What do I do all day at work? I sit in front of my laptop drawing pretty pictures, writing code and hacking through more CSS than you could shake a stick at. I am, by all accounts, a geek. I even gave that last instance of “CSS” an abbreviation tag, and even worse linked the words “abbreviation tag” to the w3schools article on the subject so the reader, if so inclined, could find out more.
Yes, I’m “into” the web big time. I do it for a job, think about it when I’m out, and the other night I had this dream about this giant mouse trying to kill me… But that’s another story.
There’s a few things that people like me, erm, like (bad English not withstanding). They are Facebook, Twitter and Skype. Granted there are a LOT more, but for the purposes of this post - they’re the only web services that exist, got it?
So I’m feeling like I want to update all my “friends” (God forbid that I actually have people I talk to in real like, no that would be scary). I’m particularly enjoying a cup of tea perhaps, or have smashed my car into yet another wall. Only, I can’t be bothered to Twitter it, update my skype status AND do my little “Jon Roobottom is…” thing on farsebook. That’s where two magic apps come to your rescue.
The first is Twitterrific. This cool little (Mac only) app not only shows you your friends twitters and allows you to twitter until you fall off your chair with excitement, it also updates your skype status for you! Sweet. One down, one to go.
So jump on Facebook and find an app called “TwitterSync” - add this bad boy, and it’ll update your status based on your last Twitter! Awesome.
Follow these two simple instructions, and pretty soon you’ll be having your twitters sh*t out all over the net. Result.
I have to applaud the BBC who have been pioneers of pushing new web media web services since the inception of www.bbcnc.org.uk (BBC Network Club) in 1994. And though a little rough around the edges sometimes, they always managed to achieve something special. They really thought about their output - which is what you want from a name as prestigious as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Then The iPlayer. And in one word, wow! Gone is the terrible terrible choice of RealPlayer, replaced with the much more robust and reliable Flash (not to mention the wide-spread support of the Flash-plugin). The design is fresh and very functional. The ajax is usful but not overcooked and most importantly of all - I can watch whatever I want, when I want. Truly the BBC embracing the way programs will be accessed in the future. They’ve seen that transmission is dead, and have taken a BIG step towards content on demand.
The New Homepage
I really want to hate the new homepage, and to be fair there’s lots of things to hate about it.
Stuff I hate
It’s not exactly (erm, how do I say this nicely) very professional looking. Come on BBC, you’ve been pioneering new media for the last 12 years, and you’ve come up with this?! You’d hardly describe this as having finesse. There’s little attention to detail - it’s all rather big and somewhat over cooked.
It’s fixed width - which in itself isn’t a bad thing. I’m not about to slate a website for being fixed width when 99% of the things I design are. But in this case it just feels lazy. The BBC must have a whole team of designers working on their flag-ship web page, and they couldn’t solve the problem of catering for different screen sizes while still having movable content? Come on, Netvibes managed to do it.
The text size by default is big - which again isn’t a bad thing. But this feels like the design would have benefited from a smaller text, then allow users to increase the text size through some cookie-stored accessibility options. So what happens when you increase the text size now? Well, try it. One text size bigger is OK (just about) but two causes all the boxes to crash into each other.
There’s a LOT of functionality they should (could) have included, but didn’t. I’m sure there’s some important internal wrangleings that went on here - after all the bbc want only their own content, but think of this situation :- There’s a flood, and the BBC are the first to report on it. But, they don’t have any decent pictures - so make a call for public photos. A user has some excellent photos on flickr (or facebook, or whatever) and has enabled his “BBC photo viewer” which pulls in his photos to the homepage. He then simply clicks the ’submit these photos to a story’ button, et volia! The BBC have the photos. And they’re more likely to get submissions to as the process is now much easier. It’s catering for everyone - It just seems that the BBC wanted a content rich, Web 2.0 homepage, but have missed a trick somewhere along the line.
One (tiny) niggle I have is that the navigation on the top-right fixed contact block controls the colour of the whole page. Why? What has this content got do with the rest of the page
Well, I said I wanted to hate the new page, but it’s growing on me. Yes, it could have been better - but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. I understand some of the decisions they’ve made in relation to text size, functionality and overall design but I really thought they could have done something far better. These are the guys behind the superb iPlayer after all. I hope they can continue to build on this step in the right direction.
What would I have done?
Well, I had a quick play a while ago (when the beta was around) and did a fixed width and fluid version of the homepage. Well, at least started to. They’re not finnished, but you’re more than welcome to give them as sound a thrashing as I’ve given the official version.
ebuzzing is a new pay-to-blog service from France, just launched in the UK. Their man Dan dropped me an email asking me to give it a look see, so here’s what I thought of it.
As a rule, I really don’t like pay-to-blog (P2B) sites as they’re usually really restrictive on what you can write about. Why would you write a review on a product you don’t own or particularly care about? Selling your integrity to the man has never been high on my agenda with this site, but Dan insisted that ebuzzing was different…
They basically have two ways to feed the blogger content - Network and Direct.
Network is the regular fare I’ve come to expect from P2B sites - there’s a big list of products and services that people want you to blog about with a price they’re willing to pay for you to do so. I say big list with some trepidation, as currently the ebuzzing UK site only has a request to review their own site (cue this review). Dan assures me that the French network is much bigger and they’re working hard to bring across some of their French partners as well as some big British advertisers.
Direct is what makes ebuzzing somewhat different. When you sign up for an account and add in your blog you’re given a recommended price per article (or you can specify your own). This is based on several things (technorati rank, inward links, etc.) but it looks like it’s mainly based on your Google page rank.
As far as I understand the idea behind this is - Advertisers that have a particular product or service they wish blogged. They are then presented with a list of blogs that write about that sort of stuff (via a number of tags you specify). I actually really like this idea - it means (at least if it works like it says on the tin) that you’ll only get offered the sorts of stuff you’d normally blog about anyway. And, if they’ve got any brains, the advertisers will have read a bit of your blog and know that what they have to offer will be well received. That way - less selling out and a nice little earner for you - just for writing about the stuff you normally would anyway.
If this actually works remains to be seen - but at least ebuzzing have thought outside the box a little.
The only other thing I’d like to say about their service is their website. Good idea, slightly rickety website. It’s still a little rough around the edges (for instance, some of the Javascript popup alerts are still in French). The whole site needs some serious interaction re-design. It’s not really intuitive or easy to use. But I think once they’ve sorted that out they’ll have a potential killer service.
In summary - ebuzzing is a great idea that hinges on them getting some big blogs together with some decent advertisers. Do that, and they’re in the money.
Since the beta launch last June the Glubble team have worked non-stop to create the 1.0 version. And if you detect a little touch of pride in my tone it’s because I think the new version is nothing short of an internet revolution.
When Ian Hayward contacted me last April about doing some freelance stuff for Glaxstar he gave me an impassioned speech about how he had a vision about protecting young kids on the web. Well, not only has he done that - but Glubble also makes it easy for parents to give their kids some really cool content.
So? What’s new?
Well, pretty much everything’s changed but the concept - So I’ll give you the top five coolest features.
Usertabs - These little suckers make it so easy to log into your Glubble user account. Simply click your tab and (if you’re a helper, kids don’t need passwords) enter your password to unlock Firefox. Oh, and the ability to auto-disable the browser lock has been added to.
Family Homepage - This is cool. You get your own family center where you can check out what your family’s been up to online and send each other little messages on your family wall.
The Glubble Library - The new Glubble Add-on comes with a whole load of “content bubbles” or Glubbles for your kids. These are basically groups of links that have been checked by our experts and are certified safe and fun for kids. The ability to create your own Glubbles and share them with family and friends is coming soon.
My Secret Homepage - Each child gets their own secret homepage containing all their most used content. They can also write on the family wall from here and pretty soon they’ll be other cool, customizable stuff they can do!
Visual Favorites - When a child adds a page to their Favorites (bookmarks) Glubble automagically creates a thumbnail of that page and puts it in their Bookmarks Bar for easy access. I want this Add-on for Firefox myself! It’s so much easier to remember what a site is from a screen shot rather than just a title.
Try Glubble
If you’ve got young kids and you’d like to give Glubble Add-on for Firefox a go. Then get yourself a copy now. It’s free! (maybe that should have been the top feature)
Instead of the standard Wordpress list of archive months, the Archives display a full list of posts in a kind of pseudo calendar view. In this way, it’s easy to browse back through the years and take in the wonder and beauty of roobottom through the ages.
But now, even more goodness. I’ve integrated my Flickr photos in with the archives, so that each time you visit you’ll see a random picture for each month (if there are pictures for that month). You can even link directly to the full Flickr archive.
Oh, and I’ve updated the comment system to give you a little more feedback. It hopefully will put an end to the confusion over comments being held in moderation.
So what next? I’ve made upgrades galore, but it’s stuff that I wanted and I thought was cool. But what do you want? Do you even care? Here’s a few ideas I had to kick off.
An easier (but still spam-proof) way to comment
Monthly Video Blogs (my face and voice coming at ya)
More fun with the Archives.
Writing a WP plugin to make the Archives available to all
Avast! The fine fellows at Talk Like a Pirate have put together a video on how to speak like a scurvy dog pirate to get you started.
Most notably tho, Flickr has gone all out in support by adding a new language option for the occasion, so go and check it out quick before yarrrr miss it!
The iTunes store is great, I love it! And that’s the problem. They have my credit card details and it’s way too easy for me to click the all to available ‘buy now’ button. And, to make matters worse, we now have TV shows in the UK store.
Oh crap, Ugly Betty is quite good, and I don’t watch TV so this seems like the perfect solution. Click, watch.. and then cower under the table when my Visa bill is delivered each month. They add more stuff all the time, why wont they let me rest?
And then, the final straw. They go and launch the iPod touch. How do Apple do that? Make you want their things? And with WiFi access to the store I’d be as dangerous as a granny with a chainsaw.
Somebody help. Surly there must be a support group for this kind of thing?
I’ve got a cool new icon on my dock, that of Joost - an on demand Web TV service. First impressions are pretty good, for a ‘friends only’ beta it works well and the programs load and buffer pretty well (although that could have something to do with my shiny new ADSL connection).
Joost is a stand alone application that links to their service. It starts up in full screen mode, and works pretty much like any other digital on demand service. You can pick your channel and show from an easy to use menu. There’s also a ‘My Joost’ menu with things like an on screen clock, but I didn’t really see the point in all this.
It’s an ad paid for system, but that’s cool, and you only get one 30 second advert for each 15 min of TV.. Which is a lot better than ITV.
One thing I did miss was an indication of how much of the program was buffered. I really missed the ability to pause and let the stream catch up with itself, this would have saved a little jerkiness I noticed later on. Maybe when some of the US users were logging on and slowing the servers?
It performed pretty well in window and full screen modes, although don’t expect HD quality. The compression is pretty obvious on a 15″ screen, although it looks mint in window mode.
I’ll be looking forward to this system getting noticed and attracting some (much) better programing, as to be honest the shows they have at the moment are a little pants. Anyway, if you want to check it out, drop me a line and I’ll invite you..
The DDA is the UK governments legislation that governs all sorts of businesses and services to ensure that people with disabilities can access the same services as everyone else.
(un)Fortunately for web designers this legislation covers web services too! At Trinity we’ve developed certain working practices that ensure all our client sites are DDA compliant as possible. So what are these requirements, and what can be done to ensure that your next project isn’t going to get your clients sued?
We’ll it’s not actually that difficult, thanks to our friends at the W3C who’ve drawn up a Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. In general It’s acceptable to ensure all your pages meet at least the Priority 1 checkpoints (or provide an alternative page that does) and as far as possible follow the Priority 2 checkpoints - especially so if your site is intended for the wider EU user-base.
So, getting back to basics, what do you really need to do to ensure your website is compliant? (remember, these are the bare minimum, always refer back to the W3C guidelines).
Use (x)HTML and CSS to separate content and design. That way users can turn-off the styling and control the size and colour of the text as they wish
Use alt tags on images to describe their content and title tags on links and abbr items to give an extended explanation of what these elements are.
The use of accesskeys to offer an alternative way of navigation on all main navigation, and any sub-navigation possible
Use Javascript to replace any Flash elements, so you’re providing an html alternative
These four things will not only cover many of the guidelines, but also increase you’re chances of getting listed in the search engines too. It’s worth investing a little more time investigation exactly what the DDA requires of web sites, an good staring place may be to Google “DDA” and read up on some of the official (and not so official) documents you find. Don’t underestimate the good that following the guidelines will do your website, it’s well worth investing the time to find out more.
At last! I’m ready to release the public beta-1 version of greeneStripe, a new theme for Wordpress!
It’s still very much in the testing phase, but if you can cope with a few bugs then please feel free to download a copy and install it on your wordpress. It even includes support for Automattic’s Wordpress Widgets, which work very nicely once installed.
Please post any bug reports / design ideas / slag-offs here rather than on the theme blog! Thank you!
Then The iPlayer. And in one word, wow! Gone is the terrible terrible choice of RealPlayer, replaced with the much more robust and reliable Flash (not to mention the wide-spread support of the Flash-plugin). The design is fresh and very functional. The ajax is usful but not overcooked and most importantly of all - I can watch whatever I want, when I want. Truly the BBC embracing the way programs will be accessed in the future. They’ve seen that transmission is dead, and have taken a BIG step towards content on demand.
