I’m a member of the Design Museum here in London and so it was nice to see they have a free app with collection of the best pieces. It does remind me of the Phaidon Design Classics book-as-an-app (which still has not been changed since the first iPad).

I like this application and I was researching text overflow and scrolling. Since iPad no longer shows scrollbars then it’s up to the user to figure what is scrolling or not.

The basic design to highlight text overflow, is to make the bottom of your text container cut through the last line of text. This works well most of the time, yet doesn’t work if your copy could have line breaks and paragraphs.

Another way is to use ‘Paradigms’ which means that the user experience is the same (similar) to other apps of the same kind. This can also work well – because this app has a visual style that reminds me other apps, then I know to expect scrolling.

The interesting design flaw when you don’t have scroll bars is that I missed the user comments container also scrolls. Had you spotted this?

Linkage

Get the app for iPad

Damien Saunders

Siege is a great tool for performance and load testing your web application. I’ve been using it for the past 6 months to test WordPress websites along with other web apps that we’ve been building.

Use it to straighten out any kinks with applications like WordPress, learn if you’re server and database is flakey or prove that your CDN is super.

Siege testing vs Apache Benchmark

If you’ve used Apache Benchmark in Mac OSx or Linux then you’ll already have an idea what Siege can do. Siege is better then AB as you can create a user journey for it to follow or give it a list of pages on your website to randomly hit. The configuration file gives you a lot lot lot more then AB.

Siege testing is not load testing

Nothing beats a good Siege – but in reality if you really want to put your site under stress then you’ll need to switch to your own server setup with jMeter or checkout Blazemeter.

Finally .. you might as well give up on performance testing with Siege or Apache benchmark if you Siege server and Web App are on the same internal network / IP address range / co-located in the same data-centre.

Running Siege

Once you’ve started using Siege you won’t look back. It’s quite verbose and it’s great to watch it running through its test.

DAMIEN-RED:~ damien$ siege -c 10 http://damien.co
** SIEGE 2.70
** Preparing 10 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege...
HTTP/1.1,302, 0.60, 28,/,1,2012-01-25 21:59:53
HTTP/1.1,302, 0.60, 28,/,1,2012-01-25 21:59:53
HTTP/1.1,302, 0.60, 28,/,1,2012-01-25 21:59:53
HTTP/1.1,302, 0.63, 28,/,1,2012-01-25 21:59:53
HTTP/1.1,302, 0.66, 28,/,1,2012-01-25 21:59:53
HTTP/1.1,302, 0.69, 28,/,1,2012-01-25 21:59:53
HTTP/1.1,200, 0.05, 7146,/steven-mackintosh-the-changing-man/,1,2012-01-25 21:59:54
HTTP/1.1,200, 0.20, 7146,/steven-mackintosh-the-changing-man/,1,2012-01-25 21:59:54

and at the end … Siege gives you a nice sumary

Lifting the server siege... done.
Transactions: 534 hits
Availability: 91.60 %
Elapsed time: 84.10 secs
Data transferred: 1.83 MB
Response time: 3.41 secs
Transaction rate: 6.35 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.02 MB/sec
Concurrency: 21.65
Successful transactions: 537
Failed transactions: 49
Longest transaction: 29.90
Shortest transaction: 0.05

How to Install Siege

Centos

If you’re on the latest Centos with yum install you need to type

sudo yum install siege

Ubuntu

If you’re on the latest Centos with yum install you need to type

sudo apt-get install siege

Get started with Siege

From your CLI / Terminal you’ll want to generate a config file

siege.config

this generates a hidden config settings file. Then you’ll use your favourite editor to change Siege the way you like it.

nano .siegerc

The I suggest you put something under Siege

siege -c 10 http://example.com

This will generate a performance test up to 10 consecutive users. Remember some websites struggle to get more than 2 consecutive users so go easy.

Hints: Making things tough

1. Follow the User Manual and create a urls.txt file with a list of pages on your website.
2. Make sure you have Webmin or Munin running so you can visualise the pain you’re inflicting on your poor web app.
3. Run the siege for 60 minutes with something like 20 users.
4. Run the siege for 200, 500, 1000 consecutive users. Watch your server load average go up and your free memory disappear.

Linkage

• Download the latest tar file
• User Manual
• Read up on concurrency stats

Damien Saunders

It’s not often that we (as app user or developers) stop to consider how important the First Time User experience or the Getting Started Guide is.

If you had never heard of Evernote (or many other apps) then you rely on this introduction to do a lot of things. To sum it up, the first time user experience has to do two things:

1. sell the customer that the app will do what the user thinks it will do (they’ve already installed it but app store descriptions can be misleading), and;
2. tell the customer how to use it

Ultimately, large multi-platform applications have many, many, more features then there is time for a Quick Start Guide or First Time User experience.

What should be in a Mobile App First Time User experience?

I’d like to think that an App’s First Time User Guide needs to do 3 things

1. Sell the customer on what the app can do
2. Tell the customer about 1 feature that you want them to use
3. Tell the customer (immediately) what to do next.

In the case of Evernote, I think this introduction spends too long on selling a number of features that it actually stops the customer from get started.

I think the Evernote app misses the point here – the key thing to do first is get the user to Sign In or Create an Account. So the first time user experience needs to achieve this (because once you’ve logged in, the app will sync with Everynote on your desktop).

The introduction does do one thing interesting (visually it’s annoying) – the 1st screen at first glance, looks to have some thing wrong on the right hand side, as if part of another image was accidentally included in the app launch screen. Actually it’s the hidden 1st steps in the welcome guide.

Damien Saunders

It’s pretty easy to jump in the deep end with Axure and start building wireframes and hi-fi clickable prototypes. But the joy of Axure is starting low-fi (use Post-It Notes) to map a user journey and then create this process flow in Axure. Following a workflow like this means you get the customer journey mapped and you easily link your Axure wireframes to business processes.

I’ve been using Axure for more than a year and it’s now my tool of choice for mapping customer journeys and user interaction design. I started out just throwing stuff into Axure and not seeing how the on-page experience relates to the customer journey.

So in the latest Axure v6.5 they’ve improved some of the tools for mapping flowcharts – but the best feature is that building a flowchart create hot-links between steps in your process and the actual wireframe.

App Maps – Detail Customer Journey by Role

For a recent project I was Product Manager / Project Manager for bespoke web-application with a CMS. This web-app has user roles like author, editors and subscribers … so each user role has their own app map.

HINT:

Start be adding a sibling page in Axure and change the type to Flow — then create child pages for each of the user roles.

Add Child Pages to your Axure  - Sitemap pane and drag n drop these pages into your Flow chart. You’ll see each page is automatically hot-linked rectangle with anchor points so you can link the steps of your process to pages.

Detailed Process Flow Chart

Axure has improved it’s flow diagram tools in v6.5 – We’d never expect it to have all the features of Omnigraffle or Visio – Interaction Design and Prototype is what Axure does best.

In Axure, you can easily drag n drop shapes from your Sitemap pane in to your flow diagram and then you can connect them together to make very good App Maps or business process flowcharts. When you generate your prototype, you can easily click and navigate from your flow chart to a specific wireframe.

In Axure 6.5, the connector lines have been improved – previously these lines reflowed automatically. Now you can manually adjust  lines with elbow ‘joint’ connectors.

HINT:

Try to make a business process flow diagram which combines the user experience as it actually is – then talk to your Product Owner or Marketing Manager to see if the user experience in anyway conflicts with actual process (or desired outcome).

Linkage

For other ideas on workflow (such as naming conventions) I suggest you read this book:
Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials

Damien Saunders

Have you tried Storify? Is it just a little too busy? a little too complicated to get started with?

I’ve read some great stuff about how to use Storify to archive events (weddings for example). Using Storify you can collect all the tweets, Facebook messages, Flickr pictures into a ‘story’. Sounds good so far.

But what if you’re creative and not a creative writer? What if you just don’t have enough going on in your life?

I do like to see the sidebar navigation being used more information – I don’t really like how busy the iPad can be with a number of open panes and the keyboard.

Damien Saunders

Comment – Seems to me that ‘everyone’ wants to find a fault with Google+ and many maybe ‘wishing’ it to fail. It’s hard to get traction with social networks as we are likely to be regular users of a few social networks. It’s harder still to get people to change their primary social network of choice when your online social network all still use The Facebook.

Source: Google+: still not as interesting as Pinterest, new study finds: ”

Damien Saunders

I’ve just finished changing my domain name URL for my WordPress multisite. After running WordPress as a network for nearly 2 years and managing a number of other WordPress sites, domain changes should be easy to do (but over time things get more complicated).

WordPress multisite adds a layer of complications – if you just want to update the domain URL for one of your blogs, then check out Domain Mapping plugins.

It’s fairly easily to modify the domain names for a WordPress single stand-alone install. Just go look at your WordPress settings.

Before you change your WordPress Network URL

Changing the website domain can be complicated and you need access to DNS domain management tools as well as feel comfortable with using PHPMyAdmin and editing SQL tables.

If this makes you squeamish, then you’ll probably be better of setting up a new instance of WordPress with the new domain and importing / starting from a clean install.

SQL

1. Always make an EXPORT of your SQL database BEFORE you do any of this or you will break your website. Yes, break your website as in 404, 503, database connection errors, redirects and worse search engine errors!
2. You’ll need to use a MySQL editor like sequelpro or SQLyog. Editing with PHPMyAdmin can take too long.

DNS Records

1. Remember to update your Domain Registration and remove any redirects or unpark the new domain you’ll want to use.
2. Add the * wildcard sub-domain redirect for your new URL.
3. Do delay by a day or do this on a slow traffic day if your DNS records take time to ‘flush’.

ISP Host

public_html/oldsite.com

Let’s Go Change your Multi-Site Network WordPress Site URL

wp-config.php

You only make one change here the value of

Domain_current_site

from oldsite.com to newsite.com

 define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'damiensaunders.com' ); 

Note … adding the hack in wp-config for SiteURL or HomeURL doesn’t seem to do anything here.

wp_options

You make 2 changes here

siteurl

and

home

from oldsite.com to newsite.com

wp_blogs

WP standalone doesn’t have this table. You need to change the domain value for every single one of your blogs. I’m lucky, I’ve only got 10 blogs to change.

You need to look for and change

siteurl
home

for each of your sub-blogs.

Images, Guids and other things

Once you can login – Install Search and Replace plugin and do a ‘sweep’ of your website for references to your old site name.

Be very careful with you Search and Replace ….

don’t just replace http://oldsite.com with http://newsite.com  because your manual changes should have done this.

don’t replace oldsite.com with newsite.com as you’ll break folder paths etc.  e.g. if your folder path is public_html/oldsite.com/wordpress then you can’t do a search & replace.

don’t change the GUIDs unless you know what you are doing!

Google Analytics & Adsense, Adwords, Feedburner

Once you’ve changed your domain name you need to update your Google Analytics and other web-tracker accounts. If you run Adwords you probably have 1/2 a day before Google will recognise and disapprove your ads.

SERP, SEO & Google Webmaster Tools

Now’s the time to read-up on 301 redirects and .htaccess rewrite rules. Afterwards, submit your new site map via Google Webmaster Tools and also follow the options to migrate your old URL to the new URL.

HELP – it’s all broken

Well no – it’s not all broken. You just have to figure out where things were changed that stop stuff working. In the first place, check your database options and look for the changes you made – maybe you overwrote URL’s in too many places.

If you need help — then email me

LINKS

Change the Site URL – multisite

Damien Saunders

I’ve just getting started automated testing with Selenium for a number of web app projects that we’ve been developing lately. My background has been all about managing the project, test plans and manual test execution, so the learning curve is a bit steep.

Automated testing fits in well with Agile and Scrum project management. Using Selenium IDE you can first create the test case, try it out manually and then when development is finished, you just run the automated test. If the test automation completes without errors – then you can thank your developers for a job well done.

Selenium IDE is not Selenium

Well it is .. and it isn’t … Selenium IDE is like a Windows 95 macro-recorder as it copies your mouse clicks and keystrokes in Firefox and then repeats it for you.

Selenium is it’s big brother and runs as a standalone java server (called web driver) and you need to know some java or other languagues to use it.

Firefox runs Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is a Firefox browser extension, you need to have installed Selenium IDE: http://seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/, you can’t automatically use Selenium IDE to test chrome and internet explorer.

I’d also recommend you install Selenium Flow Control which will allow you to repeat, loop or iterate some of your test case.

Damien Saunders

Google+ has updated it’s app for iPhones – here is a screenshot from my iPad 3

Even though the app is not universal – you can see Google+ has high-res / retina display assets and so it renders quite ‘crisp’ even at 2x zoom on the iPad.

This is great job using fonts and HTML elements so the overall effect is impressive.

Damien Saunders

Did you know that social media is more than just blogs and RSS feeds? Well I hope so.

I have a following on Twitter that is <— this BIG —>   which is a lot for little me.  Maybe you prefer Twitter because you can dip in to the Twitterstream – maybe you should try following me.

What does Damien Saunders have to share on Twitter?

Damien’s Twitter account is kept updated 24/7 with the latest headlines from across my Internet websites. This is complimented with unique social media news, and sharing of important articles from across major tech and internet websites.

Let me share what’s up with you

I also spend a few minutes each day reviewing what people who follow me have to say and I do go out of my way to RT (re-tweet) anything funny, interesting or new.
If you don’t like Twitter — well stick to reading my blog or subscribe to my RSS Feed.

Or if you don’t like social media — then why did you read this?

Damien Saunders

Hats Off (HT) to Wired UK for the tip about Curators’s Code. What’s the Curator’s Code you might well ask … Actually it’s a great idea to make content attribution easier and recognise that not everything you read on the Internet is new.

Content Attribution is not a licence to use

It’s great idea to always attribute and recognise your info sources – I should think it is mandatory if you are aggregating content (which is almost akin to stealing someone else’s work).

Attribution, even when done right – is not a licence to copy and plagiarise content. We know that the music industry is flogging a dead horse on this – copying that is. So do check before you HT or link via ( the Curator’s Code ) that the content your referencing is licensed under Creative Commons or Copyright law.

Symbiotics, icons and symbolism

The only thing, being a visual / design / marketing person that I have some issue with is that the Curators Code recommends using a rather unknown character symbol to represent HT and Via.

I’m not going to use them here – Symbols and Signs are very difficult to use when they are so obscure and not used in wider society.

Linkage

What’s the Curator’s Code

Wired UK

Damien Saunders

WordPress introduced custom post types allowing creative and technical types to do more then just write pages and posts. Your websites main RSS feed doesn’t include custom post types — but custom posts do have their own unique RSS feeds which you can use.

What’s the RSS feed for custom posts?

The custom post rss feed looks like this

yourwebsite.com/feed/?post_type=yourposttype

So a link to my Presentations would look like this

http://damien.co/feed/?post_type=portfolio

Linkage

HT WordPress.org

Damien Saunders

If you like WordPress – you’ll love reading these:

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Need some help or training with WordPress?

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Damien Saunders

It’s time to catchup on some missed out reading. So here is a collection of 10 of the best Social Media resources that you love to read.

I’m not going to second guess these related posts – I’m sure there will be stuff about Twitter, Facebook, Email Marketing and Foursquare.

Damien Saunders

Do you have problems with read / write permissions with WordPress? Are you stuck and can’t upload or change files? If you’ve tried to change the CHMOD values and failed, it might be time to go to the command-line.

Working Alone – Single WordPress site

Run these commands from terminal (command line interface) or ask your web host provider to do this. This will set all files to read/write for the owner and read only for everything else.

sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} ;

sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} ;

Run this from inside your WordPress wp-content folder as the . means it will run in on every folder or sub-folder from that . (point).

Working as part of a team – Shared Read/WritePermissions

So that your fellow developers can always help you out it makes sense to have files and folders as group-writable.

Run these commands from terminal (command line interface) or ask your web host provider to do this.

sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} ;

sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 664 {} ;

Now all you have to do is make sure your team and Apache are all members of the same Server Group.

If you’re trying to update other peoples files you’ll want to run them as Sudo

Links

WordPress.org – Changing File Permissions

Damien Saunders

When ever there is a security update for WordPress you should always update your blog and website as soon as possible. According to Kaspersky one of the reasons that the recent Flashback Mac OSx Trojan malware infected 600,000+ computers was due to infected WordPress websites.

So how did this happen? When developers build you a website there typically is no time or budget left over for maintenance and updates. This means websites can be left running on old versions of WordPress with known security issues and these can be exploited by hackers.

Even worse – for customer usage, the ability to update WordPress can be locked off from the backend or these messages can be hidden.

The message is clear – always, always, always include maintenance and support in your WordPress projects.

Damien Saunders

WordPress 3.3.2 is here … and it’s not to be confused with the 3.4 beta releases. Being a point release, you shouldn’t expect significant changes.

WordPress 3.3.2 is a security release, which means it’s critical that you update your site. The release note for this

• Media Upload – the Flash Uploader and the newer Plupload have been updated
• Vulnerability where a site administrator could deactivate network-wide plugins
• Cross-site scripting vulnerability when making URLs clickable and in redirects after posting comments in older browsers, and when filtering URLs.

How to Update Safely

This is very easy to do from any logged in user page –  but you should always follow a simple process

1. Make sure you have a current WordPress database backup
2. Enable your Maintenance mode page.
3. Disable any / all plugins
4. Run update
5. Update any plugins that also got updated
6. Enable all plugins that you need
7. Check for any new issues
8. Disable your maintenance mode

Having Problems with this update? then read 3 steps to recover from WordPress website killers

STILL NEED SOME HELP? THEN I’M AVAILABLE TO HIRE

If you’re still stuck … get in contact and I’ll be happy to help you out. Perhaps you’re interested in setting up your own WordPress site or blog

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Damien Saunders

‘Another week, another beta’ so it seem. WordPress 3.4is on its way … it’s entered public beta, which means you can download it and try it for yourself. This is beta 3 so we can probably expect Release Candidate 1 in a week.

Don’t try this at home if you’re new to WordPress.

WordPress 3.4 does a lot for Themes and Theme Developers

As I’ve previously posted, this release is all about themes. So there is a lot of stuff around making it easier to change the look of the site for logged in users.

Should I update to this beta?

As this is a beta you shouldn’t use this on any live site – but it does mean it’s pretty stable and useful.

To install the release candidate you need the WordPress beta updates plugin and then just go to your updates sections.

Before you update any live site – backup

This is very easy to do from any logged-in wp-admin page – but you should always follow a simple process like this:

1. Make sure you have a current WordPress database
2. Enable your Maintenance mode page.
3. Disable any / all plugins
4. Run Backup
5. Run update
6. Update any plugins that also got updated
7. Enable all plugins that you need
8. Check for any bugs or other issues
9. Disable your Maintenance Mode.

If you’re still stuck … get in contact and I’ll be happy to help you through

Damien Saunders

Well it had to happen … I’ve found a better domain damien.co and I’ve completed the biggest hurdle to migrate from damiensaunders.com to damien.co

There are a flew glitches which I’m trying to sort out today.

The most obvious one is that sub-domains are not redirecting

so to get to wordpress.damiensaunders.com you need to go to wordpress.damien.co

Damien Saunders

Are you responsible for Twitter and Social Media in your business? Perhaps you’ve been feeling a bit lost after CoTweet closed its free version (shame on them) … here are a few alternatives you can look at

HootSuite

- yes I said alternative to CoTweet – personally, I like to use my own bit.ly Pro URL so this was not an option.
- Hootsuite has a very reasonably priced premium version and it has clients for pretty much any device

MarketMeSuite

- MarketMeSuite is looking the most promising ‘free’ solution.

Integrated with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Tools for scheduling tweets just like CoTweet or HootSuite.

GroupTweet
- GroupTweet could be good for sharing access to 1 Twitter account in much the same way as CoTweet

SocialBro

- I’d forgotten all about SocialBro til a colleague showed me the latest logged in / dashboard.

- Definitely one to join and compare.

Damien Saunders