MrQwest is the alias of Anthony Killeen, a London based freelance web design & development chap who enjoys building accessible & elegant websites. Let's talk!
Adding some texture to your site
The Great Big HDMI Cable Rip Off
A retrospect of the last decade
Using Gmail on your iPod Touch
Everyone’s heard of A List Apart right? The sweet website with some fantastic articles on the web published every fortnight? I’m a big fan of ALA, my Instapaper account is full of ALA articles ready to read when I get a spare 10 minutes.
ALA is a great resources for designers & developers alike — in fact, it’s perfect for anyone who works with the web.
So you can tell I’m a fan of A List Apart. Can you imagine my excitement when I heard they were starting a collection of books? Not big books though, short & sweet books all focused on one subject each. No technical mumbo jumbo, just the basics of what you need to know in a no-nonsense manner.
Fantastic! A book doesn’t hold my attention for long so something like this is ideal!
The first book to be released (A Book Apart #1) is written by Jeremy Keith and is called HTML5 For Web Designers.
I read the book on Sunday and so glad I did!
HTML5 isn’t a subject I’ve really looked into; but it is something that I — and every other web developer — should get to know & love. As a specification, HTML5 is still relatively new and the browser makers have only recently (last 6 months or so?) jumped on board – but not all browsers cover the same HTML elements at the moment, so do bear that in mind.
The book however is a great starting point in getting your head around the new HTML5 elements. It gives you quick overviews of the main new tags like <header>, <nav>, <article>, <section> & <canvas> as well as media tags like <audio>, & <video> for native media playback. It also gives you some real world examples on how you’d put these new tags to use including there attributes & how they can make your code more semantic and easier to use.
As I mentioned, this is a whistle stop round-up of HTML5 in a nifty little book. Thanks to Jeremy Keith’s unique writing style, it’s easy-to-read and hard to put down!
I’m certainly looking forward to the next one!
Did you get a copy of this book? What do you reckon?
Last week, I came across Jeremy Keith’s huffduffer – a service for creating your own podcast of ‘found sounds’ that you find online.
A good thing about this service is that it also lists audio found by others. Riding at the top of the most popular ‘found sounds’ was Relly Annett-Baker’s talk at @media earlier this year titled ‘All The Small Things’. I follow @RellyAB on Twitter but don’t really know a lot about what she does except she’s good with copy.
So I downloaded the audio file, loaded it onto my iPod and listened on my way home from work.
What got me about Relly’s talk is that she is so enthusiastic about what she does, she knows her stuff and knows how to convey the message so that everyone understands! I was gripped by her talk, so much so I’ve listened through a couple of times already and will be handing a copy to our marketing dept at work so they can understand the importance of copy!
What I took from her talk though is that just the simplest changes to some micro-copy can make the world of difference to the end user!
I also noted that as web designers, developers & web ‘creationists’ (I hate that word), we sometimes think that the copy we write can be understood by all, where in actual fact – it can only be understood by those who work with the web. There’s no point telling an end-user that there’s an ‘Error 404 – file not found’. What the hell does that mean to anyone who doesn’t understand it?
We understand it, we know there’s a page or file missing somewhere & we know how to fix it or what to do when we come across that message, but to Joe Soap who uses the internet for the odd email & browsing the BBC website, a ‘File Not Found’ error message is jargon.
In fact, the ‘File Not Found’ error message sounds like it was written by a techie trying to reach out to Joe Soap & speak simply – but failed.
A simple change to something like “Oh no, the page you’re trying to visit isn’t here anymore, but let’s try to find it for you” and then put a search box or some options to at least direct the user elsewhere.
A lot of what Relly said made sense and it’s certainly made me think about the way I deal with copy & how I should ‘direct’ the user along a path to their goal! I’m no expert at copy, but this talk has certainly helped me understand it better.
If you work on the web, if you’re ever in a situation where you need to write copy for a website or a form or anything related to it, I urge you to take download / listen to Relly’s talk!
Simon Collison recently announced his new venture – New Adventures in web design, a web design conference held in Nottingham in 2011.
There are a lot of design conferences now, but each one seems to have a high price point for tickets. For some, this isn’t a problem as conferences are a chance to meet up with old friends, spark up new relationships and build up some contacts within the industry – however for some of us (like myself), it’s just too much money. I’d love to visit Build but with the tickets starting at £200 £250 for the conference ticket, it’s just a bit too high.
‘New Adventures’ however, is priced at a reasonable £80, and that seems very reasonable when you see the line up of speakers… Some of my favourite designers including Tim Van Damme, Elliot Jay Stocks & Sarah Parmenter as well as a host of others. Just check out the website for the full line up!
So the fact that it’s 2 hours from London, and incredibly priced, how could I not register?
It’ll be my first conference, and even though it’s 6 months away – I’m already nervous.
You see, I’ve never been a sociable person. On a computer, I’m ok (isn’t everyone?) but in person, i’m shy and awkward. I tend to avoid social situations if I can. But this is something I have to work on, so that’s the other reason I’m going to ‘New Adventures…’
I’ve never been to a web conference before, I’m going on my own & I won’t know anyone there. It’ll will go one of two ways. I will sit in silence on my own, in the corner awkwardly fumbling with my phone so it looks like I’m busy or I will try and be social, spark up some conversation and hopefully make a couple of friends either before hand or on the day.
Are you going to the “New Adventures in web design” conference? Fancy saying hello?
That clever chap, Oliver Ker has been busy tinkering away and has produced a iPhone friendly version of the Textpattern interface.
I’ve always tried typing and editing this website on my iPod but it’s just not an ideal method. Using Oli’s interface though makes life so much easier.
Textpattern now feels at home on my iPod / iPhone and it feels great to use. In fact, I am writing this on my iPod and it works like a dream.
TXP Mobile is currently in a very early beta but can be downloaded from the TXP Mobile. It requires you to upload a few files so you’ll need FTP access & a small edit of a file once on your server & then you’re all good to go!
If you’re a Textpattern user & you’ve wanted to update your TXP website using your iPhone, you’ll want to have a look at this one.
dribbble appears to be the community that most designers want to be in on. It’s an invite only community for designers which askes “What are you working on?”. Post up a teaser or snapshop (400×300px or less) of what your working on for critique, praise or constructive criticism. Whatever.
There’s a lot of buzz around the website and a lot of talent already drafted to the team and there’s also a lot of designers who want in on the fun.
Invites are few & far between and it’s proven difficult to get one.
However, over the last couple of days, Rogie from Komodo Media has set up a small raffle…
Welcome to the first ever Dribbble community charity campaign. Yaron Schoen, Chris Wallace, Brad Miller (aka Christopher Walken), Rogie King and a whole slew of generous Dribbble community members have combined forces to raffle off over 25 Dribbble invites.
The idea is you donate $5 to “charity:water” and your name is put in the hat for an invite. Donate $10, you get two tickets, donate $50 & get 10 tickets… You get the idea, for every $5, you get a virtual raffle ticket.
We’re hoping to hit $5,000. We’re just under $1300 at the moment.
Anyway, head on over to the dribbble rebound post for more details on how to donate… and if you’re already on dribbble, why not have a go at rebounding the shot yourself?
© Copyright 2007-10 Anthony Killeen, MrQwest