September 23rd, 2008
I’ve managed to increase my reading speed from around 270 words per minute (wpm) to just over 500 wpm.  My goal is that by the end of the week I will have it up around the 650 mark.  Obviously practise is huge part of the process and I needed to find a book that I was generally interested in but not desperate to read if reading quickly was a disaster and left me with no recollection of what I was reading.  So I grabbed Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, figuring that it wouldn’t hurt to read that and if it were a little dry then at least I was getting the speed reading a workout in exactly the way that I wanted - get something read before I get distracted by whatever new shiny thing comes along.
Fortunately the book rather than being a chore to read has come as a revelation to me and has opened my mind up to some of the fantastic concepts and promise of Web 2.0. Â As I’ve gone through it I haven’t been missing any of the concepts and yet have still maintained just under double my normal reading rate.
One of the practises though of getting real value out of speed reading is collaboration, a topic found quite heavily in Wikinomics.  You read a book quickly whilst others read books of their own quickly and then you present the core concepts and ideas of each book to each other, thus allowing you to grapple with a lot of information in a fraction of the time.
Since I’m not in one of those study groups I figured I would just share some of the key concepts here, maybe you’ll get something out of it, I certainly will and since it’s my house I can do what I want.
One of the first parts of the book talks about the benefits in open collaboration to corporations and individuals. Â How the idea of being transparent with your intellectual property can lead to financial rewards rather than failure. Â It talks about companies that have begun sharing what was once closely guarded secrets are now reaping the rewards of having the whole web community as their research and development department and by shifting their revenue avenues making more profit.
There is a company that I had a very small role in evaluating last year called Squiz, specifically we were looking at their open source CMS solution MySource Matrix. Â It took a little bit to get used to the idea that the company itself was developing an open source product that anyone can download, install themselves and configure to suit their needs.
Surely the company would sink because they are giving their product away for free, which actually wasn’t the case at all, their product was the value add that they offered as they are the absolute experts in the product. Â You can, if you are so inclined spend the time trying to configure the system yourself, but they can do it quickly and more efficiently than you probably can. Â They can also customise modules for you, build up new capabilities and train your people. Â This is where they can make their money. Â
The key thing about this whole situation though is that everyone benefits from improvements made to open source framework. Â The Squiz research and development team is their entire client base and as people tear the software apart and make improvements, the framework gets better and better. Â They then can focus on delivering their services to the clients who are driving the direction of the CMS.
At least that’s how I imagine the theory works and if it isn’t exactly that way it still makes in my mind good business.
You see you can look at it in a non-info-tech scenario to illustrate why open sourcing your product isn’t the end of the world or profit:
Plumbing.
There is no army of lawyers and corporations trying to keep you from understanding how plumbing works, there are about a million books on do it yourself plumbing etc. Â You can buy the tools and the materials from your local hardware store without licensing or signing non-disclosure agreements. Â There is nothing stopping you from learning everything there is to know about plumbing. Â
But some of us just are no good at plumbing, I don’t imagine it is easy for one minute. Â I don’t personally have the inclination or the time to learn how or to develop the skill-set. Â Which is no problem because there are plumbers. Â Plumbers who are very good at what they do and can make a decent living selling their skills. Â But they don’t sell you the secret of plumbing, because there is no secret, in fact most plumbers I’ve ever dealt with are more than happy to tell me what the problem actually is and how they’re going to fix it.
There will always be plumbers, despite the source code of plumbing being available. Â I imagine the same for software.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Categories: Books, Web Design |
Tags: Anthony D. Williams, Books, don tapscott, open collaboration, open source, reading speed, research and development, speed reading book, wikinomics | 10 Comments
June 17th, 2008
I was talking about this the other day, about what the actual value of a tag cloud is and if anyone had implemented it really well.
My initial reactions were ‘of course’, ‘they’re everywhere’ and something to the effect of yes they’re very clever.
Of course only some of my thoughts were gathered for this conversation and I did go away and really considered the effectiveness of a tag cloud specifically for blogs and why I generally warm more to a tag cloud than a list of categories.
I’ve embraced a tag cloud on my site pretty much from the moment I discovered a plugin to do so. Â Maybe it’s just the way my mind is wired but I’ve always liked the look and feel of them. Â So when I was able to I had to have one.
The only thing is that originally I don’t think I used it well, it wasn’t very well integrated into the site. Â Tags were an afterthought if I was feeling particulary thorough on the day.
My categories were my bread and butter, you want to read about my thoughts on a television show then you have to go and have a look at the television category (or use search, never forget search!), but who knows from the title ‘television’ which shows I was talking about. Â I’m talking Star Trek and 24 and you were hoping for Gilmore Girls. Â If instead of my category list you were looking at a tag cloud you may notice Star Trek and Jack Bauer in the cloud but no Rory or what’s his name who has the baseball cap in Gilmore Girls.
This is all very well and good but I have somewhere in the vicinity of 200 plus tags and they show up randomly in my tag cloud so this isn’t the best way to navigate my site, if you are really interested in reading my thoughts on Ghost Rider it’s probably best to do a search unless it’s his turn to show up in the tag cloud.
But how do you know that I might be writing about Ghost Rider if he doesn’t show up immediately in the tags or the categories. Â Well this is where the real value is, and this is something that I discovered on the Aussie Blogger’s Forum (which is celebrating its six month anniversary too btw). Â Your tag cloud is a great summary of your blog.
You see I was working on my about me page at the time and I was wondering if my site was focused and on topic enough. Â Speaking to someone on the forum I mentioned my concerns and they went straight to my tag cloud and said it paints a pretty clear picture that you write about popular culture, sure enough there it was, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Comics, Iron Man, Sci Fi, books etc.
Now it becomes clear how important the tag cloud is to your first time readers who will very generously give you something like four seconds or something to be convinced to stay. Â If your tag cloud has keywords and topics that grabs my interest I’m more likely to bookmark the site and come back or even continue reading there and then!
Mmmmm I’m thinking of a template refit and maybe I’ll bump my tag cloud higher.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Categories: Web Design, blogging |
Tags: blogging, Tag Clouds | 14 Comments
March 30th, 2008
I didn’t get the chance this weekend to draw as much as I had hoped, actually I barely got the chance to throw a couple of outline lines down, but I did work on sargedesign.com’s refit. I’m building it as a portfolio site and using a Wordpress theme to do so, unfortunately I have to completely gut the theme and rebuild it. By the time I finish it it should be a pretty sweet theme.
But I’m going to do something here that I wouldn’t normally but it may interest you to see the process. Here is the sketch of Iron Man that I’m working on, the pose may change the surroundings will definitely change but it gives you an idea of where I’m going:
No podcat today either, maybe later in the week.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Categories: Art, Comics, Web Design |
Tags: Art, comic book, iron man, sketch, Web Design | 4 Comments
October 27th, 2006
I recently changed sargedesign.com from it’s zen orientated Flash based website to a still zen but now CSS styled site. A couple of my friends had trouble using the old site and I’ve decided to go with a more universal and bandwidth friendly site.
But I saw this website the other day and to me it is the perfect use of Flash - check out http://www.willyoung.co.uk/home/ to see what I mean.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: Flash, using flash | No Comments
October 25th, 2006
Please note that the images in this post are currently missing due to a move in domains - I’ll get them back ASAP or advise that they are gone forever.
On the standard MySpace profile your name is in text in the top left hand corner.
Now what if you wanted to change this to something a little more cool like:
The code you will use is:
span.nametext {font-size:0.5pt; display:block;
background-image:
url(http://yoursite.com/yourimage.jpg);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:center;
overflow:none; background-attachment:scroll;
text-align:center; width:200px; height:50px;
color:white;}
The image itself you’ll want to be careful with it’s background colour so it matches your existing background and also the size - it’ll be cropped if you don’t change the text-align tag to your dimensions. Another word about the size is remember anything you do here will effect the rest of the page - if you put an image too tall it’ll push everything down.
I loaded this into the “who I’d like to meet” section just to keep it seperate from the other CSS we put in the other day - really I would normally put it all in the one CSS but again I’m breaking it all up for these purposes.
The name still appears but tiny and in white so it doesn’t show up against the background colour - you need to change yours to reflect your own background colour (remember leave out the #).
And there you have it you now have an image for your name!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: myspace | 4 Comments
October 24th, 2006
Please note that the images in this post are currently missing due to a move in domains - I’ll get them back ASAP or advise that they are gone forever.
For some reason and I’m not entirely sure why on MySpace they have a 435×75 box with the words “yourname is in your extended network”. This stands out straight away and takes up valuable screen space. In this quick guide I’ll show you how I’m customising this section and taking back this real estate.
A number of people have recognised the value in having a MySpace site in conjunction with their ‘normal’ website. It’s a marketing extension that allows you to take advantage of the extended network. Mmmmm maybe that’s why those words are there…nope you’re still got to go - sorry Tom!
The websites that I’ll be working with are www.quietpaws.com and myspace.com/quietpaws. Fortunately I know the owner and she’ll cut me some slack whilst doing this so I can make future revisions. Normally when skinning a MySpace page I would make an overall look and feel master image to work from but for the sake of these guides I really just want to focus on the smaller changes that you can make yourself. If you visit the site in the future and it’s all different you’ll know why!
If you take a look at QuietPaws you’ll notice it has an obvious style and uses the ‘paws’ imagery as it’s flourish. We’re going to use the main graphic at the top to create a banner that people can see so they know to visit the main site from it’s Myspace cousin.
First off we already have the dimensions 435px x 75px. My web graphics program of choice is Macromedia Fireworks (now Adobe). So straight away I’m setting up a blank canvas in those dimensions. One of the things that is good about the standard MySpace page (and I assure you there isn’t that much that’s good!) is it’s plain colours. Anything we do here now won’t really look that much out of place.
I’m not going to go too much into what makes a good banner here because I’m really more concerned about how we get it onto MySpace. It is fortunate though because I did the design on QuietPaws I’ve got access to the source files and images etc.
Here is the design I’ve gone with.
Now how are we going to get MySpace to deal with this?
We’re going to insert some CSS code directly in the ‘About Me’ section in MySpace. The code itself is fairly straight forward though MySpace does do some weird things such as
strip out # in any colour descriptions. At any rate the code you use is:
table table table td { !important;} span.blacktext12 { color:transparent; visibility:visible !important; background-color:transparent; background-image:url(”http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/banners/yourimage.jpg”); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-position:center center; font-size:0px; letter-spacing:-0.5px; width:435px; height:75px; display:block !important; } span.blacktext12 img {display:none; }
table table table td { !important;} span.blacktext12 { color:transparent; visibility:visible !important; background-color:transparent; background-image:url(\’http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/banners/yourimage.jpg\’); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-position:center center; font-size:0px; letter-spacing:-0.5px; width:435px; height:75px; display:block !important; } span.blacktext12 img {display:none; } table table table td { !important;} span.blacktext12 { color:transparent; visibility:visible !important; background-color:transparent; background-image:url(”http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/banners/yourimage.jpg”); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-position:center center; font-size:0px; letter-spacing:-0.5px; width:435px; height:75px; display:block !important; } span.blacktext12 img {display:none; }
Remember of course to change the background-image url to whereever you host your image.
Take that code and cut and paste into the about me section in MySpace:
And all done!
becomes
Popularity: 17% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: extended network, macromedia fireworks, myspace, myspace page | 1 Comment
October 21st, 2006
Been a little busy over the last couple of days working on a couple of smaller projects. The biggest of these is Crypt Hunter which i’m pleased to say just goes from strength to strength. Last month we doubled the unique hits on the site and this month we’ve already smashed that figure and going to do around four times as many visitors as last month. With the growth we expanded it a little and now you can buy stuff with the Bowler Hat Brigade (read the site from the start to make sense of this!!). the next thing will be to put up a downloads page where you can download a couple of desktops.
Click Here To Visit The Store!
I was really happy with the ‘Dummies’ mock up I did for that post too - it came up really well (check it out here) .
The next thing I’m going to be doing is a new layout for a myspace profile and blog page for quietpaws (I did the wordpress blog site). I’ve done layouts there before but myspace can be quirky and you have to do a bit of gonzo CSS to make it do what you want! I’ll post here my progress.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: blogging, crypt hunter, myspace, new layout | 2 Comments
October 19th, 2006
After about a year away from the ‘web’ industry I really felt when I decided to come back that a refresher course was in store and I must say it has been refreshing!
I’m going back and doing all the HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL tutorials I can get my hands on. Not that I really need it but I think it’s good to sometimes strip back to the bare essentials and renew your confidence. Besides even good old HTML has changed over the past couple of years and CSS has become really important. Sites like myspace and blogging tools really show what knowing a fair bit about style sheets can do!
The other things that I’m looking at are business related guides too I figure it all helps - might have to learn a new language too!
Popularity: 5% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: blogging, html css, myspace, starting from scratch, style sheets | 2 Comments
