Websites

I am neurotic

In Websites on 13 August 2010 with no comments

I am neur­otic, a col­lec­tion of neur­oses gathered into blog and book form.

(What is the appro­pri­ate col­lect­ive noun? “A para­noia of neuroses”?)

For what it’s worth, I am not neur­otic. And if I was, it def­in­itely wouldn’t be related to dairy products.

Current obsessions — Spotify Playlist

In Websites on 9 December 2009 with Comments Off

In lieu of going to bed, I give you the Spo­tify playl­ist I’ve been obsess­ively play­ing over and over for the past few weeks, to the det­ri­ment of Al’s men­tal health. It’s only eight tracks long (track­list­ing below) and it’s in no par­tic­u­lar order that would make musical or lyr­ical sense, but I sug­gest you play each track on repeat about ten times before listen­ing to the whole thing. Trust me, it’s the best way to listen to music and the people you live with will just love you for it.

Obvi­ously, because it’s a Spo­tify playl­ist, you’ll need Spo­tify to play it, and because it’s a Spo­tify playl­ist there’s a good chance it ran­domly won’t work because the sky is the wrong shade of grey or there are leaves on the inter­net or something.

Click here for playlist

Low – Just Like Christ­mas
David Gray – Please For­give Me — Radio Edit
The Hol­lo­ways – Gen­er­ator
Slow Mov­ing Mil­lie – Beasts
Taken By Trees – Sweet Child O’ Mine
The Big Pink – Dom­i­nos
Andrew Bird – Eugene
Kate Nash – Mariella

Mighty Morphin’ Power Links

In Design, NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Websites on 11 November 2009 with Comments Off

Because I have a couple of half-written lengthy draft entries that I don’t have the energy to fin­ish before I col­lapse into bed for the night, I’ll share some (admit­tedly work-based) links with you instead.

Typekit
Typekit can be sum­mar­ised as font replace­ment through javas­cript, which in turn can be sum­mar­ised as “magic hap­pens”. I’ve not played around with this as much as I’d hoped, but if you read this on the site (as opposed to the RSS feed), you’ll notice I’m using it for entry titles (and all other h3 ele­ments, too). Dis­turb­ingly easy to imple­ment, this is some­thing I’d genu­inely pay for if the choice of fonts improves.

Brizzly
Man­aging more than one Twit­ter account? Brizzly is the best solu­tion I’ve found, mak­ing it suit­ably dif­fi­cult to announce your per­sonal secrets to your work account. Now includes Face­book integ­ra­tion and has seem­ingly man­aged to get over a bizarre bug where it finds search res­ults over and over and over again, announ­cing them as new every time. This wouldn’t be so annoy­ing had I not pos­ted the tweets that triggered the search find­ing in the first place… (Still invite only, I think. Leave a com­ment or send a mes­sage to @whoopdedoo on Twit­ter if you want one).

Mobile web­site devel­op­ment
Without giv­ing any­thing what­so­ever away about what I’m cur­rently look­ing into for work purposes:

• Smash­ing Magazine on Mobile Web Design Trends. Des­pite my own pre­ju­dices,  Smash­ing Magazine do actu­ally pro­duce con­sist­ently use­ful art­icles, all of which must include the word “trends”.
• Cameron Moll: Mobile Web Design Book.
• Jakob Niel­son: Mobile Web Usability

How to Under­stand Your Users with Per­so­nas
PONIES!

Cleaning windows

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Websites on 2 November 2009 with 2 comments

I’ll admit it: I really don’t mind Win­dows. In fact, I quite like it. I could hap­pily use Linux if it could run Pho­toshop with any pro­fi­ciency, and I’m sure I’d love a Mac if I could just find a rel­at­ive I could sell in order to buy one, but des­pite all of the hoo-hah, and once all user account warn­ings have been dis­abled within an inch of their lives, the Win­dows of 2009 is really not that bad. This is quite a use­ful thing, given that for the second time in two weeks I’m watch­ing Win­dows 7 install onto a machine at a speed that would make a snail quake in its boots. You know, if a snail could wear boots. Or install Win­dows 7.

The first install was planned, a full install on a brand new Vista laptop, and went smoothly apart from that small issue with the graph­ics driver and the web­cam only show­ing upside down images. You want to chat with someone who appears to be hanging from the ceil­ing? I’m your girl. The second install was not so planned, but ended up being an upgrade-ish from Vista to Win­dows 7 on my desktop’s shiny new hard drive, a hard drive that talks to my com­puter and works and everything. I say upgrade-ish, because you can’t upgrade from Vista Home We’re Awe­some Edi­tion to Win­dows 7 We’re Suit-wearing Pro­fes­sion­als Edi­tion, and so it makes up a story about how it’s doing a clean install. This is a blatant lie, incid­ent­ally, but a happy lie from Microsoft for once.

All of this is a long-winded way of say­ing, I love Nin­ite. The first thing I nor­mally do after a rein­stall is open Inter­net Explorer and use that to down­load Fire­fox. Once Fire­fox is sor­ted, I then start the three-day-long pro­cess of work­ing out what it is I actu­ally use, remem­ber­ing only when I go to use a pro­gram that I still need to down­load and install it. Nin­ite takes out the guess­work. Open IE, head to IE, tick boxes for almost everything I use on a daily basis — includ­ing Fire­fox, Thun­der­bird, Note­pad++, Spo­tify, Adobe Reader, AVG, VLC and Win­SCP — and I can down­load a cus­tom installer that gets it all done at once. This means that the only soft­ware I need to manu­ally install are the big­gies — Pho­toshop, Illus­trator, Light­room, and any drivers that need to be argued with (assum­ing that those drivers are avail­able before mid-November, that is. Just sayin’, Hewlett-Packard.) So kudos, Nin­ite — you have made the past two weeks infin­itely easier.

(Note: all credit for the pump­kin above must go to our next door neigh­bours. Sadly, I can­not take any credit for those artist­ic­ally swirly eyes or the way our stair­well sud­denly smells a lot like rot­ting veg. You don’t know how temp­ted I am to take the lid off and put the ham­ster inside, just hav­ing him knock on our door to get in again once he’s had his fill.)

Och, ye cannae come in the noo, hen

In Rants, Websites on 27 September 2009 with 3 comments

I’ll be hon­est: I secretly love the Daily Mail. Not in a ser­i­ous way, or even in the same — admit­tedly slightly evil — way that I love watch­ing people get park­ing tick­ets, but in the way that some­thing goes so far bey­ond the bound­ar­ies of bad that it begins to tran­scend real­ity and become breath­tak­ing awe­some, in the true ‘worthy-of-amazement’ way.

If you’re from the UK, you won’t need a primer in Daily Mail Hate, and the quite wor­ry­ing trend of people read­ing a Daily Mail head­line or story and using that as an allegedly fac­tual basis for some form of pre­ju­dice. In fair­ness, the DM also does a good line in cute animal pho­tos and in quirky stor­ies that BBC News will steal the next day, although they tend to be some­what less con­ten­tious. But they have now pub­lished a head­line that goes wildly, enter­tain­ingly, bey­ond even the DM’s usual stand­ards: “Eng­lish pas­sen­gers forced to show pass­ports when arriv­ing in Scot­land”.

In short, we Scot­tish people hate you Eng­lish people so much, even though you pay for everything for us and we steal all of your money and give it to stu­dents and ill people that we now make you show us your pass­ports at the air­port. We think you are such a major ter­ror risk that you might do an incen­di­ary Mor­ris dance or foot­ball hoo­ligan­ise us all to death that we have decided to to incon­veni­ence you slightly in order to make our point.

So let me do all of middle Eng­land a favour and trans­late the head­line into actual fact: some pas­sen­gers, regard­less of where they’re from, are being asked to show their pass­ports at some air­ports for secur­ity reas­ons. This, strangely, will prob­ably also include some Scot­tish people, return­ing home to Scot­land in order to deep fry a Mars Bar and toss a caber or two before nip­ping back down to Engli­and to steal your votes. And so hor­rific is the abuse of our Scot­tish powers that the Mail end the piece with the news that “Met­ro­pol­itan Police, which cov­ers Heath­row and City air­ports in Lon­don, also use the powers on domestic pas­sen­gers. A Met spokes­wo­man said: ‘From time to time we to stop people and look at their travel doc­u­ments. It’s not that unusual.’” This would con­sid­er­ably under­mine the entir­ity of the Mail’s argu­ment but, erm, you know, that prob­ably doesn’t count as kilt-screening because, erm, ooh, look what Sienna Miller’s wear­ing today! And is that a baby duck without a mother?

I admit it: I’m a bit­ter Scot who some­times gets annoyed when Dorothy Per­kins in Sus­sex won’t take my 100% genu­ine Scot­tish £20 notes without first treat­ing me like a money laun­derer who’s put on a dodgy accent. I’ve had whole argu­ments with my Eng­lish boy­friend when he won’t accept that the word “juice” cov­ers all forms of drink­able flu­ids apart from water and alco­hol. The words “answer” and “dan­cer” do not — and can not — rhyme. But regard­less of that, even we money-grabbing, bagpipe-playing, mean­ies, who have sent our entire pop­u­la­tion to work in the Cab­inet, really couldn’t care less about look­ing at your pass­port unless we have to, apart from to laugh at  your photo.

After all, our time is pre­cious: we have chips we could be eat­ing instead.

Image inspiration

In Design, Websites on 25 September 2009 with Comments Off

Like most people who have to be cre­at­ive for a liv­ing, I go through troughs and peaks of inspir­a­tion. And some­times the troughs are big­ger than the peaks, with my most recent trough last­ing, well, all summer.

One of the ways I store images and ideas that feed the idea machine, though, is on a big folder on my hard drive, not an ideal solu­tion since I’m not always sit­ting at my desk when I need to be inspired, so I was quite excited to find ImageS­park. Free (for now), ImageS­park allows you to upload and share the inspir­ing images found online and, import­antly, give some credit where it’s due. Fun even for those who don’t have to fil­ter everything they see in life into Pho­toshop, I just love to watch the some­what whim­sical trends and pat­terns that emerge in what I like. Today, poster design. Cur­rently, col­our. Always, birds.