I think I need to establish early on here that attending a web conference was a new experience for me entirely - well not entirely - I once attended a bee-keeping conference. Yes, you did read that right, and no, it didn’t have many similarities.

For me, @media is pretty synonymous (if not the definition) of ‘a UK web conference’. I was the first I ever knew of, and pretty much has therefore remained top dog in my mind ever since.

A major reason why I never made it to @media previously was cost. As start-up self-employed, it can be hard to budget the hundreds of pounds for tickets (and the rest) which other larger organisations spend without so much as a moment of hesitation. But when I saw this year’s lineup, and combined with a change in the circumstances of the business in the last two years (e.g. the limited status) it made it far easier to finally say yes. And so I went.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that there is a general agreement that 2005 was a ‘buzz’ year, and since then the industry has perhaps has slowed down a little (not loads, but a little). One of the problems I’ve found when contemplating my attendance previously has been the potential problem of paying to attend talks on subjects you felt had been discussed to death and just wouldn’t be worth the investment of your own time.

And so it’s with pleasure I can say I wasn’t disappointed that I waited. From amongst the well-weathered attendees that I spoke to, the consensus seemed to be that this year has been one of the best to date.

I don’t want to sound utterly gushing in praise, but over the two days, I met some fantastic people and enjoyed every talks I sat through. Admittedly some were more useful to me than others, but absolutely nothing disinterested me.

Day One took a strong design perspective, and the speaker lineup comprised of Malarkey, Jon Hicks, Dan Rubin, Colly, Mark Boulton and Jason Santa-Maria. Of all these, I’ve only ever seen Jon talk before, and I was pleased to see that although he was talking icons, it was a significantly different and improved version of the very enjoyable talk he did at Geek In The Park 2008.

Andy’s piece really was beneficial to the understanding of his most recently aired views on IE6, process and CSS envelope-pushing. I had a wide variety of half-formed views on this bucket of ideas already, and I came out with a greater sense of clarity.

Simon provided some really nice insights into working practices at Erskine and I scribbled quite a few notes here. I wasn’t sure I’d call it a toolbox like he did, but there were loads of really useful pointers on things like content auditing, audience grouping and then some genuine physical tools for getting the job done.

If there was one real gem in Dan Rubin’s enjoyable presentation (and there were a few others), it was the demonstration of the Offset Filter in Photoshop. However I lived without it before I don’t know - it automates the worst part of image tile-making and so I am eternally grateful.

Mark delivered insights into typography on the web, and although I felt the climbing analogy was a bit tenuous, the demonstration of typographical imbalance and an explanation of potential pit falls over the coming months was good food for thought before people rush out and just start implementing every font under the sun into their websites.

Rounding off the talks for the day, Jason delivered a beautifully designed presentation as you might well expect from the man with the wonderful blog posts. It left me creatively yearning, and with an urge to just get going on something of my own. Genuinely inspiring.

If day one encouraged you to break down walls and start implementing all this stuff, day two could have been a list of reasons why you couldn’t implement any of it yet. Despite my cynicism, it turned out that was not the case.

Douglas Crockford opened with his witty observations on the work methods of developers. It could have been dry, but I really enjoyed the humour and it set a good tone for the rest of the day.

Molly (and sidekick Bruce), replete with arseless chaps and cowboy hat) answered some really useful questions about HTML 5 and where we’re at with it now. I was surprised to see how far some of the implementations actually go already and would recommend that you keep an eye out for the HTML5 doctor project launching in the next week or so. The whole event did feel like we’d all accidently turned up to a Opera away day though :)

You could tell that Chris Wilson from Microsoft was being eyed with a degree of suspicion before his talk, and although of course there were the inevitable clashes of doctrine, he came bearing apologies (which were more for amusement than genuine recourse, but which were accepted well) and a very useful perspective on to the state of IE now and going forward.

Andy Budd’s guerilla usability testing proved very useful and really filled a gap in my practical knowledge of these things. I’m now feeling geared up to start directly applying some of the methodology he suggested and might seek out one or two of the book recommendations too.

Robin’s discussion of accessibility in today’s web was an eye opener. I’ve never seen a first hand demonstration of JAWs, and came away with what I felt were some really useful insights and bringing me a bit closer to the realities of access on the web in 2009. I’m really pleased there was some decent accessibility stuff provided to supplement everything else that had gone so far.

And then Jeremy Keith’s hot topics, which was a good amalgam of all the things that had already been discussed so far, but interspersed with beautifully dry contempt of the whole internet by Douglas and a fantastic piece of facial hair modelled for the full hour and a bit by Jon Hicks.

I couldn’t complete this without mentioning the other major aspect of a conference like this, but I really did meet some great people, and spent much time chatting and discussing things with really interesting folks including Natalie and Paul from ClearLeft, Chris Mills, José, James Smith, David from Beggars, Remy, Marco and Andy from RNIB, Aussie Sheila and everybody else who I ended up chatting too. There’s a stack of business cards here which need filing.

Naturally I also spent much time with Owen and Paul doing our utmost to present the acceptable side of the Multipack too, and between us all, I would think many of the restaurants and bars can remain confident of their own futures based on their performance over the past couple of days alone. And what brilliant sunny days they were too.

Comments (0)

It’s been a long annoyance of mine that Wordpress insists on writing paths directly into the database, so when switching from staging or production to live you have to alter these paths.

However, if you also find this an irritation, a quick way to solve it is to define a couple of constants in the wp-config.php file. You simply define the url and home addresses as below, and as long as you are running a server that supports the server variable HTTP_HOST (e.g. Apache) the switch should be automatic and override the settings in the control panel.


// WordPress address on settings page
define(’WP_SITEURL’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);
// Blog address on settings page
define(’WP_HOME’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);


Comments (0)

Ok, so this is a little deeper than what I usually pen on this blog, but as the economic screw continues to tighten, it’s of course of interest to speculate what this means for the web, our industry and it’s immediate future.

I’ve been saying for quite some time (if I’ve put a couple of pints down my neck) that I believed that the web bubble would burst once more. Perhaps not anywhere like as seriously as back in the early noughties, the big businesses may have matured a bit, but certainly in my view there is scope for a temporary collapse in certain areas.

What I really mean by this is the vast amount of web start up ‘ideas’ that until recently been getting investment. Not businesses building the web (development firms), and not web businesses already with dedicated audiences (MySpace, Digg etc), but specifically all those new venture capital funded ‘ideas’ that were, and to some extent still are, appearing like dew each and every morning.

In the past year or two, there has seemed to be an increasing, eventually endless, well of funds. It’s been overflowing and allowing pretty much any web-based idea to be transformed into a product. Especially if it was ‘social’. Perfect times for innovators - if it sounds good, throw some pennies at it and let it flow. If it doesn’t take off, no worries, the next idea might be the big one. New Money web-types were more than happy to step in and become VCs themselves - investing their time, knowledge and well earned cash into more of the same.

It wasn’t just the big web powerhouses chucking out products (although Google was doing this too), but large numbers of these products were developed ‘in-house’ by small teams or individuals, and the sheer number was mainly down to the vast number of small web designer/developer/agencies that were sponsoring their own internal products to fill niches.

The result was a saturation and a mass of overlap. Most people realised you couldn’t build the next Facebook, but you could try and capitalise on the digital renaissance, and an ever more savvy and curious-minded web community. You can plainly see the successes and failures of this gold rush. For many developers, If there wasn’t an application out there that did exactly what you wanted, you just prototyped it over the weekend, slapped a beta star on it and put it out there for the masses.

You could say that it was hopelessly optimistic, but at the same time the climate was good and it really didn’t matter if your idea sank because ultimately the only thing at stake was a bit of time, and that wasn’t a problem as it was all being bankrolled by some venture capitalist or your primary business - probably making websites.

Diversity has meant so many ideas have flooded the web in the past few years (what will probably be looked back upon as the 2.0 boom time) but clearly there were too many ideas that were simply not viable as full on businesses. If you can name ten, twenty, thirty successful web apps, you eventually would have to stop. But if you flick to the homepage of something like feedmyapp (a site I randomly selected from Google), there are more applications in the first category alone than most web-users could name (and the first category is Accountancy).

Of course there will always be some amount of duplication on the web - after all Facebook wasn’t the only social networking app ever developed - but it became one of the miracle heroes of 2.0 - and suddenly had a disproportionate share of the market. The thing is, this energy and belief that any Tom, Dick or Mark Zuckerberg could create a world-dominating, popular web app soon appealed to every developer in the world. And with ten-figure numbers acquisition numbers being banded around (even if it wasn’t real money), it just whipped the hysteria up further.

I think it would be fair to say that had the Google/YouTube, AOL/Bebo or Last.fm/CBS deals been on the table now rather than a year ago, they might not all have turned out the way they did. Who would have thought one year ago that Yahoo!, packed to the gunnels with some of the best developers in the business, would be begging Microsoft for a takeover and saying goodbye to their CEO Jerry Yang in fairly ungracious circumstances?

Clearly the impact of the downturn is already being felt in these big organisations, and I really wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see a decline in the number of ‘throw-away’ web apps being produced in the coming weeks and months. Google doesn’t seem to be relentlessly pursuing hundreds of new developments, but rather is spending time refining what it’s got - solid products that seemed to resonate, such as free alternatives to office applications. While experimentation will continue and more fundamental ideas are likely to be pursued, the amount of hours developers will be pumping into personal projects in the near future are probably going to wane significantly in both big and small organisations.

I can imagine one day we may well get back to the lofty web-app factory days of early 2008, but it’s hard to imagine in the current climate that businesses and VCs will be wanting (or able) to invest the money in web apps that might or might not succeed.

And this comes to one of my biggest questions - Facebook. Seemingly a giant of the web industry, this monolith network feels to me like the interest surrounding it has probably peaked. That’s not to say thousands of people are not still signing up daily, but for those who work in the web I think most people would agree the initial excitement has passed somewhat. Recent developments such as the restructuring of the design and attempts to allow ‘externalising’ have perhaps been the first signals of change of direction that could, in my view, be the tipping point.

I’m not saying we’re going to see it collapse or go away - there is simply too much invested for that to happen - but I can’t help wonder where exactly all their money is coming from. Mark Zuckerberg is mosquito-like in his attempts to dodge questions on the state of their finances, and I can’t help but think the valuation on the company might have been somewhat over-inflated by the ‘buzz’ factor that seems now to be wearing off a little.

Then when last week Pownce made the announcement that a terminal decision had been made about it’s future it probably came as a surprise (maybe not a shock) to the wider web community. Dedicated users were clearly at a loss, but in reality there must have been a hundred other relatively unknown applications along the same lines that have already failed. Pownce may have initially done well because of it’s endorsement from certain members of the web elite, but it is entirely representative of the 99% of web apps that you won’t remember this time next year, that is if you ever heard of them in the first place. That’s not a criticism of Pownce, it just illustrates one high profile casualty. Just because you build something well, dedicate hours and hours to it, run it with enthusiasm, create a burgeoning community and look good, it doesn’t mean it’s invincible or will even generate enough to sustain itself.

On the flip side, I wonder whether MySpace will be a winner in these uncertain times. Murdoch’s injection of cash seems to have kept the profile high, and it’s proper move into music seems to have increased it’s credibility and longevity somehow - something Facebook hasn’t successfully achieved so far. Amazon also seems to be going from strength to strength. Cheaper music seems to be the key to the consumer heart, and stepping into the UK with MP3 prices that now significantly undercut iTunes seems like a savvy and well-timed move. In line with their ever-cheapening products for ever-more demanding developers, they look to me one of the stronger ones going into the recession.

With bleak expectations on the social/webapp front, my other ideas maybe seemingly contradictory regarding the other place where big money is involved - e-commerce.

When the going gets tough, especially in retail, businesses will start turning to balance sheets and trying to cut costs. My guess is that following January we will see a number of rather surprising big store closures, and in many cases, a retraction to smaller, pared down, web-based commerce.

High street businesses such as WHSmith and JJB Sports are well known to be struggling, and Woolworths have already bit the dust. Predictions in the papers in the past few days have said that this weekend people will have been visiting all these usual high street colossuses, but then heading home to buy what they saw online at two-thirds the price. This probably doesn’t sound that huge - people having been buying online in significant numbers for years now - but I wonder if this won’t be another major win for e-commerce providers. I really wouldn’t be surprised if internet sales are significantly up this Christmas (as a proportion of overall sales) as retailers struggle to sell goods in stores where the prices are traditionally higher.

And this is why I think the web industry as a whole may not suffer quite as badly as others. That’s the same view I had six months ago, but now I have slightly different reasons for making the judgement. I think although there maybe a collapse in the VC funded market for hundreds of little applications all doing minutely different things, the amount of work available to the web industry may well now receive a shot in the arm by yet another consumer and retailer lurch towards the internet as a place where goods and running costs are lower, and the inevitable scramble for the remaining traditional highstreet based companies to catch the magical web zephyr, and for existing web retailers to get more aggressive.

Of course, I maybe entirely wrong; it has happened before (twice perhaps I think - once was a spelling error). However, I would like to remain optimistic that friends, colleagues and I will be able to get through this period without having to endure the worst of an economic slump. I’m not so ignorant that I don’t think things will get worse, but as it stands I don’t believe we are quite as badly placed as perhaps those who are in other business sectors, and if anything am curious and intrigued by the whole odd situation that the world currently finds itself in.

Now go and have a lie down - you’ll probably need it if you read all of that. Opinions welcome…

Comments (0)

I’ve made it a habit in recent times to steer clear of mentioning actual clients in actual blog posts, but as so much time and effort has gone into the complete re-skin and slew of new features, it’s only fair to give this one a bit of a nudge.

RateMyPlacement is one of my big ongoing and often more intensive projects, and today/just now, we proudly launch version two. Hence why I’m still sitting on the edge of a cup of very black Spanish coffee, six hours after I drank it, and it’s just gone midnight.

For those familiar with the concept, this paragraph is needless, but for everyone else, RateMyPlacement is a place for students looking for, and who have returned from, internships and placements. It allows users to rank and share their experiences with future ‘placementeers’ and is a resource peddled across universities and placement offices around the country.

There are a few bolts to be tightened and edges to be deburred, but on the whole it’s there.

One interesting day follows another - tomorrow I’m in Cheltenham teaching GCSE kids how to design a good logo.

Comments (0)

This is good news.

Comments (0)

This morning I received a parcel that I’ve been waiting on for around a week. When I say a week, what I really mean is two years, but lets not get too technical.

I’ve been meaning to get a proper printed copy of my dissertation since I wrote it back in 2006. After the uni kept the one copy that I hand-bound myself, I hadn’t got anything tangible left, and considering it’s one of my favourite bits of work that I produced during my studies (for a variety of reasons, not in the least that it was on a topic that none of the staff in my department had a clue about), I really wanted a hard copy for myself.

The original was bound in a wrap around cover and held together with some brass binding screws, but I couldn’t be hassled with going through the rigmarole of pillar drilling and lining up of all the bits and pieces involved again, so about a year ago I decided I’d get it professionally done with short-run online printers, Lulu.

Well, in total I probably spent two weekends worth of time wrangling with the document, trying to convert my highly formatted text into a size that could be printed on, but failed repeatedly times before finally producing a copy that was passable. And so it went to press.

So this morning when I peeled back the layers of bubble wrap I was really pleased to find one case bound copy of my dissertation. Maybe the cover could have been a little less glossy (by I can’t remember having that option to choose a satin finish), but aside from that I’m really pleased I’ve got closure and a decent copy of the work.

My advice if you ever consider using Lulu; always design to their templates from the word go; never try to work it the other way around, especially if you have in the region of 80 pages with illustrations, custom margins and things that inevitably will fall apart the minute you have to resize anything. Otherwise, the process was straight forward enough, and the end product looks top notch.

Comments (1)

About this time two years ago I encountered my best practices epiphany, when in a whirl of blog posts, articles and university modules I managed to haul myself onto the table-free markup bandwagon.

At the time there was a frenzy of community based activity, and even if a lot of other people had made the conversion to high-quality code before me, I’m sure there were also a lot more who followed after.

I loved the engagement, the semantic pedantry, the arguments, the twists and turns through the intricacies of the markup, which by all accounts had turned out to be a much larger tapestry than I might have previously believed. This empowered movement has been one of the web industry’s greatest achievements to date, and it’s effect seems to have manifested itself into the lifeblood of most web professionals today.

However (and there is always a however), I came to realise soon enough that this was a phase and not an era. This level of frenzied output would eventually be stifled by a number of factors. Ever-increasing, ever-more critical audiences meant that the pace of discovery and analysis quickly reached a boiling point and saturation occurred. We ended up running out of useful things to say on the topics of HTML and CSS. Whereas a small group of people had championed and educated the masses previously, the masses were now looking for their own slice of web pie, and the advent of Web 2.0 was the real world consequence of our new found knowledge and confidence with our technologies. It was like Ug had been making sparks for years, but had only just discovered how to arrange kindling.

The effect was a revolution that was probably the most bloodless in history. Ever.

I don’t know anyone who has been put out of work by Web 2.0 (I’m talking creatives, not entrepreneurs), and it seems that some focused retraining is really all it takes to make the leap. It’s not like the industrial revolution when your Spinning Jenny suddenly needed to be replaced; we even had the luxury of knowing our equipment was still adequate and the training was completely free (especially if you knew how to use a search engine, and most web professionals don’t feel they even need to include that skill on their CV these days).

This was all part of something big. It wasn’t just about clean code and semantics. Nor was it wholly about getting your styling to work in every goddamn, picky version of Microsoft’s browser. It was about a general step forward which brought us nose up against the glass bottom that is Genuine Progression.

Staring at the arse of Genuine Progression is also where we left Ug. Ug is a simple chap who has very recently learnt how to light a fire. Even before he mastered how to create it for himself, he knew what could be achieved with it. He saw it warming things, destroying things and cooking things. Ug is harbouring big ideas for his new skill, but frustratingly he doesn’t seem to be able to execute them.

For a start, Ug wants to make a bonfire with a Guy on top. The problem is that King James won’t be born for another 8,000 years, and no one has a clue how to make sculpture because ancient Greece doesn’t even exist yet. Ug knows what he wants, but he just can’t do it. He also pines for wonderfully sqidgy, sweet, melt-on-a-stick marshmallows, but despite having more sticks that he could ever desire, he sadly lacks the powdery pink and white confections needed to make the experience truly ‘complete’. Roasted sticks just don’t taste as nice.

And this is like us, the web professional in early 2008. Save for a few minor distractions and spending time taking a Polyfilla-like approach to smoothing out the gaps in our knowledge, we can’t actually go much further without improvements to the technologies we work with.

There are two monumental events that still and always will get web pros excited (aside from LOLcat). The first is the release of a new web browser. This really gets us going, especially if anything vaguely interesting has been done with the rendering engine. Wowsers at browsers.

The second things is far more important, and far more rare. In fact, it is so rare that at the going rate, a web professional might only ever encounter four of these events in their entire working life. What I’m talking about is a Specification Upgrade. Oh how we lust for a Specification Upgrade; waiting for some acronym-prefixed-decimal to increment just once is like hanging around for the phoenix to figure out how to begin the ignition sequence.

So is this going anywhere? Good question. I’ve always been interested in what we can do to improve the web, and more than happy to get into discussions where we debate future progress. After all, those choices we make now will affect our direction in the future. But in recent weeks and months, I’ve become bored of the debating floor. Far too many superfluous opinions make making judgements cloudy and decisions hard to make. Bitterness between parties is prevalent, enlightened argument is either lacking or overflowing - either way, no one seems to be able to agree on anything - and I’m not talking major divisive issues - I mean anything.

Our next scheduled monumentals are Firefox 3, IE 8, widespread adoption of CSS 3 and then finally HTML 5. The first two are on the radar (albeit with a wedge of time between them) but the last two are not. The bickering, the in-fighting, the lack of direction, the flawed design by committee route means that a decade will pass between the recommendation of 4.01 and the ordination of new version (and then we can look forward to the adoption process afterwards - like an after-party, but one that goes on for just a little longer than eternity itself).

Essentially like Ug, I am disillusioned with staring up the backside of progress. We’re waiting for a monolithic system to finally display some kind of life and allow us the space we need to fly some new kites, and which ultimately is the reason why the entire web community for the foreseeable future will continue to waste dedicate all it’s creative resources and energy to having a massive free-for-all arguments on topics like the use of a meta tag.

Comments (2)