Just Beyond The Bridge

Revealed! Does The ‘Birmingham Web Scene’ Exist or Not?

2009-06-29T16:31:29Z

Yesterday evening I sat in a crowded pub in Moseley, an attendee of my first barcamp event. Well it didn’t strictly follow the barcamp format, but it had a collection of short presentations by local webnorati and social media types. It was good, and I’d do it again (photos here).

If you decide not to read all of this post, I urge you to read the final paragraph (but it’d be great if you did look at the rest too!).

One question that has been raised and discussed recently is that of the stability or existence of a ‘local web scene’. Matt bravely volunteered himself to poll the masses at the barcamp, and put the question to the floor, “Well, is there one?”

There was most certainly a mixed response, but the most noticeable thing is that is was nearly all positive. People seemed deeply passionate about the topic, and I thought I’d summarise the salient points.

Clearly some people already believe Birmingham has very much a thriving ‘web community’. A few people highlighted that there had recently been some extremely positive praise by communities in other regions, including specific examples from London and Spain, which came as a surprise to me, although it quickly became apparent that there are two different things we are talking about here.

Firstly is the idea of what the web community is. Someone from the floor pointed out that Birmingham does have a fantastic reputation for Social Media - and this might be considered a group of it’s own - web development and design is another, and perhaps this is why there is some disparity. Despite highlighting this difference (which quickly became apparent through the comments from the floor) this particular contributor suggested that there might be a difference now, but he personally believed that greater overlap of the two web communities would benefit everyone.

There also seemed to be a feeling that, to quote another contributor, Birmingham sometimes feels like “an echo chamber”, a place where a lot is talked about, but sometimes, not all that much materialises. Several people agreed with this point, and others mentioned that although there were pockets of vibrancy, it did seem to lack wide-scale co-operation and joined-up-ness.

Despite this, it was possible to intone that people were not keen on ‘branding’ Birmingham; something which I happen to agree with. Umbrella organisations wouldn’t benefit anyone here and with so many strong identities already here, this should provide the groundswell that lifts the city’s profile alone. Several people commented on the uniqueness of the community, and one person specifically said that they didn’t want to interfere with it’s natural development or an attempt to perhaps ‘commercialise’ the process. There had been suggestions during the evening that some central shared space might benefit the community and stimulating more collaboration.

This however leads onto the second thing I observed. There seems to be a marked difference between the internal and external perceptions of The City. From my very unscientific canvassing of @media attendees last week, it seemed the perceptions of folk involved in the web industry in other cities were not necessarily negative, but certainly nothing more than neutral - mostly responding “I don’t think anything happens there”. Nobody I asked seemed to be aware of anything that was going on up here, and there was general feedback that they didn’t believe the midlands had any web based networks at all- perhaps strange considering we may have more networks here than in many of the major northern cities.

This seemed in stark contrast to many local people who contributed opinions suggesting we have a very strong and feature-packed web scene.

As part of external perceptions, Stuart proposed that we might need to be careful about losing out to Manchester in becoming regarded as the Second Digital City, which seemed to rub some audience members the wrong way, who fairly questioned why we couldn’t be the First Digital City (in a way that seemed to suggest that some people believe we are already in pole position). Although it seemed not to have been received well, I think it actually proved that people are very passionate about this, and would go as far to say it seems people do want to give London and other potential digital destinations a run for their money. I think they were simply irked at being told that we might have no chance of achieving that.

Earlier, Stuart had suggested to me that we are potentially at a tipping point and I very much agree. In three years time, we may either be ‘the place to do digital business’, or we may miss our opportunity because we failed to promote our efforts externally more effectively. It’s a crown up for grabs, and I think it would be a great shame for a city like Manchester to add that string to it’s bow, especially if regionalisation does remain important (and I still believe it will, because great community seems to breed excellent output).

In my view, those who are heavily involved in projects locally (Social Media Cafe, Likemind, Social Media Surgeries, Multipack etc etc) do a great job of engaging local people who are seeking involvement, but struggle to attract wider audiences or change the wider perception that Birmingham doesn’t appear to have a great digital offering. I don’t doubt that groups of people who come to work here leave very impressed, but I don’t necessarily think that is enough to win widespread external regard - especially since Birmingham has a long standing image problem that is still dogged by stereotypical regional perceptions (something I have experienced on a number of occasions in the past few weeks).

Someone made an astute point that perhaps continually asking others might be part of the problem and suggested we might be better acting as amplifiers for the successes of regions existing communities. Perhaps we should be actively talking to people in purely positive terms about the existing scene here. I think as West Midlanders, we tend to be a fairly modest people and I worry that we do indeed miss a trick when representing ourselves to key parties. As the guys from Created in Birmingham interestingly pointed out, we do enjoy being the underdog and I do wonder if it is perhaps a reason why external views on the city are almost inexistent - we simply are not wired to better our lot.

OK, so I think I’ll sum up my views on this. Clearly ‘scene’ is important and we’re still in the formative stages. In some sectors we are well regarded already, in other sectors more work is needed. Work is needed to promote Birmingham’s digital merits externally to competitive cities and regions, but also we need to engage people within this area who still are not aware of the cauldron of activity that apparently is present in The City. The tools are appearing to do this, and with the launch of Josh’s digitalbrum.co.uk (and the various partner sites) it’s becoming easier to tackle some of these issues.

But no matter your opinions, I would suggest one thing to help grow the outwards facing image of Birmingham and the Midlands as a digital centre. The next time you engage someone from outside the region in discussion, refrain from the negative, refrain from indifference and proclaim some of the great stuff going on here, whether you know the details or not. Reference it, use it, make examples of it. I think a shift in the way we talk about ourselves might just improve the impression we maybe conveying already - whether we realise it or not.

@Media 2009 in Brief

2009-06-27T17:19:02Z

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.

Demonstrating Colour Blindness

2009-06-08T08:34:43Z

A few months ago I was introduced to two guys through a mutual friend of ours. They have devoted a significant amount of their time while at and after university to the development of products which assist those with the most common forms of colour blindness.

The two Lukes (as they are known) generated algorithms to simulate the effects of dichromatic colour blindness, and they have just launched an iPhone application, Huetility, which allows you to effectively simulate how nearly 1-in-12 men, and a smaller proportion of women see the world.

The app is being promoted as an educational aid for parents, teachers and opticians to demonstrate and understand the effects of colour blindness, however there is no reason why this should not be part of every designer’s toolkit. All too often overlooked - badly thought out design decisions can prove difficult to those with an inability to perceive colour - and although not every design is colour critical, a quick check using this tool can help to eliminate these problems.

At £1.79, I think it’s a snip. You can find out more about Huetility here, or you can download the application from the App Store today.

How To Compress PDFs As You Create Them On A Mac

2009-04-21T08:20:29Z

If you’ve ever created a PDF using OSX you’ll know that it’s very simple. Macs come with out-of-the-box PDF support which means you don’t need a program like Adobe Acrobat Reader (or anything more heavyweight) to open or save your files as such.

However, you’ll also know that emailing the files it creates takes much longer than it should - the created files are massive in relative terms.

I’ve created one-page invoices using PDFs for a long time, and thankfully, due to this great little PDF compression plugin, they are crunched down to a sensible size from the outset. However, I recently switched to let Billings handle my invoicing and it uses the default OSX PDF creation tool to generate it’s PDFs - big files ahoy.

To give you an idea of the difference in file size between a compressed one page document - Billings chucks out a 1.4Mb file, whereas my compressed versions of the same documents are about 19Kb. Not ideal when you quickly want to output an invoice, attach and send it.

So how do you solve it? Well there are some nifty features in OSX that you may not be aware of (or at least not use), namely Folder Actions. Essentially folder actions allow you to run a script every time a file is placed in or removed from a folder on your Mac.

This creates a great little hook on which we can run a script to compress the files in a specific directory then move them to a ‘Compressed’ folder once done.

Step-by-Step: How to Do It

1. Download and Install Compression Plugin

Download and install the PDF compression plugin. It’s a Quartz filter workflow that uses well-chosen settings to reduce your file size down. You will also now benefit from the use of it everytime you encounter a save dialogue from now on.

2. Create an Automator Workflow

Automator is a free program bundled in every OS X Mac (have a look in your Applications folder). It allows you to run series of tasks automatically in a single process. You simply need to create a workflow consisting of:

Get Specified Finder Items (once added to the workflow, click Add to select the directory which will contain files to be compressed.
Get Folder Contents
Apply Quartz Filter to PDF Documents (Select ‘Compress PDF’ from the drop-down - this will only appear if you have installed the plugin as above)
Move Finder Items (change the location to a place where the final, compressed files will be automatically moved)

3. Test The Workflow

Place a test PDF in your ‘Compressor directory’ (specified in step 1 of the workflow) then run it. It should compress this PDF, then move it to the ‘Compressed directory’ you specified in step 4, leaving the ‘Compressor directory’ empty.

Once you’ve got that working, you can automate the process, so this executes every time a PDF is saved or moved into the folder. Click save, and Save as Application (as opposed to Save as Workflow, otherwise every time you run it, the Automator program will want to load up fully instead of run in the background).

4. Create A Script

You now need to create little AppleScript which can run this workflow application.

Go to /Libaray/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/

Duplicate one of the existing scripts, and rename it to something sensible like PDF - compressor.script

Open it and paste the following. You must manually alter the path to your Automator application as appropriate.

The code below is wrapping because of my thin blog layout. Best idea is to copy and paste directly, or View Source of this page to determine where the line breaks actually are if you are not sure.

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items try tell me do shell script “open -a /Users/Andy/Documents/My\\ Mac/Compress\\ PDFs.app” end tell end try end adding folder items to

Note! All spaces in the path must be double backslashed as above. To test if your typing is correct, paste the bit between the quote marks (e.g. open -a /Users/Andy/Documents/My\\ Mac/Compress\\ PDFs.app) into Terminial and run. If it runs the Automator application you created, your script will work. If it doesn’t, check the path you have typed.

Save it and close the Script Editor.

5. Set It Up

Find your ‘Compressor directory’ (specified in step 1 of the workflow) and right-click on it. From the menu that appears, select More > Configure Folder Actions…

Tick the ‘Enable Folder Actions’ box, then press the Add icon (+) to add the ‘Compressor directory’ as a trigger folder. Select it, and make sure the ‘On’ tickbox it ticked.

Next, click the Add icon (+) for the right hand pane to add a script. You should be able to find and select the AppleScript you have just created (something like PDF - compressor.script).

6. Done!

Close the window and you’re done. Every time somebody pastes or saves into the ‘Compressor directory’, the folder action will kick in, launch the AppleScript and that in turn will execute the Automator compression tool and move the compressed version of the PDF into the ‘Compressed directory’. Sorted.

Of course, there is lots more scope with this. Automator means you don’t need to know much AppleScript to get this going, but you can really push the boundaries if you are willing to experiment. This setup suits me, but it’s likely you’ll need to experiment to get it to the way you need it.

Wordpress: Moving From Development or Staging to Live

2009-04-17T10:13:48Z

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’]);

4

2009-04-08T19:08:07Z

I once had an urge to write. It was probably born out of a frustration that (at the time) everything creative I was involved with either was being hand drawn and product shaped, or laid out using a computer.

It’s been exactly four years since I wrote my first post on this blog, and not much has changed except I’ve lost my almost insatiable desire to write. It’s not that I don’t have ideas and thoughts, but everything these days appears to be summed up in 140 characters and I rarely think of a topic that I want to elaborate on, at least in a written form at least.

I know this won’t last forever. Twitter will come and go like everything else on the web. When I think back over the past seven years I have actively used the internet and consider all those things I used to visit/were so important to me at on time or other: DeviantArt, amused.com, Rojo, Friends Reunited, My Yahoo!, my Angelfire and FreeYellow websites, BoltBlue, Facebook - you realise things can only last a finite (and apparently increasingly short) period of time.

I also know I will get back my desire to write again one day. I tend to get these bursts of energy which have to be captured in words, but I think since I started running the business as a full-time occupation, that energy has been channelled via other routes.

I really have thought long and hard about the future of this blog. I’m not sure I want it all to remain online, especially in it’s current form. Malarkey did something a few years ago which was to archive anything interesting for anyone who really wanted to find it, but otherwise stopped it being immediately obvious. That appeals more and more.

Realistically, I don’t have to do anything about this site. It’s not doing much harm to anyone, except to me. Every time I visit it, it looks so forlorn and badly kept that I feel bad I don’t make many contributions to it anymore. But then again, for the two years that it truly shone I was in a state of overdrive and made commitments to write near daily - no matter how poorly - so comparisons to ‘the good old days’ are simply unrealistic.

I suppose also that in a way I feel like we (the ‘interneteers’) have created a bit of a primordial swamp over the past few years. Our general creativity, outpourings, projects that never went anywhere, willingness to ditch one web-based product for another at a moments notice and slimy trail of media (videos, podcasts, blog entries) can now be viewed with some hindsight. We’ve really worked hard since we got our hands on the controls, however now behind us we’ve left a soup of semi-useful stuff and we’re finally venturing out a little from it’s murky waters. Well, perhaps we’re not even that advanced. Maybe we’re just developing fins or something. A lot of effort has gone into getting us to this point, including a significant number of my own hours that went into this chronicle that I’m now seriously considering wrapping up on.

I wonder what the value of all of this will be in years to come.

F1 Calendar: Formula One Race Times for Your Desktop Calendar

2009-03-16T08:51:22Z

F1Calendar.com is a little something Si and myself have been working on recently.

Very much in the tradition of Si’s previous ‘KickOff’ productions (Six Nations Kickoff, Euro Kickoff and World Cup Kickoff), F1 Calendar is a quick way to check Formula One race times and dates for the entire season, or retrieve of the same details in a file that can be loaded into your copy of iCal or Outlook (or other desktop calendaring software).

You can download a standard .ics file, or subscribe to the updating ‘webcal’ version which will update throughout the season to reflect any changes that occur to the planned event dates over the coming months.

F1 Calendar supports every world time zone, and remembers the last one you viewed so you can always return to view the most relevant schedule, instantly.

We’ve also allowed a level of customisation for the downloadable content; we imagine not everyone wants all the practice and qualifying sessions recorded in their calendars, so before you download you are asked to pick which ones (if any) you want to include. We’ve got dates and times for all Grands Prix, qualifying sessions and practice sessions.

The design and architecture has been kept straightforward - there is only one page to speak of, but there are quick urls for all time zones if you need to send them as links. Also we’ve decided that IE6 will get a reduced visual experience (and a reduced visual experience only), and this is the first site either Si or myself have been involved in which we opted to use a Bring Down IE6 inspired philosophy - really on the basis that people who understand how to download calendar files and subscriptions will also understand how to download a browser and how it would benefit them.

If you like it, please Tweet it, pass it on or bookmark it - we’re on twitter at @f1cal.

Building it was pretty enjoyable.

Formula One Race Times & Dates

Multipack Presented

2009-02-25T23:31:10Z

I’ve been thoroughly booked up the past few days. What with having a bit of a large night out on Friday with George, Will and Gwyz I was on surprisingly good form for Saturday’s Multipack, although I did avoid revisiting the beer.

Hosted entirely in Digbeth (just below Brum city proper) we had a really good turn out and I met a good number of new faces. Kudos to Mr Oxton who made a nice comment about me on his blog for the price of a Guinness.

Matt’s talk on ARIA was a nice little intro to a wider subject that I had previously known little about, whereas Bruce very neatly illustrated some of the finer points of HTML 5 as it stands and the political wrangling that always threatens with web-specs. Stuart rounded off everything with the most technical part - outlining the best bits of ‘new’ JavaScript and what we can look forward to from browser support in the future. I suppose it therefore was only fitting that he had co-ordinated with Apple to release the upcoming beta of Safari so soon afterwards… (I also quite surprised myself when I realised I had understood pretty much all of it).

Other things I took away from the day was a brief and sandwich-punctuated discussion about Microformats and Birmingham Social Media with Andy Mabbett; a chance to examine the new and neatly put together studios of One Black Bear; discuss wacky Japanese architecture with Jon Dennis and discover why exactly Tess was brandishing a thick PHP textbook at the last meeting. And of course it was great to see all the usual suspects as well. Photos here.

The only disappointment was that the sun didn’t last until Sunday but since then I’ve seen Raj, Tom and George, caught up on Lost and Flight of The Conchords (of which episode 5 is a cracker) organised go-karting for the weekend and been pleased by what the accountant had to say about the business helping to pay the rent.

Tomorrow I’m doing my annual attendance at the old school, answering questions on web design for kids about to pick their A-Level subjects. The buffet is usually excellent.

I’m also looking forward to the next couple of months. I’ve organised a trip down to Southampton on business, have a great piece of work coming up which almost makes me envious of myself (if that’s possible) and am eagerly awaiting delivery of rare book purchase (for me anyway) - the Typographic Desk Reference. It will nicely prop up the one other proper design book I own.

I think this photo most adequately sums up last Friday.

Multipack Presents Emerging Web Standards; This Saturday

2009-02-17T17:54:27Z

I’m pleased to announce a new type of event from Multipack launches this month; Multipack Presents - and it’s happening this Saturday, 21st February in Birmingham. Open to all, free to everyone.

On this day we will reluctantly peel ourselves off our Birmingham barstools and reposition ourselves at the new offices of Birmingham Web Agency One Black Bear in their Fazeley Studios for industry-related talks by web powerhouses, Messrs Machell, Lawson and Langridge.

Topics of these free presentations will be HTML 5, the new W3C accessibility tool WAI-ARIA and other emerging web standards. And it’s going to be good.

Pre-talk drinks are at 2pm in The Old Crown (Digbeth High Street), and the talks will be held in the studios at 4pm, though please come along and socialise beforehand (especially since we may need to enter the studios en-masse if the reception is not usually open on a Saturday!).

Kindly email supremos Campaign Monitor will be supplying some refreshments and freebies for attendees, and being as the whole thing is ruddy well free, there is no reason not to show up, although it would be very courteous if you add yourself to the Upcoming group so everyone involved gets a good idea of the numbers to expect.

Looking forward to seeing you all there :) Any questions can be fired at me or other Multipack types on Twitter. More info here.

Higgsy’s Wonderful Wordly Insight

2009-02-01T19:19:03Z

It’s been a while since my last post. Around a month I believe, which is a fairly big gap by my standards. I believe twitter has something to do with this, but also a general lack of desire to write loads.

However it has allowed me time to contemplate the following three pieces of wordly-wise advice for you.

The speed limit on single lane national speed limit roads is 60mph and most people know that. If you think it’s 50mph, or 40mph, I suggest you re-read the highway code. Also if you don’t know it’s 70mph on dual carriageways, the same applies to you too. The government should take note; most people don’t understand the white disc with a black line through it. Perhaps it would be more sensible to put a number on all future speed limit signs so the whole thing is unequivocal. Sensible huh?
Gym members; if it was intended for that, they wouldn’t have called it a hair drier. Why you think anyone else wants to watch you heat your genitals while standing completely nude in front of a mirror is a mystery to me. Get it away from there before you do an injury to yourself. It’s not going to increase the size of anything, and even if it does, we don’t all want to have to watch.
If you’re installing iWork ‘09 and you had previously installed iWork ‘08, please remember that just because you installed it doesn’t mean the default program which opens a file has changed. I found this out halfway through a keynote presentation. Delete the old version to avoid and mid-presentation annoyances.

I’m not actually that much in a ranty mood, those are the exceptions to the rule. To counteract the negativity of the three points listed above, here are three positives from January 2009.

If you haven’t seen Slumdog Millionaire, you really should do. It’s very enjoyable.
If I had to recommend some music right now, I couldn’t say better than The Black Key’s last album (2008), Attack and Release. And what better way to listen to it than through free online music service, Spotify
The Simon Amstell interviews Eddie Izzard experience was great. The audio recording will be available as a podcast on iTunes shortly.

That is all for now.

It’s 2009

2009-01-04T10:49:26Z

The great thing about Christmas is seeing people who you haven’t seen for a long time and indulging in appalling quantities of food, alcohol, and food laced with alcohol.

Over the festive period I was able to meet up with a load of school friends (one who has made a good case for me to visit Uganda), and for new year make a first visit to Leeds with some uni mates.

I have to admit, I really didn’t feel too Christmassy until the 28th, which was the first day I actually set foot in a shopping centre - something that usually figures much earlier in December and gets me in the mood. For some reason, most of December felt like it was masquerading as October.

There is inevitably a portion of time dedicated to watching TV while you let the Christmas Dinner settle - and I was entertained by the return of Shooting Stars and a Morecambe & Wise Christmas special in full, but disappointed with the 39 Steps and the return of Jonathan Creek. As the reviewer of the latter in the Telegraph put it,

In the end, by the time the secret of the original mystery was unlocked, the only room one really feared never being able to escape from was the one with the telly in it.

I don’t know what people use to review the 39 Steps, and maybe it’s my attachment to the book that got me a little annoyed, but chunks of plot were not just removed, but replaced. Saying this, I’ve never seen any other adaptions, so it’s hard to compare - I hear others are even more wildly different, so maybe it’s just a hard one to adapt. Admittedly, it’s not ever going to be a Bond action flick, but I would loved to have seen a more faithful representation. Maybe they’ll have chance to make amends in a production of Greenmantle.

I think I can safely say December has been the most ill month I can recall in the past two years. For some reason I contracted the flu twice (even with a flu jab) and then just after Christmas started to get pretty horrific pain at the back of the mouth and in my lower jaw. Due to odd closing hours and the fact my dentist has left the practice (as I discovered) I couldn’t get it looked at until after new year, but thinking I knew what it was (emerging wisdom tooth) I waited patiently to discover that I had been wrong. That said I was also extremely happy that I didn’t have to have anything extracted. I won’t explain exactly what it was in case you’re not into descriptions of dental loveliness, but needless to say it was pretty nasty but easily fixed.

This weekend I’ve been helping to construct a family photo book for a relative using Blurb.com. I’ve previously used Lulu.com for this sort of thing, but a different set of requirements was needed and I was immediately impressed with Booksmart, their platform independent book editor which has taken all the hassle out of PDF preparation. It does impose page layout constraints on you, but I can live with that for this particular piece of work.

Next weekend could be a trip down to St. Albans. Looking forward to it.

The photo is of my great-great-great grandfather, James Bligh with wife Angelina and his family. He and his son Edwin Bligh were both coach builders in Kent.

Four Days, Then Christmas

2008-12-21T20:26:01Z

It occurred to me today that we are getting close to Christmas.

This may not have been much of a revelation for other people, yourself included, but for me it came a as a bit of a surprise. The few presents I have bought have been done so with the help of others, which has partly taken out the associated stress of shopping at this time of year, however it also means that so far I’ve not really drunk in any festive spirit.

I did fetch the tree down from the loft a number of weeks ago, and also think I saw some tinsel recently too. Other than that, exposure to truly Christmassy things have been missing to date. Even this year’s Christmas number one is not very Christmassy, but then again, I can’t remember the last time one was.

For the most part of this week I’ve been grappling with proposal documents, long days in London learning tag-based codes, eating pies, drinking in Stourbridge, spending hours getting a bulb fixed, and picking up my new chair from Rotherham, which gave me an excuse to see folks in Sheffield. It could have been any other week in the year.

My todo list in things has become far more static than it should be, and I’m now finding that although I’ve reduced the number of items ever in my inbox at any one time, these have simply been translated into list items.

But this isn’t a moan, more an observation. I’m now quite looking forward to a few days off and all that excess - I just wish this weekend had been a bit longer.

Jobs In Stourbridge

2008-12-16T11:50:29Z

I was pleased to discover this gem in the Stourbridge News this week. This free CV listing service has been running a while, but it wasn’t until this week that I noticed the fantastic social observation of my local area which the illustration provides.

Clearly the demographic illustrated here is a true representation of the cross-section of society which can be found in Stourbridge. If you have ever visited here you can always expect to see number of road workers, cleaners, doctors, office workers and police officers. What you might be more surprised to learn is that one in every 17 people in Stourbridge is an astronaut.

Another fact that you may not be aware of is that Stourbridge has a higher ratio of Ninjas to any other single profession in the town. Both red and white Ninjas live in the Dudley Metropolitan Borough, but of course, you wouldn’t know that because Stourbridge-bred Ninjas are very, very good at their job.

We also have a number of celebrities living here. Chef from South Park, Britney Spears and both Roy and Moss from The IT Crowd.

Clearly the most dangerous job in Stourbridge is being a nurse. Most nurses live in fear of the famous yet terrible brain-sucking monster, which of course eats their head like a creme egg.

I hope you now have a little more insight into Stourbridge and the sort of people who live and work here.

Credit Crunch In The Web Industry?

2008-12-07T00:38:44Z

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…

Switzerland

2008-12-01T18:53:04Z

I’ve wanted to visit Switzerland for a long time. Of all the western European nations, it’s one of the most interesting politically, historically, scenically and racially and so I was really pleased when James (who I tend to do photography trips with) decided he’d like to try it too.

I gave myself the week off and we flew from Luton on a bitter Sunday morning, and were more than relieved that despite the temperature in Geneva, the weather was crisper; less sleety and less wet.

We spent the next few days as the only residents of a hotel in Interlaken (quite literally, even the staff weren’t on-site most of the time) and took time to explore Murren, Thun, Wengen and number of other mountainside/lakeside villages. Ski season hasn’t yet commenced, but the first snow is falling, which made for ideal photography conditions - unspoilt slopes, no overcrowding and complete isolation in some cases. On a couple of occasions we ended up in normally buzzing villages only to find that most of the transportation wasn’t running, let alone anyone else in sight. It was highlighted by the fact in the five or so days I was away I didn’t have a single opportunity to speak to anyone who wasn’t Swiss.

Limited German and French didn’t matter much as most people speak English, but I actually enjoy the challenge and being the only other two languages I have any knowledge of, meant I got to try both.

The highlight of Interlaken was definitely heading up to the Jungfraujoch - 3471 metres. Stupidly, despite my own interest in the mountain and it’s conquest, it had completely escaped me that the Eiger (especially the White Spider, or famous North Face) was actually in the immediate group of three mountains ahead of us. It really was stunning. The weather had been snowy and cloudy below about 2000m, but from the railway station at Kleine Scheidegg, looking up at the three mountains, we had exceptionally good visibility.

It’s expensive in Switzerland, but Swiss Pass railway passes halved the price on the few lines that aren’t ‘all inclusive’. You could feel the altitude, although it wasn’t anything like Tibet (where dizziness turned into a splitting headache), and instead made the whole experience even more surreal. Outside on the plateau the temperature was a chilling -18.8°C but it made a great platform for taking photographs. The only downside of these pre-prepared spaces is that everyone gets the same image - but unfortunately there is little other option at that sort of height without a helicopter and money to burn.

On Wednesday we returned to Geneva and had a chance to have a look around the Old Town, not before James took the hotel’s rooms to pieces (critically, not literally). As someone who designs them for a living he was able to point out some pretty clever cost saving techniques that you wouldn’t necessarily have considered before.

Historically of course, Geneva has an important role to play in both the League of Nations and the UN, and it was interesting to step in the same footsteps as some of the greatest world leaders. Inter-war European relations was one of my pet topics until A-Level and it really puts things into perspective when you see the rooms from where Haile Selassie made his impassioned plea and where the Geneva Convention was first signed in the Alabama Room at the Hotel de Ville. All good history stuff.

After getting back in time for Saturday’s rugby, I caught the train to meet with Sean before the match. I don’t think we expected too much from England’s performance, but after a fairly stale first half against the All Blacks (6-12), the second half could have provided a surprise result. It did, and we lost spectacularly.

Actually it wasn’t all bad, but some pretty awful discipline left us playing with 14 men for most of the game, and some lazy play and lazy kicking meant we we’re pretty stuffed.

When I got back at around 11pm I was surprised to find myself in the car heading over to Kidderminster to meet up with George, Tom and Gaz for a celebratory drink (George getting back from Canada). We ended up in a lock-in I think because the beer was still flowing until the early hours, but I had the benefit of a fantastically comfy spare bed and didn’t wake up until midday.

A good week off, all-in-all. Photos are here.