John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Code-a-thon article: 25 March 2008: We got into the paper for the Code-a-thon. You can buy old copies from the office on Aberdeen Walk.
The Turin Shroud: 24 March 2008: Did anyone else see the programme about the Turin Shroud? I'm convinced. I mean, not about Jesus being the son of God and all that. I'm more comfortable with him being a kind of militant Paul Daniels. But I'm happy that the Turin Shroud actually could be the one that wrapped Jesus. Crazy. It could also be the one that wrapped some other geezer from the same batch, but hey.; The whole "how did the image get to be there" thing is a little weird. Science, apparently, has no answer. In that case, probably, yeah, OK, you win, it's a miracle, he was the son of God. And is it just me, or did he seem to have a black person's flat nose? Jesus turning out to be black would be fun. Funny, they didn't quite dwell on that.; Anyway, what interested me was a part of the evidence about fashions in crucifixion. In the images we see of Jesus on the cross, he has nails through his palms, and through the top of his foot.; Apparently the Romans worked out a better way of doing it because, basically, the palms may not have enough resilience to hold the full weight of the body.; OK. So picture the scene. Actually, for some reason I imagine it as a soundtrack. A radio play, perhaps. Some people are aural, most are visual, others are touchy feely. Clearly I'm aural. Anyway, so the soundtrack begins with the usual moaning and crying from people in pain on their crosses, and relatives on the ground crying over their impending loss.; Then, the sound of tearing flesh, someone goes "what the .. ", then a dull thud.; Then .. "owwwww, that really hurt" as one of the crucified, who has falled off the cross onto his head, gets up and rubs his head.; Cut, then to the monthly management meeting of the new Roman crucifixions management committee.; "So, any other businessicus?"; "Well, if we could stop people falling off the crossicus, we could do more crucifixions per dayicus"; Anyway, the upshot was that the Romans decided to nail people by their wrist and their ankle. Those people stayed up. You don't really need this in your life.; Plus, full marks to Corro for explaining the real meaning of Easter in the perfect moment between Roy and Becky where she'd asked Roy to settle a pub argument .. is Easter when Jesus was crucified, or when he rose from the dead. Roy said (I think, I've probably got this entirely wrong, even Wikipedia isn't clear), that Easter is when he was crucified. Ascension Day is when he rose from the dead. To which Becky went "eeeurrr, well, wrong again". Corro plays a big public education role, witness the recent "don't go wandering around lakeland without a map, compass and flask" scenario. That's the hills not the shop, although come to think of it.; No, that didn't work for me. I looked more into it. This makes more sense. Good Friday is when he was crucified. Easter Sunday is when he rose again. That's why it's a celebration.; But I absolutely remember Becky saying "eeeurrr" (she often starts this way), "you'd have thought they'd celebrate something happy", so Roy must have said it was the crucifixion. My memory of these things isn't good (blokes only remember what matters to them .. now if they'd been talking about whether to use liquid layouts or static ones, I'd have it word for word). Maybe they were talking about Good Friday. I'll leave all these untied ends here and I'm sure someone will correct me.; Interestingly, too, I read an article the other day about how wars aren't always caused by religion. "Really? How so", I thought. It cited Nazism and I think Mussolini as science-based badness, and I think perhaps alluded to Chinese communism, and made me wonder about the Year Zero thing in Cambodia. Yeah, OK, fair enough. Maybe it's the big brush that's the problem. One person or a small group with a lot of power making sweeping decisions that gazillions of people follow. And if that's true, then our current world where people just buy stuff and make their own decisions, perhaps that's the safest thing.; And while I'm at it, why can't I get the Jesus and maltesers thing out of my head now?
Hail Easter: 23 March 2008: As promised, yesterday's weather was pretty tough. Here are two webcam shots from breakfast time one showing hail. North bay seas have been pretty spectacular too, and a picture taken on North Bay was published in, I think, Saturday's Guardian but I can't find it online.
A prospect chat: 20 March 2008: Here's a chat I had recently with someone who is about to embark on an Internet marketing programme. I've anonymised it suitably and don't try to tie up the xs, ys and zs for consistency, I didn't:; [18:02:12] PROSPECT: What I need to work out is how much activity is required to drive traffic to the site, what sort of activity and who does what- my rough budget is £100/month to include pay per click - I have absolutely NO idea if this project is going to work but I want to give it a go
[18:07:18] JA: OK, well I would usually use PPC for testing. If it happens to make profit, then basically your budget is a lot bigger because you can make money through PPC, the rest is about lowering your cost per sale, you know the terminology of course
[18:09:10] PROSPECT: Yikes - I'm not sure what you mean but happy to be guided
[18:09:43] JA: Thanks, it helps to know what ball park you're playing in.
[18:10:04] PROSPECT: I thought my best bet would be to have an ad appear in the left column in google (for e.g.) when someone did a search on [x], or [y], or [z] etc. - not sure how that works
[18:10:23] ... sorry right hand column - jeez - it's late
[18:10:27] JA: :-)
[18:10:39] ... Time to crack open a bottle, surely :-)
[18:11:04] PROSPECT: i was just waiting for permission
[18:11:23] JA: Not from me surely .. be my guest :-)
[18:11:39] PROSPECT: bottoms up in that case
[18:11:49] JA: With Adwords, you could spend £400 a day on those terms, in the UK alone.
[18:11:56] PROSPECT: yikes
[18:12:20] JA: So we have to get down to something really specific that will convert well, so we need keyword analysis
[18:12:31] ... Why did you choose those keyphrases?
[18:12:36] PROSPECT: what leg work can i do to help
[18:12:49] ... which key phrases
[18:13:02] JA: [x], [y], [z]
[18:13:40] PROSPECT: [x] - a requirement for everyone who wants to be a ..., [y] - the top course and [z] my target market
[18:14:12] JA: OK, but if someone types in '[z]', there are a zillion things they could be wanting.
[18:14:41] ... So, any thoughts what someone would type in if they want exactly what you sell?
[18:16:07] ... The strategy is: focus right down to something specific and try to get that profitable. Expand from there.
[18:16:22] ... Not: big and general and then specialise. Does that make sense?
[18:18:03] PROSPECT: I'm not sure what someone would search on - "[y] for non-[y] people" perhaps but that doesn't position the product for [z]'s and I guess i want to catch them just after their [x] results
[18:18:39] ... or even before
[18:18:50] JA: To catch those who have failed or passed?
[18:19:49] PROSPECT: both - all [these people] need to understand a [specific type of report] - only a few really understand the basics - many get by on bluff - but those who grasp the basics have a head start
[18:20:23] JA: OK, there's a thing called the 'long tail', which says that although something like, for instance '[z]' looks like lots of people search on it, there's something else going on
[18:20:32] ... Firstly, those people are just researching.
[18:20:35] ... You've done it yourself
[18:20:39] PROSPECT: sorry - you've lost me
[18:20:44] JA: You search for [z]
[18:20:49] ... then the results seem too general
[18:21:05] ... so you go "[z] [y]"
[18:21:15] ... and still don't see what you're looking for
[18:21:34] ... so you get to "[z] [y] preparation" and see all sorts of courses in the US and whereever
[18:21:44] ... so maybe "[z] [y] preparation online"
[18:21:51] ... and you find us, and buy something
[18:21:59] ... The long phrases are ones people buy on
[18:22:02] ... But
[18:22:08] ... The long phrases are different for everyone
[18:22:25] ... That's the world we're about to step into
[18:22:36] ... [over]
[18:22:38] ... :-)
[18:22:50] PROSPECT: Aha! I had a different perception. I thought if I hgihlighted "[product name]" and they landed on a page about how all [z]'s found [this matter] difficult but we have the answer and they HAVE to [have this] etc ...
[18:23:33] JA: I think that's a sales message once they've arrived
[18:23:41] PROSPECT: whoops
[18:24:14] JA: Not whoops, just .. we'll get it sorted :-)
[18:25:10] PROSPECT: Say you search on [x] and google comes up with its best offering websites and in the right hand column you see a google ad saying [x beginner]? Get your [product name] under your belt now .... or something like that - would you click on it
[18:26:03] JA: It's too general. You'll pay for each click, they'll arrive, see it's not what they thought, and leave. Your budget will disappear quickly.
[18:26:29] ... And
[18:27:08] ... You might not get enough clicks (because not all will be PROSPECTs), and Google might stop the ads for being poor responders.
[18:27:11] ... And
[18:28:00] PROSPECT: Good grief - the trouble is none of this has anything to do with chocolate - and I'm beginning to regret the whole thing!
[18:28:25] JA: Google has a thing called page quality which compares the ad text with the page you're sending people to. They need to tally nicely using good keywords so that Google give you a high score and a low cost per click. Otherwise you're paying too much for your ads
[18:28:32] ... :-)
[18:28:47] ... Don't mention chocolate. Paleolithic man didn't have any.
[18:28:49] PROSPECT: we can do that?
[18:29:01] JA: what?
[18:29:09] PROSPECT: page quality stuff
[18:29:19] JA: Oh yes.
[18:29:29] ... It's a bit pernickity but yes.
[18:29:39] PROSPECT: ok - shall we sleep on it?
tbontb: 20 March 2008: Not, obviously, that I sit around watching morning telly, but I did get the format of To Buy Or Not To Buy explained to me recently and it's interesting because I think it's analagous to my situation.; Apparently buyers present a list of things they want in a new house to the presenters who wander off and find two matching houses. Then, they also pick a 'wildcard' choice, which doesn't match the buyers' list but which the presenters hope they'll like.; And here's the thing. More often than not, the buyers choose the wildcard house.; Let's underline that. The buyers presented a list of what they want, then bought what the experts recommended even though it wasn't what they originally thought they wanted.; Well, that's what happens here, or should do. The point is, me, and the people on that programme, are experts in our area. When a client comes to us with a list of requirements, we know we're involved too late. Requirements go in fashionable waves. Right now the big deal from the Business Link people is that the client should be able to update their own website. Did they think about the user's ability to operate a mouse when they said that? Not as far as I can see. What about the fact that most of the time the changes are minimal enough for me to do them for free, or maybe for a tenner, whereas building a client-maintainable website and/or training them how to maintain it might cost hundreds or thousands more. And, because the client only wants to make a few changes a year, by the time they come to make a change they'll have forgotten how to do it. And what about having someone around who will actually bully the clients into making changes to keep the site up to date?; Anyway, I digress. My point is this. If you come to me for a website, you're not an expert web developer. So fixing on a set list of requirements ignores the whole point in employing an expert in the first place. Sure, start with the list of requirements, but then discuss the ideas and watch the whole thing flower. You might save money or get something you didn't know you wanted (like, err, traffic maybe).; Here's a real and recent request, suitably disguised: "I came across your web site and decided to write to you to check out your service and price for a possible web site design for a b&b. We are looking for: B&B Online Availability Software - this is open source software; Logo Design for your B&B; FREE Domain Name for 1 year; FREE 1 Years Hosting; Picture Gallery of our B&B; Location, Attractions, Menu; Room Information Page & more; Visitors book; B&B flash web design; Website Statistics; Website Updating Software; Unlimited Email Addresses."; It's like Frankenstein, a hideously glued together set of disassociated thoughts. Where's the top level? Is this a romantic hideaway or a backpacker's stopover? Any thoughts on where the traffic's going to come from (horror and disaster film enthusiasts perhaps).; I suppose it's fairly clear from the implied question "what's the price of FREE 1 years hosting", that it's all glued together for comparison purposes, but still.; I'd say if you want to compare different companies, ask a question like this: "We are a (for example) seaside B&B with sea views, evening meals and we are licenced. Our existing website is [here]. Our problem is, we are not getting enough bookings from the website. We'd like to hear your improvement suggestions with an approximate budget of £500."; The point is, the value is in the top level guidance that you get from involving and taking the time to converse with an expert early on. So don't get fixed too early on what you want, start talking with someone who knows what's possible and what's easy and, more to the point, what's right.; Actually that's key. An expert is usually someone who has honed their skill to a small set of core values and lives by those. If you're not an expert in that field, you have different values. For instance, I would say that usability is almost paramount. If no-one can use your site, it not only wasted everything that went into building it, but it will continue to irritate your potential clients until you fix it. Part of usability is accessibility. A liquid layout is important so the display flexes according to the screen it's being displayed on. Functionality is important: does your site do anything useful or interesting? And so on. These are some of my most important values. Other experts may share some of those but of course we're all different. But we'll cluster around a core set of professional values that are central to what we do.; If you're outside that world, you can't easily discover or internalise what those values are. So when you make a list of what you want, you're not thinking about what your site could or should or might be. That's the professional input bit.; And I know the world is becoming a people's world in which we all get exactly what we want. But whenever I use an expert, I always feel I'll get the most for my money if I use their knowledge and skills and work with them as partners. If only because if we work together as equals and the expert gets to really pour into the project, they'll buy in to it and actually, in the end, I might get something special.
7lbs: 17 March 2008: This Paleolithic diet is a bit of a grazing diet in that there's not a lot that's got enough calories to keep you going for hours, so you have to keep eating. That's been highlighted this week by me having four or five days of dodgy tum tum (including comedy stomach gurgling loud enough to wake us up). So I haven't eaten like I have been, and I've lost seven pounds over the last week. Yowser.
The code-a-thon: 16 March 2008: I gave my yesterday to charity. Specifically to Digital Scarborough's Code-A-Thon, which as I write has a Mogulus window displaying a loop of recorded video from the event (but which was broadcast live on the day).; The idea is a group of web developers, writers, photographers and associated new media developers gather with the aim of providing a website for a charity, for free.; In fact, there were around 13 contributors from 9-6pm so we did two, and here are the results: Friends of Royal Albert Park and Scarborough Homeless Support Services.; Because I develop alone, it's always just a little curious when I'm off to sit with other geeks and play computers because geeks play a game I don't which I think must be a little like an initial spar between two karate fighters that's aimed at finding out just how good your opponent is. It involves a series of staccato conversations about technical achievements, or perhaps an attempt to solve a problem the group is facing by displaying some flair or knowledge, or it can be a simple gadget contest that often begins when one extracts his (most often) mobile device. The game simply attempts to work out who is best at what, it's a capability contest, heirarchical swapsies. I've never been one for comparing knob sizes, I'd rather contribute quietly and walk off into the sunset, Caine/Grasshopper style. Not that I'm quiet or shy, I just actually don't play that game because I wouldn't be any good at it because I share my doubts openly, so I'd be in battle without a shield, and I don't bother remembering detail (I just have exceptional notes), so I'd lose anyway. I'm much more likely to roll over and show my belly with "can someone help me with this: I'm trying to do x and can't work out y, anyone done that sort of thing before?" Sometimes, that works in my favour, though, as .. if no-one can help, it means I'm working on something new and interesting. I don't know if I do that deliberately or not .. I've only just this second worked it out. It's quite powerful, it means I'm not a threat and pulls the plug on the game.; The Code-A-Thon, actually I presume the fragrant organiser of it Darrell Hooper, had organised for us to use Joomla, an open source (free (as in freedom and, I think, as it happens, beer)) content management system (CMS). That's a system that enables a group of people to contribute content to a website without having to know HTML (the language web sites are written in), and typically, within a framework of permissions. We even had Brian Teeman, a Joomla co-founder, to join us. And that's pretty awesome, so huge thanks to him for coming up and well done to Darrell for organising that.; I've never used Joomla before, but it was in my head for the next opportunity. Many people want to be able to change their own website nowadays and it can increase the cost a great deal if we have to program that from scratch, so for anything above trivial a CMS is probably the way to do that.; So anyway, it being a code-a-thon, and with Teeman in place, I imagined there would be plenty of coders, and plenty of them would have Joomla experience. I'm older than many so I've been able to gather other skills too, so I thought ahead of time that actually one skill that would be most likely to be missing from the group would be my ability to interview people well, extract the emotional/important nugget from a story, and write it well .. I used to have my own PR consultancy. So I imagined that's what I'd be doing.; That is how it turned out. Four Friends of Royal Albert Park turned up and I interviewed them and wrote up the story. That, pretty much, was my entire contribution to the website. Then, it turned out, the manager of Scarborough Homeless Support Services and a fellow volunteer were hanging about with nothing to do, so I offered my skills to that team, they accepted, and I interviewed them too and wrote that up. They used it on this page, well, unless that page gets updated, but it's there right now anyway. Interviewing five or six people and writing up those interviews was my entire contribution for the day.; Quite quickly the graphic designers got hold of designing logos and mastheads, which in both cases have turned out really well, I particularly like the SHSS one.; I didn't take his name, but the photographer on our team did a grand job of taking portrait shots of those I interviewed, and also shots of the park itself.; Andy Copeland, as a professional project manager, took a natural central role in our project and did a cracking job too.; Now, it's not a competition to see which site is best but we do have a secret addition to make: panoramic shots of the park.; However, I'm very troubled, and here's why. I don't like our site. Not at all.; I know it's partly the economic climate, and it probably doesn't help being in Yorkshire, but I'm getting feedback that I'm expensive. Now, I disagree, and I justify my price in two ways. Firstly, I charge the going rate. That's not based on a vague 'feeling' for the price, the real price is publicly available in various places, calculated from job ads and freelance rates, updated in real time and presented month by month. It's different for each skill, whether it's project management or PHP programming or writing copy or search engine optimisation. Many freelancers use it to know what they should charge, and to watch for rare skills that are in demand and command high prices, with a view to adding those to their training and development plan. To calculate a project price, I work out how many hours I expect to work in each role, work it all out, and round the rate to the nearest fiver (2.49 and below goes down, 2.5 and above goes up).; What is one to conclude of someone who offers themselves at a lower than average rate? I don't see how one can not conclude that they think themselves unworthy, somehow, of the proper rate. And if they know they are unworthy, well, they know themselves better than you know them. So it has to be a sign of some form of inability, some shortcoming or some lack of proper business practice. Basically, you get what you pay for.; Not that I'm against it per se. I've often charged under (sometimes well under) the going rate for my time when I'm inexperienced or untrained in an area, and although those areas are rare now, I still would. That's been with the full knowledge of the client and so any consequential mess or unforseen result we've ended up with is accepted because the client knows they paid someone who was, essentially, learning.; My second justification is efficiency. In my third year university project I benchmarked my productivity against the industry average for a software team. The word 'team' is important.; There's a way of measuring the size of a programming task, called Function Points. Basically, you run your software specification against a ticklist of things like: how many input fields, how many screens, and how many database tables and you end up with a number .. the number of Function Points within the project. As a programmer, you probably consistently take a certain length of time to complete the code to achieve a Function Point. A more efficient programmer may take less time. In my final year of university, I was more efficient than the average software team.; So, despite me charging the going rate, I deliver more in less time. I should charge more than the going rate (but I don't), so you are getting a bargain. Plus, if (like now) the rate actually drops, my charges reflect that, so there's nothing really to argue about.; So now let's look at what happened at the Code-a-thon. I took an hourly headcount, and I think there were 12.7 people involved in the whole project per hour, for over 9 hours. That doesn't count people momentarily in the loo or standing outside for a cigarette or, often in the case of the photographer, taking location shots or portraits in the daylight. Nor will this estimate include the pre-work done by Darrell to get a briefing from the clients, nor any time spent supporting these clients afterwards. Furthermore, the sites are clearly not finished, so it doesn't include that time. And it doesn't include the time spent creating or integrating the panoramic photographs for the park.; So, underestimating a lot, each project took 12.7 x 9 / 2 = 57.15 hours, and at the going rate, that comes to just over £2,500.; Peter Brewer jeweller is a site of mine that came in around that figure. Fantasy Forest is another, and there's also The Ideal Kitchen Company, Huddersfield.; There's also American Car Spares, which is built on a similar principle, just using a different piece of software instead of Joomla which needed a bigger investment but is probably more comparable with the real hours invested in our Royal Albert Park project.; Joomla gives us some functionality. Actually we started with a glorious list of possibilities from Teeman, but it appears the only one we actually implemented in the Friends of Royal Albert Park site was the 'get driving directions' one. And basically the driving directions are: drive to Scarborough, drive to the coast road north of the castle, park, enjoy.; The whole point of a CMS like Joomla is that it provides a way for the users to update content themselves. None of my sites really provide that, and they'd have been more expensive if they had, but look at the code behind the site for the Albert Park site (choose View->pageSource), and do the same for one of mine. You should find the Albert Park/Joomla site is full of markup, whereas mine is mostly full of content. Mine is written in a more up to date way. With my sites, you can pretty much edit them with a text editor and, for more than one client, I've provided a manual to enable them to do just that.; So. Here's the deal. Even with one of the founders of Joomla present, and with a preponderance of coders, Joomla didn't seem to provide an efficiency benefit over me coding a site from scratch. Of course, that wouldn't be true of a site that required lots of functionality that Joomla provides 'out of the box'. Nor would it be true if you knew Joomla well and didn't want to change it much. But it appears to be true here.; But all I could hear all day were discussions of "this doesn't work" and "this doesn't display right", "there's 5 pixels of padding somewhere you need to remove" .. in other words, Joomla wasn't straightforward. Perhaps you have to know it. And that makes me fall back to: I'd rather know PHP (my most commonly used programming language), then I can build anything.; Because at the end of the day, the Royal Albert Park website doesn't look like a park website. It looks like the design for a blog for someone whose hobby is building electrostatic speakers. And if we were getting "where's the padding" problems with Joomla out of the box, how much more time would it take to really customise it so it looked right?; Talking generally now, a project led by geeks will be led by capability and coolness. "Hey guys, we can add this, look, it's a live map of everyone who's eating kebabs in Scarborough". For me, yes this plays its part but I've never been into gadgets or technology. I'm into purity and focus and clarity, clean lines, simplicity and power when its needed. Sure there are cool things you can do and it would be completely wrong not to be aware of the current state of what's possible. But for me, for a website, it all starts with the user of the website and what problems and issues they have that we might be able to solve. Once we know who we are talking to, what problem of theirs we are trying to solve, then we should look for solutions to offer. It's all about the user, not the client. The client's client.; Joomla seems to encourage geeks to think about gadgets rather than encouraging them to think about the real problem. I'd like to see a study to see whether Joomla websites were satisfactory to their users. User satisfaction is one of the three pillars of usability, efficiency and effectiveness being the others. Or, were those sites just kinda jangly and distracting. Is Joomla an activity centre for geeks, and not really a professional tool?; The other part of this is about budgets. To manage your budget you have to manage what you're going to build. My approach, focussing on building something the user will want, is more likely to deliver satisfaction than picking sweets from Joomla's pic-n-mix counter. If I manage to do something different (invent a new sweet), that would appear to differentiate my site from the crowd, and that can be a real market pleaser. Of course, there's no sense in re-inventing the wheel, but you do have to resist just throwing loads of capability at something because you can. Every addition adds complexity. There's more to go wrong, and upgrading costs more. Much better to create a well engineered, robust, secure, maintainable, accessible, usable and findable core solution that's within budget. Otherwise you have a complex solution that's not particularly well done. Well that's just an accident waiting to happen.; What I think is really missing from the Royal Albert Park website is any kind of feeling for the user. It's basically a box of pebbles, the content, such as it is, doesn't seem to be in any sort of order.; The park will have lots of different users: runners and exercisers, surfers, family holiday amblers, families picnicking, geologists, people interested in the plants and flowers and nature, skaters, and local dog walkers. We could have organised the site according to the users, presenting information relevant to each visitor. That gives us the opportunity to optimise each page for phrases those people might use in a search engine so that the right page might be found by the right user, with increased traffic overall. It leads to community possibilities too, with, perhaps a comments section at the bottom of each page. There's not much point mixing the views of the skaters with the dogwalkers, but if the skaters find their experience is exceptional in particular weather or people need to watch out for a bloke in a bobble hat and a kalashnikov, that's great to share in their own community.; Which brings us to how the day went overall. I loved it. I met some really great people, no-one acted badly, the whole thing was a great experience and (if they let me), I'll do it again next year.; But for me what was missing was any sense that we were developing the site for its users. Perhaps we were geeks on a jolly, freed from those constraints we all work within every normal day, and because we were giving our time for free we could just throw in gadgets and toys onto the page as we wished without having to talk to pesky clients or answer to any manager. I give my compatriots that as a getout, because ...; This team wasn't more efficient than me on my own.; What I thought would happen in a team is we'd spend all our time talking and there would lie the inefficiencies of teams. But we didn't. Everyone got on with their work. It was heads down, all day. I guess geeks like it that way. So what was wrong?; Quite accidentally, my g/f and I yesterday evening got talking about teams. She's a budding work psychologist and says research is saying that teams aren't that efficient.; That led me to think that all the bluster from business over the decades about high performing teams is more or less because that's what businesses are: teams of people. There's no implication that a team is the best way to do something, just that's what businesses are, so better make the best of it.; I've always thought of it like this. If you can get a whole issue in your head (rather like loading from the hard disc into RAM), you can process it quickly there. A team has members and the members have to communicate using language and that's an awfully complicated thing. It's longwinded and tiring, you may not quite say what you mean and what you say will be interpreted differently by everyone who hears it, and it's very slow. So while debate and discussion is very stimulating and exciting and I'm a big fan, it's not as efficient as having someone who really understands the problem mull it all over in his or her head. Mulling it over means weighing all the different options and possibilities against a snowstorm of values and experiences. It's infinitely complex and could never be modelled or fully communicated.; So forget teams, hire freelancers like me.; All of this is here to highlight why I am worth my hourly rate. I'm old enough to have loads of experience, and loads of skills. I'm a mixture of a marketing consultant, a technical open source geek, and an Internet marketeer.; I can come into your business, spot the opportunities (and avoid the problems), understand your market, work out what would give you market advantage, build it, and market it so it makes money for you. Start to finish.; I don't see how I can discount that. I'm a cash machine.; And no-one else I met yesterday seemed to have that*. And even as a team, we didn't do that.; *I'm not saying no-one had value, not in the least, I had at least two very inspiring conversations and there were many people there who have a different skillset to mine and who, I'm absolutely certain, are complete blasts in their area. I'd work with these people tomorrow, they're fabulous. That's not my point.; I'm just saying, to my market .. miniscule, small, medium or even relatively large businesses looking for success on the Internet .. I may be the only PHP programmer, or web developer or Internet marketeer, or business consultant or writer or photographer or graphic designer or database chap or usability and accessibility consultant or ideas man or traditional marketeer you'll speak with who can actually do all of those things well to extremely well, plus take on the project, deliver it, bill you less than a team would on 30 days credit while being a pleasure to spend time with. I'll probably remember your birthday too.; So if you, my beautiful potential clients, are looking at other, say, PHP programmers, just bear in mind PHP programming may be all you're getting. I'm a PHP programmer that works on a much higher level, saving you from doing the wrong things .. saving you money, delivering a better product.; All I need now is proof I'm not full of crap. I have that. Watch this space. Actually, join my mailing list.; (Am I perfect? God no. If I wanted these sites to be more user focussed, why didn't I open my mouth and make the case on the day? Why don't I make them user focussed now?); Update: Scarborough Evening News' take on it
Fruit jewellery: 10 March 2008: Dried fruit jewellery. Completely nutcase, but it's strangely desirable and it's making me laugh, so that can't be a bad thing.
Friends: 8 March 2008: So there I was trying to persuade one of my lovely B&B clients to join Facebook and I was explaining how it works. "So the idea is you join, and then you find your friends and connect with them".; "But", she interrupted, "we haven't got any friends".; Then "Oh, we have, we've got two .... but one of them's dead". And she disappeared into peals of laughter.; Alright. So maybe Facebook's not for everyone.; But actually the point is, they do have friends. They were off after my meeting to meet some, and they talk about other people too, suppliers they work with and so on.
Visual language: 7 March 2008: There are people who are absolutely thrilled by visual things that I find, frankly, either trivial and childish or a turn-off. For instance, I know a professional musician, who you would expect to be turned on by sounds, to be aurally led, who, when showing me a soft synth, concentrated mainly on how the interface looked just like a rack of synths, and you could turn it around and pull jack plugs out and plug them into different holes, and .. and this is the important bit .. how the lead you moved flexed and swayed realistically as you moved it around.; In discussing a homelessness charity project, I found myself trying to get into the issues, wondering about giving the homeless people being supported some blogspace and opening up a wiki so they could all share information. Others were thinking of how you could create a stop-start animation of turning a heap of rubbish into a home for the night. To retain the level of good taste and decency I know you've come to expect from this blog I won't tell you the extent of the visual ideas .. we didn't quite get to bumfights, but we almost did.; I don't understand. I don't understand what's good about swaying leads for a soft synth. Again, I have to think that if they spent budget on that, they took that from somewhere. But it's more than that. I just don't value that at all, in fact, when I see that I'm repelled (not in a big way, but a little). It feels childish and I feel like I'm not being treated seriously, or that I'm being shown a magic trick: "concentrate on the wobbly leads my friend, and don't worry about the sound quality (watch my hands not the cards)".; If anyone has anything that could help me understand this, I'd be very grateful 'cus I'm going nuts over it, because it's important. If this matters, if people really do like cutesy visual nonsense and they don't think like me, if I'm the one that's weird, then I need to take that into account.; I know about people being led visually, aurally or kinesthetically, but that doesn't seem to sit with the musician who you'd imagine would be aural.; Is it a character trait? Is it playfulness or boredom threshold or sense of humour or appreciation of aesthetics?; Is it that entertainment actually takes us momentarily out of our lives? Is it whether your life's dull or not? If you're driven by purpose do you dismiss these things, if you're working 9-5 do you need them? I don't think Anita Roddick or Bono would be impressed by wobbly leads, but someone working in a bank by day may dream of getting home to play with their new soft synth and if they've been looking around for which one to buy, wobbly leads .. I am talking about them now .. is quite viral, they stay in your mind and won't go away.; So maybe it's not about anything but sales. A soft synth without wobbly leads sells less than one with. In that case I'd be wrong about the budget for wobbly leads taking away from the sound. If they sell more synths, they'd have more budget for everything.; Wobbly leads may not be a zero sum game. It might be win win, a victory for those who think outside the box. I may have to run that up the flagpole and see if anyone cheers.
Open Source Laptop: 6 March 2008: The Guardian praises an open source/Linux laptop for £200; Did you get excited about the open source mobile phone (a link from the consommacteur article earlier?) You can build your own casing for that! I mean, that's a thrill, right?; (Why am I the only one nodding and grinning?)
Facebook can ruin your life: 3 March 2008: Facebook can ruin your life, apparently.; I'm not sure this article is what I'd expect from The Independent. A tabloid maybe. Actually I think it's from Associated Press.; "In Texas, a driver whose car was involved in a fatal accident found his MySpace postings ('I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a drunkaholic') part of the prosecution's case."; "the Florida sheriff's deputy whose MySpace page revealed his heavy drinking and fascination with female breasts - and swiftly found himself handing in his badge; the Argos worker in Wokingham fired for saying on Facebook that working at the firm was 'shit'; an intern at Anglo Irish Bank, who told his employers he had a family emergency, but whose Facebook page revealed he had, in reality, been cavorting in drag at a Hallowe'en party".; OK, these are good things. Who wants a drunken sheriff whose judgment could be twisted by breasts?; Only your friends see what you put on Facebook (or am I wrong about that)? So the chap who blagged the day off at the bank to go to a party would seem to have been shopped by his mates who presumably were narked to discover that they'd been covering his job for him while he bunked off. That's a good thing. People who lie to get days off aren't right for a bank where honesty is what we all expect.; "A survey released by Viadeo said that 62 per cent of British employers now check the Facebook, MySpace or Bebo pages of some applicants, and that a quarter had rejected candidates as a result. Reasons given by employers included concerns about 'excess alcohol abuse', ethics and job 'disrespect'."; If you are employed by a company, they will expect you to fly the flag for them. You can't expect to work for a company and then use that position to undermine their public image. Companies work incredibly hard to create and maintain a brand and they will shoot you down if they are paying you and then you publicly diss them. That's perfectly reasonable. If you don't like your job, get a different one.; "A Newport Pagnell man, for instance, was ordered by magistrates not to contact his estranged wife, but when he joined Facebook, an automatic 'friend request' was sent to everyone on his email list, including his former partner. She contacted police; the man was arrested and got 10 days in jail."; The list that comes up on Facebook gives you the opportunity to uncheck everyone you don't want to contact. You'd have thought the fact he has an injunction would be permanently dancing at the forefront of his brain. It's not the sort of thing you just forget. So at that point, he simply should have thought about what he was doing.; "As well as unwise posting of content, there is also an unknown but large number of people whose privacy has been compromised, or their identities stolen, as a result of their own naivety combined with the security vulnerability of the social network sites, and the willingness of others to exploit that."; Yes. Make sure you have a really good password. A simple password may well eventually be guessed by trawling robots and your site compromised with porn.; "Although MySpace, Facebook and Bebo do what they can to maintain the privacy of their users, there is a constant stream of security breaches related to the applications placed on the sites. These number in the tens of thousands, most of which have been devised not by corporations, but individuals. Virtually all of them require a user to sign away various bits of personal information in return for getting the application, and, to begin work, all an identity thief needs is a name, address, date of birth, and a pet's, parent's or sibling's name."; Yes, basic rules apply. If you're giving away your information for a quick fix of "does my rabbit look like your rabbit" or whatever, then there's an issue there. But that's the same as downloading entertaining software for your PC that might turn out to be a trojan. It's not special to social networking. You just have to apply some judgment. And, don't use your real d.o.b.; So basically, think of your own image. Only put stuff on Facebook that you want everyone to know. If you're secretly into whatever, there are sure to be places for you to reveal that. Otherwise, Facebook is for your public persona. And if there's a huge disjoint between what your public persona should be and what your reality is, it might not be Facebook that needs fixing, it might be you.; Update: A friend made this excellent point: "Will job opportunities be withheld for not having a site? Socially disinterested, inhibited, no friends?"
Are you a consommacteur?: 3 March 2008: "What brands have to do in the future is not create a big idea that people buy into, but be useful for people." I've been saying that for years. Read the article in The Independent.
Visual -v- functional: 3 March 2008: I do miss Mrs Merton and Caroline so in her honour, let's have a mass debate.; I've just attended a lecture on CSS, which is the part of a website implementation that determines how the page looks. The lecturer was a fine artist who turned to web design, and he's exceptionally good at it and I learned some good stuff.; He held up two websites as an example of how important good design is: http://del.icio.us/ and http://ma.gnolia.com/ and said "they both do the same thing, but look how much nicer Magnolia is, I know which I prefer".; Leaving aside whether they actually do do the same thing for a moment (because I don't know if they do and I suspect that Delicious probably does more than Magnolia does), I just wanted to scream "But no-one's heard of Magnolia, and everyone's heard of Delicious, so that doesn't make your point, it makes mine" which is that functionality wins.; Interestingly, after I finished with this blog, I went back to Magnolia and entered a query. Then I got bored waiting for it to answer me and opened a new browser, searched for Delicious through Google, entered the same query there, and got my answer. Magnolia was still working on it. Case closed.; The point is money's always tight and unless you are really special you can't have it both ways, you have to make a choice. If you choose looks over functionality, your site will look good but won't work. If you choose functionality over looks your site will work but be fairly unexciting to look at. Given a choice, there's no point going to the one that looks good (but doesn't work), it's like having a pretty cash machine that keeps getting your money wrong.; I think I'm right in my area: businesslike, functional websites, and I accept that that's only one type of website. But even that Mighty Boosh site I blogged a while back: its purpose was pure entertainment but I couldn't get it to work, so it irritated me. Whereas I'm sure the designers would have argued that their approach was consistent with the brand, I'd argue that they cocked up the brand anyway. It sure irritated me, and where the Mighty Boosh were Gods, now in my mind they are mortal, capable of making flawed decisions (although obviously I imagine they didn't actually make that one).; The Chemical Brothers did the same thing, created a Flash only site. I actually refused to go on that at the time. For me The Chemical Brothers was about joining everyone together in a mass of rhythm, something so basic, transcending country boundaries and language, available to all. To do the Chemical Brothers' website in Flash was a nuclear sized horror. Not everyone has Flash, not everyone wants Flash, not everyone can use Flash. It's a cleaver, a separator, a divider. Not consistent with their brand, I'd say. Kinda like having Chemical Ali as the model for Loreal (my mind's gone off: strapline: "because you're Kurdish" ?); Anyone care to mass debate with me?; Still, this chap did advise us to keep a scrapbook. Not an electronic one, a proper one, with loads of print/design stuff we like in it. So I will. Good idea. Better than the Magnolia one. Oh, and looking at buildings for grid ideas .. cracking.
No country for old men: 2 March 2008: We watched 'No country for old men' just now. It's paced like 2001 A Space Odyssey: loads of space inbetween bits of dialogue.; It's gorgeously set in a time when cars were made of metal and things that communicate by radio had telescopic aerials.; Weirdly, the film contains a large collection of violent murders. Well, OK, maybe mindless shootings. And I came away from the film thinking "well, nothing really happened". So that's how accustomed we are to seeing people being shot. If this film had been released in the sixties there'd have been uproar.; OK. Here's the big deal, how I saw it. I'm usually wrong but I've a good feeling about this one, so I'll stick my neck out. The world is changing around the sheriff who, in the end, doesn't get his man and retires. So the film is about the inevitability of the world changing around you until you're no longer relevant.; And I kinda wondered, why now? Why is this film being released now?; It appears to me to be tackling the idea that America itself is growing old and irrelevant. As China and India's gravity grows stronger, America appears like the belligerent old grandad, stuck in his ways.; What backs that idea up is the film contains lots of references to comfort blanket stuff like men in cowboy hats riding horses, men hunting deer, that sort of thing. And the film's set in Texas, perhaps the most American of states.; Yet it's also set on the Mexican border. I think America shipped all its cheap manufacturing out to Mexico before it sent it to China and India, so Mexico, which in the film is the root of all the changes the sheriff doesn't really grasp, stands as a metaphor for all those countries that are now beginning to bite back.; Curious stuff. I'm not sure I can say I *really* enjoyed it, but it's a film that sticks in your head.
RE: 1 March 2008: Wow, the Graffiti application for Facebook (I don't know if this will allow you to see if it you're not a member) allows you to draw quite basic images and send them to your friends. Right?; Wrong. Take a look at the results of the ReGeneration competition. Wow. Inspired images from talented people. OK if you poke through into the top 150 it quickly turns skilled but still amateur. But what's inspiring me is the way the ideas or concepts are turned into images. I don't think I think like that (but perhaps it would be fun to try).