Egypt

Camels parked liked cars.

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14 Apr 2012

Responsive SPT: A Case Study

The theory of responsive web design is that by using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries you can deliver people a great experience no matter what device they are using. This sounds convincing, but then a lot of theory does. It is only when you put theory into practice that you really understand of what’s going on. This post is a case study of how I made the SPT site responsive. In particular, it is about my experience of creating a responsive layout from a pre-existing design.

Why responsive?

The business case for going responsive is clear: 20% of our visitors are using a mobile device. We could have created a stripped down mobile site or built an app, but both options are much more expensive. The former means maintaining a separate codebase and the latter involves difficult choices about what devices to support and how much time to devote to maintenance.

Where to start?

Luke Wrobleski has argued that responsive designs should be built mobile first. By starting from the smallest canvas, you are forced to focus on the what message you want each page to get across. You design for users rather than the space. Mobile users are treated more respectfully: their time and bandwidth is precious. By starting with mobile, you put user experience at the core of your design.

Unlike most people who undertake responsive redesigns, I didn’t start with a blank canvas. Before I was hired, SPT had commissioned wireframes, mockups, and HTML from D8, a really great design consultancy in Glasgow. My role was odd one, consisting of guiding D8, writing the content for the site, and building the CMS. I was, however, happy to get the desktop site finished before beginning the responsive version, if only as a point of reference.

Comment it out and start again

Despite having pre-existing CSS to work with, my first action in making the site responsive was to comment out all the old CSS and create a LESS file. (If you want to get started with LESS, I recommend using Andy Clarke’s 320andup framework, which includes some really useful mixins). Don’t worry about breaking anything. Indeed, it is good to break things to understand that they do. For instance, D8 used the Meyer reset, I replaced this with Nicholas Gallagher’s normalize.css and some things broke but overall it reduced the amount of CSS I had to write.

My process from here was to get get the main page elements working – container, header, navigation, main section, sidebar, footer – using a semantic grid system to take care of the percentages for the columns. Everywhere D8 had used ‘width’, I replaced it with ‘max-width’, meaning that the site looked virtually identical to the desktop version in no time, especially once I started reintroducing styles that I had commented out, rewriting them for efficiency and sustainability.

Display:none

Using display:none is bad in theory, as it means you are reducing the experience of the mobile user. As a pragmatist, I am happy to use it on secondary content until I have got the main functionality of the site working. It is a question of resources and using display:none can really help in the early stages.

When it comes to main content you can’t use display:none. The things that broke most egregiously at 320 pixels were tables and tabs. For wide tables (e.g. Bus timetables), I used Chris Coyier’s excellent CSS for converting table cells to block elements. For tabs, I shrunk the text size and padding, ensuring that they were still clickable with even the fattest of fingers.

Polyfills

Jamie Boyd, the front end developer who wrote the HTML/CSS for Macdonald Hotel site, recommends presenting a static site to those using IE8 and below, but I ran into no problems using polyfills.

Debugging

I debugged the site completely at 320 pixels, then at 480, then at 600, then at 768, then finally at 1024. This mobile first process of debugging, checking at all the breakpoints and fixing as issues as appropriate was much quicker than I expected it to be.

Conclusion

Responsive web design is not the only solution to the problem of multiple devices in a world where technology is constantly changing, but it’s the best we have at the moment.

21 Mar 2012

Reflections on a Month without Facebook

Last month I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. The 700 million members would – for a month at least – be a mere 699,999,999 and I would experience life without the intravenous drip of status updates, messages, and events. Would I become a social pariah? Would I be less anxious and more productive? Would anyone even notice?

Over the past few years, Facebook has gone from being just another social network to being so ubiquitous that it has become a verb, like ‘to text’ or ‘to email’. Some are betting that ‘to Facebook’ will replace both. The reasons for its success are manifold: it is simple, usable, fast, and, crucially, made permission-based photo sharing easy to set up. Unlike MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, and Bebo, this allowed Facebook broke the age barrier. It is photos that tease the social anxieties of teenagers, tickle our voyeuristic, vicarious tendencies, and ensnare parents and grandparents with the promise of seeing their children and grandchildren at play.

We are living in an age of accelerating addictiveness and Facebook the crack cocaine of websites. It is compulsive: rewarding short, frequent visits with ‘likes’, pokes, comments, event invites, phototagging, and chat. Some have reported pangs of withdrawal as the fear of missing out on something takes hold. You become conscious of an addiction when it starts having negative consequences; people drink a lot of tea, but view see themselves as being addicted. What are the negative effects of Facebook? For me, it was the consciousness that the content was so banal that I felt myself become cretinized. There is only so many times you can see a ‘funny’ video or a witty bon mot about some ephemeral news story before you want to poke your own eyes out. I like my friends, but found their Facebook output depressingly low on substance.

For people like me, regular internet users since the mid-Nineties, Facebook represents a refutation of the idea that you can be something more than your meatspace identity. All those avatars and nom de plume were replaced, in Facebook-world, with the stolidity of your first and last name. Arguably this is the great advance of Facebook over other social networks. The dream of Zuckerberg and his cohorts is that by having everything you do attributable to one identity, people will be more responsible in what they say rather than hiding behind the mask of anonymity. This is very useful for advertisers and potentially useful for human beings. Anyone who has ever been abused by a pseudonymous forum member or commenter will know that this is a good thing. But what happens when that so-called identity becomes a vivid part of yourself. What happens when its tendrils wrap themselves around your conception of who you are with all your likes and dislikes. What happens when this self-conception starts to limit possibilities? If a person falls in a forest and there is no one to say “Lol” do they really fall at all? The more you write about yourself, the more imprisoned within your ego you become. A personality is nothing more than a collection of reactions by other people. Is the person who is reacted against more real than the person who is ignored?

On day two of my experiment, I was hit by a feeling of dread. It was as if I had no identity, I was a free-floating collection of atoms with nothing to confirm who and why and what I was. And yet, by limiting the amount of information I consumed, my thoughts were clearer and I am generally more relaxed. It makes you wonder how much mental energy goes on keeping up with the social whirl.The longer I remain deactivated, the more incredulous I was that I visited Facebook at all. When you give something up there is a point after which it is so insignificant that you you wonder why you gave it up in the first place. The anxiety of missing out on events and the validation from having something click “Like” on your post, didn’t matter a jot.

If the noise of Facebook is the bottomless banality of Farmville, music videos, and checking in, what is the signal? What is the good stuff? It seems to me that the good stuff is the sense of human connection, it is a one-to-many communication device that doesn’t feel completely impersonal. Alas, on Facebook few appeals to the many are felt as personal: it is spam, boasting, teasing, provoking, or just banal. And, it seems to me, that because Facebook is used when we want to procrastinate, it is banality that is rewarded with comments and ‘likes’, further discouraging thought or beauty.

Facebook updates (photos, notes, links, videos) are like crisps, you can keep eating them as long as they are there. If, in the middle of a packet of crisps, you found a steak you would throw it away, it is inappropriate.
*

My first full day after having given up Facebook proved one thing – and that is that the human mind is capable of finding distraction everywhere. Distraction is the thing that takes you away from the moment. When you are in the moment, there is nothing like it. Distraction is the thing that takes you out of the moment, preventing you from embracing it, telling you to look elsewhere for enlightenment.

*

Facebook is like capitalism in the sense that it can consume everything you throw at it (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Livejournal updates), but cannot be consumed (due to the walled garden). It is the end of the internet. Douglas Ruskoff, an early internet pioneer and prophet, is misguided when he says that Facebook will fade as the cool kids leave, just as other social networks faded in the past. Unlike the other social networks, this one has gone way beyond cool kids into the office and the retirement home.

*
Without Facebook, life is quiet; you can concentrate on things without the tyrannical need to check for reactions, events, happenings. I no longer felt alienated from the modern world and its celebration of tittle tattle. I found that I was more willing to engage in one-to-one conversations, which are far more rewarding than one-to-many. One-to-many feels like spam to me, however cutesy the wording is.

*
Trouble is, if you’re going to stop Facebooking there are a lot of other silly online things that you need to stop doing at the same time. Reading newspapers (and especially newspaper comments), watching YouTube videos, going on Twitter, or checking email.

*

Completely removing yourself from Facebook is an extremist, scorched earth policy, which implies that you are incapable of moderation. The people I admire most on Facebook are those who are on Facebook but don’t use Facebook. They understand that it is a fact of modern life — like television and the mobile phone — but don’t need to check it compulsively or at all. And so, for the last few days of the experiment, I reactivated my account in order to see if I was capable of this kind of self-discipline.

At its best, Facebook is just a set of tools: an events manager, email without spam, a nice way of keeping in touch with friends and family, a means to connect to websites without being forced to fill in yet another registration form. Ignore the relentless banality of the status update, resist the urge to observe the drama of everyday life, and it might even be useful.

16 Oct 2011

How to track podcast downloads on iTunes

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

The Gamification of Everyday Life

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02 Jul 2011

Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann is a fascinating character. He first became noteworthy for introducing a generation of nerds to David Allen’s Getting Things Done via his 43 folders blog, he got a book deal on the back, things got complicated*, and now he is carving out a niche as a kind of hypermanic Buddhist dedicated to undermining productivity fallacies. Alas, it doesn’t look like Inbox Zero is coming any time soon, so I have (rather presumptuously) put together a list of tips that help me to deal with email.

1. Turn off all intrusive notifications
Your most precious asset is time and attention. Every notification erode attention and takes up a moment of your time, preventing your from getting into a state of flow. Instead, assign time one a day to batch process email. No email requires immediate acknowledgment.

2. Treat all random inputs as email.
Facebook is an inbox, Twitter is an inbox, text messaging is an inbox. Just because one of them is full of nice messages from your friends and other has requests from your boss, doesn’t mean they don’t both take up time and attention. Reduce the number of inputs to a minimum in order to reduce friction. Forward everything to one account and respond there.

3. Don’t look in your inboxes unless you have time to process them
It is the easiest thing in the world to check stuff, somewhat more difficult to something useful with it. The variable reward addiction of email and Facebook, makes you think there will be something fun or sexy or exciting in your inbox. So you keep checking, hoping for something fun, when — disaster! — there’s something horrible. Worse still, you haven’t got time to deal with it now. Stop checking for the sake of it. Don’t increase your expectational debt.

4. Process inboxes properly
When you do have time to look at your inboxes, process it properly. You can do one of four things: 1) delete 2) archive 3) reply immediately, or 4) reply later (archive it and add a reminder to your tickler file). Insist on the preciousness of your time when dealing with timewasters. If you can’t do something, just say ‘no’.

5. Process items one at a time.
I go through my emails systematically from the top (freshest first) and blitz them one by one. It is easy to cherry pick the nice ones and be left with the nasty ones, but this increases guilt and resistance.

6. Overcome resistance
Do you ever have an email that you can’t bear to look at because it sets off feelings of guilt and shame? Perhaps you have let someone down. Perhaps you haven’t met your own expectations in some way. Either way, you are repressing negative emotions by avoiding the dreaded email. You will do anything rather than address the issue. The solution? Just do it. It will never be as bad as you think.

7. Unsubscribe to all product emails
The noise of product emails is not worth the trouble it takes to delete them. The idea that you have to know about a feature immediately is spurious.

8. Use a text replacer
Use a text replacement tool for frequently used replies. Even simple examplea like “cch = Cheers, Neil” will save hours of your precious time. I use Texter on PC and TextExpander on Mac.

9. Write clearly and simply
Think of email as if it were text message. Be direct, clear. Do you need to say ‘Dear’ and ‘Yours sincerely’ every time? No! Email should be free of fluff. Say what you need to say, no more.

* Not 100% sure how things got complicated but this post offers some explanation: the publishers wanted a book on email, he wanted to write a book on the nature of being.

14 Jun 2011

Books Read in 2010

I started noting the books I read in 2006, this year I thought it would be interesting to write about what impression they made.

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19 Dec 2010

What do you want to do?

I hate that moment when a stand up comedian, empowered by microphone and spotlight, asks someone in the front row what they do. There’s an awkward pause, a blush, then the confession of being “in IT” or working “at Asda’s”. It’s almost always mundane, tragically illustrating the nullity of most lives.

The question is a way for the stand up to draw the audience into their world, creating some tension through random banter, but it has wider implications. The IT geeks and checkout girls aren’t just IT geeks and checkout girls; they are killing time and making money. Everyone is a million other things — the check out girl could be an artist or a seductress — but society only thinks about people in terms of money and time.

I asked my five year old nephew, what do you want to do? Not only did he not know, but he didn’t really understand the question. He was alive, he was being, he was existing, he was playing. Being alive was enough doing. You don’t need to do anything else. Just be. Move on. Be again. Don’t define yourself.

Of course, this doesn’t help when you’re chatting to someone at a party. The answer is crucial. Here you have to walk the line between impressing them and disappointing them. Do you go with what you do 9 to 5 or something you aspire to do? Maybe 1 hour a week you polish your novel. Characters are flat, it isn’t really working, but it forms a part of your identity. There’s something there, there’s some spark that makes you want to continue. Could you call yourself a novelist? No.

Nevertheless, it is nice to have that gap in the universe for spontaneity. People who overplan their lives are rarely happy. Time is only thing in the world that you can’t get back. What you’re doing now is what you should want to be doing.

01 Nov 2010

On Teetotalism

If you want perspective on life, it is useful to imagine the regrets you’ll have on your death bed. Will you regret not having spent more time making inane quips on Twitter? Will you regret having watched too little porn on the internet? Will you regret being too confident rather than curling up into a ball of depression waiting for the world to say hello?

For each of these, the answer is obviously ‘No’, but there are a few ambiguous propositions. Take alcohol, for instance. Drinking with friends is fun and a good way to bond, but is it worth the wasted hungover days, the destroyed neurons, and the liver damage? Perhaps teetotalism is the way forward.

Teetotalers fall into three distinct categories.

There are those who drank too much and have had to give it up, like Frank Skinner, Will Self, and Russell Brand, former addicts who fear that the smallest drop of alcohol will make them lose control and leave them in the gutter pawing over their shattered dreams.

The second type are those who haven’t got time for the impurity of alcohol for spiritual reasons: Tony Benn, Ian Paisley, and Tom Cruise fall into this camp.

The final type are those who want to be super productive and don’t want alcohol and the resultant hangovers getting in the way of doing stuff. Isaac Asimov, David Beckham, Steve Jobs, and Friedrich Nietzsche have given a pretty good account for themselves on this score. They realised that life is short and that they want to be sharp. Not for them the glass of red at dinner that blunts your conscious mind just enough to get you through an evening of trash television.

Alcohol numbs reality and I know from past experiments with teetotalism that after a month or so you reach new levels of clarity . . . and yet. And yet I can’t quite become teetotal. People in the pub are generally more full of bonhomie than those in cafes. The pub is a nice place to go. It is a brilliant way of sharing consciousness with other people. When we meet we are individuals, when we leave we are united.

24 Oct 2010

The Topography of the Web

The topography of the web is becoming flatter by the day. If you post a link on Facebook and Twitter, 90% of the comments appear within the first hour or so. After that it is buried beneath a million other banalities and forgotten about. People don’t dig below the surface anymore, their curiosity is sated by the front pages of social networking sites, especially if they link off to socially validated forms of diversion like YouTube. Even Google, the default search engine for many, is becoming more and more obsessed with the ‘now’.

The idea of the best stuff rising to the top is good in theory but in practice it is horribly skewed towards the mediocrity of the masses. Sure, if you are reaching out to — and have a relationship with — early adopting mavens you may do okay, but there is an awful lot of stuff out there and only a limited amount of time. When was the last time you clicked past the fourth or fifth page of Google search results? We scrape the surface, find something the approximates what we are looking for and then move on.

There used to be a time where websurfing was a voyage of discovery, where you could find new ways of thinking and carefully constructed essays on life. This is being replaced by skimming minutiae on Facebook and Twitter. Nobody is interested in the minutiae of your life, but given the choice between reading fluff and actually having to engage in something meaningful, they’ll take the fluff.

21 Oct 2010