I’ve been playing around with sketches and designs to give this website a full refresh for over 2 years. Apart from a lack of time, talent and design skills, not to mention an attention span a goldfish would envy, I’ve been thwarted by technology. First, a dreadful and very expensive hosting service, and second, the increasingly arcane, complicated and plain slow Movable Type. I solved the first by moving to meirhosting.net, a truly wonderful service, after a false start with another company I won’t mention, but which reveals the lack of a key feature only after you’ve paid up. Merci, les gars. After a bit of fiddling with Code Igniter, and an experiment with WordPress, I finally settled on Expression Engine to build the whole site, pages, blogs, photo galleries and all. It’s a great tool. I’m not sure if it would scale up to epic industrial proportions, but for this sort of site, provided you know a bit of HTML, it’s perfect.
Posted in category "General Rants" on Friday, December 05, 2008 at 09:54 PM
Trying out the brand new Yaika service today, freshly delivered from my friends in Estonia.
The sky outside my window...
Yaika is a "lifestreaming" application, a mashup of videostreams, audiostreams, blogs and much else, all wrapped up in a very fresh and attractive design.
For such an ambitious and complex service, it is quite remarkably stable and glitch free.
Give it a try - it's fun!
Posted in category "General" on Monday, June 09, 2008 at 02:17 PM
I frequently find myself writing about the mobile and web interface of Playyoo, and other services and products. But the fact is, Playyoo's mobile interface is a web site, styled for mobile phones, and Playyoo's "web site" can, at least in principle, be accessed using a mobile device powerful enough to support it.
The distinction, clearly, is not in the technology, but in the type of user activity we're trying to support in each case. The mobile interface is strongly tuned to deliver the right content quickly, and to bypass conventional search mechanisms. The "web" interface is designed to support a more engaged. more complex set of activities, and in many ways is the auxiliary interface in Playyoo (as opposed to, say, mobile Facebook or mobile Flickr, which, whilst useful, are essentially heavily watered down token efforts).
The term "mobile" can equally well describe the user's situation as well as the target device. But "web" is far less specific, and implicitly it means "the user is sitting in front of a computer with a large screen and a broadband connection". And more and more this is going to become a very shaky assumption.
So what's the opposite of "mobile" ?
Posted in category "Mobile" on Friday, May 23, 2008 at 08:44 AM
I've just read Joshua Porter's book, designing for the social web, in under 1 day. I wish I had had it to hand 1 year ago. Porter manages to pack a huge amount of insight and great advice into under 180 pages. His style is easy to read and concise.
I've discovered quite a few new tricks which could be, and should have been, incorporated in Playyoo. I'm also relieved to say that I discovered a few things we've done right, or at least not too wrong.
In the whole book, I only found one thing I disagree with. Discussing user feedback, he says:
Actually, there is a third choice. If you really don't want to succeed, you can disagree with the feedback.
This, I think, is a little extreme. It also conflicts with the idea that any product, including a web application, benefits from a strong vision. Obviously, disagreeing with all feedback would be plain stupid, but I can't quite accept that all feedback is relevant.
Anyway, this is a minor point. Designing for the social web is a great little book, and deserves to become a classic. Highly recommended.
I'm trying to get Movable Type 4 back under control, as a first step towards making some desperately needed bug fixes and updates to this site. I've gone back to using default templates (not an easy process in itself), so that I can start to use MT properly rather than fight with it.
At least, now, I hope that comments work again. Sorry.
Posted in category "General" on Friday, May 09, 2008 at 09:41 AM