Scene by valho

This is the third article in a series covering the topic of Project Team Composition, hence the incredibly cunning name of it.

So we have now established people in our Dream Team should have complementary skills of a similar level. We have also established people in our Newbie Team should have complementary skills of a similar level, mainly because it really doesn’t matter what level you put the team on, it needs to be of a similar level if you are striving towards Project Team Zen.

We have also established that a team can have a bad player, but also that no half decent team becomes awesome only because they have one or two awesome team members. So lets continue with our list, and go through the last two points.

Striving for similar goals

Blue or red pill by Victor de la Fuente

This one might appear to be so obvious you might question why it is in here at all. Trust me, it wouldn’t be here if this wasn’t a problem in the real world. For skilled interested and passionate people the search for more or improved skills never stops. Their quest for perfection never stops and the willingness to improve is never ending. Now, there are two types of people where this does not necessarily apply:

1. Those who are not interested in learning new things, mainly because they could be working anywhere, and have no passion at all for where they actually are currently working. These guys mainly “do a job” and they right now happen to be at an agency for online marketing.
2. Those who had talent, took it a bit (but only so far) but got cocky thinking they know it all, in particular if they are specialists within a specific area. They often dismiss other related areas as “unworthy” or “less efficient” without actually trying them out, which in time turns their skills base more and more obsolete, by which time they are too old and tired to start with something new.

3 by BlondeShot Creative

One of the keywords here is passion. Passionate people often work with something they love so much they would be doing it for free if no one paid them. It is a mystery to those who don’t have passion, and for those who do it is a mystery why the others don’t have it. It is like mixing apples with bricks; they will never truly  understand each other, and it is really tricky to make them blend well on a professional level. In leading companies that manages to be constantly high performing they rarely hire dispassionate people. You are unlucky indeed if your team has one (or indeed more than one), as that means not only has that guy been hired erroneously but also you have been unlucky enough to be paired with him or her, as your ultimate goal for the project no longer can be “awesome” or “excellent“, but that you instead will have to settle for “passable“, “average” and “we got away with it!“, unless you are really lucky.

This can be soul destroying for the passionate people you do have, who have spent an amazingly long time acquiring their skills, often in their spare time, in the hope of rising to glory due to their awesome skills, to instead having to settle for dodging curve balls due to other team members non-knowledge.

Mutual respect for people and skills

Photo by kiyanwang

In all actuality this fourth point is the amalgamation of the three previous points, however this can more often than not hurt the people who have skills, passion and understanding for others, as they spend more time doing “the do”, or trying to fix what is currently broken by a colleague, than trying to figure out how to hide their own incompetence by pointing in every direction but their own.

It matters less if you like your colleagues as long as you respect them and their skills. This is not about “let us not tell him the truth, it might hurt his feelings” or “it isn’t very constructive to put it like that“, but sometimes some people need to hear some hard facts without the others beating around the bush too much.

The thing with respect though, is that it has got to be earnt. The saying “years to build, seconds to erase” applies to respect more than most other things, and if the respect isn’t there, either because it has “gone away” or because it was never there, matters little.

Perfect mix

Photo by Stuck in Customs

So the challenge becomes obviously simple to define: Find people who are all awesome, who wants to do the same things in their careers though they happen to complement everyone else in the team, and who won’t kill each other in the process, right? Well…errrmm…yes. Exactly so. That is what your competition is going for so I don’t see many reasons for you to not trying to do the same.

This does take time though, as it is more important to not hire badly than it is to hire “anyone”. Nothing is as important as keeping your (hopefully) high standards of quality up (I can possibly write another series on the importance of Quality), and nothing can kill Quality as efficiently as having the wrong team on the job.

Speaking of time, if you have lots of it, you can also train people to do almost anything, it is very rare that people are completely hopeless. True enough, time will not make someone who doesn’t have an aptitude for development a good developer, they will be decent at best, but if people have the general skills, making them play nicely together, allowing them to move around between different teams, can be wise. Some people might be awesome in the right surrounding, and not-so-impressive in another. That only works however if you also are able to put the good ones back together for the next project, a thing that definitely is a challenge for most agencies as people get caught up in different new projects after they have been split up. If you can’t recompile your winning teams again you are probably doing something wrongly.

Not about departments

Photo by jouni_k_seppanen

I said in the first article that this is all about Project teams, not Departments, and that I would touch on the difference as well, so I guess I better do that as well. A department, in my mind, is a collection of people that have similar skills as each other. Much like running a set of only-guitarists, or only-midfielders. There are obviously differences between the different members, they can even have different specialities, but that is irrelevant when it comes to actual Project teams. It is rare indeed that a Project team is dysfunctional because an ActionScripter in the agency, who isn’t present in the project team, isn’t a great team player, regardless of how much the other developers like him.

Having said that, there can be instances where people, including yours truly, have over specified one department with only senior awesome can-do people. That is all fine and well, and looks great on paper, but is sort of ignoring that if the rest of the agency isn’t at the same level, or of the same mind set, it will have been for nothing. The actual Project teams will be as good as the weakest link in the chain, and there will be some very bored developers (in my case) who can get fed up with teaching every one else in the Project teams the most fundamental things, whilst waiting for the others to pick up the crudest and most basic amount of skills to understand their own jobs, let alone the job of the developer, which obviously is needed to be able to figure out if they are good or bad.

The lesson learnt? Hire people for your department across seniority levels to be able to throw the correct level into the equally correctly levelled Project team. If that means the Project team consist mainly of juniors it doesn’t have to be bad, and juniors most often equate to “less experienced of hardships”, not necessarily “not as good” so they might get away with it. In fact, they might forge stronger bonds together as a team by achieving, and learning new things, together, which is a good investment for future projects, for them and for your agency.

This is where I could have a long rant on “job title confusion”, regarding seniority levels and “title inflation”, but I think I shall save that for another article altogether.

This rounds up this series for now, but has opened up for future reviews/articles on Quality, Titles and a few other things that has popped into my mind typing this series. Remember, all of this is my views, not the views of my current or past employers or organisations I have been a part of. It is however based on working in various agencies over the last 16 years. If you think I am completely right/wrong, or if you would like to add something, use the comment box below.

16 Band Aurora by Image Editor

Have you ever tried to change your home, your car, your job, your team, even your country, and just move somewhere else and do something new? Well, I have. And here I go again.

After 3.5 great years I have decided to leave my current job at Profero. Actually, after 10.5 years I have decided to leave the UK and London, but seeing as me and my little family will be moving back to our native Sweden, further employment with Profero would have been complicated to say the least, so leaving the great team at Profero, where we have been doing some really great work, hired some awesome people, particularly lately, and over the years won a truckload of awards, is one of the necessary sacrifices I have to make.

Weighing things up

Even though we, me and my family, really like it here in London, having made some great friends over the years and me being in a really nice job, there are these days several reasons for us wanting to move back. We, as a family, quite simply found we had more reasons to be in Sweden than we had for staying in the UK.

Closeness to family and friends, or lack thereof, is obviously always a thing anyone who has moved countries will experience, but it really gets emphasized when you get kids of your own, and grand parents and cousins are in a different country. We currently have one boy, going on 3 in December, but we are also expecting a new little baby in January. All these things of course had something to do with where we had our mind set of late as well.

It is obviously going to be sad leaving London after 10 years, and there will be lots of things we will miss when we go back, most notably people, but we also see this as a new great re-start for us, and to match that up I have found an great new challenge when it comes to work.

Reboot

I will be starting at Tieto, working in a really exciting team with lots of challenges, some great people and some excellent clients. The overall team is called Digital Service Design (they used to be called Digital Innovations until they changed name) and that should give you an idea of the direction of the department in any case.

It is really exciting, and I am really looking forward to it as I have heard so many good things about Tieto in general, and DSD in particular, from several of my friends who either work there directly, or from people who are working with Tieto indirectly. Besides, it sounds like an excellent new challenge in a direction I have been leaning more and more towards of late after having spent 16 years in online advertising/marketing, as Tieto not being online advertising per se is something “new”, but still using my skillset well.

Destroy, Erase, Improve

To be honest, having spent the last 3.5 years with top UK agency Profero, and prior to that 5.5 years with top UK agency Dare, winning all online advertising awards there is I think (as a team obviously, not me personally), I was struggling in finding reasons, for whatever my next challenge would be (which is always wise to be on the lookout for), to stay as head tech body for any agency within advertising.

Without wanting to sound too brash, it felt a little bit like “been there, done that, seen it”, and we all need new challenges now and then to keep stretching our capabilities and to keep things interesting. It quite simply doesn’t get much bigger or better within online advertising/marketing, than working with award winning global clients at the top agencies around. I was therefore looking for something different, a new challenge, to get me out of my immediate comfort zone a little and still know I will be able to do a great job. Tieto will fill all those needs for me I suspect, and it is going to be great fun.

So…if you have ever wondered what it would be like to do a complete reboot of your life, stay tuned, I will be updating you with the best bits of it, mixed in with my reflections on what is different between UK and Sweden, both for good and for bad.

Scapegoat by h.koppdelaney

This is the second article in a series about Project Team Composition. You can find links to the related articles in the series index above.

In the last article I said there are a few things a good well-oiled constantly habitually repetetive winning teams need to have:

• Complementary skills, and knowing and trusting the others will do their part
• Approximately the same skill level
• Striving for similar goals
• Mutual respect for each other, and for each others skills

Lets start going through that list in more detail, and today I am more about football than music, just so you know.

Complementary skills

This might appear obvious, but what often is overlooked is the fact that people from different backgrounds have different perceptions on various things, including what the solution should be for the problem the team is trying to solve, what their own role is within the team, as well as having different perceptions on what the others roles are within the team. If they for example never have worked within online advertising in an agency, but instead come from a financial institute, they will quickly have to figure out that developers in agencies have completely different challenges than their often bored brothers at the banks.

Beginner

This can obviously be worked around over time, if you have time that is, and people will learn what is expected of them and what they expect from others. In real live projects though, for paying clients, this can be a hard, and for the company costly, learning period.

Much like a football team has a keeper, defenders, midfielders and forwards, project teams within agencies usually need to cover the roles of project manager, designer, front-end developer, back-end developer, ActionScript and/or Flash design, information architect (or UX or HX or whatever they call themselves these days), copy writer and in some cases someone who manages the client on top of the PM/Producer. That list might fluctuate depending on the project of course, and other roles could be added to cover every eventuality, but that is missing the point of this article, so moving on…

Now, if you have those guys in your team you are doing well, but as you might remember from the paragraph on top of that, the actual guys in the team need to understand their roles within the project as well, and that is regardless of what project methodology you have decided to work towards (for example Agile/Scrum or Waterfall/Prince2).

Agile vs. Prince2 by Hiddenloop

In particular if you are going all Waterfall (which often is company wide as opposed to the odd project here and there), where the project flow is more of a relay race, the role of for example the project manager becomes crucial in updating the designers, IA’s and developers about changes in the scope, especially if they have given timings to an initial scope, as those timings may well be rendered obsolete otherwise, as “what used to be true” no longer is.

Otherwise there can, and will, be deadline unhappiness, as the designers/IA’s/developers will, quite naturally, not know what they haven’t been informed of, by the project manager who should be the hub that makes the project tick along and who has as one of the main tasks in their job description to ensure that everyone involved in a project have what they need. If you are working towards Waterfall those designers/IA’s/developers are quite possibly busy on other project as well, so to expect them to iron out possible changes in potential future projects isn’t really realistic (IMHO).

If you start pushing the need for nailing down the scope of work to for example a developer, or if you start doing copy amends during design and expect the designer to proof read and change it all, you will be on the wrong track, if nothing else because those people in those roles were thinking they were hired to do something else (like, errr, their own jobs). If you bore them enough with this they can, and will, move on to another employer where that is true.

Approximately the same skill levels

Approximations of Sport by John Flinchbaugh

This is very often over looked, or even misunderstood, and that is a very common reason why projects can end up in a place no one would like. It really isn’t rocket science, and still people (including yours truly) at times get this wrong. It is all about balance though. In short, mixing people with different seniority and experience levels often means there will be a massive misunderstanding of the point above. The senior guys will assume the juniors know as much about their own field as the seniors know about theirs. Well…they don’t. And the junior guys will quite likely miss something that hasn’t been explicitly stated by one of the seniors because the seniors count on everyone to do at least that.

This usually leads to overcompensation from the other team members, who then get the feeling they are doing the job of at least two people. Simple example: if a junior football team get Ronaldo to play a game with them, you can bet your behind on that everyone else in the team will pass Ronaldo as often as they can. That is completely overseeing the fact that part of his normal brilliance is fast runs and being where he isn’t even supposed to physically be (in the minds of his regular opponents), so his team mates can play him when the opposing team least expects it, and instead all of a sudden he has the ball all the time, and thereby all the opposing defenders complete and full attention all the time.

Now, with Ronaldo in the junior team they might actually be able to benefit from their new weapon due to the lack of skills from the opponents, which leads me to what one of my former colleagues and dear friend usually says about other team members at work: “He/She knows just enough to be really dangerous”. What he is referring to is of course that after you have grasped a little bit of skill, you often get to a “I am INVINCIBLE!” state, and you start doing all kinds of weird mistakes, to the horror of team mates and bosses.

Ronaldo

This also means that for example Ronaldos possibly match winning appearance in a junior team, for one game (his sanity wouldn’t cope for more) can be removed completely if he is playing with the U-21 team, simply because they are good enough to be really good (though not yet at Elite level), but also often cocky and eager to prove themselves, in particular to, or compared to, players like Ronaldo. His brilliance might be completely negated due to factors that are out of his control. The only thing he knows for sure is that he, alone, can’t make a somewhat competent team into complete and constant repeat winners. He might get a good game now and then, sure, but unless the other players also are at elite level…well…again, you can probably imagine that he will not be a happy bunny.

Players like Ronaldo need the rest of the team, both his own and the opponents, to be of an appoximately same level of skill. Over the years he has changed teams as his skill level has increased. There are no reliable shortcuts and there are very few exceptions to this, regardless of if you are talking football, music or project teams. The one thing we know for sure is that top teams spur each other on to enable them all within the team to be constant winners. We also know that a good team can have a bad player just as much as we know a bad team doesn’t become good if they have one good player only.

This rounds up this second article on Project Team Composition, but there is quite a bit more to come so stay tuned. Thoughts and comments are welcome.

Arena

The concept of team work, and project teams, is an interesting one, particularly as there can be more combinations of teams than there are people. As this will be a series of posts on the topic I shall start this one with laying the foundation for some of the reasoning later.

I ended my old article, Excellence – Teamwork or flying Solo, with the following statement:

Point being, if you have a well-oiled team, who knows each other and each others skills, and who trust each other, the chance of innovation, of improvising and experimenting on the fly when things you predicted didn’t really materialise, this can take you to (greater) places no plan could have foreseen.

Worst case scenario will be that you did everything in your power with the best talent you could find, which should be a whole lot better than quite a few alternatives.

Now, let us have a look at Project Team composition, how and why it can be so completely “right” one time, but also how and why it can go so completely wrong at other times. When a project team goes not-so-well as well it normally leaves chaos, disaster and/or general unhappiness behind. Please note that I am talking about Project teams here, not departments. I shall touch on the difference later, but for now, let’s have a look at what makes people in great teams to become great, and lets start looking at it from the perspective of a music band, just because I can.

Band Zen

Takayama by katclay

Most music bands that you know of are the result of constant individual searching from each of the bands members. It is very rare indeed that a super group “just forms” at the first attempt, and most bands, even the great ones (Beatles, Rolling Stones, U2 etc), go through several different line ups before it all “clicks”. When it “clicks” it is usually based on three things: the members are skill-wise complementary (it is rare you find bands with 5 bass players only). They are also at approximately the same skill level within each of their instruments. That skill level can actually be low, the important thing is it is approxiamately at the same level as the others. Further to that, they want to go in the same musical direction. Finally, they often find themselves as baffled by their band members skills and ingenuity as the other band members are of your skills. Mutual admiration and respect for the others in the band. Magic happens, and they all do more amazing things than they could have dreamt of being capable of. World conquering thoughts. Happiness. Let’s call that state Band Zen.

“Squeeling Pigs” and “Septic Tank”

Chixbone (3) by matt.searles

However, before they got to Band Zen they made parents ears bleed by honing their skills in their garages/bedrooms, finding like minded people, making feeble attempts at forming bands (with crap names), realising the kid on bass actually is more interested in football and that the so-called drummer has two left feet and couldn’t keep a beat if his life depended on it. Words doesn’t even begin to describe the singer, but that is ok, no one thinks he understands words in any case. They move on, either individually, or as pairs/clusters finding/firing band members and they get a decent one, skill-wise, who unfortunately is acting as a complete dictator prick who just can’t listen, mainly to draw attention away from the fact he is dead scared of performing in front of people. Again, they move on, perhaps as a larger group, or perhaps still as individuals.

Forming a (good) band is really hard work. It is definitely time consuming. Most musicians never find Band Zen, even if their skills border on virtuosos, and I haven’t even started involving “luck of the draw” when it comes to record companies, A&R people etc who weed out those who might have achieved Band Zen but have yet to work on finessing their song-writing skills, from the competition, which is fierce, etc.

Widening the scope

Scope?

If you swap out bands for Project Teams and music skills with work skills, most/all of the above need to happen in any team, at least to a degree. As always there are exceptions to that, much like in music, where two people who really don’t like each other actually can create outstanding work together, but that only highlights that they in fact must have respect for each other based on the others work skills and that in itself might be more important than being able to chit-chat about colours on mugs or what your kids did last weekend, if there is work success, which leads to happy feelings.

There are also examples of teams (and bands for that matter) that, on paper, were looking rather mediocre as a team, but that all of sudden just had “that idea“, and were able to execute it brilliantly and award-winning-ly, possibly because no one told them they couldn’t, and they just went with the flow of things, because they liked what they were doing, and they liked the people they were doing it with.

That is it for now, it should have set up the topic alright though so I can expand on some reasoning from this post in a few follow-up posts. If you have any comments so far, go for it, comment field is where it normally is.

Time to save the world

This is the second part of my instructional blog post about…errr…blog posts. You can find the first one over here: How to write a blog post, and just to re-cap: this is mainly for the guys (friends and colleagues) that I have recently installed Wordpress blogs for, and who maybe not are entirely used to writing for an online audience. If this is not you, and you don’t have a blog, you will probably not find this overly interesting.

So, with that out of the way, what can this blog do? Quite a few things actually, however, for any post you add you only need to keep track of a few things:

1. Paragraphs
2. Headlines
3. Images
4. Where the “Read More” link goes

If we start from the top:

1. Paragraphs

Paragraphs

These should be the main bulk of your content. Even if you only post a YouTube video, add a few paragraphs on the reasons why you find it blog-worthy or interesting. It doesn’t have to be a full on bible you need to write, but something is a lot better than nothing.

For text based posts I would recommend you just sit down and type stuff in paragraphs and “go with the flow” of typing. Don’t concentrate on anything else just yet apart from getting the meat of the post in place, which should be paragraphs.

When you think you are done, either for the day or completely with that post, spend some time reading it. Over and over again. Save it as a draft and read it again tomorrow. Use the “Preview” button at your top right. Ask yourself:

• Does it read well?
• Are you mentioning something that you can link to? If you talk about Google Maps, or about a specific article on Mashable, make sure you are also linking to it.
• Are you mentioning something that require prior knowledge? Provide a link to Wikipedia or wherever the reader can read in more depth about your topic.
• Are the paragraphs broken apart from each other to allow the readers eyes some breathing space? Can the readers eyes latch on to natural breaks or breakers in the text? Or is it one huge mass of text?

When you link ensure you are selecting enough text to provide context for users who use link extractors (this is about Accessibility and best practices). Don’t use “Click Here”, as people with link extractors will not know the difference between 15 “Click Here” links. Also, when creating links, make sure you don’t select “open in new window” etc. No bloggers do, and it breaks “best practice”. If your blog post is good enough they will find their way back. If the users are web savvy in the slightest they know to hold CTRL whilst clicking the link which opens it up in a new tab in their browser.

Also use the “B“(old) and the “I“(talics) buttons where appropriate to emphasize context.

1.1 External Text Tools

Don’t use MS Word for blog texts

I would strongly recommend that you do NOT use Word as your editor for posts. The reason for that is that when you select all your text in Word and then copy/paste it into the blog, Word adds a million lines of crap code (slightly exaggerated for effect here…). Word is not good at HTML. Wordpress is. You are better off typing your text in Notepad (Win) or Textpad (Mac) than you are typing it in Word. Just don’t do it. Trust me on this.

2. Headlines

Headlines

When you think your paragraphs are flowing and are all linked up, have a think about where you can insert headlines. Headlines serve two purposes:

1. They make it easier for the readers to latch on to with their eyes, and makes the text much more “scannable”.
2. Headlines carry more weight for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.

Headlines is also where you can go a bit creative. Make the headlines fun. Make them enticing to ensure the reader reads more. Make them memorable.

To add a headline, just move a paragraph down a few steps in the editor and plonk in your text for your headline in the space in between two paragraphs. Then you select that text. Now, if you look in the editor toolbar you’ll see a droplist that has the text “Paragraph” written into it. You rarely will need to use “Paragraph” as such, as the system does them automatically, but you do need to look a little further down in that list, until you find “Heading 2″. Not 1. Not 3. Heading 2 is what you want. This isn’t complicated, so moving on to:

3. Images

Mirror Mirror by Mubina H

This theme is based on having one large image as the start of the post, and then it also handles smaller content based images well. The large “post hero image” should preferably come from Flickr. There are many reasons for that, but “Most Linked” is one, “using social networks to their fullest” is another, “lowering server load” is a third. The fact that Flickr has a couple of standard sizes is probably one of the best ones though, as we then know the width of the image quite certainly.

To add images to your Flickr account you would need to acquire the login details, or set up a new account. You then upload your images/screenshots to Flickr. So far so good. Back in this blog, in the editor toolbar, you will find an image at the far right (in the toolbar) with Flickr’s blue/pink circles on top of an image. Click that button.

Now, you can either use the images from your own account, in which case you just add that user to the overlay window that will have popped up. You will then be able to browse all images from that Flickr user (so yes, it can be any Flickr user, more on that below though).

Plastic @ Victoria Baths by contactmcr

An added benefit with that Flickr button is that you can add others images that you actually are allowed to use as well. If you in the search box put in your search term, for example “carrot”, it will list all images that you can use royalty free, hopefully with carrots in them. When I say “royalty free” that usually means “with attribution to the photographer, including link to original image”, as per the rules of Flickr and the Creative Commons Licence.

Regardless of where on Flickr you get your image from in the button above, for the hero image, you want the “medium” size. Nothing else. The reason for that is that a medium image is 500 pixels wide at the most, which is nice for this theme. If you pick a larger size it will break the layout of the page, as all text will also try to fit that larger size. If you pick anything smaller it will look wonky. It should be noted that visually, horizontal images make for the best Hero images, as portraits will be 500 pixels high, not wide.You do NOT have to select anything in the droplist that says “alignnone” as far as the Hero image is concerned. Basically that means it will be centered. The other options in that list is “left” and “right” and you want them for the images described below.

As for captions, it defaults into having the checkbox for “automatic captions” checked. That means you either settle for what is suggested, which should be the title of the image and a link to the photographers Flickr account (as per the Creative Commons Licence). If you think that text isn’t suitable, or if you’d like to write something yourself as a caption, make sure you uncheck that box and instead use the field for custom captions below.

Hiko Sejuro by Daniel Y. Go

In the field for “custom caption” (after having unchecked the box above) you basically type in the text you would like to sit under the image. Keep it short, you don’t want to create line breaks in there (I have, on purpose, illustrated with images in this post what that looks like), and if you want to write longer texts you should do so as a text paragraph, not a photo/image caption. The image will still link to the original image on Flickr.

For images that support your text I would recommend you do as above, but instead of “medium” select “small” (with a maximum width of 240 pixels). On the Small images you do want to ensure it doesn’t have “alignnone” in the droplist for alignment. Instead you really do want “left” or “right” as that will make the image go to the side you’ve selected, with the correct padding between the text and the image as well. As for captions, which we should have on any and all images, the same as above is still true to read that paragraph again if unsure.

3.1 Image placement

So for the smaller images I normally put down the cursor to the left of the first paragraph after a headline and click the Flickr button. After having selected my image as per above I then go to “Preview” to ensure it all looks good.

Not Rocket Science

If you did that the image will be on exact level with the paragraph, and that sounds good, but at times it can look strange (depending on context, text layout etc). If it looks weird, just undo what you did and pick another location for the image. This isn’t rocket science by any means, nor is there any “right or wrong”. It is what you find look best that is the correct way of doing it.

4. Where the “Read More” link goes

Blogg Bliss

Now, if you’ve done all of the above you are almost done. It is time to think about the fine details of things. One of those is to figure out where the “Read More” link will be placed, and this affects the readability of the home page. I would say you place it after the first 1-2 paragraphs (if they have 2-5 lines of text) below the Hero image, as that gives just enough information to make things interesting, whilst being able to see more than one post on most screens at any time on the homepage, to encourage further exploration.

The End

Yes, well, that is about it. Again, I have to stress that all of the above applies to this specific theme, which also is the theme applied to the blogs I have created of late. In reality it is a “child theme” to the awesome Thematic Theme Framework and based on the Thematic Power Blog Theme, which is extremely powerful right out of the box. Both are made by Ian Stewart, who is doing a great job.

I have then modified it (mainly CSS) and enabled a set of plug-ins that they all use. I have also hacked a few plugins, most notably the awesome Flickpress and added some JavaScript and some CSS to add a few options mentioned above. In following the GNU licence, under which both Thematic Power Blog as well as Flickpress are licenced I shall make those modifications available for download on this site in the near future.

As for the images, I have been a bit “free” in my thinking regarding attribution. This is mainly due to giving artistic freedom to the authors, combined with the fact some people give their images VERY long titles indeed. I have reasoned as such that if I still follow the Flickr guidelines, and ensure any externally used image still links back to the Flickr original image, we are probably fine, as that also attribution, even though it perhaps isn’t written out. It is most definitely clear if you click the image (or hover it for that matter).

Questions? Comments? Use the comment field below.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

I have recently been setting up several different self-hosted Wordpress blogs, covering many different topic matters. All those blogs are being maintained and content edited by people who are not me, and I have noticed that several of those the content editors do not have much experience in writing for online audiences. That is ok. No one has experience until they’ve done it.

However, there are a couple of quick wins one can do for the articles per se, to make them easier to read and more entertaining for the reader, and I shall, completely non-scientifically, go through a few things I appreciate with other blogs out there. This also means this will turn into a blog post about blog posts, a thing I said a few years ago I would never do (because there are enough of them out there already), but I shall make this one exception to that rule in an attempt to be kind to colleagues and friends.

The basics

Wordpress

Firstly, we are using Wordpress, The Premium Blog Tool On Planet Earth. Get over it. Get used to it. I don’t care if your cousin swears by blogger.com nor do I care if your old colleagues neighbours middle son is claiming he can build you a system for a pack of cigarettes. A large percentage of the leading blogs out there run Wordpress. Now your blog is as well. Great eh?

And, for sake of clarification, seeing as my work require both .NET(C#), PHP and other technologies: even if you were to write about Microsoft Sharepoint only, your blog does not need to run on Microsoft Sharepoint. In fact, I would challenge you to point me to any single .NET blog engine that is as comprehensive and competent as Wordpress. Your blog and its underlying technology should quite possibly not be the topic of your blog articles in any case. Don’t confuse those two separate things, use the right tool for the right problem. Moving on…

WPtouch

One of the main benefits with a Wordpress blog that you run on your own server is the vast amount of plug-ins you can install (7144 at the time of writing this). There are literally millions of really clever people out there with far too much time on their hands. There are a few not-so-clever-ones as well, but let’s focus on the good ones here. Quite a bunch of those are trying to still their create-wordpress-plugins-fetish. Guess what? You are the winner. Most of them give away their hard labor for free, to you.

Enjoy, but most importantly, don’t let their hard work be for nothing. Try stuff out. Use the plugins I have installed, they are not only really good, they are also very helpful for you and your creative writing vein. You can also install various apps and extensions on your Firefox browser and in your iPhones to enable you to type and write more effectively.

How to write

Target well

The most important thing: Remember who you are writing for. Who is your target audience? What tone are they expecting from you? If you don’t know your intended audience, how would you like them to get to know you? After you have decided on that, stick to it, at every point within your blog and your articles where you interface with your audience, which should be pretty much everywhere unless you are doing this as an ego trip only.

Blogs are personal, even if there are several contributors on the blog. If you start sounding like a machine people will not talk back, at least not nicely. If you sound like a massive corporation the only ones who will talk to you are probably going to say things you don’t want to hear. Be nice. Be personal. Be relative. Be conversational. That is, after all, what you are trying to achieve with a blog. If you want to burp out marketing messages there are other, better, ways to communicate.

You are trying to make people comment and to enable them to create a dialogue with you. Hopefully that dialogue is interesting to others, who also will become regular readers and in time will contribute with comments, you will perhaps even get to know new people, possibly even gain new friends.

Final Verdict Not Needed

Not needed?

If you read up on the “pro” bloggers out there you will notice that their success rarely is accidental. They plan their blog posts, often quite carefully, and you can often figure out their post patterns by viewing their older posts. It goes something like this:

1. Some posts have news value. Time is of the essence, as you want to be perceived as one of the first ones to blog about your particular topic. That means that you will end up quite high on the search ranking when the rest of the world start to figure out what you figured out a full 3 days ago. These posts you should type as quickly as you hear someone sneeze it. It is more important to be quick than right with these ones, though if you get it wrong enough times people might actually think you are not all that clever after all, so moderation could be a good lead word here, and some fact finding would be recommended. Another common practice is to play it somewhat safe and let a known expert do all the hard thinking and to only contribute with a “me too” post, though again, people will in time see through this, and the benefit of awesome “googlability” gets somewhat diluted.
2. Other posts have longevity. They are not news, usually because they will always be true. This very post fits into this category. This also includes comments on various topics, or insights, which may or may not be triggered by something news worthy (cunning trick to sort of fit into point 1 above as well). Regardless, it is the insight that is of importance, and the “Pro’s” often create series of these articles to make you come back for the entire series. This type of posts you can type in “Draft mode” for forever. Type a little bit every day. Stock them up, and publish them when you are feeling a bit off on your news finding skills.
   1. Even better with this type of articles is that you have a reason to expand on it at a later date, and link back to your original post when the insight, or key elements of it, have changed. People will read both your articles to ensure they have understood your initial point and how it now has changed.
3. There are lots of lists out there. “My Top 10 iPhone apps” has a lot of keywords in it that loads of people will click on. “The 5 best ways to use Twitter” is another given crowd magnet. The good thing with lists is that they will not be relevant in 6 months time, which means you can repeat the topic in regular intervals.
4. Some people, depending on the topic of their blog, mix it up with something rather personal. Others avoid the actual mixing up of things, often because they have a separate blog for that very purpose. I leave it for you to decide, but I have noted it more common than I thought it would be when I looked around. Perhaps I saw more of it because I looked for it, much like I now have a pregnant wife and therefore mainly think every woman out there also is pregnant, as that is what I see.
5. You do not have to reach a conclusion. The idea with a blog is that it starts a conversation with the reader. Feel free to post articles where you haven’t actually come to a revelation or a revolutionary insight, you can always go back and edit the original post, reply to comments on your post or to re-post your new insights in two weeks time. This is often a massive barrier to people (included yours truly), where they/we think we have to present a final exam result.It is not needed, and people love to shine with their brilliance in the comments, telling you how it really is. If you think this is wrong please say so in the comments below.
6. Despite point 5, it is good if you have something to say.

I could go on, but in the true spirit of presenting sooner and looser rather than full-on insight I realise this will have to be a two-part post after all. If you have any comments so far, type away below.

Major trend information finding complexity.

Some time ago I wrote the text below to a friend regarding tools (Firefox Extensions) for research and writing. I figured it would make a decent blog post as well, so here it is.

It goes something like this:

Firstly, it is all mainly Firefox related.

1. YubNub: Replace the default Google search for your address bar that does not look as URL’s, to instead use Yubnub. Instructions can be found over at (one of my fave sites) LifeHacker.

yubnub by αnnα

To fully use Yubnub you need to have a look at yubnub.org but in short, it is a “command line interface” for various online services. Have a look at their “most used commands“. If you, after implementing it in your browser, type in (in browser address bar, without quotes): “gim football” the browser will open up Google Images on the search result page for the search term “football”. Now, that was a quick illustration only, yubnub has thousands of commands that, when learnt, dramatically speed up searches for various things. “youtube pantera” searches YouTube for your term, “wiki management by objectives” open up the relevant search result page on Wikipedia etc.

The beauty of Yubnub is that if you don’t give a command it defaults into Google, just like your browser did before you made the change above.

You can even combine a few commands, so “gimflint dolphins” will open up BOTH Google images AND Flickr (sorted by “interesting”) on the topic “dolphins” in your browser, side by side. This also leads me on to the next thing on my list which is:

Scrolling

2. Install the Autopager extension: (download Autopager)
It does one thing, but it does it well: it preloads “paged” pages automagically when you scroll. No more clicking “2”, or “3” or “next”, just keep scrolling.
Works awesomely well with search results, twitter etc.

3. One of the reasons I will have a hard time switching from Firefox to something else is Ubiquity which is made out of pure awesome.

Ubiquity

A little bit like Yubnub, Ubiquity is a powerhouse of a collection of tools. No matter where I am (online) or what I do, I can always go CTRL+SPACE which opens up a Ubiquity overlay window. Searches, word definitions, Wikipedia, Twitter, Google Maps (you can even select many addresses and have them plotted out on Google Maps). You don’t even have to remember all the commands (and there are loads, and you can make your own) as it fills things in as suggestions as you type.

Juice

4. A wonderful tool for research is Juice.
Select something on any website and drag it out on your right in your browser window, and Juice starts, which allows you to search Wikipedia/Google etc at the same time as you are still reading the originating page.

5. Another great tool for research is Zotero. In fact, as far as research tools go, Zotero is probably the only one on the list that is a properly dedicated research tool.

Zotero

It basically sits in your tray and when you click it, it opens up a window at the bottom of your screen, allowing you to save bookmarks, assets, notes, links etc, all of which are of relevance for your entry, and relevant for the page you are viewing.

This is a great tool for saving snippets and quotes, and to be able to link back to the source (because that is how it should be done). It allows advanced grouping and tagging, so you can have a moment of inspiration, and still find it again quickly.
POWERTIP 1: If you store your Zotero database in a Dropbox folder it will synchronize between all your machines as well. Take notes in one place, access them everywhere.
POWERTIP 2: The Dropbox trick obviously works for other note taking software as well, and I use a desktop Wiki that does the same, mainly to be able to take notes outside of the browser. Notepad on steroids, and shared between all my machines in a secure way. In short, get Dropbox, regardless. It has versioning, you can access it via a browser, even un-delete files, and you can collaborate with files between different people.

Zemanta

6. A tool that can help you in finding relevant content when typing blog posts or using Gmail is Zemanta.

It “reads” your text as you type it when you are in Wordpress and Gmail, and it suggests possible relevant articles/photos elsewhere. It does a whole host of other things as well. Some hate it, as it can slow down loading of said services in your browser. I like it, as I normally am on a fast machine on a fast network.

7. If you are looking at a blog and wonder who it belongs to, or where else the author has online activity, Identify, is great. Just type ALT+I on any page and you are quite likely to get more information about the person. It basically reads the h-card information of the site and tries to be clever about combining information from various sources into a package that gives you more than any of the separate sites. Sometimes it gets it wrong. Often it gets it right.

8. For finding things online quickly that you visit somewhat regularly, install the official Delicious extension.

delicious by Kai Hendry

Apart from doing the obvious thing (adding bookmarks and integrating them into your browser, and searching them quickly when you press CTRL+B) a not-so-known function is that you can right click any bookmark within the Firefox sidebar where you have your bookmarks, and choose properties. In there you’ll find a “keyword” field. For my Flickr bookmark to my profile I have put “fl” as a keyword. I have then amended the URL to instead of http://flickr.com/photos/hellquist it now says flickr.com/photos/%s . It is the “%s” at the end that is of interest here.

I can then type, in address bar(sans quotes): “fl hellquist” or “fl rebba” (’cause she’s awesome) and the “fl” bit will know it should use my bookmark keyword BEFORE it uses Yubnub (or other search engine) from point 1 above, and it replaces “%s” with whatever I put in there as the variable. “all programming” will take me to programming.alltop.com/ and “all bacon” to bacon.alltop.com/ (make a bookmark there btw).

This trick can be used on any and all websites that use a variable to differentiate the content presented to you. Another beautiful thing with the short hand code described above is that it is being stored centrally by Delicious, so you only have to set it up once, on one of your computers, and it will work on all of your computers that use your Delicious bookmarks!

9. If you think all these extensions etc are too much for you, just use Gmail. You can install all kinds of things to enhance your Gmail experience as well (like GTDInbox, which is great), but even out of the box it is actually a very competent place to store notes, to-do lists, bookmarks, articles etc. If you add “tags” (just add them as text, in an email to yourself) you can easily search for them with the built-in (doh) search in Gmail. Google will own all your data though.

10. The rest is more about using the correct web sites. Flickr, Twitter and Delicious are great for finding ground breaking news. Linkedin is obviously good when interviewing people etc. Google is your friend. Use it. Very often I answer questions by typing them into Google as they are being said, and look at the top responses. If I want to find lots of articles on a specific topic, Alltop.com is my friend (and it works great with the delicious trick in no 8 above). I also sign up on various email lists on topics that I am interested in. I rarely have time to read all the emails on them, so I sort them into folders and mark them as read. The point? I use Gmail. I am collecting information in a bag that I can always reach (yes, I have the offline capability “on” for Gmail), and it is a great first/last thing to resort to.

Nothing vastly groundbreaking above, but I have setup all my machines as per above (plus another bunch of extensions that didn’t fit this topic today) and when you get used to it all you don’t really want it any other way, and you find other browsers flawed for not letting you do what you are used to.

The trick is mainly to FULLY use the things that I have installed.

Do you use any other tools that I have missed or forgotten to mention? Tell me about it in the comments.

Firefox Usage Worldwide in Sep 2009 by ottodv

No modern computer should be without Firefox, it is even being installed by default on our machines at work by our IT team, and hey, it is free for anyone and everyone to download, so if you haven’t already, you should. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

There are a few things you can install to improve Firefox a bit though, and no one within a web design/development agency or similar work place, should be without the following three tools, if nothing else because it will make your life a LOT easier if your end product is web based in the slightest.

1. Web Developer Toolbar: (download here)

Firefox Web Developer Add-on by John Griffiths

Don’t let the name fool you, anyone working with anything web related should have this installed in their Firefox (which possibly should be your main browser for checking web sites). It allows you to check alt attributes for images, it links off to different validators, it allows you to disable CSS, images, it can show you the colour palette of the web site you are looking at etc. In short, if you explore it a bit it will make you sound really knowledgeable on these topics, mainly because you will be.

You can read more about what it can do over at Six Revisions and also over at WebDesign10.

2. Quick Java (and JavaScript): (download here)

Javascript etc

Even though you can switch off JavaScript with Web Developer Toolbar, this makes it even quicker, by placing icons in your status bar.

The benefit with this is that if Flash has been implemented correctly this also turns off Flash on the website, and we very often make Flash web sites/components where you have to check/verify the non-flash version of it. This extension makes this a 2-second job (click it, refresh page).

3. Clear Cache Button: (download here)

No cache image to be found

…and yes, very often the first question a developer will ask you is “have you cleared your cache? Are you sure? Really?” when you approach them with a “…but it isn’t working!?! I can’t see anything new!“.

If you have this installed you can turn this as well into a 2 second job (like above, click it, refresh page), without having to do a massive menu-search-and-find exercise.

firebug by zulsdesignblog

If you are keen on REALLY finding out how web sites work, also check out Firebug.
It will show you download speeds of particular files, allow you to inspect any element of a page etc and is a power house of nifty functions. It even comes with plugins of its own. You can read more about that over at Tech Hail.

Ok. That was actually four add-ons, but that is ok, they are all good.

Have you installed them all?
Good. We just turned up the web savviness a notch.

You can thank me later.

IMG_9340 by nakú

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an event initiated by Suw Charman-Anderson, and at the point of writing this, AdaLovelaceDay have 1776 bloggers who have signed up to blog, today, about women excelling in technology in whatever form we choose.

As this is a general topic that crop up on most conferences (where are the girls?) combined with the fact I have worked with so many great and awesome female developers, I figured I should contribute as well, by highlighting that there indeed are many great girls out there who rarely get into the limelight or steal the honour from the boys. In fact, I even struggle to think of any of the tech girls I have worked with who also bang their own drum, or who have a technology/development related web site of their own, or even blog about technology!

Other priorities

I write code so you don’t have to. by ndebras

As with many others out there, some of the best people in general, and apparently also with most girls I have worked with, they don’t have the time or energy to put into a personal web site for their own glory, as they are being busy churning out awesome work for clients instead.

Now, leaving this a tad late (surprise surprise) I decided that instead of talking about all of the girls I have worked with as a group, and to avoid mentioning too many names (as that inevitably will mean I will forget one or more of them) I figured I should concentrate on telling you about one of them. Eva.

Dreadlocks

one week by Meli_Mae

I first met Eva when I was in Hamburg working 10-11 years ago and as soon as you walked into the room you would have noticed her, which in Hamburg during the DotComBoom was quite a feat: the first guy I met was tall, had a mohikan and tonnes of piercings, tattoos and chains going from all possible and impossible parts of his anatomy, and he was blending in fine with rest of the office. Eva on the other hand had crisp white long dreadlocks, dressed in strong colours, had an awesome full shoulder tattoo, and she looked awesome. I didn’t actually work with her until after a week or so, but just being in the same room I noticed she was a quite feisty little bugger, and she was, at the time, doing ActionScript though (I later learnt) not feeling extremely comfortable with it.
Most notable quote from this period would have been various explicit things between gritted teeth in both German and English, so I shall spare you from it.

Now, there are a few things that can’t really be told about people, you just have to meet them and figure it out, but two things came across even during these initial first weeks of being around Eva: she is really cool, as in relaxed life loving cool, and secondly that everyone she has ever met, love her.

Land of Steel and Smoke

Steel and Smoke

Later that year I got a job for the same company that I had worked for in Hamburg, but this time in London. Eva was still in Hamburg and had moved on to other development, mainly PHP, and was giving the London office support on development issues as we were setting up a team both with staff (and desks) as well as hardware, and after having been in London (I still am) a few months we needed more people on this project we were working on (Wallpaper Magazine) and Eva was sent over to help us out.

When she arrived she still had her dreadlocks but by now they were carrot orange. The rest was the same though, in particular her smile and view on life. We spent months working almost around the clock together, we even shared a flat for 6 months, and she was (almost) always great fun, and I picked up a lot from her development wise myself (at the time I was a Sr Interactive Developer who dabbled in “back-end stuff”). Most importantly, we turned into the best of friends, based on mutual respect.
Notable Eva quotes from this period was “everything is simple when you know how to do it” and “it was working alright in most things, now I have “improved it”, which made it stop working in pretty much everything“.

Next!

Halogen Bulbs by rutlo

The project ended and several of us weren’t happy with the company in general, so we bailed ship and went to another company. Eva stayed behind for a few months, but as an opening came up at the new place I was at (still in London) she came over there as well, this time to mainly do ASP (VB) development. This company was less than good at selling us, so there was only one notable client (AIG) but they were steaming ahead quite strongly, and contractors were brought in. One of them was…umm…special, and Eva didn’t really like the way he was bossing her around (as they were on the same skill level and he wasn’t her boss), and one day she snapped back at him: “you are not my brother, you are not my lover, you cannot speak to me like that” which caused applause and which is also her notable quote for this period in time. He never spoke to her like that again. Dreadlock status was now black/purple.

Another one, please.

As they didn’t sell us that well I moved on to another company, and we were small to start with, but were expanding quite a bit, so it didn’t turn into a massive surprise that an temporary (PHP/ASP) opening came and I suggested Eva to come in to fill it and we jokingly said “buy 1 get 1 free!!” as this was now the fourth time we worked together.

Eva

I could go on, but shall instead fast forward a bit. Eva helped starting up a small company with another of my old colleagues. Though that business is not blooming today they did alright for a few years. Dreadlocks came off. She got married (in Vienna) and is today the mother of two wonderful little daughters (the latest so brand new I haven’t even met her, she is still wrinkly), living in France and working from home. Most importantly, she is still one of my best friends even though it now gets to be way too far between the times we meet up, and she has taught me loads about life in general and development in particular.

The last 8 years we have been saying we were twins separated at birth (though she got the looks AND the brains and you would laugh if you saw us next to each other as she is about 4 apples high) as we have always been thinking in the same patterns (which is a scary thought for most who know me). Even my mum and my wife bought into the slightly unconventional imported twin concept, mainly because what I learnt during that first week in Hamburg is still true to this day: everyone who meets Eva love her. And she still says the most wonderfully quotable things.

W3C no valida CSS by arrayexception

Blimey, found this in my list of drafts, guess I didn’t finish it because I started it between dishes during Xmas Day and family weren’t too impressed with me typing away on computer.

Anyways, just wanted to highlight that the guys behind the W3C validator (still) need support. Without the HTML validator (and the CSS validator etc) the landscape of what today is “semantic HTML” would have been infinitely different, and regardless of your thoughts on W3C being fast/slow moving or if you like/dislike how they decide things, the validator(s) have been there all along, for you, me and us all to use. They have created assurance where there wasn’t any, they have been a support when you needed them and they have been nagging you and forcing you to up your game when it comes to your code. If you work with front-end code in the slightest they have played a major part in how your work has been shaped.

Now, however, they do need your help. Running, hosting and updating the validators isn’t free. How this can be done has already been said perfectly by Molly so I shall quote her instead:

dsc_5760 by mathiashellquist

We’ve set up a donation system to allow for a number of different donations concepts: Donor, Sponsored, Community Fundraising, and in the spirit of open source and standards, plenty of opportunity to give of your time and knowledge to assist with the work.
It works like this:
* Donor: A donor is anyone interested in donating money to the cause. A micropayment of 1.00 USD if the validator “saves your day” can be very helpful!
* Sponsor: A sponsor is a company or organization that donates to the W3C
* Community Fundraising: There are two badges available at the W3C that link to the fundraising page. If you support the validator, encourage others by placing a badge on your site and blogging about the topic
* Time Not Money: If you cannot or do not wish to donate money, your time is as or even more valuable. There are opportunities to help the W3C maintain and grow validation services. – www.molly.com/2008/12/11/w3c-validators-in-jeopardy/

There you have it. You might notice I have my little badge in the footer, not to say that this site validates (as that would be a lie, but hey, you are here, you are reading the site, and I am aware of that it doesn’t validate) but instead to make it easier for you to donate what you can for a worthy cause, or for you to get a badge of your own.