News

It’s been a while

2009-07-16T21:35:55Z

Hi folks.

It’s been quite a while since my last blog post but it’s been hectic at the Grant household. For those not aware, Sarah, Rebecca and I were greatly blessed to recieve another new arrival in the form of baby Hannah.

Hannah arrived on the 7th June at 1pm weighing a healthy 6lbs 14oz - a whole pound bigger than her big sister. Hannah’s settling in nicely and Rebecca is becoming more accustomed to her role as big sister - she still manages to steal the limelight though.

Then my sister arrived from New Zealand with her boyfriend for 3 weeks, so although it has been generally relaxed, I’ve still been on the go quite a bit.

Interesting me this month is Open Atrium - an open-source Intranet solution powered by Drupal. In their words

Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

I’ve got a local version running on WAMP at the moment for playing with. I’m never a fan of open-source stuff on production (had an issue with Zen Cart the other week there) so beware before deploying.

I proved today that Twitter does have marketing benefits. A friend of mine runs The Chronicle Company which currently produces a product for fans of Glasgow Rangers - I sent a Tweet to my new Twitter friend Maurice Edu (a Glasgow Rangers player) and as a result, his site is getting quite a few hits and also follows on Twitter. I’d quite like to get involved with revamping the interface for my friend but I’m not into .net at the moment.

Late last month, I completed a project for Berea Bible College an Expression Engine based site. I haven’t yet hooked it into the portfolio yet but I’m sure it’ll appear in the next few days.

Anyways, hope you’re all enjoying the wonderful summer weather we’ve been having.

Take care,
Steven

The Cost of VAT Cuts

2009-04-22T09:11:22Z

In a bid to solve the UK financial crisis, our Prime Minister has seen fit to make iPods a few pounds cheaper.

Woolworths and MFI are just a couple of businesses that have already gone from our high streets and more will follow in 2009 which is a sad reality of our current economic down-turn.

One shining light in all of this though is the web. John Lewis’s high street sales this Christmas past were pretty depressing but their website broke sales records. JL weren’t alone. We spent a fortune during the run up to Christmas. On 8th December we were spending a million quid a minute. UK online sales were expected to top £13.2 billion.

That’s startling considering in 2000 we spent just a few hundred million. 8 years before that it was zilch.

Those billions go to independent shops, couriers, folks like me, ad agencies, price comparison sites, payment processors, suppliers. However, we can’t underestimate the role that broadband has played in this. Ecommerce existed before broadband but it wasn’t until connection speeds reached a decent level that things started to change.

New online services will be subject to restrictions when they have to be used on the UK infrastructure of old cans and string. It’s costing the UK £12.5billion a year to cut VAT. According to Broadband Stakeholders Group £28.8billion would bring the latest fibre optic connections to every UK home. Slightly slower fibre would cost £25billion. Going a bit lower (a connection speed of 30 - 100Mbps) would cost £5.1billion - the total cost; not an annual amount.

If we were able to reach that then future online industries could make the ecommerce revenue look like pocket change.

Quick and dirty usability

2009-04-20T16:48:09Z

It’s one thing to know what you want to do when you use your website, it’s a different thing altogether understanding what your customers/users are doing.

Step forward UserFly.com.

Userfly.com is an excellent tool that allows you to test your site usability for free - with one small line of Javascript code.

The one line of code allows the Userfly system to record a screencast of user behaviour and provides interesting feedback on how users are using your site.

userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.
Your visitors behaviour is recorded as the go through your site. When they leave the session ends.

Viewing a screencast is easy too. The Userfly system provides data on the user location, browser, time spent on each page. The screencast itself shows input, mouse clicks, mouse movements, entered text (except passwords of course) - at the end of the screencast, you can keep it or delete it depending on its usefulness.

The free Userfly account will allow you to record 10 users per month for free. Those who are interested in more users per hour and more advanced events can go for one of the other options detailed at http://userfly.com/pricing

Whilst Userfly is an excellent tool for quick and dirty usability tests, it is by no means a substitute for proper usability testing. There is no way to capture what’s is actually going on with the user, either spoken thought or facial expression which you can do with Silverback App (MAC only) or Morae (Windows).

If you would like to install Userfly on your website or look at further usability options then get in touch with me.

Microsoft Releases IE8

2009-03-19T15:30:27Z

Microsoft has launched the latest version of its web browser, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

I blogged last month about me no longer developing website for IE6 and I think this will justify my reasons. MS say that IE8 is more secure and will allow users to cut down common tasks. IE8 will also be a major feature in Windows 7.

I’m a heavy Firefox user on a day-to-day basis so I can’t comment on IE8 - I only test in IE to see that my websites are consistent across browsers. However, I’ll have a play and I’ll post some further feedback if I have the time.

Astounded by Google Street

2009-03-19T12:24:58Z

I was reading on the BBC website there that Google have launched the UK version of their Street View service.

It’s awesome!!! The clarity of the images is top notch and has some very obscure places, it even manages to pick out my house which can’t even give a decent satellite view using Google Maps! There are 9 countries now with Street View, I’ve only looked at the UK and New Zealand but I’d imagine America will be there too.

I’m not sure how it’ll work with an API or if it even will but it’s certainly going to be useful. Many different uses for a tool as powerful as this.

Try it for yourself at Google Maps.

Apple Announce iPhone iPod Touch OS 3.0

2009-03-19T09:25:59Z

I thought I should give this announcement some column space because I’m quite excited with the prospect of the new features of v3.0 of the iPhone and iPod Touch operating system.

It’s what Apple call a “major update” to the operating system that powers the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s nothing new really, 100s of other smart phones already have the functionality this update brings. Things like cut, copy and paste, MMS (picture messages) and an in-phone search facility. Unfortunately, not Flash video.

More interestingly, Apple has released an update to the SDK (software developer kit) to assist developers writing applications.

The App-Store has been a huge success story since the launch of the iPhone and iPod Touch. The store has an choice of over 25, 000 paid-for and free applications. So far, over 800 million downloads have been made!

Developers will now be able to use the iPhone’s mapping capability in their own applications, as well as take advantage of “push” technology to alert users of messaging or alert software.

The operating system upgrade, the third for the iPhone, will be available from the summer and free to all iPhone users.

Users who want to download the 3.0 software onto their iPod touch will have to pay a fee of £6.80.

SilverStripe 2.3.0 is released

2009-03-06T08:07:51Z

The new version of SilverStripe is released today for download. There are thousands of updates in place and it should be interesting to take it for a test drive.

I’ve never been a big user of SilverStripe CMS but I did dabble with it last year. What I saw of it, I really liked although Expression Engine caught my attention much more. That was mainly down to the fact I could install and configure EE on IIS whereas SilverStripe was more problematic.

I ended up installing it on my local WAMP server and had a play around, I didn’t try any advanced functionality but the simplicity of creating pages etc was excellent.

This new version has a number of new features I’m interested in playing with. Most of all the forms module. Developing an online form can sometimes be cumbersome, not so much the form itself but then the action on submit and the validation. The SilverStripe forms module looks to make that hassle a thing of the past.

I doubt that SilverStrip will ever replace EE for me (I can’t wait until v2 comes out in the next month or so)

A big day for local authorities

2009-03-02T11:14:23Z

Today the SOCITM report for local authority websites was released. I had been eagerly anticipating release of the report this year because my work for South Lanarkshire Council would be featured.

Although I wasn’t working with SLC the previous year, I was critical of the report because I felt it was inaccurate in its findings. I’m a big critic of council websites and SLC are no different unfortunately. The SOCITM report actually praised the council website whereas I found it to be lacking in several area.

That said, SLC currently are very much restricted by the “content management system” that they use (I’ll use that phrase very loosely because what they have isn’t a CMS as far as the industry goes). The CMS is something they are looking to change for the next SOCITM report.

However, the big positive for me from this years report was around the SLC search facility. Back in November I implemented a Google Mini Search Appliance on the SLC website. In has had great feedback and search is now more relevant than its Oracle PL/SQL predecessor.

SOCITM commented:

Yet another Google implementation, but this one seems perfect. Instant results, with the most relevant pages returned, very little dross accompanying it, no gaps at all. It seems simple but this is the first I’ve seen which gains full marks across the board.
(Note that in 2008 the search engine was reported as being quite poor, but that problem has been completely resolved with a new search engine.)

It’s a small feather in my cap but just the tip of the iceberg, they still have much to do to improve the overall user journey or the site. I feel there has to be a shift from a focus on content to being more task centric.

New ministry project

2009-02-28T19:40:47Z

Maybe not so much new because I’ve know about it for a few months. On this ocassion it’s Berea Bible College based in Moshi, Tanzania.

Allan & Jacqui MacKinnon are missionaries in Tanzania both were back in Glasgow last year for Allan to complete his Master’s Degree in Education (which he did with distinction!).

Upon returning from a brief visit back to Tanzania in November, Allan had approached me about designing and developing the website for the Bible College. We talked, threw around a few ideas and I accepted.

The key thing for this project is going to be that pages are lightweight, purely because of the limited bandwidth and speeds experienced browsing the web in Tanzania. It’s a hard thing to test for as well so it’ll mean more communication with Allan than I normally would with a client. I suppose speed and bandwidth is something we take for granted in the UK.

The website will be http://www.bbcmoshi.org - I’ll post more as the project develops. Again I’ll be using Expression Engine, looking forward to doing this kind of website with it.

A shout out to RefTagger

2009-02-27T18:52:16Z

Sometimes it’s the simplest things in life that we take great pleasure from - in this instance RefTagger

RefTagger is a simple little Javascript that I believe all church and ministry sites should implement. What it does is great. If your website has a Bible reference contained within the page, by adding the RefTagger code, it will read your Bible verse and (e.g. John 3:16) and it will quote you full chapter and verse in a little hover box.

As if that wasn’t enough, you can also tell it which Bible translation to use! You can use the default CSS that it pulls from the server or you can use your own. I’ve still not reached the best part yet - this little script is FREE! As yet I’ve only implemented this on the Greenview site but it’s definitely going to be in my arsenal of scripts for church sites.

IT Figures

2009-02-25T15:42:46Z

things you never knew you never new…courtesy of .net magazine

4.5 million - number of Monster.co.uk users whose data may have been compromised
2 years - the time elapsed since the Wall Street Journal announced that Google’s GDrive would be released “soon”
75% - the percentage of young adults who have social networking profiles compared to 57% of 24-35 year olds
$1trillion - the potential cost of cybercrimes like data loss and theft to business, according to a study by McAfee. 42% of businesses surveyed say that sacked employees are the biggest threat to data security

IE6 Support

2009-02-24T13:58:09Z

This month’s edition of .net magazine arrived through the door yesterday which I always anticipate. It’s a must read if you’re involved with the web. Sometimes the larger articles aren’t down my street but generally I’m happy with it.

There’s an article covers the banana skin that is IE6 for web designers & developers. It definitely got me thinking, especially as my site has been relaunched.

The biggest development hurdle I faced during the development of my site was making sure that it displayed consistently across the browsers, most notably IE6. It’s well documented as to how IE6 behaves differently from other browsers. I should have documented my development time during the build (all very well in hindsight). I estimate that plugging the bugs in IE6 must have added quite a few days onto my time, it’s also very frustrating when you know it works in good browsers.

I decided to support IE6 because Google Analytics reported that for the whole of the last calendar year, IE visitors accounted for 73%, with IE6 taking 44%.

Having read the .net article I’m now beginning to think that I made a mistake by supporting it. People generally come to me because they recognise I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the web. Rather than encouraging people to use an old piece of software, I should be encouraging users to upgrade, especially when there’s no cost involved and a newer browser would greatly enhance their online experience.

IE6 is now 8 years old, which is ancient by web standards. IE7 has been available since October 2006 and IE8 is in Beta. You then have Firefox (my personal favourite), Safari and more recently, Google Chrome.

“But you’re an independent developer!” I hear you cry - yes I am but consider larger businesses than me (and possibly you for that matter) have dropped IE6 support, businesses like Apple, Google & Facebook to name a few.

It wouldn’t take me long to drop support for IE6 so if you come back one day and you’re getting an upgrade message, you’ll know why. In fact, I’ll go one better, I’ll introduce a poll of users to see if I should drop IE6 support.

New website launches

2009-02-23T17:10:23Z

This week sees the launch of my new website.

I’m taking a very different approach with this version, intending to be more social and interacting with clients, colleagues and friends on a more regular basis. Social web tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Flickr etc. all help in this and I’d encourage you to pop by either of those apps and drop me a line.

Although the main components of the site are in place; I’ll be adding further functionality like my RSS feed as well as more fluid integration with social networking tools.

This version of my site has been a long time coming (your time vanishes with a new born as some of you will know) but it’s good to be back. Stick with me whilst the development is on-going and still importing content into the portfolio.

Ciao.