Redswish - carefully crafted banter

I'm a web 2.0 guy in a web 2.0 world!

Being a cool kinda guy, I was sat at home last night and decided to listen back to some of the recordings from last year’s Future of Web Design conference in New York. I know you’re jealous.

Elliot Jay Stocks, a designer I respect (possibly more due to his hair than his skills…) decided to rant about web 2.0 design. How could he commit such a heinous act? Well someone has to, and it may as well come from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

His ‘beef’ was not regarding the web 2.0 culture and technologies, but the design mindset; that accompanying this explosion of social web interaction and development is a sidelining assumption that to be ‘web 2.0′ you have to show off a glossy navigation bar, reflected logos, banners and badges, beveled edges etc. You all know what I’m talking about. And many of us are guilty – myself included.

Elliot’s point was that we should all stop being sheep, get trying new ideas, styles and approaches – push boundaries, get out of the web 2.0 mindset and keep evolving. And he’s right, hit the nail on the head.

My problem is (drumroll excuse), I’m a web 2.0 guy in a web 2.0 world! I’ve been designing for just over 2 years, I’m born into the web 2.0 explosion and have adopted a lot of my design styles from current trends. I’m not naturally a designer, I don’t have sketchbooks full of doodles and drawings and I never studied any form of natural or fine art. My experience is all purely web based.

So, just when I get to a point where I’m beginning to get comfortable with my design ability – Mr Stocks comes along and shakes it all up. And that’s exactly what I need, it’s exactly what all designers need. A slap in the face to say “Whoah, hold on matey – you ain’t there yet. Get setting trends instead of following them. What makes you so special if you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, you sheep?”

Well, all I have to say is that I’m sorry. I will double my efforts from now on and never settle for second best, I’ll even make sure to take a step back from the gloss mania every now and again. I’ll break web 2.0, you’ll see!

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What to do when you get Bloggers Cramp

image courtesy of fountainphoto.com

Every blogger gets it, indeed every writer gets it at some point. Writers/Bloggers cramp. (Can I coin the term ‘bloggers cramp’?)

I get it all the time. In fact it’s often the reason when Redswish hasn’t been updated for a week. Sometimes ideas run dry. For mainstream blogs that attract a lot of visitors, and especially blogs designed as a source of income – this can be crippling. So, there’s 2 main ways to avoid, or solve it.

1. Make the most of the times when the creative juice flows. Build a catalogue of drafts ready to be unleashed whenever you’re away, busy or just can’t think of anything to write about.

2. Get some god darn inspiration. Thanks to a handful of articles and tutorials out there on the net, there are plenty of methods of conjouring up ideas and copy. The most prominent article to have struck me recently is Darren Rowse’s post 24 things to do when stuck for a topic to blog about. Quite a handful of a title I know.

The article covers, well as the name suggests, 24 things to do when you have ‘bloggers cramp’. I would appreciate if you actually diverted from this site to read the article in full because not only is it full of useful tips, but the entire ProBlogger site is an invaluable resource.

However, some of the ideas it covers include:

• Change your writing environment
• Answer a question proposed to you through a comment, email or that you ask yourself
• Take a break
• Remove any distractions
• Revisit or expand on a previous post
• Try free writing or writing on paper first – about anything whatsoever
• Speak your post out loud, either to yourself or others. It may help to keep a narrative flow
• Change voices or styles
• Go searching for ideas online, or offline
• Ask your readers a question
• Do what I’m doing now and summarise other people’s work. Do not plagiarise but use it to build upon your own views and ideas.

One will often say ‘this only covers the basics’ or something similar. However, I feel Darren’s post pretty much covers all bases and is a fantastic reference for whenever you just can’t think of something to write.

I think it’s important to note that sometimes it’s better to post nothing at all than for the sake of it. When I cruise back through the past 6 months of posts on this blog, I realise how many useless, irrelevant and mildly annoying posts I’ve made, simply to fill a gap. Even though this is my blog and I can do what I want, visitors don’t want to read crap, they simply won’t come back.

Therefore it’s essential to keep your post styles, quality and if possible quantity as consistent as possible. Your readers will know what to expect and will stay interested.

If you’re lacking inspiration or any drafts to pull out when you need to get new posts up, try some of the techniques above. But if you’ve still got bloggers cramp, just leave it. Come back tomorrow.

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Which do you prefer – online or offline learning?

My latest post on the Flame blog covers the topic of offline learning (ie books and magazines) vs online tutorials, blogs and sites.

I personally probably prefer offline. Having debated with co-workers, print media seems to take the glory. This is down to a number of factors including a lack of distracting menus, images and adverts, the easier readability, the option to have a book open in front of you while keeping your monitor free, and because your are almost always guaranteed more high quality content from a book.

Check the post out here. And comment where you like!

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Sitepoint books for web designers

I would like to make a toast to the fantastic selection of web design/development oriented books delivered from Sitepoint. I own only a couple myself, the best of which is ‘The Principles of Beautiful Web Design‘, which I must say is a awesome book and reference.

Whether you’re a designer, client-side or server-side developer, project manager, freelancer, hacker, CSS Guru or jack-of-all-trades – you can be assured there’s something for you (how cheesy does that sound.)

My only advice would be to actually buy the books from Amazon – far cheaper. But check out the Sitepoint website anyway – it’s crammed with tutorials, articles and resources and is well worth bookmarking.

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CS4 Ashore!

That’s right folks… if you haven’t heard already, Adobe Photoshop CS4, working name Stonehenge, is in progress. I actually discovered this through a very similar route as others.

I, I mean ‘my friend’, whilst looking on ‘generic torrent site’, accidently searching for Photoshop CS3, stumbled upon CS4. I thought, I mean ‘my friend’ thought, you come across this all the time on torrent sites… false file names to entice people. But it was worth a little research detour.

So apparantly CS4 is in production, which of course makes sense. So far all that’s really known, or has been seen, is a beta loading screen:

Rumours suppose we should be looking towards the end of the year for this release, I think the end of next year is more likely. Things have been quiet on Adobe’s end, which could mean anything.

Personally, I doubt CS4 will be released under the name ‘Stonehenge’, and will most definitely not feature this title screen.

In fact, I’d even go as far to believe this is an entire hoax, either at some witty developer at Adobe’s doing, or some by some smart little computer wizard somewhere looking to cause a little mayhem.

Whatever the case, I’m both excited and couldn’t care less for CS4. Because I’m more than happy with CS3!

You know the old saying – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

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Haggling on the web

I’ll give you £20, £30, £25, Deal

The web is great for virtually everything (and I mean ‘virtually’). In a post I wrote a long, long time ago (in relation to the age of this blog), I proposed the age-old question of ‘What can’t you do on the web?‘. Well I’ve thought of something – Haggling.

In the West, Haggling doesn’t play much of a part in every-day shopping, eg:

Checkout Clerk: That’s £38
Customer: Oh no, that’s far too expensive
Checkout Clerk: Well you’ll have to put some back then, hurry up there’s a queue forming…
Customer: Well, how about I’ll give you £25 for it all?
Checkout Clerk: What? No… you can’t do that!
Customer: Come on! OK, £30 – that’s as high as I’ll go…
Checkout: Fine… Security!

… there’s nothing wrong with exaggerating a situation to make a point. It doesn’t really work. Sometimes it’s possible to get a free piano stool or cheese grater thrown in with the deal but generally, down to the forces of commercialism and capitalism – a price is a price is a price.

However, in Eastern, Arabic and to be honest, the majority of non-English speaking countries I’ve visited; haggling is a part of everyday life. And it’s fun, it livens up the shopping experience!

Now what about online?

Imagine going to Amazon, looking at the latest Katie Price autobiography (not that I’ve ever…) then clicking on a button entitled ‘I only want to pay…‘. How could that work? Perhaps Amazon in their infinite wisdom could create an algorithm that takes your proposition and finds a midway point between that, the buy-in price and selling price of the product, so as to still make a profit while making you feel that you’ve cheated the system? Yes I know it sounds absurd but I’m open to suggestions here.

I’ve read about (having never encountered) websites that flash a javascript box up when you try to leave the site claiming ‘If you’re not happy with the prices here, please ring us on this number and we can offer you a special price, just for you..’ or something along those lines. Personally that would annoy the hell out of me, but does strike me as a very close comparison to the Thai stall owner chasing you down the street to buy one of his mystical flutes… that has happened.

So, perhaps that is one thing that, up to now, hasn’t been achieved on the net. A price, is a price, is a price. Not that I’m complaining, if you look well enough, everything you could desire can be found at an excellent price, normally at Amazon!

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The ALA Survey 2008

I took it! The 2008 A List Apart survey. Jeffrey’s been ranting on about it on Twitter and his blog so as I generally get some benefit out of the result of these things – it seemed only fair to take part.

I don’t like filling out forms, but the Survey was actually quite enjoyable. The questions (all 18 pages – it sounds daunting but it’s really quite easy) were well-formed, understandable and to-the-point. The kind of questions where you know how the information could be used before you’ve even answered.

So – go and take the survey, and thanks to all the guys at ALA for putting it together. Hopefully the results will be enlightening and possibly provide useful benefits to us designers.

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Is Cuil all that cool?

Cuil is a new search engine service set to rival Google, ironically created by a group of previous Google employees. The search service, pronounced ‘cool’, claims to index over 120 billion pages (which if I may say so myself, is a staggering amount). Various sources reckon this is almost 3 times as much as Google, however Google state otherwise, although not revealing any actual statistics.

Cuil approaches search slightly differently from Google. Firstly, search results are displayed in a magazine format as opposed to a list. But their real USP is that they don’t collect user data as Google does. This could be a point that sways many people, especially in light of the recent focus on the amount and methods Google use to gather data on it’s users.

But do we need Cuil? Search results differ from Google’s, naturally, but Google has always been there to provide a service that works whilst giving even more in return. It has advanced far beyond it’s original purpose and is now an integral part of the internet. I can check my search history to remember how I reached a certain page or image, check my emails, see how many times I’ve visited a particular site through Google, webmaster and analyse my site’s stats and much more.

So how can Cuil even claim to rival Google? It can’t, it can only rival it’s search functionality, and as far as I knew there was nothing about Google’s search that required rivaling.

Personally I feel that Cuil… just isn’t. The search algorithms may blow a hole in the internet – yes the results returned are very concise. So are Google’s. That’s it. The user interface is ugly, I just feel the blue, black and grey does not work. The name seems like some half-arsed late attempt to jump on the ‘web 2.0 misspelled word’ bandwagon (even though it’s apparently derived from the Gaelic for ‘knowledge’ and ‘hazel’), and the claims that ‘it does a better and more comprehensive job of indexing information online’ are quite bold. And regardless of if it’s true – does it matter if no-one uses the service?

But let’s not be hasty. I will continue to dabble with Cuil, to discover if there are any true benefits. With such a huge web index and a fantastic team of ex-Googlers managing – there’s definitely potential. But the real test will be whether it still stands in 2/3 years time.

For more information on Cuil check BBC Tech News or of course – Cuil itself!

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The new site is alive!

New design, obviously not straying too far from the old one. Additions include Twitter and Flickr feeds, Gravatars and a few more features still to be added, including styling up the pagebar and adding social bookmarking links. But aside from that it’s here!

www.nathanbeck.co.uk will be up at the start of August, unfortunately it’s currently down because I’ve not been looking after my hosting.. tut tut.

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Google Pagerank finally updating!

Get on the edge of your seats people! Matt Cutt’s announced on Thursday that the latest Google Pagerank updates will become visible ’sometime over the next few days’.

Well I’m waiting… ‘anxiously’!

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