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I don’t listen to Radio 1 very much now (not live at least, although I download a few of their podcasts) but I’m not so sure they’ve got the hang of this Facebook thing yet...

If I’m honest I’m not entirely sure why the Webbists at Radio 1 feel it’s necessary to pick an arbitrary gig to promote on Facebook: surely that’s the Kings of Leon’s responsibility? But the biggest irritant is their apparent need to notify me for every Radio 1 page I become a “fan” of.

What’s more irritating (which is Facebook’s problem) is that I can’t mark a specific update as spam. I don’t mind receiving updates Chris Moyles’ or Scott Mills’ shows as I quite like them, but I don’t want to receive the same thing three (or more) times.

It gets worse though, as both shows have had events in the past two weeks that should have, but weren’t broadcast as updates.

It’s not a big thing I know, but what is the point of having a presence on a social network you don’t understand if you’re not going to engage with it.

The first interesting and well conceived Vitanim article in a long while caught my eye today, arriving as it did at just the right time. “How do you get your line manager to buy into accessibility?” is basically the question it answers.

The problem I’ve recently faced as a Web developer who reports directly to a line manager or director (as apposed to working for an agency and dealing only with your project manager) is figuring out how I can take the ideals I built on as part of my agency experience and apply them to working for a company directly.

As a Web developer working for an agency, and especially one with a project manager you’re able to make judgements based on your own skills and experience, because the marketing professional who has hired your company affords that company a certain level of trust: they don’t need to know the nuts and bolts, just that it works for them.

These judgements are largely invisible to the client and are often to do with a perceived level of quality: of code, logic, markup or data structure. An agency developer may choose to sacrifice certain “flashy” functionality for the sake of accessibility or use CSS and XHTML for layout rather than dropping images in place of text, sacrificing time but gaining flexibility in the long run.

Contrast that with working directly for an organisation that doesn’t necessarily have a marketing department and that level of trust changes. It doesn’t lessen, but rather tightens. Although your manager will trust you to develop pages with your own judgement in play, because you’re working for them (whether as a contractor or a permanent employee) you’re expected to whistle to their tune. And that’s fine: they’re paying your wages after all.

But what do you do when your manager doesn’t care about accessibility? It can be costly (under the time = money rule if nothing else) and the benefits are mostly to do with gaining kudos amongst a community that will probably never buy the product or service your employers are selling. So do you tell him he’s wrong? Do you ignore him and carry on, choosing to justify yourself if and when the time comes, or do you try and work accessibility into your practice without throwing it his face?

Although it could possibly go a bit further into providing provable key points that professionals can understand, the Vitamin article on accessibility shares some great starting-point links, one of which being Google’s easy-to-follow Webmaster Guidelines page.

If you’re planning to march into your manager’s office any time soon, preaching the gospel according to Tim, stop, breathe and read Accessibility In Suit and Tie.

When designing a new Website it can often be tempting to think outside the box, but there are pitfalls that need to be avoided to ensure your users aren’t left terminally confused.

Despite all this 3.0 talk, the Web technology is still in its infancy, and like all the technologies we take for granted, it needs time to mature.

Consider TV advertising. In the 50s it was simplistic and brash because advertisers simply didn’t know how people would respond to the medium and so subtlety went out the window. Now we see ads often of breathtaking quality but are left unsure of what we’re actually being sold, because advertisers have the confidence in the savviness of its audience.

The Web is less than 20 years old, and most of its users are still not savvy enough to handle change. They need logos and menus to be where they expect them to be, and they need sites to behave in a way they expect.

Sometimes the temptation to create revolutionary sites that function in new and innovative ways or employ subtle navigation techniques can be all-consuming. We all want a site that is different from the competition, but in the relative early stages of this medium, can we afford to lose users?

I’m not suggesting that all users are stupid, but they do need guidance because many of them are still - even if subconsciously - afraid that clicking the wrong thing could break their computer or result in the payment for an item they never ordered.

It can be very easy to patronise this audience and dumb down your Website in the process, so we as designers and developers need to take great care in balancing usability with innovation.

For now I think the golden rules have to be:

• keep the logo top left
• put the menu where it can always be seen no matter how long the page becomes
• request information via online forms only when that information is needed (ie: don’t ask for an email address unless you’re going to email that person)
• use sitemaps, search boxes and breadcrumb trails where appropriate
• avoid too much mouse movement (that means getting rid of that pull-down menu...you know who you are!)

In terms of inspiration, when the well is full to overflowing it’s tempting to draw from it at speed, lest it run dry, thus filling up your blog with exciting new posts. But what happens when the well does run dry?

I’m a big believer in transparency, especially when it comes to blogging. I try to help my clients remember that they’re not writing faceless articles but personal accounts.

Because of that I tend to blog when the idea occurs to me, so when I’m bursting with new thoughts, theories and arguments my blog flourishes but when I’m out of ideas the site suffers.

So I started to ask myself whether it was prudent to keep one or two blog posts as drafts within my CMS as reserves, saved for a rainy day, or whether this would affect my relationship with my readers.

By presenting a blog post as new when it is in fact a couple of days or even weeks old I am effectively not being truthful with my audience, but does that really matter? As bloggers we all vet our comments to make sure spammers don’t plaster their links all over the place. This is by no means transparent, but is absolutely accepted, and necessary behaviour. Can the same be said about delayed blogging?

What do you do? Do you keep one in the bag for later, or do you think you should blog honestly? Does it even matter?

Feed readers take RSS feeds and display them in a meaningful way, but if you provide only summaries of your posts you make your readers’ lives harder and reduce the likelihood of your content being read.

RSS is a technology that is most effective for blogs, giving us an easy way to read authors’ content. Before the advent of Web-based apps like Google Reader, providing summaries of blog posts via the description tag made sense: there were fewer feeds around (worth reading) in those days so you received alerts when new content was made available, much like we still do now with email.

But as the number of blogs increases, and with the advent of blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and all the rest of them, “really simple syndication” (which isn’t what RSS stands for*) is widely regarded as the way to read blog posts.

I very rarely visit blogs any more, unless a particular post uses script that Google Reader can’t render or that RSS doesn’t reproduce. However, there is another reason that forces me to jump out of my reading panel and disrupt my flow, and that is incomplete feeds.

As I mentioned before, you used to be able to get away with putting a summary of your content in the description tag of each post’s item tag. (Most developers use the word “node” as it’s an XML term, but it’s a similar makeup to HTML so I’m simplifying). However, bloggers - or more specifically blogging platform developers - can embed the entire content of a post into the item tag by creating a content:encoded tag and importing a namespace (basically adding a line near the top of the RSS document). Feed readers understand this tag, which allows for storing of HTML, which obviously includes images and embedded Flash movies.

This relatively small change has a massive effect on the way a reader consumes an author’s content and it is very simple to implement, however there are still a number of blogs that don’t use this and I find it infuriating.

When I’m skimming through the new articles that have been written in the last 24 hours or so, if I see a headline that catches my eye - or a new article by a writer whose posts I particularly enjoy - I want to read the whole article there and then, in a familiar setting. I don’t want to have to click, scroll, adjust to the layout and continue reading.

Imagine if you were reading a newspaper, but instead of printing the full article the publishers just printed the page number of an accompanying magazine which was full of adverts. If they did that for every section you’d be up to your knees in cheap gloss.

Bloggers: please take a look at the source code for your RSS feeds. (You can do it in your Web browser.) If you don’t see a content:encoded tag for each of your posts, download the right plugin for your blog software or contact your developer because your posts could be going unread. (Failing that you could simply be annoying your readers, and there’s never a reason for that.)

There are people who, infuriatingly enough serve incomplete RSS feeds on purpose, because they want to track the number of subscribers they have. This is fairly pointless however because, if you are writing good content you will insight people either to comment on it, link to it, forward it on or visit the site to find out more, all of which are trackable. RSS readers are lurkers, so you should focus on converting them to real visitors by providing full content rather than arrogantly assuming they will follow your predetermined conversion path.

_{* it’s RDF Site Summary incidentally}

I’ve been busy with new contracts and other commitments over the past couple of weeks, and my blogging has suffered. It’s a common side-effect of business and a mismanagement of proprieties.

Most people put blogging quite low down the list of priorities when they come up against their own personal busy season, but in the same way that you should never stop chasing new business when you’re already stacked, you shouldn’t stop blogging when you’ve got ideas in your head, just because you haven’t made the time to write.

Of course, that assumes you’re blossoming with ideas and viewpoints. What do you do when you’ve got nothing to write about? Should you blog “for the sake of it” or only when you have an original, unprompted thought? Do they have to be mutually exclusive?

That’s enough questions.

So, in the absence of another polemical argument, I thought I’d give you a heads-up as to what’s going on in Bluemilokshakeland.

Byron, my fancy content management framework is getting an overhaul to make it more scalable and increase its usability for developers. It’s already very efficient but as a developer tool it’s lacking any form of intuitive logic.

I’m currently doing some work in Henley in Arden (in the Midlands, on the way to Stratford, UK) and sharing social marketing links and ideas, which has lead me to think about getting a page of links setup on bluemilkshake.co.uk, or working with my del.icio.us list to provide a comprehensive list of my recommended reads.

Also got lots of projects on, and am thinking of getting a dedicated Linux box for all my various WordPress sites, and to host any new Ruby on Rails projects as and when they come about.

So that’s me. Thanks for your patience and I hope to be back and as divisive as ever very soon!

Twitter had the chance to change the way people used the social Internet, by making its services usable completely over SMS. Yesterday they forfeited that chance by shutting out those who don’t live in the right countries.

In a low-key blog post, the powers that were announced that, unless you lived in Canada, the US and for some reason India, Twitter’s SMS support would be shut down.

This comes after they suspended support for the “track” keyword via SMS (which allowed users to receive messages that were relevant to their username or a selection of keywords) and neglected to tell anyone.

I’ve been a big supporter of Twitter, having written my own Twitter app and numerous blog posts in sympathy with their reliability issues, but removing the mobile element renders the update system no better than Facebook’s (which only has support for BT Cellnet, or O2 as they like to be called).

Biz Stone, the author of the blog post gave a sensible reason as to why SMS was pulled. I think we were pretty naive if we thought that we could continue to receive updates from our friends for free and forever, but what I object to is this idea that it’s OK to shut out countries like the UK, who have got behind this site in bigger ways than I think many others have.

The fact that Twitter didn’t even attempt to strike up some sort of deal with a carrier is what has annoyed me. Biz’s explanation that you have to pay for texts isn’t just restricted to Europe: even in the Land of the Free you still have to pay for SMS, unless American Altruism is a new mobile carrier?

A Facebook group has inevitably sprung up to try and encourage mobile carriers to “cut Twitter a decent deal” but the simple fact is if the Twitter guys cared enough about what happened outside of the Americas, they’d have realised that you can charge people to receive texts. By adding the same limiting capability as was previously available the system would allow its users to budget, so they weren’t bankrupted by a slew of spammy texts they could not control.

Unless and until they plug this hole, I don’t know if I’ll be using Twitter. Not because I want to be an arse - although I am very good at it - but because there are just too many features being removed. Because tracking no longer works - even though the system will tell you it does - I have to read tweets via mobile Internet. I can send them via SMS, but I will now receive direct messages through email only.

I thought the point that tweets were 140 characters long was because this followed a similar convention to SMS messages, allowing the system to append their own 40-character comments to the end of each tweet, but now since this is no longer the case, Twitter is just a site that doesn’t have as many features as Facebook.

Best practises are methods and techniques for achieving a certain goal. By their very nature they set the standard for us to follow, and form a mechanism by which developers can be judged.

ASP.NET is my platform of choice when developing applications, but it gets a bum rap from developers on both sides of the open source debate, for its creators’ inherently arrogant approach to Web standards.

While working on a new project I thought I’d have to bite my tongue when I saw some of the .NET markup that was being used, but after a while it dawned on me that what was being written wasn’t incorrect, it was simply following Microsoft’s best practises rather than, for example the W3C.

Under ASP.NET, the tools that allow developers to change the styling for Webpage elements (font faces, sizes, colours, etc) are very close to hand. When adding a text box control to a form, the user can specify its border style, font size and colour aswell as the usual stuff like maximum length and validation functionality. Now as part of the XHTML and CSS methodology, which encourages the separation of content and styling, this type of customisation is abhorrent: it’s simply not the done thing. However, when developing the .NET Framework (and specifically ASP.NET), Microsoft were simply following a pattern.

Some people actually don’t realise, but the .NET Framework in and of itself has nothing to do with Web development: it is simply a software framework. Programmers can build desktop and console applications, libraries and games with it. Now in desktop application development it is very common for developers to be given the option to change how a form looks by hard-coding the window styles directly into the application. There is no CSS technology for desktop applications, and so programmers pick colours from a specific palette (which include system colours) and fonts from a dropdown list, to suit their needs.

Not only can you build both desktop and Web applications with the .NET Framework, you can also use the same software (Visual Studio) to build both types of application, so developers could make the transition from building Windows Forms apps to producing Websites. Microsoft even took care to give the Web versions of their controls (like textboxes and labels) the same or similar name as their Windows Forms counterparts, with the same abilities to change styling that programmers had grown used to.

So I think it’s unfair to rail at Microsoft for not embracing W3C, when this isn’t actually the case. As a standards-conscious developer I’m not forced to use the hard-coded styling method that I would use with Windows apps: I can apply CSS classes to my controls just like I could in HTML.

So hard-coding your “look and feel” doesn’t make you a bad Web developer: just one that’s following one set of practises. Problems only arise when developers pick and choose elements from different methodologies to create their own which makes picking up someone else’s project that bit more difficult.

This realisation has made me a more forgiving programmer: now I just have to learn to resist the urge to force my ideals onto others.

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.