Alan Coleman

I found these screen dumps last week whilst trying to free up some space on the old Think Pad. I used a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create the graphics, I can’t remember which versions but almost certainly pre CS. I got the functionality working with CSS and a bit of JavaScript here and there. I came up with all the designs myself with the content coming from the education side of the company.

I have very fond memories of this work and the various challenges it presented, great fun!

So I’ve now tried three different online back up solutions for my home data. They’ve all worked but all have had the same flaw, they can’t deal with external drives. Backup for the PCs internal drive structure has always worked, which is okay if you’re my mum, but realistically it’s not an option if you’ve got a digital camera you actually use and more than 2 compact discs.

As we collect more data and the files increase in size it makes sense to move to external storage. In fact external drives are a necessity if, like me, you run a load of old laptops with minimal storage space.

So why is it so difficult to back up external storage?

We can start by looking at it from the business perceptive. If you’re running this kind of service the money is made by backing up internal drives on computers that get used on a fairly regular basis. Some music, a few documents and maybe a college research project, all of it likely to be of a size that won’t exceed the average laptop. It’s a fairly simple process and the storage back at the data centre is going to be cheaper than your monthly charge. In short, you’re going to make money. That is unless users start plugging in unknown amounts of data to back up, from those terabyte beasts they sell on Amazon. Hours of video, music and photographs that are going to weigh down the network and simply decimate the back end storage. From a business perspective I’d certainly steer clear.

Then there’s the technical aspect. External drives can be shared around different computers, so when the process starts to backup they might not be available, what then? Also we know that the mounting procedure can differ from session to session which just adds to the complexity. Technically I still think it’s quite difficult for a back up process to figure out what needs to be backed up from what is available at the current time.

To finish, I’m not blaming Backblaze, Mozyhome or Carbonite, they’re just not really that useful if you’ve got loads of data. Which is slightly ironic because the only people who need this kind of service have loads of data. Happy days.

For the time being I’ll just use Dropbox.

Every time I come to write an SQL query that uses the current time against a time stamp in a record, someone always seems to suggest a different way of solving the problem. That in itself isn’t an issue, there’s usually several ways of coding ones way round any situation with personal preference or familiarity probably being as good as any other.

In this example I used DATEADD with a negative integer to filter against any records more than 30 days old. I’ve always thought that using plus and minus together in any situation is a little odd, but it’s the Microsoft way in SQL Server and it works fine.

In MySQL:
SELECT  *
FROM    mytable
WHERE   record_date >= SYSDATE() - INTERVAL 30 DAY

In SQL Server:
SELECT  *
FROM    mytable
WHERE   record_date >= DATEADD(day, -30, GETDATE())

In Oracle:
SELECT  *
FROM    mytable
WHERE   record_date >= SYSDATE - 30

In PostgreSQL:
SELECT  *
FROM    mytable
WHERE   record_date >= NOW() - '30 day'::INTERVAL

Now here’s a cool app. Strava, available for Android, iPhone and Garmin devices.

Basically it tracks your journey and allows you to compare your results with other app users that may have completed the same route. It goes further still and identifies segments of that route and places your time as an achievement on a leader board.

It’s aimed at runners and cyclists but it’ll work for any journey where a GPS Signal can be received, skiing and rowing for example. There’s all sorts of statistics available, including elevation gain and average speed as well as all the usual media sharing options too.

It was recommended to me by a colleague at work whilst unlocking my bike in the cycle store at work, which reeks pleasantly of rubber and sweat. Like most apps I downloaded it without really expecting much and kicked off by starting a new journey as I set off on my home commute.

Arriving home and completing the journey in the app I was amazed at the segmentation and achievements. On the Great Dover Street Segment which runs from Borough Station to The bricklayers Arms I managed to rank 50 out of 60, not great but it’s a start. That said I did manage 6 out of 25 on The Stonecutter and The Shoe Sprint.

A fantastic app, great looking and inclusive. More importantly it has longevity in that the app users are by nature likely to be competitive and regular. Great stuff.

Here’s the scenario. In 1998 I registered a domain with the American company Register.com, I don’t know why I used this particular registrar, they probably came out on top on Hotbot or Lycos. The years went by and I’d annually fork out around $60 to keep my domain, thinking that this was how much a top level domain cost.

Not so. I was amazed to see that a U.K. based registrar that I also use offered to host a top level domain for around a tenth of the price I was paying in the U.S. (A fiver to be precise).

To repeat an overused and increasingly annoying phrase, “It’s a no brainer”.

First of all I had to contact the company I worked for 13 years ago to get my email address reinstated, this enabled me to change the email contact at the registrar. That done, the next step was to approach my current registrar and ask them to release my domain.

I log into the portal and am immediately told that a domain needs renewing, so I follow the process of being sold various mobile apps I don’t want before being informed that I can renew for one year for the bargain price of $81.

Too expensive, so I go to get my authorisation code before being offered a renewal for $20 (Offer doesn’t last long!). Now a little insulted I decline their kind offer and continue, more sales before a message telling me that I’ll receive an email in 4-5 days.

4-5 days? How come it takes so long when everything they want from me can take seconds? Further, they know as well as I do that their email will probably  got lost in my junk and they’ll  end up getting their money anyway. So in that sense in their desperate clamour for cash they’ve ended up like the Hotel California, everything’s fine – you just can’t leave.

I’m still trying to get my head round Microsoft’s crisitism of our comapny website this week. Yes, Microsoft. The comapny that revolutionised the web with Internet Explorer, the Firebrands that changed the face of search with Bing and bossed development with Silverlight (Remember that?).

Don’t get me wrong, there’s loads about Microsoft that I can’t get enough of. Bill Gates, the PC, Windows, .NET, Windows Server and T-SQL. Love it all. However I can’t help feeling that Microsoft are still playing catch up with the Web and Internet, it’s like a loveable friend with too much money that gets into the same sport as you. All the gear, no idea!

It’s slightly diffrent with Google of course. All they’ve got to do is sneeze and we all start clapping and coding with a sense of blind panic like the worlds going to end, which in a way it could!

That said, the loveable friend with no idea is still a friend and needs to be humoured like everybody else, we wouldn’t want him going home and taking his ball with him would we?

I came across this issue after kicking off an automatic upgrade to WordPress 3.3. The visual tool-bar disappears and it’s no longer possible to swap to code view. After a little searching about I found this solution.

You’ll probably need to install “use Google Libraries” plugin.

I’d only ever played around with JavaScript as a way of achieving something within a development environment. I’d given little thought to object orientation and code reuse- ability, focusing more on write once, use once and move on as soon as the thing was working.

Then I read DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model which changed everything for me. Off the back of that I moved onto Advanced DOM Scripting: Dynamic Web Design Techniques. Just as good although significantly more complex. I did feel at least that I had a good grasp of JavaScript and its client side implications.

Things are different now, everything about how we write code and deploy it is unrecognisable from a decade ago. Time and expense are an issue with everything we do and with applification gaining momentum none of us can hang around.  Now we’re using frameworks, in my case the jQuery library, for our client side scripting. Development can be fast, although the environment on which the framework is being laid can often present issues surrounding access, especially if you’re dealing with legacy code.

For myself there are two drawbacks to using a framework. The first is the Framework itself which must be downloaded to the client browser, along with any plugins, which can be weighty and as with any JavaScript can cause havoc in an untested environment. The second is less to do with the framework itself and more to do with the developer, who no longer writes his own code, but rather gives instructions to someone else’s. Not the same level of code satisfaction but just the results are just as much fun.

So I’ve gone from reading  about JavaScript using the Document Object Model to reading about frameworks that all but dispense with the considerations of the former.

Happy days.

I’ve been looking at content management today. We need to upgrade our current CMS as the front end isn’t giving us the flexibility we need. There are a million CMS products available, all offering more simplicity than the next, the big list of corporate clients, the 30 day trial and sandbox etc.

Most products centre content management around the web pages, using in-page editing for ease of use and simplicity. I installed a copy of DotNetNuke 6 to take a look at, works really well with its flawless AJAX editing, plug ins and extensions. The thing is, we already have a database schema in place. when we set about this project a few years ago we always thought that the front end would be replaceable and it was the back end that we were going to get right. At the moment our front end is a simple table editor, and it’s this we’re looking to improve.

This is where I’m having the problem, we don’t need everything that comes with an off the shelf CMS, forums, galleries and alike. We’re just looking for a flexible table editor that gives us some WYSIWYG functionality for the editors. The .NET MVC process looks like it would do the job, but I don’t want to have to rebuild everything just to give us a WYSIWYG editor, there’s got to be more result for the work involved.

What to do about a CMS.

So now I can update my blog by using the fantastic WordPress Android app. Brilliant, why has this taken so long? WordPress, Android and HTC, what a fantastic combination.

Last month Joyent ceased to support their Connector suite of applications, the combined email, contacts and calendar app, next month they’ll be stopping the service completely. The Ruby on Rails app is several years old now and can’t really keep up with other offerings on the market, besides Joyent have moved their focus elsewhere, outside of basic hosting. Fair enough, I can see why they’re making the move, the product is no longer central to their business aims and as time creeps on the app will drain resources as it becomes harder to maintain.

Not everyone at Joyent used Connector, I did although not a daily basis. It was a useful, secure and reasonably stable place to keep my contacts and important snippets of information. Now that the service is coming to an end there’s one small question I have to ask. What now?

I have to keep this information somewhere and realistically it has to be online in the form of some sort of application. Irritatingly there’s no way I can move all my contacts from Joyent Connector in some sort of import export process, so I’m going to have to move them one by one. Mmmmm.

So now I’m looking at either Highrise from 37 Signals or Contacts that form part of Google’s Gmail. There’s pros and cons of both. I’m already using Gmail and it’s free but on the other hand I think I’d like to use something that’s not Google or Yahoo, I use those apps all day every day and sometimes fear Goo-hoo overload. However, I’m already using Google calendar and that seems to link seamlessly with Gmail, so maybe using contacts is just an extension of that. Google apps are free too.

I’d rather stamp on my own fingers that have to do this again in a hurry!

We run a dynamic website that retrieves information from a relational database. There’s lots of content involved across loads of domains and in several languages, this makes the site fairly heavy. Performance is as important as ever and it’s only going to become more so as users patience decreases inversely as bandwidth increases. Mmm.

One solution is to cache content that doesn’t need to be refreshed that regularly. The time between refreshes can be anything, a few minutes, days, weeks or never. It’s a fairly simple process that lends itself to any scripting language that reads and writes to a database. The best part is that if you’re already reading content from database tables and displaying it, you only have to adjust your script to check another table for the cached content date and act accordingly.

Here’s a really simple example of how it might work, this ones in pseudo VB:


'Query your cache table for content
objRSNavBuild.Open "SELECT * FROM tblNavBuild WHERE BuildType = 2 AND CountryID=2 AND LanguageID=1"
'Set refresh variable
navBuildInterval = 720 '24 hours
'Set timestamp from query
lastBuilt = objRSNavBuild.Fields("timeStamp")

'Otherwise write out your cached content
else
Response.write objRSNavBuild.Fields("navigationBuild")
end if


One of the most attractive aspects for WordPress has to be the method of upgrade. A simple message appears on the dashboard in the manner of desktop software and you’re one click away from all the latest goodies. For me, this is the point where on-line apps take over from applications confined to the desktop. All the processes are seamless, and most importantly are tested thoroughly before release – to the point that end users can action a single command and watch the magic.

It does recommend a backup prior to upgrade but as my install isn’t mission critical I didn’t bother, the upgrade took about 20 seconds. The beauty of this blog entry is that I don’t even know what’s new in 3.1.1! Does it matter? Not really, just as long as it’s a simple process.

I’m considering moving some of our CMS editing at work over to the WordPress platform, the WYSIWYG editor works so well, especially the more recent versions, and entering content has been a stumbling block for our users for years. At the moment they’re writing the HTML tags themselves when inputting content, the upside is that the mark-up is quite clean, but the downside is that content people don’t want to get involved with mark-up (fair enough). If I can get the WordPress install working on IIS then we could have an awesome solution.

The 5oth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s journey into space seemed like an appropriate time to talk about Russian graphic design

I’ve always liked the simplicity of Russian design. The heroics of the people, the sweeping blocks of colour and style.

I find it amazing that a society that was so isolated from western culture managed to produce graphic design that was so similar to that produced in the west. Of course it was different in terms of the subject matter, which couldn’t have been much further away from knocking out Coke and lifestyle products.

But it’s kind of like all graphic designers did the same course at the same college before going back to their respective states. The use of space, texture and typeface of Russian graphics all comply to the basic ‘rules’ of design. Those underpinning concepts of aesthetics that appealed to us in the west seemed to come as natural to those in the east too.

You couldn’t say the same about music.

Check out this poster, the colours, simple text and feeling of speed all point to ‘just enough’ and ‘just in the right place’. It’s awesome. Reckon I’ll be bring some Russian graphic style to the pages of this website over the next few months, Komrade.

I’ve been working on a project over the last week that involves fairly heavy use of Stored Procedures. It’s not a new technology and we’re not that new to it either, it’s just that during the development cycle the logic of Stored Procedures seems to have fallen off the radar.

Stored Procedures are perfect for us on a number of fronts. We run our entire website on a handful of files so the code base tends to be huge, moving some of that code out to a more appropriate home makes complete sense. There’s less possibility of an accident in the few thousand rows of code, and it also allows us to extend our code separation policy to new levels.

The creation of an abstraction layer between content and code also creates some interesting possibilities. Applications other than the website can execute the procedure and make use of the results, also developers can test queries without having to fish the SQL out of the code and replace all the variables, this often goes unmentioned but for me is one of the more useful aspects of the technology.

CREATE PROCEDURE sp_getproduct
(@UnitPrice money,
@UnitsInStock SMALLINT = '10')
AS
BEGIN
SET NOCOUNT ON;

SELECT [ProductName] FROM Products
WHERE ([UnitPrice] < @UnitPrice) AND ([UnitsInStock] > @UnitsInStock)
END
GO

I’ve been working with cookies for the last couple of days, also known as a web cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie (got that from Wikipedia). For some reason I always end up getting confused about what cookie is written where and how I get my code to respond to it, it’s simply never as easy as writing code when cookies are involved.  Chris Pederick’s awesome Firefox Developer Tools go a long way to eradicating the hit and miss of deleting cookies from a session or domain, doing the same in IE or Chrome is nothing short of a nightmare. Firefox to the rescue, again (Just seen that Web Developer tools are now available for Chrome).

Whatever the working issues, cookies do allow us to manipulate our site to respond to users in different ways, which can be very powerful. Couple this with Google Analytics and we have a blinding set of tools for testing what works, with who and where. Again, very powerful. Also from a development perspective, the idea of making changes to a page and those changes staying with the user (without the URL changing) throughout their visit is quite satisfying, although not smug.

I’ve been using WordPress to blog in various places for a number of years now, but it’s only recently that it’s started to live up to what it should have been. WordPress seems to be converging at point where all web apps  have aimed, almost like it’s stepping up to the mark.

I was fairly slack with upgrading and ended up using an ancient version that didn’t even support the one click upgrade that comes with this one, so I ended up reinstalling the whole thing. No trouble at all, just the usual fiddling around with phpMyAdmin (Needs are a must with that one!).

The changes where nothing short of incredible, in the space of a couple of years the entire package had gone from a database update tool to a proper content publishing package. All the frustrations I had with the old versions and their issues with formatting content had been resolved and improved beyond recognition.

It’s awesome, and I’m a huge fan.

Amid much fanfare Firefox 4 was released today. I watched and listened to the event live on the web, and heard the download count increase in its hundreds of thousands to whooping and applause. It sounds boring, a load of geeks sat around talking about their latest browser and how the various plugin will or wont work. But for some reason it made for compelling viewing. Programmers talking about rebuilding the JavaScript engine, marketing people talking about the release schedule and developers talking about the new website, I sort of wished I was there – glugging coffee and twittering continuously on a silver Mac.

The browser itself is awesome. The first thing to notice is the blisteringly fast page rendering speed, almost certainly down to the work the programmers and developers put into the JavaScript engine, the same thing that Google did about 18 months ago when they released their browser. I’ve only being playing around for a couple of hours so have yet to fully grasp the capabilities of this release.

The upgrade was smooth, reinstalling the latest and most compatible version of Fire Bug and even reopening the tabs that where open on the old version. The little things.

So where next? Pretty much all the real estate that is possible to be displayed on the screen is now given over to content and it’s difficult to see a point in the future when connection speed will come close to matching page render. But does it matter?

Right now it’s just great to indulge in something so slick and usable. It’s been an emotional day.

So we get broadband installed with our new Sky package and it’s advertised at a fairly respectable 20 Mbps. Start the machine up and everything connects fine, the wireless password works and the router is doing the business, wicked.

Or is it?

A speed check revealed a paltry 3Mbps, I couldn’t hide my disapointment.

Is there any point ringing customer services? Probably not, the 20 Mbps advertised is probably a best case scenario for a user living at the exchange browsing at 3am, for everyone else, which means most customers, the actual speed still only provides for an adequate browsing experience.

The capability of the Web is flying forward at brake neck pace whilst the media we are consuming is getting heavier by the day. It’s at this point that I make a profound comment about the direction of the web and the infrastructure that supports it, but there’s not really much point.

Sky are no different from HSBC, they know we don’t have the time to complain, especially when they know that we know that nothing will change. No?

I’ve been using Google Analytics a lot recently and at work it’s become an invaluable tool that guides all our online activity. The wealth and sheer depth of information available is staggering, as is the functionality afforded the user courtesy of their front end developers. This is what can be achieved when you have a budget like NASA and an equally sizable resource of talent! That’s not to take anything away from the application though, from a business perspective it’s difficult to imagine how we ever managed without this kind of feedback before. From a developers perspective I found the information at hand especially useful when rewriting URLs in a friendly fashion and anticipating any potential damage.

I think this kind of application is what Web 2.0 is really about, and more importantly it represents a turning point in the history of the web and how we develop it.

So is Google Analytics better than The Poseidon Adventure? The only reason I’m asking that question is because it’s on the box behind the one I’m typing this blog entry on, and it’s a brilliant film. A badly acted 70s seascape epic about scantily clad women trying to escape from an upturned liner. Whilst Google has certainly had an impact on my life professionally, it’s not yet at the point where it’s going to overtake the effect that Susan Shelby had on a 11 year boy from suburban Essex.

As the spring sun shone through our office window this morning I came across a couple of great things online that made the already great day even better.

The first is an online code editing app from Mozilla Labs called Bespin (Bespin video). Although only in Alpha at the time of going to press its potential is already mind blowing, a fully functioning browser based coding environment that keeps your file in the cloud. Fantastic. There’s more, included is a dashboard style file manager and command line functionality. The whole thing is put together with JavaScript using the HTML 5 Canvas Element and makes for an intuitive work area that I’m sure will at some stage offer some sort of CVS.

The second item from today is the discovery of Personas, which is also from Mozilla Labs. Essentially it’s a plug-in for the Firefox browser that allows users to skin their browser in a variety of different patterns and themes. It’s all in real time so as you navigate down the list the whole browser changes before your very eyes. Okay, it offers no additional functionality, but it does look good, great in fact.

On the same lovely morning someone sent me a link regarding an extension to Microsoft’s Expression web environment that checks your web layout in IE 6,7 and 8. So is this an admission from Microsoft that their browsers are incompatible with each other? Or just an acknowledgement that their browsing capability is a badly organised, over funded river of shit that simply does not work properly.

Redmond, you are a long way behind.

I have a couple of great additions to my world of web development that are worthy of a mention.

The first is the discovery of WebDevRadio, a site based around a set of regularly updated podcasts on web development issues. The podcasts themselves are hosted by Michael Kimsal, an genuinely friendly bloke who discusses anything from the weather in his part of the world to the finer points of his favourite PHP class of the moment. It’s all very listenable and down to earth, in fact he comes across like he’s talking it over with a few mates down the pub. On the back of listening to the latest podcast whilst doing my ironing (2 shirts, that was it) I tried to find some UK based podcasts and came across Fresh Egg, a design and marketing agency who I think are based out of Reading in Berkshire (shit county). If it’s not Reading then I apologise, but not to the people of Berkshire (shit county). Their podcasts stand in complete contrast to those of Michael Kimsal, both in terms of delivery and content. For a start, their overwhelming self importance gives listeners the feeling of being spoken down to, not good. Then there’s the intensely annoying accents, that middle England sixth form slur copied from daytime Radio 1. The content isn’t much better, instead of insightful discussion the podcasts contain a series know it all sound bites designed to fool potential clients into thinking that ‘These guys really know their stuff’. A truly awful listening experience.

Americans? Best music, best literature and best web development podcasts.

The second point I’d like to talk about is my new Whiteboard. It sits on the wall next to my desk and came complete with a set of coloured pens and accessories. It’s a really good way of visualising concepts, brainstorming ideas or even just a large area to design schemas or normalise database tables. Big, long sweeping coloured arrows make for a great environment to refer back to at the turn of the head. It’s a bit like being at school but without getting laughed at in the showers after cross country. The thing is, all of the above is just a way of avoiding what I’m stuck on at work, ISAPI_rewrite. Oh joy.

I’ve been working on the same project for several months now so haven’t really had the opportunity to mess around with new web page layout ideas. After looking around at what’s going on in the more visual fields of web design and development I was amazed at how much things have changed in such a short period of time.

All of a sudden, the web is looking great. It’s almost as if the whole thing has had a makeover following the initial hype of Web 2.0. Or maybe this is Web 2.0, it’s just that it took a little longer to happen than we at first thought it would.

One area of development that is particularly interesting at the moment is JavaScript libraries. I’ve made some fairly dramatic structural changes to our site at work using JavaScript working in conjunction with the Document Object Model, but these are scripts that I’ve written myself for a particular purpose and as such are fairly bullet proof. A library takes it a step further by offering the kind of functionality that I’d never have the time to develop.

My initial impressions of the Mootools framework was excitement tinged with the usual IE disappointment, and because of its Object Orientated nature I found debugging to be a much more drawn out process. Although it has to be said, that in itself was a superb lesson in Object Orientation.

Although we’re yet to go live with any of the functionality I’ve been playing with, it is great fun, there are simply hours of pleasure to be had from playing around with the framework and snippets of code. The whole thing reminded me of unwrapping my first metal toolbox as a child (Blue Hamerite finish).

Mootools

This is a great website too http://css-tricks.com/

2008s project at work will be the next step in our re branding exercise, the development of an in house application to manage our content, otherwise known as a CMS. The technology will come courtesy of Microsoft’s .NET framework, that being a logical progression from the classic ASP (Visual Basic) set up used to create the web site and Intranet.

It is an exiting, if terrifying prospect, one that threatens a complete immersion in a whole new area of uncharted technology. However there is hope, already the human logic of those that developed this framework has started to show itself as little different from those from the open source sector. For instance, I felt almost at home with the concept of Microsoft’s Data Tier Components, and begrudgingly acknowledged that someone has probably put a great deal of thought into what I’ve always known as, Layer Separation.

This is only the beginning of a momentous project, but what is clear already is that the .NET Framework is not quite the bloated WYSIWYG editor that people like me used to say it was.

What’s this, Something positive about Microsoft?

Maybe, only time will tell.

When I first built my website things where different, the web was still very much a media to look at and navigate, rather than to interact with like it is now. Initially I hand built HTML pages to show my photos and organised the various albums into a file structure, to save on server space and download times I compressed all the images down to 30k. Laughable when you think about what we can do now, but it served a purpose. They were my photos on my website and I thought that was a million miles away from having them sit in dusty Truprint envelopes under the bed.

From flat pages I moved to an open source CMS, Plogger, that I hosted and adapted to my own needs, and whilst it wasn’t great it made the process of publishing photos less painfull. But as with most things in life, the novelty wears off. As much as one would like to, there isn’t time to get stuck in and develop functionality and improved scripting because there’s too much of that to do at work. When this happens things don’t get used and stagnate, it becomes a corner of the web that sits redundant. I don’t update my photos because there’s no technological incentive, and I still have to work everything through Photoshop. More importantly, it’s not a scalable solution both in terms of time and space.

Also, there’s privacy to consider and this is going to be a big deal over the next few years. My brother has always said that he doesn’t want pictures of himself on the web, a little paranoid maybe, but its also his right and I should respect that. My other brother has kids and pictures of them is a whole different ball game. I don’t have the time to develop permissions on my own site so that only family or friends can see them, so why not let flickr do it for me?

I’d always thought of flickr as a site for people who didn’t have their own site, which is of course, ridiculous. For a few quid a month I get to upload an unlimited amount of images at whatever resolution comes off my camera, that’s really good. Not only that, the application interface works better than a desktop operating system, who could have predicted that we would be at this point so soon?

To a certain extent I’m admitting defeat, my photo folder cant possibly keep up with what the people at Yahoo can offer, and to not embrace it would be as pointless as it is unpractical. I know this isn’t in keeping with the pioneering spirit of open source development, but that spirit is based on ideal scenarios of intelligence and time, both of which I don’t have an endless supply of.

So what if the photos aren’t on my site, the web is changing, and that was always going to happen.

I wrote earlier this week about the rebranding process we’re going through at work, and the problems that have surfaced regarding static legacy pages. The curse of the WYSIWYG has reeked havoc amongst the ranks, the files now stand in line like badly disciplined soldiers that refuse to obey the CSS, no matter how much they scream and shout… Or maybe that’s stretching it a bit far.

There is another enemy at play, tables. Not only that but nested tables and loads of them too, with those 1px high images that push the cells open. These are the most time consuming hurdles, trying to figure out what sits within what and why. Almost all of them serving no purpose apart from contributing to the endemic code bloat.

It’s sometimes difficult trying to balance time between doing what I think I should do, and what I actually have time for. To a certain extent rebranding an old website, built by someone else with no regard to any sort of standards, is an exercise in damage limitation.

There are busy times ahead. The company I work for as a web developer is changing its name, brand and identity. It is, to say the least, a task that involves an incredible amount of commitment and organisation from every aspect of the business.

The initial meetings of a few months ago seemed like a formality, just do this then that then everything else should slot into place, that was the plan anyway. Everything seems so easy when scribbled down in a flow diagram with arrows in yellow highlighter, and I’ve always found that approach to be quite good for holding back from getting stuck in.

There comes a point, as with anything in life, when the talking stops and the physical activity has to begin, which is usually the point where the scale of the undertaking is realised. The web site in question has evolved over a number of years and apart from some basic product titles and codes it is entirely static. It does however employ some fairly cool code that communicates with our CRM and back end on the fly, this is its saving grace.

Photoshop Elements, a fantastic product and a piece of marketing genius. A stripped down version of the fully fledged software install, with all the functionality you’re likely to need unless you work in Hoxton or drink Latte Coffee or wear a Nike Windcheater. Ideal for developers like myself who just need to cut and crop and maybe do bit of contrast correction. It had the Adobe professional interface from Illustrator and Photoshop so if you learnt on one then it’s all easy, same menus, same shortcuts, same everything. All for about £50 – it’s all good, as everyone says now.

So Photoshop Elements, it’s all good. At least it was.

So there I was in one job using my trusty old Elements to great effect, then I got made redundant and moved on to my current position and they used Illustrator for Photo manipulation. Bad as it is impossible. No, “Elements” I said nodding happily, “That’s all I need”.

Elements turns up and it’s version 5 which I start to get exited about. After loading it up however, nothing could have prepared me for the horror that awaited me in my new bling monitor. I actually felt my heart drop with disappointment as I looked at my beloved Elements in utter amazement.

It’s been domesticated. By that I mean it now looks like the kind of thing that you got free with a cheap digital camera in 2003. Gone is the familiar interface, shortcuts and working environment, and in its place are huge buttons and tacky picture album templates. It is, f**king awful. Nothing works now, a prime example is the resize tool that you can no longer constrain with the shift key! The most basic piece of Adobe functionality!

Also, it’s made the Microsoft mistake of trying to be too helpful. It leaves an icon in the tray that leaps into action whenever a new device appears, helpfully looking for photos. “No, stop! Go away, I don’t want you to help me find those pictures tucked away deep in the bottom of my Flash thingy”

So now I’ve got to go back to the IT manager and ask for CS like a greedy student who’s never satisfied. I’ll never use most of the functionality and the company will have to float on the stock market to afford it.

If it’s not broken, please, don’t fix it.

I think I’m okay when it comes to technology, not like a geeky genius or anything, but able to have at least a limited grasp of how digital devices work and interact with each other. There are times however when I can’t get my head round simple concepts of usability, like mobile phones for example, which I still find difficult to use after ten nearly years use (has it really been that long?).

One of the biggest usability hurdles in my life is the touch screen ticket machine, which I find so infuriatinlg difficult to understand that I have to get someone else to operate them for me. Mind you, shouting obscenities at yourself in an underground station isn’t always the best way to get people to help you.

Okay so this is sounding a bit tabloid now, overweight middle aged white men moaning about technological progress, but I really think I’ve got a point here.

There are two issues at play, architecture and design. Both intrinsic to each other as well as to a satisfactory user experience. What is happening is that they are both being overlooked in the rush to provide machines, shut the ticket offices and of course, save money. A depressingly common theme as we use technological advancement for economic rather than customer benefit.

From an architecture point of view the information, or products on sale, are usually always organised in a manner more in keeping with a database structure rather than a humanistic one. This leads to a confusing mass of information that takes so long to digest that the ‘See more’ button at the bottom is usually overlooked. Nothing really seems to make sense as my brain struggles to keep up with the sheer weight of content.

A better way to arrange content would be to display the most popular stations choosen in the last 12 hours, plot that to a calendar for obvious variations and it won’t be long before the initial choices will change depending on the time, day and even weather. More human, more dynamic.

Which brings me neatly to design, which never really seems to extend much further than the default Visual Basic buttons laid onto a dodgy train montage. It simply doesn’t work, and the ticket machines abroad aren’t much better either, same layout, same buttons. The machines on the Berlin Metro are to usability what Helmut Cole was to tightrope walking. You know we have a problem when the Germans can’t get it right!

It’s quite obvious that these processes are put together by IT staff or web developers who have no interest or experience in Information Architecture or the fundamental tenets of usability. If you like, an unwelcome distraction from the joy of working with the Internet. Interface design is a disciple in its own right that deserves thought, creativity and above all, testing.

Okay, the 2012 logo, I like it.

All too often with these things we end up with a fairly predictable corporate logo that looks like something that fronts a local council recycling initiative.

What we have been presented with is a fresh and vibrant image that is both challenging and unashamedly stylish, which is essentially what London is all about. But as Wolff Olins – http://www.wolffolins.com/ quite rightly point out, it’s not just about the capital, which is why we haven’t got any tedious silhouettes of the London skyline or dodgy Tube map metaphors. All that’s been done before, and the competition to create an alternative logo demonstrates just how conservative design can be.

So the tabloids are up in arms? So what? Surely that just goes to show how forward thinking we’re being on this, and in breaking with convention showing how liberal we are as a city – Like it or not, London is a Labour Party city. If it was left to the Daily Mail we’d have something designed by a nine year old called Elizabeth from a Putney primary School, and if it was left to The Sun we’d have a picture of Zara Phillips in Union Jack knickers on Page 3.

Despite turning into a load of fat bastards, we love sport in this country, and as a tribute to that we’re challenging preconceived ideas as part of our well proven creative track record.

We’re great, and you know it!