notes Today I saw my old nod pal for the first time in two years. He was distributing Christian flyers next to the statue of Donald Dewar on Buchanan Street, said hello, and took the opportunity to ask me if I believed in God. I hemmed and hawed, muttering something about being an agnostic — embarrassed by my lack of interest in spiritual matters. In return, he gave me this terrible clip art flyer depicting a pretty accurate version of my life (apart from the football):
I made my excuses to my nod pal and went to see the decadent sex comedy, Horrible Bosses. It was horrible and reminded me that I make a lot more mistakes than forgetting the big G.
31 Jul 2011
blog It always annoyed me that you couldn’t get statistics on the number of podcast downloads in iTunes, especially if, like me, you host your mp3s on Dropbox. With the start of the second season of The Spirit of the Staircase just underway, I finally came up with a solution that scractched this itch.
This post assumes that you have a self-installed WordPress blog and know how to install and navigate to plugins. If you don’t, check out the Codex.
It uses a WordPress plugin called Redirection, which allows you to create quick 301 redirects like so:
For The Spirit of the Staircase I created a fake download mp3 link which redirected to my real mp3 link. You can use this fake link and the podcast will download as normal, but with the advantage of getting statistics.
It seems obvious in retrospect, but hopefully this might help out one or two people who have the same problem. Whether it is healthy to be overly concerned with stats is another matter.
17 Jul 2011
quotes Robert Hoekman Jr gained notoriety recently for his vituperative post about Whitney Hess. Whatever you think about that post, he followed it up with an excellent post encouraging the UX design community to “>Question Everything. Here are some choice cuts:
Apple didn’t make the page simple. They made it clear. Despite all the hype that we must make things dead simple, and dumb them down, simplicity is not the goal, clarity is.
[T]he best teams — the teams earning the most provable success most consistently — were teams that had no process. They had a bunch of tools, tricks, and techniques. They had generalists, and maybe a specialist or two. And on any given project, they hand-picked the tools they would use to solve the problem and they improvised.
For the good of your profession, your work, your clients, and most of all, your users:
1. Ask why. Ask for an explanation. A justification. Ask this over and over and over until there are no answers left to uncover.
2. Ask for evidence.
3. Ask if there’s a better way.
Question Everything by Robert Hoekman, Jr
11 Jul 2011
