I hear that some people read their entire twitter stream. The whole thing. Without ever giving up and saying “sod this for a game of soldiers” and scrolling to the top.

I know I “need” twitter, like it or loathe it, it’s taken over from mailing lists and RSS feeds as the fastest way to stay up to date with the web dev world, after all we invented the web, not surprising we use it more than anyone else.

I currently follow 227 people, after one of my monthly culls. I estimate I read/skim about 10% of the stream, and from what I do read, 1% is relevant, 99% is crap. And I really mean crap. Insights into the personal lives of people I don’t know is just noise, the link to the interesting and helpful article about responsive design? That’s signal.

The day someone invents a usefulness filter and sticks it on Twitter I’ll be a happy man.

Oh and if I could figure out how to remove all the spammy followers, I’d probably follow more people, as I’d follow back the interesting people who follow me, but who get lost in a sea of media drones, marketing bots and special deal tweeting machines for countries I don;t even live in.

Sort it out Twitter

One of the big projects I have on right now is a Shopify based shop  for a client who sells hand made baby clothes, crystals and other related items. She was in fact the impetus for my HTML5 Boilerplate for Shopify site.

My client, and she won’t mind me describing her as this as she’s an old friend – is terrified of computers. Where I spend 8-10 hours a day directly online, and never further than 5 feet from a connected device, she checks her email once a week. Where I use a top of the range Macbook Pro linked to a 27inch screen, she has a basic version of Windows 7 on a 12inch sub notebook. Our experience of computers & the internet is totally and utterly different.

Learning to empathise with your clients is essential, it’s the same skill you should be using to empathise with the users of the sites that you create. Presuming the same level, or even a similar level of technical experience and know how will lead to disaster. I have worked in many a team where we trot out the old “Users are stupid” line. But it’s not true is it? They aren’t “stupid” they just aren’t as knowledgable in our field as we are. It is our job as good designers, as good UX creators to think how other people feel and to design to fit them not to fit us.

Why did I mention this client? Well – she had to copy a lot of data into Shopify when she started adding her products. Shopify does have a CSV upload option but given the technical nature of the upload – we decided to go with the straight web interface instead. When we did the training to show her how to insert copy, well let’s just say even I was surprised.

Apparently the best thing I have taught her so far is that CMD-C copies whatever you selected, CMD-V pastes it and CMD-Z is a magic undo. She’s now very very happy.

Do not treat your clients or users as stupid, they are not. They are just not you. We spend our lives so deep inside Twitter, or Facebook or Tumblr or any one of a dozen other places, we have smart phones, iPads, Kindels and the sort of technology that ten years ago would have looked like magic, most people do not.

Be kind, be understanding, do not get frustrated. lacking experience is not stupidity.

I think it’s one of those natural laws. They spend all that time crafting awesome hair cuts for people that when it comes to their own they either procrastinate so much they look like an extra from The Mighty Boosh, or they have a self applied buzz cut and look like a skin head.

The same applies to web designers portfolios – having procrastinated for so long that I have the web version of Noel Fielding’s haircut, yesterday I gave myself a digital buzz cut, threw out the old design, and put up some text, slightly prettified with some nice fonts from TypeKit. I had half an hour to kill whilst waiting around at WP-Brighton (great conference BTW), so I deleted the site, kept the blog, got @CharleeSays to write me some nifty new copy and I’m away.

Good points

• No more dead links
• Latest portfolio pieces are on there

Bad Points

• No more graphics
• None of the extra features I have been musing about for years
• Portfolio looks smaller, as I have taken older sites off

All in all – I’m pleased, at the very least it will motivate me to take some time out of my paid client work to work on my own site. Difficult as I don’t get paid to do my own.

I’ll be moving the entire site to be WordPress based in the next few weeks, integrating this blog ( the /blog/ part ) in tot he root of the site and using WP as a CMS.

Hope you like it.

Which is nice, quite surprised I have managed to do so much on it already.

This release covered the reworking of the blog.liquid and the article.liquid, which is the blog front page and blog story pages respectively. I spent a long time trying to make sure that the <time> elements had the correct date time attributes in them, pretty sure they’re right but I’d appreciate any feedback.

I also spent quite a lot of time struggling with the nesting of article, heading and section on article.liquid. I settled for something that looks like this:


<article>
<header>
<h1></h1>
<p>Posted by <span rel="author">Miles Cheverton</span> on <time datetime="2011-09-01T13:52:32EDT" pubdate>Thursday, September 01</time></p>
</header>
<section id ="article_content">
<h1 hidden>Article content</h1>
<p>article content</p>
</section>
<section id="comments">
<h1>Comments</h1>
<dl>
<dt><span rel="author">Author Name</span> said on <time datetime="2011-09-01T13:52:32EDT" pubdate></time></dt>
<dd><p>comment comment comment</p></dd>
</dl>
</section>
<section id="comment_form">
<h1>Add your comments</h1>
<form method='post' action='/blogs/news/3944982-first-post/comments' id='article-3944982-comment-form' class='comment-form'>
<label for="comment_author">Name</label>
<input type="text" id="comment_author" name="comment[author]" size="40" value="" class="" />
<label for="comment_email">Email</label>
<input type="text" id="comment_email" name="comment[email]" size="40" value="" class="" />
<label for="comment_body">Comment</label>
<textarea
id="comment_body"
name="comment[body]"
cols="40"
rows="5"
class=""></textarea>
<input type="submit" value="Post comment" id="comment_submit" />
</form>
</section>
</article>


I attended my fourth dConstruct yesterday, looking forward to the usual encouraging, stimulating and inspirational ideas. Instead, what I left with was a new set of bathroom scales (the Withings set of WiFi scales mentioned in Kelly Goto‘s talk), keen motivation to steal the typographical style of two presentations and the vague feeling that some over paid speakers had stood on stage, barking buzz words and sound bites at me for a day. (I had paid the reasonable sum of £125 to be there, by the way, plus the less reasonable sum of a day’s lost pay.)

It was good to see from the #dConstruct Twitter stream that I certainly wasn’t on my own in thinking this (the stream isn’t particularly clear, since any positive comment about dConstruct has been immediately retweeted by @dconstruct themselves). The stream was pretty revealing; the most popular Tweet on there is:

Don Norman: “Don’t design for the user experience: design for the memory. Memories last for years.”

Well that’s a stunning insight. I’m not sure what it means but it certainly has all the key ingredients for a popular Tweet. This comes from the same man who stood on stage and announced to us, as if he was revealing a secret hitherto known only to the monks half way up a mountain who trained Batman, that “Google’s product is [wait for it...] you. And their customers are the advertisers”.

I can tell you, it was a good job I was sitting down.

There seems to be a smell of The Emperor’s New Clothes about this year’s dConstruct. You might notice that it’s got no substance, but woe betide you if you say so; it’s the underdog, the upstart, it’s cheap, it’s in achingly-cool-Brighton, it’s run by Clearleft…you don’t say bad things about dConstruct.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve enjoyed previous dConstructs enormously. Sadly, this one was content free and a waste of my time.

On the 24th August I received the first issues of HTML5 Weekly, a “free, once–weekly round-up of HTML5 and related technology news and links”. There’s a few other bits and pieces in the email you may be interested in (go subscribe) but what caught my eye was “HTML5 Boilerplate 2.0: One Year Old, Many New Improvements“. I’ve used the boilerplate code a few times times, and have been meaning to work it fully into my new site routine for a few months.

Parallel to these thoughts has been the idea that I really should write a good base template for all the Shopify shops that I keep building for people. I have one about to go live for a clothes shop, another about to be started and a few more on the horizon. I have plenty of off the shelf components that I use on all my projects nowadays and they all need rolling in as well.

The HTML5 Boilerplate code gives me the ideal starting point and after mentioning it on twitter and receiving at least some enthusiasm, including some from Paul Irish, co-creator of HTML5 Boilerplate, I’ve decided to give it a go.

There’s a few blockers, for one, although I’ve worked with Git & Github on a lot of projects, I’ve never actually had my own project there that I have run myself, I’ve also, never released any open source code. I’m wary about being quite so open for criticism from my peers but I suppose I can only get better by doing so. Also – I am thinking of the cost implications, although I want to do this for free, and frankly, I was going to do it for myself anyway, there is an overhead of running the project, keeping up to date with the master HTML5 Boilerplate project, adding docs etc. I do have a mortgage to pay and a baby to keep in (expensive, you realise the minute they stop drinking milk) pots of blended food. I’m considering just putting up a small site with all the info and DL links, along with a (optional OFC) PayPal donation link, or my affiliate link through to Shopify – would that be acceptable in the open source world?

Looking forward to some feedback and discussion on this one.

It’s so easy to connect with people. There’s no cost, no overheads to being “friends” with 500 people. You connected circle is a great big opportunity to chat, swap opinions, discuss, comment, promote, sell, bug, pester annoy… ah I’m tailing off into my real feelings about these things.

In the past month I have reduced the number of people I follow on Twitter from 288 to 162. Reduced my ‘connections’ on LinkedIn from 181 to 107 and reduced my Facebook account from 160 ‘friends’ to 0 (deleted).

Coincidentally in the last month, I have:

• Set up my Google Reader account properly and installed Reeder on my Mac, iPhone and iPad
• Committed to (and followed through) on 30-60minutes of training from Lynda.com per day
• Dug out all the ebooks I’ve bought on web dev & design and started reading them (Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte first)
• Directly connected with co workers at The Skiff & picked up work with Michael Bailey of This Is Deliberate
• Spoken to half a dozen potential clients about exciting projects
• Moved forward with two major commerce projects that are going live in the next few weeks.

I suppose I’m saying something quite obvious but from the other side I never realised quite how much mind clutter all of my pointless connections were causing.

LinkedIn – all recruitment consultants have been stripped out, I’m not looking for work, at least not the work they were offering. If I had a pound for every back end, permanent PHP job in Northern Ireland I was offered I’d be a richer man (nothing against PHP devs in Northern Ireland OFC, just not what I’m after)

Twitter – the signal / noise ratio on Twitter is insane at the best of time but cluttering up your timeline with rubbish from Stephen bloody Fry or Lady GaGa does nothing to help you with your day. There’s nobody left on my stream who isn’t directly related to web dev – I look at it a few times a day, follow some links, post  few questions. Never look at it when I’m not working.

Facebook….. well I’m not ashamed to say I think I was a little addicted to that tiny red mark with a number in it. In reality I think Facebook just let me know too much about the lives of people I’d barely consider distant connections. Nobody has 500 friends. Nobody has 160 friends (my last count). You have a handful, the rest are just faces you know and frankly I have other things to think about than what they had for dinner, what they’d do to sort out the recent riots in London, what they think of my updates and a dozen other useless scraps of information.

Clutter – there’s too much of it. Declutter your life and prioritise the things that are genuinely important to you.

1. My Family (Daughter, Wife, direct family)
2. My hobbies (Reading, painting, modelling, social board gaming)
3. My work (Getting good work done, keeping clients happy, getting more work)
4. My Career (Learning new techniques, optimising best practice)

There isn’t enough space in life to give these things the time they need as it is – so all those other little distractions are best left behind.

A few months ago I needed to order a lot of spices to restock my burgeoning spice rack, searching online for a supplier (I rarely have time to bricks and mortar shops) I found Spices Of India. I made a large order, it all arrived in one piece, in fact they gave me two pots of Saffron by mistake. Bonus.

The email confirmation I received at the time encouraged me to become a fan of their Facebook page, enamoured as I am with this sort of thing I joined up. There were regular announcements of new products, recipes etc. All good and inoffensive. That is until they advertised a new skin cream that contained rose oil. For those who don’t know, rose oil is an irritant and should’t go in any skin cream at all, ever. All it will do is make your face red as a reaction to the badness in the oil.

I mentioned this.

Instead of a back and forth, a conversation, engaging with their dedicated fans, proven customers in fact, they panicked and deleted the post, blocked me from posting on to their wall and made no mention of it ever again.

This – in case you hadn’t guessed is *not* how to deal with your customers using social media. Not only have they lost a customer (me) they have had bad press written about them (here), lost the opportunity to explain themselves and develop their online personality. In fact they have in all ways behaved like a much larger company faced with bad press, delete it and clam up.

Well done “Spices Of India” I hope someone a little more media savvy takes over your marketing soon.

In Brighton (http://theskiff.org/). After my last post I wasn’t sure where to go but a quick drop in session assured me that I would be able to do more work from here than I could at home and with less interruptions so I have now officially moved in and I’ll be here every day from now on

I recently moved house. Most things about the move were brilliant, my daughter got her own room, we gained a larger bathroom and Kitchen. However we also lost a bedroom which meant that my spacious and pretty well kitted out home office has had to be moved into our bedroom. This, any number of people will tell you is a bad thing.

I love my wife and daughter very much but neither of them make ideal work mates when I’m trying to solve a tricky coding problem or I’m trying to find the best way of presenting 20 different information points on a complicated design draft. Because of this I’ve decided to start looking for a co-working space in Brighton that I can use in a flexible way around my family commitments.

So far I’ve looked in detail at three that are close enough to my house:

• The Skiff
• Midnight Communications
• Wall & Pleece

I’m favouring The Skiff but I think that might just be because I know of them more than I know of the others.

Anyway – I’m going to give them all a once over and see if I can actually work there for a day. All I need for a successful day is a solid internet connection and a comfy desk and they probably all have that. I’m most excited however about the opportunities for networking as I’m embarrassingly bad at getting out there and meeting local people in the industry, mainly because I worked in London for so long!

Wish me luck.