Blog July 2008

As my Twitter followers are aware, I spent an hour hanging around Birmingham International Railway Station for a train back to New Street today, which was late due to “severe delays”.

We all know and accept that things go wrong, but I think many of us are now immune to the standard-issue apologies we receive when this happens. What’s infinitely more valuable than a blank apology is a helpful suggestion: “board this train and change at New Street and continue your journey from there”.

While I was waiting, and not knowing how long I would be sitting at the station café, I started thinking about how most Websites deal with unforeseen problems.

In his book The Big Red Fez, permission marketing guru Seth Godin looks at ways we as Website owners and developers can make our users’ lives easier in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure.

Rather than a 404 (page not found) error or a search that yields no results, why not say sorry and then suggest some of the most popular pages on your site? If a page stops working, why not get a quick form together than emails your Webmaster, provide a direct email link or list a telephone number?

Railway stations are good because they try not to leave you feeling helpless, but Websites do that to users all the time. You could be on the verge of converting a visit into a sale when the link between your site and the payment system fails, and their order details, along with their confidence in you, is lost.

The microblogging site Twitter is as famous now for its all-too-frequent error messages as it is for its revolutionary offering, but interestingly enough someone has done the contingency work for them. Twiddict lets you cache your tweet on their server until Twitter is ready to receive it. Brilliant!

So with Twitter having bought Summize, surely the next best move would be to acquire Twiddict, re-brand it, keep it on another server and send all over-capacity or “something is technically wrong” messages its way.

That’s a quick example for a fairly frivolous site, but the same pattern can be adopted anywhere. Your error page doesn’t have to follow the same design pattern as your main site: after all, your visitors are probably only going to click the back button again, so if you have a few sites, why not upload some contingency forms to a cheap Linux host and redirect your errors to the relevant form?

Just extending a helping hand to your visitors when things aren’t going their way - no-one cares if things aren’t going your way, sorry! - can really make a difference and once in a while it’ll bring you a conversion you otherwise might have lost.

Five years £349 would buy you a fairly standard small business Website, with a few static pages, some stock images and maybe a contact form.

But what’s happened now is, rather than the whole economy shift and change and the financial bar lowered, the £349 website still exists but now has to compete with businesses offering their services at £49.

The thing is, investing £49 in your online presence shows off pretty starkly your commitment to making the Web a place to do business. Now that doesn’t mean you should spend thousands, it actually doesn’t mean you should spend more than £20, but it’s what you do with that £20 that counts.

wordpress.com will let you host your own content managed site for free, and if you want your own domain name (like thisismywebsite.com) you pay a small amount for the privilege. There are tonnes of themes available which you can customise.

What you get with something like a wordpress.com site is a Web presence that’s instantly connected. When you post a blog entry that you’ve tagged with keywords, people searching for those keywords will find it weeks before a standard site, because of the technology that blog engines employ.

wordpress.com is a great starting point, but it won’t, and can’t last you forever. As your business grows, your site needs to grow with it, and you need to think about making a real investment in the Web.

Companies offering £49 for a Website are great for personal sites, but why bother when Facebook and MySpace exist? If you want to get anything out of the Internet, become part of a community and engage with your customers, you won’t get it unless you invest either a little time or a little more money.

The bottom line is, if you’re spending less than £300 on a Website, you may aswell spend £20 on a WordPress blog that has your own domain name, because you’ll get more out of it: more visitors, more discussions and a greater understanding from your customers about what your business can do for them.

The Web is like any other place: you get out what you put in; the only difference is that by putting in a little in the right place, you can get more out than you expected.

Yesterday Google opened its Knol project to the public. In Google-speak a knol is “a unit of knowledge”, and it’s aiming to be a successor to the immensly popular and sometimes accurate Wikipedia.

I thought I’d have a play with it, so when searching for web development and finding nothing, I decided I’d write my own knol on the subject. Little to my knowledge, the lack of results is not to suggest a gaping void but rather an indication that the search system isn’t particularly solid yet. Oh the irony.

It’s a fairly easy-to-use system which requires virtually no learning curve. (If you can use a decent blog engine or a word processor you should be comfortable with the Knol interface.)

Unlike the complex code and techniques required to write Wiki articles, knols are written in HTML which is validated by the rich text editor that Google provides. I would have preferred not to see the option to change font faces, colours and sizes, as these are too open to abuse and left to the mercy of people’s differing design principles...or lack thereof.

That aside, there are some useful, user-friendly features which should help to truly democratise the sharing and consumption of knowledge. The site allows readers to suggest revisions which have to be approved by the original article author(s) [there can be many authors for one knol]. The author can see the original article with the suggested additions highlighted in green and omissions in red.

There are a few bugs: obviously the search isn’t fully awake yet - unless there is a delay between the article’s publish time and the time in which it is indexed - and there a few, very minor JavaScript errors, but it’s a clean, uncluttered and readable design. Hopefully that will keep, as I think part of the problem with Wikis is their habit of looking especially “techie”, with their multiple shades of grey and various small tabs.

Time will of course tell as to whether Google’s “me too” project will take off, and how soon it is (if ever) before knols replace Wikipedia articles at the top of search results for phrases starting with “what is”. In the meantime I remain skeptically optimistic!

Did you know a Google search for the phrase "click here" returns some 2,210,000,000 results? Probably not, as I imagine searching for such phrases is not the way you like to spend your free time, but it’s true nonetheless!

What this means is that on over 2 billion pages, Web authors are using the words “click here” to link to other pages.

That may sound like useless knowledge, but when you consider the fact that something like 22,000 Brits use screen reading software to browse the Web, that’s quite shocking.

A screen reader is a piece of software that, as the name suggests, reads the contents of a Web page, usually for the blind or partially sighted. Popular commercial products include JAWS, Microsoft Narrator and the proprietary system Browsealoud.

When a fully-sighted person browses the Web, they can read the whole of a paragraph that contains a link, and choose whether or not to click that link based on its context, so if we see a sentence that reads “click here for information on properties in Spain”, we know that clicking that link shown in bold will take us to a page about Spanish properties.

Users of screen readers don’t have that luxury. If they want to “click” a link, they first have to tab through the entire list of links on that page, listen to the text of each link, then either “click” it or move to the next one.

So a blind user’s audio experience of our fictional property page might work something like this: “home”, tab, “about”, tab, “contact us”, tab, “click here”, tab, “privacy statement” etc (where “tab” indicates the user moving to the next link).

The problem is compounded when you have more than one “click here” link on a page: for example a list of news headlines and summaries.

Unfortunately many Web developers have a strange knack of following rules exactly to the letter when it comes to W3C guidelines, so rather than using the phrase “click here” they use the phrase “find out more” or something similar, but that’s just as problematic because it means nothing when out of context.

For more information, see the W3C’s guidelines on link text.

While checking through the UK Business Forums today I found the following post which has subsequently been deleted:

There is a gadget out there that is totally new and unique - I Love mine and could not live without it.

It is called the MiShake and you can see it at w w w.MiShake.com

It is a media player like the IPOD or Creative Zen, but better with more features and it has a motion device built in - you have to see it to believe it. The best part is that it is more cost effective than anything in its class at under £100.00. Also they have a great game on their website where one lucky winner once a month with the highest score wins a MiShake. I understand that demand for these little devices is so high you may struggle to get one - however on the website it looks like they have stock for the moment.

I think the important lesson to learn here is: if you’re going to join a forum, post a spam message bigging up a third-party product within the same day without introducing yourself, don’t set your username to the name of the company you’re promoting.

Obviously both you and I clocked it the minute we saw it - this is obviously self-promotion - but I just love the lemming-like idiocy of a person who writes “hey, have you heard of this company?” from that company’s forum account.

Never underestimate the power of stupidity.

Not only have Twitter bought Summize, but the beleaguered social Internet near-giants have rebranded the site as Twitter Search, and moved it to search.twitter.com.

For the unaware - where have you been all this time? - Summize was a service that let you search Twitter in various ways, and build a feed or Pipe to track a particular topic of conversation. But now I wonder whether, with its clean and uncluttered look Twitter are branding their newly acquired system as a social search engine, thus becoming the Google of social search?

The idea of social search is simple: rather than relying on a computer algorithm to determine the relevance of content to your criteria, you use the conversations people are currently having, index them, query them and pull out the resources that suit you. Rather than getting a simple list of links, you get multiple conversations which you can engage in straight away.

You could easily argue that simply engaging in Twitter itself and ignoring the search capabilities (ie: simply asking a question and waiting for a response from a peer) is social search in action and the results you get back are more reliable because of it, but why not use Twitter Search as a springboard? Why not filter the results you’ve been given by the search engine by getting in touch with the people who put those tweets there in the first place?

Every so often little corners of the Web come alive to the tune of the latest security flaw to be discovered in a browser, operating system or in a recent case the entire Internet.

It’s very much in vogue at the moment to point the finger at Microsoft, who are seen as the “establishment” and without getting into a whole debate it’s worth mentioning that sometimes even what people perceive as the “good guys” get it wrong too.

Google are still widely held - albeit probably by mass consumers rather than niche social Internet users - as being a company quite incapable of evil or indeed incompetence, but it’s good to see that, like anyone else they make mistakes too.

The one I is quite a small flaw really, that means anyone with access to Google Calendars can find out the name behind an email address. This isn’t a massive problem if, like the blogger I’ve linked to suggests, you just want to find out who’s taken that mail name you were after, but if you’re a spammer this is potentially pay dirt.

One of the ways spam filters know what’s legit and what’s not is by knowing your own name; information which the spammers don’t have. But by addressing you by your full name which they can now find out through Google Calendars, they increase the likelihood of their messages being read, either because they’ve slipped through the net or because you’ve checked your Junk Mail folder and taken the messages as legit.

This vulnerability has seemingly only just been discovered, however a recent study shows a 27% rise in unwanted email actually originating from Google Mail (Gmail everywhere else but the UK).

I’m not writing this to gloat at another company’s mistake - and let’s be honest, it is just that - but as a reminder that complacency is fraud’s fuel, and if we stop looking for security holes or we assume they aren’t there because the software is open source or the company isn’t evil, is the moment someone else finds that hole and exploits it.

This is Mark Steadman, pushing your paranoia buttons in Birmingham. Now back to the studio.

While chatting with Josh Hart - he of Live Brum fame - we both hit upon the idea of programmers being different from developers. This has been discussed elsewhere, but I felt it worthwhile to look at this angle, two years on from the original article that prompted the post in that link.

WARNING: Grotesque instance of management speak following in later paragraphs.

It’s easy to think about the difference between developers and programmers as one that is based on knowledge: a programmer has a deep knowledge of the languages and frameworks he uses, and a developer has a broader but consequently less holistic understanding of them but has the ability to plan, talk to clients and manage a project. There are elements of truth in that statement, but it’s not wholly accurate.

I for example have a foot in both camps. I learned VB by sitting in my room, playing with my custom-built Windows 98 PC and not kissing girls. I got a job fixing computers then went on to develop desktop applications for large companies. I now develop Websites for a living, and I code for the fun of it: the results of which are currently TweetPaste.

But I also blog, work with and build WordPress plugins, collaborate on different projects like The Big Picture and Rhubarb Radio, all of which have come from an active social life. I work on open source and “closed” systems alike because I’ve got the end in mind, not the means. I can do the handshaking, business-card swapping, coffee meeting thing, and I really enjoy it when it’s with people who are there to revel in the exchange of ideas.

Josh told me he doesn’t consider himself a developer, but when presented with the code for Live Brum which he’d written almost entirely single-handed - and was able to thoroughly explain - I balked at that claim. He corrected me however, saying that he was a developer, not a programmer (not to be difficult: simply to draw a distinction).

It may come down to a difference in brain types: some people are logical, others are creative. You can have elements of both of course, but I think one will always outweigh the other.

I’ve had similar conversations with my friends David North who runs Digital Rant and Kevin “DigiKev” Rapley, a programmer and designer respectively; both people with an appreciative eye of the other’s discipline, but a firm understanding of their own strengths. Currently they’re both either engaging in or undertaking projects that will see them finding a middle ground, but having approached it from opposite directions, so perhaps these titles are defined, but not set in stone.

Given the right framework a developer can build very powerful Websites, but can you then take that knowledge and learn a new language from scratch, thus becoming a “real” programmer? Similarly can a “hard-core” programmer take the helicopter view and acquire time management and client-facing skills? Yes, probably, but what’s more important is the question of whether either wants to.

Some are very happy being given a problem and figuring out how to solve it, whilst others like to be given an idea and told to run with it or wait for inspiration to strike. There are opportunities for both, unfortunately there are also frameworks for both. ASP.NET is seen as the programmer’s language whereas Ruby on Rails is for creative types. This is partly because creative people embrace the ideals that open source licensing embodies, but also because of the reputation of the likes of Microsoft, as a stuffy, almost archaic organisation.

Or is it just about mindsets? MySpace is (now) built in ASP.NET, and Facebook which is programmed in PHP is under constant criticism for creating a walled garden (a closed space, far from the ideals of the open source ethos).

So therefore the technology - and even the ideals behind them - are not what makes a programmer or developer what they are: it’s what they do with those technologies that makes a difference.

There’s a whole bunch more I could say on the subject but I think I’ve gone on long enough, so if you fancy telling me which camp you think you belong in - or whether there’s room for a third...or more - please comment away!

On Thursday I thought of a problem. I like the microblogging site Twitter, and sometimes I like to mention what my friends are talking about.

However, there is a problem. In order to preserve the status update (or “tweet”) as it’s known, you have to either copy and paste it - and get rid of all the nasty code that goes with it - or worse, take a screenshot of the tweet, save it, upload it and paste it onto your post.

Solution: After spending a couple of seconds on Google - that’sreally all you need - I discovered that there wasn’t anything out there that would do the job, so I thought I’d have a pop, and thus TwitterPaste was born.

It’s a ridiculously simple app: all you do is copy and paste the link to the tweet you want to embed (which you can get fairly easily), hit the big button and copy the code you get itno your blog.

Another problem: it doesn’t work on WordPress. Although this site is built on my new Byron CMS, any collaborative blogging projects I am involved in tend to be run on WordPress because it’s something bloggers are very familiar with...and it’s really good. The problem is however that, unless you’re editing in code view (which shows you all the “raw” HTML as apposed to the formatted text) all the code that TweetPaste generates gets stripped out.

Solution: The TweetPaste WordPress plugin. This simple one-file plugin generates the code needed to embed a tweet onto a page. And because it uses IFrames it deprocates so RSS readers should be able to display a link to the tweet, if they can’t display the IFrame.

And in other news, this is my first ever WordPress plugin! WOOT!

So now I can embed tweets into my blogs, and allow others to do the same. And all in less than 12 hours.

Oh, and to prove that it works, here’s me tweeting the fact:

I’ve been listening to BBC Radio 1 today, specifically Jo Whiley’s show (for my sins).

She has a regular slot on her daily show in which she answers questions texted or emailed in by listeners. Questions such as “what was the music on that advert that was on last week?” or “where does the expression ’fishwife’ come from?”

The BBC engage reasonably heavily in Twitter (although as pointed out in a tweet by Paul Henderson this engagement is fairly one-sided) and have accounts for each of their major services, one of them being Radio 1.

Interestingly enough however that account is lying dormant, the last post being 10 months old. Now to me this looks to be something of a missed trick.

I know from past experience that BBC policy prohibits its own online actions, rendering its broadcasters unable (certainly without receiving flack) to read out URLs for other social networks in which they are involved. Chris Moyles has previously complained that he can’t direct listeners to his show’s Facebook page without those responsible for the station’s official Website complaining that he is driving traffic away from the site.

With this in mind I can see why saying twitter.com/bbcradio1 on air would obviously cause civil war to break out within Broadcasting House, but think how much more interesting their shows could be if people could communicate with the station hassle and cost free.

Plus think how many more casual listeners they could gain if they tweeted that Bloc Party or some other “worthy” band were to play an impromptu set at Maida Vale and it was due to start in 15 minutes, or that a guest on Chris’ show has just said something outrageous that must be heard with a link to the iPlayer.

I don’t listen to Radio 1 that often but I think I would if the message I received from Twitter was more interesting than “Radio 1 has received 1905 texts in the last hour”.

In fairness, inhabitants of the Twittersphere are probably more likely to be 6 Music listeners, so what’s stopping that station from engaging in this growing platform? 6 Music doesn’t (don’t?) even have a Twitter account, let alone an out of date onr (or in the case of Radio 4, an account that has yet to be updated).

As people who do “technical stuff”, we Web developers sometimes need to remember that the knowledge we take for granted isn’t shared by everyone.

Often those in the proverbial “know” find striking a balance between condescension and confusion a might tricky, and we can often find ourselves driving up what I tend to think of as a conversation cul-de-sac.

This can be characterised by starting a conversation in which neither party is entirely sure what the other one needs. Take designing a Website for example. Sometimes there are limitations that affect the design: screen resolution, installed fonts, browser capabilities and so on, but there are often ways to get round these problems, but it is important for the client to be aware that there are consequences involved.

Communicating this in writing can sometimes be easier because you can say everything you need to say, and the reader is given time to re-read and digest the information to better understand your point.

When this becomes more difficult is in a face-to-face situation, because questions get asked, not at the end when one person has finished making their point, but mid-argument and sometimes mid-sentence. Because of this, neither party has a full picture of the problem or the possible solution, so you can find yourself driving up an avenue that leads to a dead end in which the conversation can go no further because both parties are confused. “I don’t understand what you mean” followed by the response “yes, but I don’t understand what you want” and that sort of thing. Hence the conversation cul-de-sac.

It can be a very frustrating place to be, and if not handled correctly these sorts of situations can get awkward. I’ve been guilty of making the odd dismissive comment to someone or saying “of course you know what I mean!” because I couldn’t or wouldn’t believe that my explanations were left wanting.

So my solution tends to be to go back to the start and try to find an alternative route through the conversation. This often involves a lot of repetition, but eventually either you or the client will explain something in a slightly different way that instantly makes it clearer. When this happens you can find a different road and eventually get to your destination: complete understanding.

I think any business that is based on knowledge can come up against this problem, and it can be frustrating for both parties. Developers often get labelled as techies with little conversation skill, so taking the time to restart a conversation from scratch rather than try to induce comprehension by force can be very valuable. Not doing so can lead to you being seen as someone with few interpersonal skills, meaning your chances to meet clients dwindle.

Above all remember that your client knows their business, not yours and vice-versa, so a little sharing of knowledge, well delivered can be invaluable.

I’m suffering from reader’s guilt. There are just too many posts from people I like, and not enough time to read them all.

It’s a problem I think many people have already come across and learnt to deal with. Their feed lists become fatter and fatter until eventually something gives and they end up hemorrhaging reading material.

Those whose blogs are well written and widely read often have a string of writers behind them, all gagging for their feed to be added to the author’s reader.

I have a similar problem. My blog isn’t massively read - I get the odd stumble which you assume helps you pick up one or two new subscribers - but I do have a lot of content I like to keep up with, and a fair amount of it is from friends and other contacts who are important to me, both personally and for my business.

As I’m a busy man with numerous projects and commitments on the go - as of course we all are - I only get time to glance through my Google Reader list and pick up on the ones that most attract my attention. The rest get marked automatically as read so that I don’t end up with a sea of folder names in bold blue with numbers of ever-increasing size in brackets.

Sometimes the only feeds I get the chance to read are ones to which I’m most closely linked: personal projects, possible networking opportunities and pearls of marketing wisdom. Even some of those types of posts fall by the wayside but in the main that’s all I seem to read now.

So my problem is not simply that I have too much to read, but more that I’m increasingly finding myself in a situation where people (in real life, you know, away from the monitor) talk about their latest posts and ask for my opinion, however I have no opinion to offer because I’ve simply not got round to reading their posts.

Again this is a problem I think many have dealt with: you learn to reconcile yourself to the fact that you can’t possibly read everything written by everyone you like, no matter how good they think it is. And it’s not because their work has a lower currency, it’s simply that when you’re reading for necessity and not simply for the pleasure of learning new things and being inspired, you have to make a difficult decision.

The simple fact is, I may never read that brilliant post you wrote last week, and that’s fine, because there’s so many other people who will that it makes no odds whether I do nor not. Thanks Pete for that piece of wisdom, which you imparted to me many weeks ago in a pub somewhere in Aston.

It’s been a long time coming, but finally Bluemilkshake has a .NET site again, after popping over to WordPress for a wee while.

WordPress is a great system, and one of the things I loved about it was the way you could just “get on” with writing without really having to worry about anything else, and that’s part of what I’ve tried to achieve with Byron, the content management system that this site is built on.

I moved hosting a week or so ago, from a budget PHP host to Fasthosts, and with the move came the necessity to close down the original site, moving as I was from PHP to .NET (in short meaning that the old site wouldn’t work).

So I put up a holding page claiming boldly that the new site would be up by July 1st, a deadline which had already been put back a few days. I had a number of other projects on at the time which needed my attention so inevitably my own site suffered, leading to something of an all-nighter, the evidence of which you can see in the three videos below.

10pm

12am

3am

There’s nothing like sticking to a good deadline is there!?

Anyway...there’s still a lot more to do on the site, and a lot of content to add but I felt it important to at least have a place I could direct people to, plus it’s nice to get my blog back again!

(I’ll be working on getting all the old URLs to redirect but in the meantime the RSS feed URL that readers use to subscribe is being automatically redirected so you should be able to pick this new post up in your RSS reader.)