No, its not a support group for lonely web designers. Well, maybe it is now that I think about it. Inspired by Matt I’ve put relationships on my “friends” links to comply with the xfn guidelines. This enables links to be mapped between sites and divided into classes depending on the relationship given. Funky stuff.
archive for 2005
There are some neat interface design tips over on my current fave 37signals.
Joe has found a new job working for Forbidden Planet which is probably one of his dream companies to work for. He’s not just working for them though, he’s now running the Company Blog. Oh the irony!
I’ve decided to enable Gravatars on my blog comments to give the “commentees” a bit more of an identity. Gravatars are basically avatars that are tied to your email address. When you comment on a blog using your Gravatar enabled email address an image of your choice will show up next to your comment representing you. I think it’s quite neat and helps to make discussion a bit livelier.
Started reading this monster.
Update: I’ve picked this up again, after a gap of about 8 months!
300 Good Free Fonts for Designers: http://www.goodfonts.org
Colour WW2 Photos: http://www.ww2incolor.com/gallery/
Great gallery of 50s futuristic art: http://davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm
Had some strange spam this morning that managed to slip past spam assassin. It’s sole content was:
Ashlie Ahmed
€
and the title was “Cyb Billingham”. Two words that have obviously been scraped off my site (I’m from Billingham). So, they went to all this trouble of scraping my domain before sending the spam and then include nothing useful in the content. Weird…
Looks like Half-Life 2 totally cleaned up at the BAFTAs.
BAFTA Results : Guardian Unlimited Gamesblog
So, Yahoo have jumped on the API bandwagon and gone head to head with Google. With the Google API you are limited to 1000 queries per day and you can access standard search listings and thats about it. But with the new shiny Yahoo API you have a 5000 query limit and you can access web search results, news, images, local and video search. Plus, Yahoo have a wiki and a blog! Good grief! It’s all a bit open-source and un-Yahoo like. All this help and community makes Google’s handful of API pages look a bit, well, rubbish.
Of course, I had to sign up as a developer and give the API a try. It uses REST instead of SOAP (like Google) and I have to say, it is much easier to use. Have a play around.
More and more of this ‘XML HTTP Request’ stuff is getting coverage as people pick apart Google and other sites using it. The method that people like Basecamp and therefore Ta-da Lists use has been given the name ‘Ajax’ (Asynchronous Javascript & XML). Ajax is basically a method where you update the client using Javascript (which is pretty instant) and update the server simultaneously (using XML HTTP Request) in the background (doesn’t really matter how long it takes). In this way you give the user a nice a responsive user interface, something which the web is not always great at. There’s a good write up of the method here.
So, it appears that GeoURL is back on the block after downtime of like, years. Reading around the new site I found out that it was originally started by Joshua Schachter, who went on to create deli.cio.us. The site is now being developed by Bjorn Hansen and he seems to be adding lots of nice new features (It knows I’m near Corstorphine). Of course, I’ve added myself to the database complete with new flat coords. Check out my neighbours.
My Mum was up in Edinburgh to visit Kerry and I on Friday and Saturday of last weekend. She shopped most of Friday and then we met up and went out for dinner in Kalpna. Kalpna is famous in Edinburgh for its food and this was the first time any of us had been. It serves Indian food but all vegetarian. The portions look small but the food is somehow deliciously dense. Good stuff.
On Saturday we went to 80 Queen Street for the ‘Jazz Brunch’, which is surprisingly on Queen Street. Its a gorgeous cosy hotel-like bistro place which does delicious food accompanied by some nice light jazz.
It’s amazing what you can do in your lunch break.
David Jones the guy behind Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings is currently working on a new game called All Points Bulletin (APB). It’s a MMOG but not in the Warcraft vein, instead it pits the factions that want to uphold the law against the rabble who prefers to break it. Sounds a little bit like an online GTA to me which is not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t sound amazingly original but then most of the stuff from Dave Jones turns out to be gold-dust.
There is a fascinating and informative history of multimedia and ‘interactive design’ over on smackerel.net. It’s written by some guys who’ve been around since the birth of the mac and really, really know their stuff.
1937 – 2005
“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”
I wish Google would filter out all these lame Adwords that just parrot back your search terms. They often make for some very silly results:
Just noticed, I seem to be the 3rd most know Olly in the world.
The blogging software I use for the front page of the site is the very nice WordPress. Version 1.5 has recently come out and has some very nice improvements so I upgraded last night. It was pretty painless but not as nice as the install process, could do with a little polish. The main new feature is a themes system which was sorely needed. Originally you had to hack about with all the default wordpress files to change the look and feel of various areas. This was done as nicely as possible through a web interface but still you were messing with things that could really break your blog. The new system allows you to create “themes” which are basically separate pages and styles for the different elements of your blog; the front page, the comment page etc. Now, you can leave the default WordPress theme alone and hack about to your hearts content. I converted my hacked pages to a new “cyber-junky” theme and switched WordPress over to use this. It worked surprisingly well. I had to make a few changes but that is mainly becuase of the way I use WordPress, I don’t use it soley as my front page. This theme system fits nicely into the old adage of seperating content from style, where the content is the blog logic/code and the style is the theme.
If you spot any bugs, please let me know.
update: wahey, it’s just been officially announced. Matt seems like such a nice guy 🙂
Both sixapart.com and moveabletype.org have had a re-vamp. A lot less cluttered and much easier to read. These rounded boxes seem to be getting very popular aswell, I’m seeing them everywhere.
Google have yet again pulled an amazing piece of work out of their magical hat. Google Maps is the latest project to enter their ‘beta’ program. It manages to dynamically resize your window, scroll with the mouse in real time, zoom in almost real time, search for businesses in the current map area and can be controlled via keyboard shortcuts! Its only the US at the moment but knowing google it won’t stay that way for long. They also manage to cram in route-finding, that will show you the route and give you a list of directions.
Like Google Suggest they do lots of requests in the background to maintain the ‘current page’ for the user. This time its not all with that new fangled XMLHTTP object, they request content in a hidden iframe and then switch it about. Even cooler though is the fact that they actually get back XML data and use a javascript XML object to do the transformation into something readable. It looks like the map segements are all pre-rendered aswell, they seem to want to keep the processing as much client side as possible. Which is extremely sensible for google as I’m sure they have a lot of computing power, but not unlimited.
More reading:
http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/09.html
http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html
Great interview with Neal Stephenson over on reason.com: Past, Present, and Future: The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America
This is very cool. It basically allows you to do slide shows in very simple XHTML and then the system does all the navigation and progress bars and basic layout. Very nice use of the technology. I must remember to try to use it the next time I have to make a presentation.
One blog that caught my eye as I was browsing the 2005 bloggies entries was SimpleBits. The design is very, very nice. It’s pixelly, very tight and precise and I love the colour scheme. I think I need more icons on the site here, another thing to do when I’m feeling better.
Some new FireFox extensions that I’ve discovered recently:
- ColorZilla gives you a little dropper in the status bar to quickly get the colour value of any pixel on a page. Great for matching colours or one of those “ooo, thats a nice colour” moments.
- Google PageRank adds the page rank of the current page to your status bar. Handy when you’re optimising pages for search engines.
I’m ill, been off work since last Friday. Being ill sucks…
A while ago Alex pointed me to this site about how to make your own cute pixel objects. I messed around a bit and came up with this:
Hey, it’s a start! It also came to me that you could write code to do this for you. Some kind of php module with methods like:
pixelcube(dim_x,dim_y,colour);
You could have a pixel objects graphics library with all the basic primitives like cube, sphere etc. Hrm.
So, after my marathon post below about new search engine features, A9 have come out with a new Yellow Pages function. They went around some of the major cities in the US taking photos of all the shop fronts on either side of the streets. Then, when you search for a business you get an actual picture of the shop frontage. You can even ‘walk’ down the street by flicking along the pictures. All very cool.
Some has hacked it already (of course) so you can grab a view of an entire street. Nice.
And then a9 pay to get a shamelss plug into the OC, someone actually uses the phrase “a9.com-ed”. Doesn’t quite work aswell as “googled” 🙂
All the companies playing catchup to Google have recently brought out new interfaces to their engines. Google have been a staunch follower of the simplistic design approach with a minimalist front page and adverts that are incredibly unobtrusive when compared to their competitors. The competitors have obviously taken note that users maybe actually like looking at nice things and not some mess of animated red/black/purple blinking/scrolling/fading in 20 boxes all packed together on the page.
I’ve always been an admirer of design company 37signals. They have an incredible uncluttered and useable design style. The thing that made me notice them was their ’37better’ project where they redesigned some common websites themselves. They’ve also got a host of very cute projects like Ta-Da Lists, an online task list mananger and their fully-fledged project manager BaseCamp. Such good project names 🙂
In the past I’ve ranted about how clunky the Adwords interface is. Google have at last seen sense and are releasing an API: siliconvalleywatcher.com.
I was reading some rant of Cory’s on boingboing tonight and googled up one of his friends names and found his website. He’s a pretty interesting guy, who’s certainly been hanging out on the internet stoop for a while. I mean, he proposed the alt.* newsgroup category, that is some serious old skool. Anyway, his website has some interesting material, and I find that he is a found member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Clicking ahead I go, bracing myself for the horror that used to be the eff website to find that they’ve had a re-design and its actually not bad. Would be nice it it validated though…
I got the domain bug the other day and went a bit crazy.
I did mange to snag: http://ollyjackson.co.uk which I’m sure was registered to someone last year. I also picked up:
http://ollyjackson.org.uk and http://oliverjackson.org.uk
They are all just pointed here at the moment, but I’ll do something useful with them, sometime.
Every now and again I get the feeling I’ve seen all the cool (i.e. I think is cool) stuff on the net. When I find sites like this I realise how dumb thinking I’ve seen everything is, there’s always something else out there.
Another busy day at work…
I just got this with some of my christmas money. It is extremely shiny and nice:
Another brilliant t-shirt idea from skinnycorp (the people being threadless). Anyone can submit ‘slogans’ which they think would look good on a t-shirt. Then, other users can say whether they would wear them or not. The best ones will then get printed up and the user who submitted the slogan gets $100 and $100 to spend in their store.
Check it out: www.omgclothing.com
Really nice customisable hoodies, tees and lots, lots more:
They’re even more affordable for us Brits at the minute with the weak dollar 🙂
This is geting nuts, it’s made the Scotsman and the Guardian! Joe explains more here.
Also, I started a page collecting together all the publicity.
After talking to Jed (our local friendly lawyer) I figure I should make my position clearer on the whole Joe firing issue. I understand that what Joe did was most likely in breach of his contract and can easily be called Gross Misconduct. It’s just I expected a company such as Waterstones, that sells books, to have a slightly more open-minded approach to this whole thing. A minor reprimand would have been a more apropriate response in my opinion.
Also, stop the presses, Joe has made the front page of boingboing. They’ve quoted a bit of his post where he talks about me, I wish I’d gotten on to boingboing under better circumstances.
I left Waterstones over 6 months ago now and it was basically going downhill when I started about two years ago. Higher levels of management were imposing more HMV-like directives down through the structure and it was all getting very ‘un-bookshoppy’ in my opinion. But hey! I’m glad I don’t work there now because my fellow mate/blogging/geek Joe Gordon has been fired for blogging about working there. OK, he made some small criticisms about the management style but nothing that would warrant a full dismissal. Apparently it was ‘gross misconduct’ and ‘brought the company into disrepute’.
I really do feel for Joe, he certainly brightened the place up when I was there. But he was so frustrated with some aspects of the business that were being imposed. He had to vent somewhere and his blog turned out to be an ideal outlet. His venting was not a frequent thing, after all his blog is based around his satirical magazine, it’s not just a personal blog.
After I stopped working in waterstones I realised how crap it is. I only ever go in there now to talk to people I worked with and get the latest goss. Shops like Blackwells or Ottakars just have more soul. Waterstones is just like a shell that has books and I till in it. OK, this may be a little all-encompassing. There are some renegade branches out there, or ones that have enough clought to get away with stuff (like Manchester Deansgate) but Edinburgh – East End just seems cold. Anyway, I buy most of my books online now from amazon or second stuff from the nice wee shops in Edinburgh.
Joe also seems to have lots of other support on the internet: here, here, here and here.
Threadless, amazing t-shirt suppliers and one of my many money-spending weaknesses have had a re-design. Must resist…
No, I haven’t been honoured. But, Peter Molyneux has been. Molyneux seems to have been around for ever and constantly has amazingly original game ideas. I never really got into Populous back in the day but I did love the Syndicate series and many other Bullfrog games like Theme Park and Theme Hospital. It’s good to see the UK gaming industry getting some recognition at last.
So, they did indeed buy LiveJournal as everyone was speculating. Reading around the Six Apart website I began to think I was a little harsh on them with my hatred towards the mess they made of the Moveable Type licensing. They do seem to be a jolly nice company with nice people working there. I’ve no intention of moving back to MT or going side-ways to Type Pad though, WordPress does everything quickly, cleanly and oh so smoothly for me.
Six Apart, the company behind MoveableType and TypePad are rumoured to be be buying the teen-angst ‘blogging’ emoticon filled pit of despair that is LiveJournal. I gave up on MoveableType when they started the whole world-domination thing and were so obviously neglecting MT in order to work on their pay for use blogging tools. I can almost hear all the livejournals screaming with drama…
I’ve ordered myself one of these babies with my christmas money 🙂 mmmmmm, shiny.