Nov 20, 2005 · 2 minute read
Back from Manchester after a pretty good weekend all in all.
It didn’t start particularly well. Very briefly I was late getting to the station. Missed train. Waited an hour and the next train was delayed half an hour. Missed meeting everyone at the station and had no clue where the place was. After a trip (in the opposite direction to the pub) to the tourist information centre I finally got there and things picked up markedly.
Present where Patrick Lauke, Vigo, Andy Saxton, Jack Pickard, Pixeldiva, Robert Wellock, Dan Champion and myself.
We started out in a small deserted bar where Patrick had booked a table (including a reserved sign with bad fonts). Considering that we accounted for the vast majority of people in their throughout the afternoon this was mildy amusing.
I missed most of the introductions but not to fear. Conversation jumped around – people who made it to d.Construct filled everyone else in with the highlights and the behind the scenes gossip. Tales of massages and ladies mainly. We had a wireless laptop connection and browsed around a little. Bad examples of error messages (I’ll dig out the links later on), brand new public sector sites that simply consist of sliced up images (including links with blue underlines and ovely image maps) and goings on at the BBC. But we cant speak about the later. Some talk as well on privacy issues tied in with the whole open API goings on and an idea we intent to sell to google – stalking.google.com – which is fairly self explanatory but we got into a worrying level of detail!
After a brief break to stop off at the hotel, and for some of the group to depart, we got some Indian food on the way to a pub recommended by Patrick, who was going to meet the rest of us there. It was a ROCK pub. Rage on the jukebox, lots of proper beers, people wearing black, etc. All of a sudden we found something else we had in common – musical tastes. More discussions going backwards and forwards between the music (what’s that tune?) and the state of the industry. All good fun.
Overall, another enjoyable meetup. Thumbs up to everyone turning up and I’ll look forward to the next one. I’ll post links and the obligatory flick details once everyone else has their say.
Nov 15, 2005 · 1 minute read
I’m not going to prattle on but something that’s bugged me for an age. The usage of the word “Creatives”. And lo and behold it bugs other people too.
I like knowing that it’s not just me!
Just to say as well that anyone reading this and going along to the Accessify Meetup in Manchester this weekend let me know. Leave a comment. Be good to put names and faces to email addresses and web sites!
Nov 12, 2005 · 1 minute read
Right. I wasn’t at d.Construct I’m still a bit gutted really as it sounded like a hoot and lots of it was up my street and would have been good to meet up with ‘people’. But hey, I can still watch the feeds pour in right?
With that in mind, to again make my life easier and hopefully be of some use I’ve set up another (the first one was for @media) feed syndicator.
morethanseven.net/dconstruct
All I’m doing is parsing, storing and displaying all the feeds. On first run I picked up 27 and hopefully by the time you read this more will have been said. The collection of feeds are a combination of people I’ve met and people who where blogging about `media. If you have a feed and want it adding just leave a comment on here or drop me an and I’ll add it to the rest.
I’ll just say a big shout for everyone at Clearleft for organising it on such short notice. I’d rather thinks like this happen and me not be there than they not happen at all because of problems with size or cost or admin. Maybe next year?
Nov 8, 2005 · 2 minute read
After getting a few comments about the site design, and in particular a few of the fluid nature comments about it being tricky to get right. I’ve found myself tending to develop fluid designs more often that not over the last few years and thought I’d do a short series of posts about some of the techniques I use. I’ve generally found it pretty easier to find discussions about the pro’s and cons and the basic principles but less so on actual techniques. I’ll try cover some or all of the following over the next few weeks or so:
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extendable background images
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using overflow hidden
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use of fluid flash banners
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min-width and max-width (and javascript)
I’ll kick off with tricks for background images.
This techniques makes extensive use of the background CSS property which is used as following: div\#iBackground { background: url(path/to/image) center top no-repeat; }
I’ll assume some familiarity with this and CSS in general, basically all we are doing is setting a background image to the div with an id of iBackground which is set to align to the top vertically and centered horizontally.
Moving the image to the background has a couple of interesting effects, the one that we are interested in here is that the the size of the div is not affected by the size of the image (as it would be if the image was placed inside it). It acts as a kind of viewport into the world of the image. By specifying the width of the div in percentages (or em’s if you are dealing with an elastic design) the size of the viewport can change dependent on the size of the browser window. An example is inorder:
joshuaink.com makes use of a large background graphic that stretches the full width of the site. This means the space can be used for pretty large imagery but without breaking the experience (sideways scrolling!) for those with lower resolution displays. Note that the flower background is 2000px wide.
The only problem with this technique that I have come across is generating the images in such a way that they degrade gracefully. You need to make sure real content (logos or text) appear in a smaller area that the whole image and live with the fact that not everyone is going to see the whole thing. In my mind this is a small price to pay for asthetically interesting fluid layouts.
Nov 6, 2005 · 4 minute read
Well. Lots of goings on since the reboot. Rather than fill up lots of posts I thought I’d summarise – If something is interesting enough I’ll probably come back to it.
Thanks everyone for positive comments about the redesign, lots of new visitors to the site from the reboot site itself and people who liked the design and said so on their sites:
I even got onto screenspire which was nice.
All of this I’ve had the joy of watching from the vantage point of mint. I mentioned that I’d installed it a while back, as much to have a play around as anything but as many before me had stated, you can easily get hooked on the stats – and I’m enough of a numbers fan as it is. So what follows is a very brief, but real world opinion, of Mint. In case your only interested in the final opinion – I’m a fan (you could tell that anyway).
First things first, purchase, download and installation was an absoolute breeze. OK so I’m fine with all kinds of command line driven installs but their was non of that anyhow. Just change a simple text configuration file, create a database and upload. Everything else was just point at a URL and away we go.
I decided to install a couple of the official peppers (plugins) along the way, again a simple matter of upload, login and click install.
Login presents the nice interface everyone was googling over. It’s all nice shades of green, shadows and javascript scrolling. The pane’s themselves provide information about Visits, Referrers, Pages and Searches. This isn’t all the information you might be used to from other log file based packages but once you get over that you dont really need anything else under most circumstances.
One thing that did interest me was information about screen resolutions and that’s where the User Agent 007 pepper comes in. Displaying information about screen resolution, along with details of Browser and Flash versions. It’s all very voyeuristic I know but hey.
The Visits and Referrers panes are probably where most of the action is. The Referrers section is great from my point of view for seeing who is linking to me, really useful for tracking down interesting people I have no other way of finding out about. Visits details lots of information about the number of visits and visitors – cunningly logged using javascript so as to avoid lots of referrer (ie. spider) spam. Having said that, Google cropped up in my User Agent 007 pane so maybe Google triggers it too?
So. Is it for you? I get the feeling that it depends. It’s come out of the blogging scene so to speak and it shows. Design decisions have been made that strengthen it immeasurably for blogs while, in my mind, weaken it for other kinds of sites – in particular from my past experience for campaign style sites where you really want to look at this sort of detail.
For example the choice of PHP, how many well known blogs (at least in the corner of the web inhabited by web designers) dont use PHP? So for blogs that’s not a problem but for other sites it can be.
Another area is the ability to query the statistics. For a blog you just want to know traffic all the time probably. For a campaign you want to know what happened when. And that might mean going back in time so to speak – when putting together a report for instance. It might be possible to mine this data, even build a pepper around it – but I’m not sure that’s playing to Mints strengths.
As I said initially, these aren’t really critisisms. Specialist software is where it’s at in my mind. And this is definately a very nice piece of software.
Nov 1, 2005 · 1 minute read
The real CSS Reboot should be going off anytime now. But I’m in Rome (this message is coming at you through the magic of Textpatterns publish on date facility) so had to put things up a little prematurely. Oh well. In fairness I know which one I’d prefer to be doing.
I’ll miss the initial rush of running through lots of screen shots and sites, finding new things and generally wanting to redo the design at least for a week anyway. When I’m back I’ll post a list of one’s that caught my eye.
In the meantime a couple of other ongoing bits. I’ll try and sort out lots of photos onto Flickr when I’m back, hopefully including some shots from Rome and a few other series I’ve taken and not got round to. Also after meetups, lots of discussion on and around newcastlenewmedia.org hopefully a sense of renewed focus and some hapenings around that.
All in all I’m sure I wont be missed, but enjoy the reboot. If you have any personal favourites then leave a comment. If you have opinions about mine then leave those too. Especially if they’re nice.
Oct 28, 2005 · 1 minute read
UPDATE Well. Five people seemed a good number on the notice and the size of the table we got at the Forth. The trick of leaving a copy of bulletproof web design casually on the side of the table worked a treat.
Lots of hello’s, some vague recognition and lots of shared experiences and good ideas floated around. All in all a positive thing I though and hopefully the first of similar meetups in Newcastle.
Hi to, in no particular order:
The accessify forum meetup is tonight was on Thursday at the Forth for anyone who doesn’t know about it and is around the area. Looking to be a small number turning up but should hopefully be good to meet new people. I’ll post more details on here, and any photos (no photos, sorry), post event.
What do I want out of it besides the beer? Hopefully some ideas and enthusiasm. I keep meaning to do more with newcastlenewmedia and a few people have expressed an interest in pulling some things off – the mailing list even kicked off yesterday with a flurry of posts. So some concrete ideas, a broader network and some beer will do nicely.
Oct 25, 2005 · 2 minute read
I’m actually going on holiday soon and seem to be getting all sorts done before I go away. The obvious one is the change of scenery around these parts. Let me know what you think. It’s not complete as yet and I have a few more bits to add and check (yes I mean you IE) but I’m all for release early and often.
I’d been meaning to move on a little recently, and the move to textpattern cemented that. I’m still impressed with it and wanted to delve further into setting up flexible forms and pages. I’ve set up a few areas of the site to hopefully make me organise things a little better – specifically an experiments section to play with code and an articles section if I every actually get round to writing something properly. Both appear in the sidebars.
Another reason for the sudden change was, after using ShortStat for quite a while and looking over the Mint information on the haveamint.com site I made the plunge. Some had moaned about the cost but really £17 is the price of a DVD and with a DVD you dont get the sense of supporting a really smart developer. Ok so I could have seemlessly moved from one to the other without a change in the design but I didn’t want to (confuse my database).
I’ll hopefully post a review of sorts (better late than never) as the dicussion doesn’t seem to have died down yet. I’d personally like to see more of this sort of small, clever, personal application development. I’ve been a bit Open Source advocate for a good while which has it’s merits but I’m still of the mind that something as focused and polished as Mint is more likely to come out of one mind. The question is, I guess, about the market? If you’re friends blog to a huge number of other web designers, bloggers and developers then you have an in on the promotional front but will that become the norm rather than a very clever marketing ploy?
Also on the paying part, lots of people thought $30 was quite steep, I disagreed but will we be back to Shareware and people not paying? Lots of questions. Not many answers yet. But should be interesting to see where things go – at least for people like me with an interest in the sociology of software.
Oct 25, 2005 · 1 minute read
If you want to talk to me about, well anything really, let me know. Your best bet is probably emailing me on [email protected] and hopefully I should get back to you. Unless you’re a spam bot in which case expect to be automatically deleted or ignored.
On the other hand I can be found wandering the corridors over at designersinhouse.com or appearing in person at anything I can get along to that sounds interesting.
Oct 25, 2005 · 1 minute read
morethanseven is the personal playground of Gareth Rushgrove, a 26 year old web designer and developer living and working in Newcastle, UK.
Before bored people ask, morethanseven is a reference to an interesting essay The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, by George A. Miller, originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97. It’s about people’s ability to remember sets of data.