the problem for me: as an experienced web developer who works on big enterprise projects (thus projects that may lure in spammers, harvesters and other bots) I’m well aware that there are necessary steps that need to be taken to ensure the people using these sites are people, and not mechanical creatures of the digital underworld. No, what really gets my goat is that when these systems fail (when CAPTCHA imags don’t validate or verification emails just don’t get sent), you’re completel...
More About: Cost , Anonymity

A breath of fresh air
2008-03-24 13:03:00
For the last 18 months or so I’ve been skipping from one host to another trying to find a company that didn’t cost the earth but also provided decent support. This is harder than you’d imagine. My journey really started back in 2005 when I discovered GNX Online, a small firm who I think were based in India. As I was an ASP.NET programmer I plumped for their .NET hosting which was - and still is - extremely cheap. It used a Plesk control panel which is great, and they had both instant chat and a support ticket system. In all fairness the web side of things was OK on the whole: now and again the permissions I’d setup in Plesk would be reset and I’d have to go in and reinstate them, but the real problem was with their email services. There really is nothing worse than knowing you should have received an email but having no evidence to suggest this: hosts love that because there’s no mail to dispute (you can argue about a late email, but a missing one? forget it). To cut a l...
More About: Breath , Fresh