Tag Archives: Blog

Brett, you are my man… Congratulations

This week, the author of one of my favourite blogs, ‘Brett and the City‘ proudly announced that he had been given a Nationally Syndicated Column in “The Fresh Xpress: The Pulse of Young Black America.”

My first reaction was to be really chuffed for him, and my second was to wonder ‘what the hell is a nationally syndicated column?’ It sounded a bit like a nationwide immunisation program for some horrible disease.

Not wanting to appear ignorant, I resorted to Googling ‘nationally syndicated column’, and it spewed forth the fact that Brett had been awarded a spot as a resident columnist in a large US website.

Bloody hell. Way to go Brett! You have got blog writing superhero powers!

As we exchanged emails, we slowly forged a cunning plan. Brett is going to write a book called ‘The Diary of a Short Black Man.’ It is going to be an immediate success which will necessitate a visit to the UK to do book signings. I am going to show him round and make sure that his fans don’t inflict any injury in the ensuing melee. Then we are going to do some sightseeing before he jets off back to America (in first class obviously, because by then his book will have gone platinum).

‘So’ I hear you cry, ‘What’s so good about Brett’s blog?’

What isn’t good about Brett’s blog? It is irreverent, unpolitically correct, laugh out loud funny, observational and ironic. Go and have a squiz….. because once you have read it, I know you are going to want to buy me a beer!

My blog has moved to a new pad…….

Guess what? I’ve got me a new domain name! Yep, I did an internet search and I managed not only to find, but to register this:

http://www.thedayafteryesterday.co.uk. How cool? Uber cool, that’s what. I’ve gotten myself my own pad.

But then it hit me. I had no idea whatsoever about how to put my blog into that domain. I mean, it’s not like moving house – you can’t just pick up a blog and shove it into it’s new location. Darn, I appeared to have fallen at the second hurdle.

‘No worries,’ I thought to myself, ‘I’ll Google it.’

I typed ‘how do I move my blog somewhere else?’ into the search engine. The top ranking result was this article:

I Should Really Move Somewhere Else

This is what happens when you let your 14 year-old son name the new neighborhood you designed. Now all the other neighborhoods laugh at your awkward mornings. Why Do I Live Here?

It wasn’t going well. In terms of relevancy, the article above was not helping me solve my problem of how to get my blog into my brand spanking new, sparkly domain.

I decided to search ‘Blogger help’ for a solution to my problem, and voila! it did indeed have a section on ‘posting your blog to your own domain’.

‘That’ll be the puppy’, I thought to myself, and clicked on the link.

After my initial high hopes, things deteriorated quickly….. the posting was entirely constructed of ‘IT speak’, i.e. baffling acronyms telling me to reconfigure my DNS, modify my CNAMES and update my IP. WTF? (look at me getting into the spirit of things).

The situation was looking dire, but just before I concluded that it was ‘game over’, I had a brainwave……… my friend Dave owns a successful ‘Hosting and Domain Name‘ company, and he has looked after every website I have ever set-up. I decided to give him a call, and less than 20 minutes later, he had moved my blog over to the new domain, with no downtime at all. What a star! Dave, I love you more than Pizza Express!

In fact (even though I don’t normally like doing plugs on my blog), I am going to make an exception today, and highly recommend Dave’s company, Apex Hosting……. because yet again they have bailed me out of the brown stuff with excellent customer support. So if you fancy getting your own domain like me, you know where to go……. actually, I might try and negotiate commission!

Not everything was plain sailing though, a problem with Blogger.com meant that I lost my ‘Blogroll’ in the process…… that is, the list of blogs that I read on a regular basis. I have tried to resinstate them from memory, but still have a nagging doubt that I have forgotten some.

So I would like to leave you with two things:

1. If I have missed your blog off my blogroll, please contact me and let me know because you will be missed

2. Welcome to my blog’s new home!

New site – devbytes

If you used to like the more tutorial based posts on slightlymore then this website might be for you. I will be posting snippets of code which will be highly tagged to try to create a personal delicious-esque code library. This is taken from the (quickly and badly written!) about page (or go straight to devbytes now!):

Welcome to devbytes. I want to build up a personal collection of useful code snippets, programming sayings, paradigms and ‘gotcha!’ moments (like when you first understand the JavaScript closure) for future reference. A bit like an ever evolving personal textbook, library, reference and cook-book.

I decided to put it into blog format because I know how useful it is to stumble across that page which has the solution to my problem on it. Now I’m not imagining for a moment that this will be anywhere near as good as many of the resources out there – but if it helps one person solve one problem then being a public blog rather than a private notebook then it’s all worth it.

Plus, at the end of the day, a blog is far more searchable than paper ;) For this reason, I intend to over-tag each of the posts too (it helps me search through delicious because I super-tag everything on there) but keep the categories relatively tight to separate the posts into things such as thoughts, design patterns, programming philosophy and other distinct types. But I guess I’m not really doing anything groundbreaking there, am I? It’s just that I use the categories in such a ridiculous way in all of my other blogs!

Anyway, I believe that I’ve waffled enough for now – I present to you devbytes.

As mentioned – this is designed as a personal reference – but if you find it useful or interesting too – then all the better! Naturally, it has a twitter account which will auto post when a new byte is posted (@devbytes) or you could subscribe to the RSS feed if that’s more your cup of tea.

Go to devbytes →

Redesigning slightlymore and a fun side project

My close friends will know two facts about me (probably more, too): I work a lot and I love roller coasters. I’ve already confessed to the near death of slightlymore in its current incarnation (more on this in a sec!) and after getting back from a holiday to Spain to a theme park, I have decided to write a book to give me something to do in the evenings instead of work.

I have been into roller coasters for as long as I can remember. In fact, one of my first memories is asking if I can go on a massive looming structure which I later worked out was a roller coaster. I’ve always wanted to write a book. So what better way to improve my writing skills, write a book and create something physical which I can say I designed than to write a book about roller coasters? Happily, there is a web site – BobBooks – which produces quality books of your design. So I’ve decided to create a roller coaster annual of 2009 (and hopefully follow it up each year with another – how cool would that be?!)

Which (via a bit of a tangent) brings me on to the redesign and rethink of slightlymore. Up until now, it has always been a kind of portfolio, tutorials and, well, impersonal. It’s my web site, so why not make it an online representation of me. That makes sense. As mentioned in my previous post I want a place where I can write whatever I want to write, not just write about web development. Why do I need a site which shows off my knowledge as a developer and not who I am as a person – it’s not like I’m looking for a job!

The new design is coming along quite nicely, and I should have it done by the end of the week. It will be a lot simpler than slightlymore currently, and it will be a lot more playful, which I think will encourage me to post more frequently. Under the hood, I am going to play around with just how little presentation I can get from virtually no markup. No unnecessary divs here or classes there. It’s going to really shine on the bleeding edge browsers yet still render nicely in older ones.

I have some really bad TV to watch now, so tata for now ;)

slightlymore is dead – long live slightlymore!

So it appears that my blogging activity at slightlymore has slowly but very surely ground to a halt. This wasn’t intentional – I set up the site with very specific goals; to own a website which was a great resource for developers with some great tutorials on it. I just don’t have the time to write that kind of content.

I’ve thought about the purpose of the site quite a few times, and remedied the lack of posting problem by introducing new sections. But that’s not the way to save a site. It might seem like it, but it’s not. The only thing that will create is a monster of a site with no purpose which is confusing to everyone except me. What I really need to do is start again, redefine what I want the site to do for me, and build it up from there.

I have decided to make the site much less faceless and much more personal. I want to write posts about what I think, not only what I do on a day to day basis. This way, I’ll be more willing to post whatever I want instead of being constrained by the rather tight requisite of a post being useful to the developer community. Essentially what I’m saying is that I’m going to stop taking the site so seriously (in the sense of making it look like a well-respected professional resource and all that nonsense), have a bit of fun and give the site a personality more in-keeping with my own.

The good news

If you’re one of the people who comes here for development tips and tricks, I’ll still be writing them every now and again. That’s the beauty of the new ‘mission statement’, if you will. I’m redefining slightlymore as a place for me to write about things I want to write about in a way that I want to write about them and to the length which I want to write to. That means that in the long run, I will be writing more stuff. And more interesting stuff too.

Also…

Everything which has currently been written will remain here clearly labled as archived. So if you have a particular article which you find useful and refer to, you’ll still be able to get to it and use it.

You won’t see much posting over the next month or so (not much change there, eh?!) as I’m having a bit of a redesign to accommodate the new structure of the site. But rest assured, if you’re an RSS subscriber or follow me on twitter you’ll be the first to know when the new site is ready and live!

Shameless pluggery

In the mean time, if you’re looking for something to read, why not try out OxfordBloggers or Diary of Things? Go on… you know you want to ;)

Playing with card sorting

If you want your website navigation to reflect the way that users might find your content, you obviously want it to serve their use cases and the terminology they’re comfortable with. Ideally you’d do this by asking sample users to build your navigation for you, but in the absence of any willing volunteers one of the best things a site owner can do is card sorting.

It sounds pretty simple. Take the resources you want people to navigate around—so generally the furthermost leaves of your navigation tree: rich content pages, applications and the like rather than section indexes, which might contain navigational preconceptions—and try to assemble them into groups. Pretend they’re written on cards—or, in a more agile way, actually write them on cards and shuffle them round a table—and try to assemble piles of similar resources. Closed card sorting involves predefining the groups, and is ideal for arranging new elements in an existing navigation and a good compromise for building a new navigation quickly; open card sorting is the same, but with no predefined groups. The results are better but it takes longer.

Card sorting really helps site maintainers escape preconceptions and build a navigational hierarchy that makes sense. So although it seems like overkill, this is actually what I have just done for this website. As with much that I’m currently doing towards the site rebuild, it’s intended as a learning experience; a voyage of discovery, albeit taken on a Tonka truck within the safe confines of the wee sandbox that’s my personal site.

My first pass yielded around fifteen resources—rather fuzzily defined, but including varied things like “my blog” and “a link to my Twitter feed”—which I wanted people to be able to navigate around. I arranged these in a single-parent hierarchy beneath six main headings: ongoing, literature, coding, academia and portfolio. However, this felt a bit forced (and some sections, especially “academia”, are mostly opportunities for old documents to gather dust. I tried to imagine adding a more freeform vocabulary that cut across a lot of this, something like tagging, but there was something wrong.

Unsatisfied, I completely scrapped the single hierarchy and tried again. This time the list of resources had expanded to more like twenty, and I went for a more radical approach to grouping. Instead of trying to group objects as cards in a pile, so each card could only be in one pile, I tried to imagine from the start what groups plural they might fit into. Although I was still thinking in terms of menus, the parent terms were now more like categories from a taxonomy, with any menu item being available from several categories.

This resulted in seven terms:

tech, content, social, lit(erature), work, love and misc

This blog, for example, could fit under “tech”, “content” and maybe “work”, and would be accessible from all those places. My attempts at creative writing on Quiet little Lies could go under “content”, “literature” and possibly “love”.

As long as the number of objects didn’t get too long (and objects didn’t spread under too many terms) then these seven terms could still make sense to the user as a starting point, even if they found different things in multiple places. In fact, in the brave new world of folksonomies and tags, web users might be getting used to less hierarchical ways of navigating, so this might even pay off.

Drupal’s menu system supports multiple or mixed hierarchies out of the box, but I preferred instead to actually use categories, and tie these to a menu with the Taxonomy Menu module. I might not follow that route in future, as it essentially only supports linking to Drupal’s out-of-the-box category index pages, with content sorted in reverse date order, whereas I’l almost certainly want to do something nicer. But like card sorting itself it was a good springboard to getting things working and feeling happy with progress.

For now the hierarchy is implemented with dummy content, but I hope to fill it out more—and then expose the navigation—in the next few days. Right now it’s just nice to see things starting to come together. Also, having seven top-level terms fits in rather neatly with the design decisions I’ve already made: more on those later.

How to find Inspiration on a grey day

You know those days – stuck inside with grey weather and in a rut creatively, feeling that there’s nothing you can do.

I’m a photographer by hobby, and when such a day happens (like yesterday) one often wallows in it a bit.

There are lots of great posts out there on finding inspiration by a variety of means (especially breaking photographers block), but sometimes you are away from other people and or the internet, so what can you do?

Keep a notebook. Nothing fancy, just something dedicated for ideas of things to try kept nearby on your desk or close at hand. When you do have ideas, jot them down, so that when a grey day does happen and you are feeling uninspired, you have a list you can delve into. Something that can be applied to all creative outlets, whether you write, code, make music, art or photographs.

Notes

There are all sorts of online tools you can use in collating list of things and links (like delicious appropriately tagged or favoriting inspirational photos online showing techniques you wish to try).

But when it comes to regularly accessed lists, the simplicity of pen and paper can’t be beaten, and it’s great for recharging your inspiration now and again when it’s flagging.

Diary of things

I’ll just tell you – you probably already know anyway. I’m a lazy blogger. I don’t seem to have time to write as many articles as I’d like for slightlymore. I know what the problem is – I don’t write enough because I have this strange inability to put small or waffley articles on it – I’d rather that it stayed as a blog devoted to development and internet related things.

I present you with my diary of things which I intend to use as an outlet for the frustrated writer in me who wants to write short snippets about cool stuff. That’s not the aim of the site, however. The aim of the site is for me to write about ‘that interesting thing’ which I found. I am planning on writing something every day (wish me luck on that!) but because it’s really only a microblog I hope that it will happen. And I reckon that a happy side effect of all of this will be that in the end I find it easier to write here because I will have already expunged the crap from my head :)

I’m not really sure what content will be going on to the site – I don’t even know what will be going on it tomorrow until I find it. All I can tell you is that if you’re a little bit nerdy, like me, then a lot of the content should be quite interesting and relevant. Be sure to follow @diaryofthings on Twitter to see when something new has been posted.

Or subscribe to the RSS feed if that is more of your cup of tea.

Gotta love those clouds

Gotta love those clouds, originally uploaded by Al Power.

Taken on a visit to Sissinghurst in Kent, at the weekend. Lens was a 17-40mm f4 shot at 1/400th at f/8.0 aperture with a focal length of 32 mm. I believe the clouds are of type Cumulus (low detached) Humilis (not tall) Radiatus (in rows due to wind).

oxfordbloggers.com

It was around 9 or 10 in the evening in the Jam Factory. After a very successful Ox Tuttle, Ben Walker (@ihatemornings), Colin Mercer (@colinmercer) and myself came up with one of those genius drunken ideas. oxfordbloggers.com is it.

The aim is simple – to create a place to collect the thoughts and ramblings of Oxfordonians to give an idea of the general flavour of the local part of the blogosphere (man, I hate that word!)

The rules are also very simple. Live in Oxford? Have a blog? Want to be part of a relatively active nerd/geek/blogging community? Answer yes to those and you’re fully qualified to get your blog put on there too :) A rough outline/overviewy kind-of-thing reads something similar to this:

  • We’re not going to put advertising on the site, or make money in any way.
  • All content is fully attributed to the blog authors.
  • All links go directly back to the original blogs.
  • We’re not enabling comments – if you want to comment, go to the blog.
  • We’re only doing this to get some more people to read blogs that we think deserve it.

Taken from the about page of oxfordbloggers.com

It’s still early days (less than 24 hours from conception to go-live) so excuse us if you manage to break something or you get a splinter from a badly sanded edge.