Imbimp.com

Integrating AIR Application with iTunes

Tim — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:15:22 +0000

iTunes has long been a closed platform and Adobe AIR is not designed to natively launch or interact with other applications except for the browser. I needed a solution to add MP3 files downloaded through an AIR application to iTunes or any other media player that the user may have installed.

Option 1…

Modifying the iTunes library XML file could potentially be done, but this has risks. Firstly, the XML file can get prohibitively big, and given AIR can only use the DOM method for parsing XML, it could crash the application and do untold damage to the XML library itself, which brings up the issue to backing up the library first. Also unknown is the behavior if iTunes tries to modify the library at the same time as the AIR application, not to mention the requirement to restart iTunes after the change to reflect the changes. All in all this was not a good option, with lengthy development, risky outcome and poor user experience.

Option 2…

iTunes has a COM api library accessible from a native java or .Net application, which in turn could be initiated by AIR. This is far from ideal due to having a second application running on the user’s computer, the volume of development effort to create the application and the complexity.

Option 3…

Users can commonly add songs to iTunes by dragging files into it. This is accompanied by the fact that iTunes launches when double-clicking on any file associated with it such as .mp4 or .mp3 and of course .m3u playlist files. By launching an m3u file with a collection of track paths contained within it, iTunes will launch, songs will be added to the library and user experience is not compromised and development is simple. Although AIR cannot natively launch iTunes, it can launch files, via the browser, thus launching any application that is associated with the file-type. m3u files are commonly associated with iTunes, but also windows media player and any other media player worthy of use.

The key area of development is to dynamically create m3u playlists before calling them with a URLRequest. This function uses Fzip to unzip any zip files that may have been downloaded and creates a collection of paths to write to the playlist file. The playlist data is stored in memory with each download item until the user decides to add the item.

private function generatePlaylist():void {
var playlistName:String = (tmpFile.name.split(’.'))[0]
var os:String = Capabilities.os.substr(0, 3).toLowerCase();

var playlistpath:String
if (os == “mac”) {
if (productType == “album”) {
playlistpath = unzip(File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath(tmpDownloadURL + artistPath + tmpFile.name.replace(”.tmp”,”")).url,File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath(tmpDownloadURL + artistPath).url);
} else {
playlistpath = viewableDownloadURL + artistPath + tmpFile.name.replace(”.tmp”,”");
}
} else {
if (productType == “album”) {
playlistpath = unzip(File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath(tmpDownloadURL + artistPath + tmpFile.name.replace(”.tmp”,”")).url,File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath(tmpDownloadURL + artistPath).url);
} else {
playlistpath = viewableDownloadURL + artistPath.replace(/\//g, “\\”) + tmpFile.name.replace(”.tmp”,”");
}
}
this.Playlist = playlistpath;
}

I kind of got into a mini pickle over forward slashes and back slashes that causes this function to be a little more complicated than is probably necessary, but you get the idea. Next it is necessary to create the playlist file and do the URLRequest after a button-click…

public function addToItunes(e:MouseEvent):void {
var playlistfile:File = File.applicationStorageDirectory.resolvePath(”playListCache/” + e.currentTarget.data[6] + “.m3u”);
var playliststream:FileStream = new FileStream();
var dlManager:DownloadManager;

for (var i:uint = 0; i < downloadManagerObjects.length; i++) {
dlManager = DownloadManager(downloadManagerObjects[i]);

if (e.currentTarget.data[2] == dlManager.FileID) {
playliststream.open(playlistfile, FileMode.WRITE);
playliststream.writeUTFBytes(dlManager.Playlist);
playliststream.close();
}
}
navigateToURL(new URLRequest(playlistfile.url), 'quote');
stage.nativeWindow.alwaysInFront = true;
stage.nativeWindow.alwaysInFront = false;
}

Notably I do a bit of mucking about with the stage to make sure the application stays in front when launching the URL through the browser.

Custom Flex Wordpress Frontend

Tim — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:12:44 +0000

Creating a front-end for wordpress is incredibly easy and great for making weird and unnecessary versions of the site with UI swoops and swishes. All the data you need is available in the RSS feed for the site. You could even add a special feed specifically for the purpose of supporting a flash version of the site. Just make sure you change the settings to add a good number of full posts to the feed. You can always link back to the site for anything older than that.

The flex version of Imbimp just went live and it tries to improve on the standard Imbimp cardboard interface by keeping everything on one page, where arrows allow the user to browse new content. The widget sidebar is also combined with the navigation. There are no huge benefits to either party (ie me or random imbimp reader) but it’s a good proof of concept of what can be rustled together using Flex in about a day.

Fetching the RSS feed is as easy as calling an httpService…

result=”loadWordpressXML(event)” />

and…

private function loadWordpressXML(evtObj:ResultEvent):void {
var myURLPattern1:RegExp = /content:encoded/g;
var myXMLString:String = evtObj.result.toString().replace(myURLPattern1, “content”);
wordpressXML = XML(myXMLString);
}

From here you can then use the XML in whichever way suits your design… For example, here I am creating the navigation dynamically…

private function generateNavigation():void {
for each (var itemXML:XML in wordpressXML.channel.item) {
var navigationItemHBox:VBox = new VBox;
navigationItemHBox.styleName = “navigationBackground”;
navigationItemHBox.width = 280;
navigationItemHBox.height = 37;
var navigationLabel:Label = new Label;
navigationLabel.text = itemXML.title;
navigationLabel.width = 240;
navigationLabel.styleName = “navigationText”;
navigationLabel.truncateToFit = true;
navigationLabel.buttonMode = true;
navigationLabel.useHandCursor = true;
navigationLabel.mouseChildren = false;
navigationLabel.data = itemXML.guid;
navigationLabel.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK,selectPost);
navigationItemHBox.addChild(navigationLabel);
navigation.addChild(navigationItemHBox);
}
}

The most difficult part was to position the main post elements in the right place before whizzing them into view. There is a little bit of dubious logic required to do that. Look at the attached source for that.

Also given the increased size of the feed - ie it loads 100 post in one go (not including images) it’s important to have some kind of preloader in place while things load up.

Download an earlyish version of the source here to see how I did…

…and see the finished version here

Flex 3: LocalConnection fails for no reason

Tim — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:48:36 +0000

I have had more problems than worth mentioning with the LocalConnection API, but felt compelled to write about it after finally getting everything up and running.

The setup I have involves an AIR app communicating with a Flex 3 application running on an SSL enabled web page and back again. There seems to be rarely any problems going from browser to AIR, since the AIR app is easily addressable using the applicationID and publisherID strings or by passing strings though outside of the localconnection method in arguments along with the browserInvoke event.

When communicating from the AIR app back to the browser it seems to be rather fragile and fails regularly. Addressing the browser I use the last part of the domain and random ID of the browser flex instance (see previous post) eg “imbimp.com:dhdvgks35357″.

Now unbeknown to me, the domain string should not be the top level domain shown in the browsers address bar but should in fact match the TLD of where the Flex SWF file is hosted if of course it is different from your original site.

There are a few confusing bits and pieces to include around allowDomain and allowInsecureDomain, all of which are fairly well documented on Adobe’s livedocs pages, but seemed to have little effect when faced with inadvertantly addressing the wrong place.

No error event is thown in this case, just a statusEvent classing the connection attempt as an error of no particular type. Annoying.

Flex 3: Detecting Network Status

Tim — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:24:52 +0000

There are a number of methods to detect network connectivity, all of which can be read about here, here, here and here. What I found is that these seem to work fine when there is an actual change in your network connection. eg disconnecting your wireless connection, unplugging a network cable or USB modem. But if there is just a drop in network connectivity, such as a break the router side, invisible to the user’s PC then these methods work less well.

When using a URL monitor in flex, it polls for a URL on first start, and then after that you can configure the poll interval depending on your needs. Unfortunately, this is far from ideal given that people are online more often than offline, and its just not great to poll some URL every few seconds when it really isn’t necessary.

My recent download manager application uses a URL monitor but it also has a timer running in the background for each download. Every 10 seconds it checks to see if the bytes downloaded has changed. The theory being that if even the slowest net connection has downloaded 0 bytes in 10 seconds, its safe to say there is probably a network problem. It then begins polling every 10 seconds until there is a response and then assumes the user is online again and the download can continue. This is done as follows….

Firstly I initiate a timer and update value using a progressEvent tied to my URLStream.

private function onDownloadProgress(event:ProgressEvent):void {
value = Math.round(event.bytesLoaded);
}

Then I compare the bytes downloaded to a running count as follows…

private function possibleNetworkProblem(e:TimerEvent):void {
if (lastLotOfBytes == value) {
lastLotOfBytes = 0;
sendNetworkError();
} else {
lastLotOfBytes = value
}
}

If the values have not changed then I disconnect and reconnect the URL monitor every 10 seconds until network returns….

private function sendNetworkError():void {
if (monitor.available) {
myTimer.stop();
myTimer.removeEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER,possibleNetworkProblem);
initiateDownloads();
}
monitor.removeEventListener(StatusEvent.STATUS, announceStatus);
monitor.stop();
monitor.start();
monitor.addEventListener(StatusEvent.STATUS, announceStatus);
}

Downloading Large Files using Flex/AIR

Tim — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:39:43 +0000

During my download manager development I tried a number of different methods to download files. This article was invaluable, as it explains how to download in 50k chunks rather than buffering much larger amounts.

To start with a tried buffering about 5mb. Seemed sensible, since I figured it would cut the amount of writing to disk that would required. Especially since most mp3 files are about that size. Unfortunately it did not work, since for some reason downloaded files were becoming corrupted. 50k is a pretty good level of buffering to improve performance and avoid an infinite level of disk reads.

For a while I figured that changing the method for downloading was impacting performance due to the application hanging and scrolling being disabled. This was due to an unnecessary amount of debugging though. Or rather - writing out to a text field for the purpose of debugging without relying on trace statements.

Set-top Box with Flash Lite 3.1 for the Digital Home

Tim — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:42:10 +0000

There seems to be a general obsession with getting flash onto mobile devices of all kinds, but little documentation around running it from a set-top box. Given this is what I want to do, I thought I would write about some of the considerations, given there appears to be little else written about this other than some high-level points and brief tutorials on the Adobe site. Apologies in advance to anyone else stumbling across this article…it provides no answers, but perhaps some helpful sole will comment.

Availability:

Availability lists seem to show mobile devices, when in fact there is no reason a fridge couldn’t be flash enabled or even a tap. So firstly I would like to know what set-top boxes, available now have Flash Lite 3.1 on them, and where can they be purchased from?

Software Stack

Now if these mysterious devices do indeed exist, what comes with them? Do you get a video player, with all the c++ extensions and ActionScript methods all sitting there waiting to be used, or is this a prerequisite of the development?

Hopefully this is enough for this post to surface in Google and maybe the lack of any helpful information will encourage others to improve the level of support in this area. Updates once I learn more…

Flex 3: 40k argument limit for LocalConnection

Tim — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:07:12 +0000

Using either the arguments field when launching an AIR app from a browser or initiating a local connection between AIR apps or Flex apps and the browser is a great way to pass data and create a better integrated user experience. However, there are some serious flaws. The documented limit for passing data between flex application using LocalConnection is 40Kb. This is easily enough for a few IDs, but not a sizable XML document.

The argument field when launching or installing AIR applications from the browser when creating a custom AIR badge is even more restrictive. It is not clear what the limit is for this although in various tests it seems closer to 10Kb. The workaround is to split data into chunks and then send multiple messages. Here is how I did it….

Firstly gather the XML either by generating dynamically or in my case fetching it from the page using the ExternalInterface call to a JS function embedded on the page in the browser…

var orderXML:String = ExternalInterface.call(”getXML”);
var arguments:XML = XML(orderXML);
xmlChunkProcessor(arguments);

Next the xmlChunkProcessor loops through the repeated nodes in the XML passes blocks of 10 items back out. 10 worked fine given the limited amount of data in each “delivery” node. However this figure may need to be change depending on the complexity of each node…

private function xmlChunkProcessor(arguments:XML):void {
var item:XML;
var counter:int = 0;
for each (item in arguments..delivery) {
counter++;
chunk += item.toString();
if (counter == 10) {
xmlChunkDispatcher(chunk);
chunk = “”;
counter = 0;
}
}
if (counter < 10) {
xmlChunkDispatcher(chunk);
chunk = "";
}
}

Lastly the xmlChunkDispatcher adds xml headers and footers to the collected nodes and sends it off to the application the needs it using the localCollection method in the function sendMessage…

private function xmlChunkDispatcher(chunk:String):void {
var queueString:String = xmlHeader;
queueString += chunk;
queueString += xmlFooter;
sendMessage(XML(queueString));
}

I have tested this with upwards of 300 items, so the receiving application would receive 30+ messages in quick succession. This seems to work OK, but performance in the application degrades depending on what processing needs to be done to the XML the other end. In my case i am using the XML to build UI objects and so once you get beyond 300…it runs very slowly.

Flex 3: Image Caching/404 Handling

Tim — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:46:01 +0000

Sometimes it may be useful to cache images locally or provide default alternatives in situations where an AIR application is used offline. When linking to images at a URL always add an IOErrorEvent listener to the image, so that it is caught….

myImage.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, Application.application.img_error);

Then rather than showing a broken image, a better and local alternative can be shown in its place….

public function img_error(evt:IOErrorEvent):void {
var defaultImage:String = File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath(”images/default.jpg”).nativePath;
}

If the AIR application is launched by the browser, then its fair to assume that the application is likely to be online when first launched, this gives you the opportunity to cache images for use later when the application has more patchy connectivity.

Take a look at this CacheImage class, which can be used when the application is online to cache images and then use them later….

var imageCacheFile:File = File.applicationStorageDirectory.resolvePath(”imageCache/” + imageName);
if (imageCacheFile.exists) {
myImage.source = imageCacheFile.nativePath;
} else {
var imageCache:CacheImage = new CacheImage(imageSource, imageName, imageCacheFile, defaultImage);
myImage.source = imageSource;
}

Flex 3: Anti-aliasing on buttons, tabs & other labels

Tim — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:29:18 +0000

Over on the Adobe live docs page on embedding fonts and anti-aliasing there is plenty of help on how to go about getting elements looking good.

Firstly, is it really necessary to embed standard web fonts to do anti-aliasing? Seems a bit overkill, since 99.9% of users must have these fonts…thats why they are standard web fonts. It increases the size of each application and creates more work/processing. Lets just have an option to make text anti-aliased and be done with it.

Secondly, is it just me or do the examples on the Adobe page clearly show buttons with dreadfully pixelated text. Sure, the labels looks good. But try making the text of a button, or a tab or a progress bar label anti-aliased. It just doesn’t work. This is fine for applications that do not use any of these items. But for everything else, it seems like a bit of an irritating gap.

I ended up using images or simple labels to get round this.

Flex 3: Messages between multiple browsers and AIR

Tim — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:19:45 +0000

Sending messages from the browser and AIR using the Flex localConnection class is fairly well documented. I recently needed to extend this to support multiple instances of the same browser flex application talking to a single AIR app. (Cheers to Dave for this trick!)

To do this I assigned each browser instance a random ID, which is sent across in the arguments of a standard AIR launch call…

_air.launchApplication(appID, pubID, currentlyConnectedSwf);

or on install of the application

_air.installApplication(appURL, runtimeVersion, currentlyConnectedSwf);

Over in the AIR application I then return the message from the AIR app targeting the specific browser instance using the ID collected by the browserInvoke method….

outGoingConn.send(”www.imbimp.com” + “:” + currentlyConnectedSwf, “localConnectionHandler”, ‘AIR to SWF’);

Flex 3: Detecting hard disk space

Tim — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:03:45 +0000

Flex does not appear to have a library that deals very well running out of disk space, and this was a key part of the recent work I did on a download manager. When downloading files using the URLStream method and saving to disk with a fileStream, if you run out of space, either on your main hard disk or perhaps a USB flash drive you will get a runtime IO error, #3003.

This is handled easily enough with an event listener…

stream.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, ioErrorHandler);

But also ensure this is followed up with a check for the error code, since the same ioError will be fired if network connection goes down unexpectedly.

Passing XML to AIR app via a Browser

Tim — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:12:58 +0000

In my recent efforts to create an MP3 downloader application I have been extensively investigating the Adobe Flex browser API to pass through download URLs and other meta data through to my app.

Any sensible person would ensure a web service or suitable server-based XML file was available to AIR requiring only an ID or two to get going but in this instance I had no such luxury.

Typically a flash/flex badge sits on a website and can detect, install and launch an AIR app while passing through simple arguments. It is not widely documented that these arguments may only be alpha-numeric and may not include special characters like dots, slashes, percents and ampersands. This counts simple encoding out.

The way the flash badge fetches content from the page is using the External Interface method whereby the flash badge can call JavaScript functions embedded on the page, which in turn allows XML, also embedded in the page, to be collected and encoded.

I came up with my own encoding mechanism so that XML could be passed through the flash badge and into my AIR app as a string and then decoded there. This meant replacing . with DOT and % with PCNT and / with SLSH etc etc

So everything is working a lot better now, although it would be helpful if Adobe included details about this restriction in their Flex documentation to save wasting time debugging why the flash badge fails to launch the AIR app for no apparent reason. It’s probably a fair restriction for various security reasons due to people running dubious scripts on even more dubious websites that would somehow take hold of your computer via AIR. I had never thought a percent sign could be so dangerous, exclamation marks are much more scary.

London Run on Bikes

Tim — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:16:15 +0000

Westminster, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Saturday night saw us embark on the first London Run for a number of years. The basic premise behind a London run is to navigate around London’s various sights throughout the night, thus avoiding the crowds and using as much petrol as possible, then saving petrol on the return journey by cruising round the M25 at 56mph. The car journey usually passes through Heathrow, all the key sights in central London and finishing at a round about North of the Thames in view of the Millennium Dome.

Anthony’s Pensive Excitement, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Clearly on Bikes this kind of journey would be ridiculous since it is more or less a 100 mile round trip and bikes/motorways are kind of out of bounds. So instead we decided to cut out Heathrow and the M25 and concentrate on landmarks.

Hyde Park Corner, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

The journey started at Hyde Park where we flooded with various liquids and wheelied about as the sun went down. Next up we went to Buckingham Palace and got this slightly wonky photo lined up in front of the gates…

Buckingham Palace, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Then came Westminster, Trafalgar Square, London Eye and a cycle along the South Bank and back up over Tower Bridge.

St Pauls, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

I even managed to get a puncture from some errant thorn as I rumbled over the cobbles on the South Bank. Although I feared the run was over for me, unbelievably the team managed to fix the puncture with one of those clever repair pack things. The key success factor was almost certainly marking the hole with chalk before sealing it up.

Given how late it got, we never quite made it as far as the Millennium Dome, so that will be a task for another day.

Success, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Adobe AIR Downloader app

Tim — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:47:04 +0000

Since designing and estimating the work on this downloader app, the time has come to actually build the thing.

The first thing to overcome was using the built-in components to facilitate a download. Searching for assistance on this was made particularly tricky given that my previous article seemed to keep appearing in Google despite providing no actual help.

Huge thanks go out to Elad and his flex download api. This helped me get going enormously. To start with it only supported single downloads, and although I could queue these up, I wanted to be able to support concurrent downloads.

To do this I extended the progressEvent class to be able to attach the unique ID of the file being downloaded. This enables me to uniquely identify the progress bar for each download as I go through.

package
{
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.events.ProgressEvent;

public class MultipleProgressEvent extends ProgressEvent
{
public var fileID:String;

public function MultipleProgressEvent(type:String, bubbles:Boolean=false, cancelable:Boolean=false)
{
super(type, bubbles, cancelable);
}
}
}

…I also changed the DownloadManager class to include the fileID within the method as follows…

private var fileIDString:String = “”;

public function getFileID():String
{
return fileIDString;
}

public function DownloadManager(fileID:String)
{
super();
fileIDString = fileID;
}

Next I ditched the hard-coded progress bar tag and dyamically generated the progress bar tag, along with the other graphical elements at the point of parsing the XML containing the download URL and meta information.

Here is my call to my XML service…

url=”http://www.imbimp.com/someXML.xml”
result=”resultHandler(event)”
fault=”faultHandler(event)”/>

… and here is the dynamic generation of the progress bar…

private function resultHandler(event:ResultEvent):void
{
loadedData = event.result.myDownloadResponse.content.pendingDeliveries.delivery as ArrayCollection;
for(var count:int = 0; count < loadedData.length; count++)
{
var fileID:String = loadedData.getItemAt(count).product.proprietaryId;

myProgressBar = new ProgressBar();
myProgressBar.name = fileID;
myProgressBar.minimum = 0;
myProgressBar.x = 0;
myProgressBar.y = 30;
myProgressBar.label = “Progress 0%”;
myProgressBar.mode = “manual”;

progressBarContainer.addChild (myProgressBar);

}
}

All that remained was to modify the onDownloadProgress function to target the progress bar using the fileID. This was actually the most difficult bit, since I had not realised that when using Flex you cannot access the properties of an object while it is a DisplayObject, and that you must specify the object type before changing properties. Not quite sure where this is documented…I ended up getting the support from an experienced Flex developer to find the answer.

Something like this…

(ProgressBar)(progressBarContainer.getChildByName(event.fileID)).minimum = value;

Now this is working more or less, I need to investigate how I can integrate with other services and actually launch the app in the first place. The integration here will be critical to ensure the security and end to end goodness.

Agile Methodology: misconceptions

Tim — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:18:46 +0000

Working to some kind of Agile methodology can be a great way to deliver web development projects but it can also be a complete nightmare if not done properly. Most people will be familiar with the standard waterfall approach of design, build test and may have heard about the possible benefits of Agile…

1) Agile is a way to avoid documentation

Not quite. No one like documentation. Least of all me, its probably at the top of my list of most boring things to produce. Working away on formal prose that nobody is likely to read is very demoralising. Agile does not remove the need for documentation, but it can simplify the process since you do not need to produce some kind of 200 page functional or technical design up front. Instead specific functional areas can be broken down into stories that should detail key aspects of development but these can change over time. Status reports can be avoided through regular updates with the team and project plans can be simplified by using cards.

2) Agile means complicated projects can be delivered in less time than using more traditional approaches

Hardly. Agile processes sometimes seem like they streamline development to the point that more can be delivered in set timescales. This is not necessarily the case. The real benefit is that changes can be absorbed throughout development at the beginning of each sprint so that the final product is far closer to business expectations, rather than developing something that matches the design but is no longer relevant by the time is is finished. Clearly the kind of change that can be dealt with through agile is not free. Some features and functionality that is initially asked for will fall into the backlog and not delivered if more things are added along the way.

3) Business representatives have no place in Agile since developers can make decisions for themselves

No. When developing using Agile there needs to be closer ties between the business and the technology departments because there is far less documented objectives. Work produced needs to be regularly reviewed, functionality demoed as soon as its ready and clarifications fetched from stakeholders at every opportunity. Without this contact developers will make decisions and get on with things, but this can waste valuable time when it turns out to be wrong.

4) Agile works with offshore development

As long as everyone is offshore. The problem with integrating an offshore team is that often they will require more detailed requirements and design than is available at the beginnings of an Agile project. Without detailed instructions the productivity of an offshore team will be low and projects will not get finished in time. Communication is a real problem here. Although you can have teleconferences, video conferences, IM chats and all the rest of it, there just isn’t the ability to empower developers when they cannot just shout over the office to answer a question or clarify a requirement.

5) Agile give you detailed project plans

Although it can inspire confidence by planning a project in detail from beginning to end, this is a fruitless and pointless task. Changes that come about over the course of development and through discussions with the business will mean that any initial plan gets blown to pieces in no time. Buy a huge white board, hundreds of brightly coloured cards, multitudes of stickers and plan out the first few sprints and then let everyone get on with things. Soon it will be clear what the velocity of the team will be and the speed at which things are getting done and then it will be easier to estimate the rest of the project.

6) Developers do not need to be involved in project planning

Developers are the most important resources in the Agile approach to development. They understand the scope of changes, the can break down the complexity of business requirements, they know best how long things will actually take, and they know better than anyone else what they like and indeed want to do. When planning sprints, developers should volunteer for tasks, they should estimate and not only will they be more engaged with the project but will have then invested more in its success. If developers cannot do any of these things they should be replaced with ones that can. Project managers who take too much of this responsibility away from developers should also be replaced.

Super Chocolate Cake

Tim — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:19:22 +0000

Super Chocolate Cake, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

This is the rather dubious looking cake I baked for Clarkson’s birthday recently. It was based on a Waitrose recipe for Super Chocolate Cake and was generally successful. I changed the initial recipe by adding copious amounts of white chocolate chips and chunks of dairy milk. I also iced it with lemon flavoured icing. Red for the top, orange for the middle. The main problem with the resulting cake was that it ended up being a little stodgy. I put this down to my method of throwing all the ingredients in a bowl and mixing them all up rather than the careful steps described in the recipe of folding, whisking and flufferising.

It was only when I was pouring the mixture into the cake tins that I noticed it was a little runny due to a lack of flour, but that is what it said in the ingredients. I think my lack of mucking about in splitting the mixing process into various stages meant less air was captured by each dollop. So although I finished off the thing over the course of just over a day, i am still reflecting on the comment by another baker on the waitrose site that…

You wont regret making this cake!

Super Chocolate Cake - zoomed in, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Adler Tippa S Typewriter

Tim — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:56:25 +0000

Adler Tippa S Typewriter, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

I got this typewriter for Clarkson for her birthday. It is a quite fantastic device. It also happens to be the first thing I have bothered to win at auction at ebay for the paltry sum of £12 + £10 p&p. This is pretty good value since they can go for quite a lot - up to £300 in some cases. The age of this particular model is tricky to determine. The manual that came with it was photocopied from the original and the way that it is written does not suggest it is from the 50’s. It seems like this particular design of typewriter has been in production for quite some time. They even still make them in China apparently.

Not quite sure what is going to be done with it yet. I would quite like to take it to work in place of my laptop and type emails and place them on people’s desks. I suspect this may just get me in trouble rather than respect for my retro attitude. Apart from anything else it is a little noisey - at least it might drown out the sound of irritating mobile phones going off.

Adler Tippa S Typewriter, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Imbimp Pie

Tim — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:21:57 +0000

Imbimp/Elephant Pie, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

This weekend Clarkson made me an Imbimp Pie, with real, or at least elephant shaped bits of pastry walking round the edge. I think its probably apt for the website since not only does it carry the imbimp logo, but also carries the brownish theme, making it a little camoflaged.

Making the Imbimp pie is very easy. You will need…

Shortcrust Pastry - enough to fill a round or possibly elephant-shaped dish
Bacon or lump of gammon depending on your preference
Sweetcorn
4 thighs of chicken
1 cm of tarragon from average tarragon wielding pot
Chicken Stock
Flour for thickening
Garlic salt
Black Pepper
Imbimp Cutter - don’t actually cook this but use it for cutting
Onions
1 egg - for brushing the top of the pie

Cook the pastry in the container you wish to deliver the pie in. Cook the meat and then mix that in with the rest of the ingredients. Once piping hot and free of common diseases place into the pie and put a lid on it (lid also made of pastry).

Cook for 40 minutes or until golden brown. Then eat. Yum Yum.

Imbimp/Elephant Pie, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Cricklewood Fridge Proliferation

Tim — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:45:03 +0000

IMGP3312, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

For some time now, I have suspected that Cricklewood is a place that loves fridges. The reason I say the place loves fridges rather than the people that live there, is that its residents seem rather less keen on the devices, as shown by repeated cases of fridge abandonment at almost every opportunity.

Today I spotted two examples in relatively close proximity and decided to capture their sad door swinging loneliness for prosperity. But why are these fridges being left? What is it about the lazy residents of Cricklewood and their obsession with fly-tipping? Will they ever at least shut the doors on these things? Its not like by leaving the door open, people get a better look and are more likely to take the thing away and keep it for themselves.

Here we see how a combination of an old fridge freezer, a rusty bent-out-of-shape goal post and doughnut derived tyre residue all come together to make for the perfect living environment. I would say I have everything here but the kitchen sink, but I suspect one will appear before long.

I think the only way this white-goods-based litter bug behavior can be legitimised is if every could get their act together and really dump a large number of items. Not just fridges of course, but a whole array of white goods. That way at least it would be an impressive display of kitchen appliances of old or a more efficient use of the council’s time come the time when they decide to clear up the mess.

Cricklewood: 2020

iGoogle Mobile iPhone Rummaging

Tim — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:24:26 +0000

It appears that Google have changed their mobile iGoogle experience yet again. I wrote before how they have removed the fantastic iPhone optimised version back at the beginning of this year and replaced it with a generic application that just isn’t as good. My main gripes were that I want a summary view of the main stories of the moment from all my RSS feeds, that loads quickly. Obviously a specific RSS reader application would do this, but all of the ones I tried take too long to download all the stories of a given feed before I can just zip down the list and read them all.

The key thing with all this is that the main use case for a mobile iGoogle is when you are on the bus, train, maybe even the car and you want to quickly read up on stuff but without a reliance on a consistent mobile signal. I may have a few seconds to load up safari before the train goes into a tunnel, or before the universally dodgy 3G coverage self destructs and all I want is my headlines and associated story.

So what have Google done? Well the page that loads has three headlines per feed, (why can’t this be altered, 5 would be loads better for minimal extra load time) but then to view further information you have to click the more link and it then fetches a further 5 (3 before last week, or whenever they changed this) stories/short paragraph summaries. To see the full feed, you then have to click on the link through to the article either in traditional web form or mobile optimised. Ideally I want the contents of the feed available from initial load, otherwise I am relying on signal for the duration of my browsing. By the time I have read all the stories, the chances are that the signal has gone. hmmmph. Regardless, once I have finished reading the full story, I then need connection again to go back and reload the previous page….yet more reliance on network coverage.

Oh well, at least Google are constantly improving the interface. Perhaps in a couple of months they will have fixed this. The real solution is to take the Gmail labs approach and add these features voluntarily and allow users to add them depending on preference. I can see why some may want a faster initial load and do away with loading the full story in the background. Fine…just don’t turn on this imaginary feature I have just invented. What is more surprising than Google not making this the perfect application is the total lack of competition. As I mentioned before a number of competitors, such as Netvibes and page flakes have iGoogle equivalents, but they all take way long to load and are really not optimised enough for the mobile environment. Even Yahoos recent efforts promise much, but fail to deliver an experience that I want on the mobile. Their app is slow to load and nowhere near configurable enough.

Homemade Beasts

Tim — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:49:50 +0000

IMGP3270, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

A few months ago Clarkson and I made some cuddly beasts. Mine is the larger and more disturbing of the two, Clarkson’s is the smaller and more obviously happy looking. It was a very easy process to create them. In fact I can’t understand why more of these odd looking animals are not made since they are much better than the creatures commercially available and infinitely more unique. I even learnt how to do a spot of knitting to create a scarf to hide the unfortunate paunch that my beast seemed to take on after being stuffed.

If there is any downside it is that mine bares more than a passing resemblence to the “C’MON” creatures that appeared in recent Vauxhall Corsa adverts. I think its the mouth that does it.

IMGP3270, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Daubeney School Website

Tim — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:04:10 +0000

IMGP3270, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

I was lucky enough to work on website for a local school over the last few months with a group of people from work. It was a hugely rewarding experience and I went along to the school on thursday to launch it. The kind children and staff at Daubeney Primary School gave us each a card to show their appreciation for our work.

One of my ideas behind the development of the site, was to engage the children by getting them to design websites too. It was going to be a slightly simplified version of my craft afternoon pitch, but with 750 children at the school it would have been a little logistically difficult. Instead I produced a lesson plan about good and bad web design and the teachers delivered this to the children in the week leading up to the launch.

It was really amazing to see the work the children produced. Without any perception of what specifically makes a good website, many of the designs really exceeded my expectations of what I expected. Here are some of my favourites…

I really like how the creator of this one has thought very carefully about usability, and designed a sort of a strange kiosk button pressingy thing. There appears to be almost no point to this button whatsoever and its that which makes it so brilliant.

IMGP3270, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

This one has clearly thought carefully about filling all the whitespace on the page with all sorts strange shapes, colours and people running around. I think in fact it may well be a clever kind of magic eye crayon drawing where all sorts of shapes jump out at you, the longer you look at it.

IMGP3270, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

My Prezi Work in Progress…

Tim — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:42:17 +0000

Grade II listed 17th Century cottage - For Sale

Tim — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:31:54 +0000

Grade II listed 17th Century cottage, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

A superb and unique Grade II listed 17th Century cottage situated in this sought after village location with two double bedrooms, stunning re-fitted bathroom and kitchen with garden to the rear.

This house is for sale… Set up an appointment with Peter Lane and come and see it.

Key Features

Large kitchen/diner with original bread oven built into wall
Original beams in all rooms and solid wooden floors
Excellent decorative order throughout
Lounge with open fireplace
Two double bedrooms on the first floor
Stunning re-fitted three piece bathroom suite with corner Jacuzzi bath on the first floor
Low maintenance landscaped garden to the rear
Property is believed to be dated back to 1647
Highly sought after village location of Great Staughton set in conservation area
Direct train link from St Neots to Londons Kings Cross, only 39 minutes

Tenure: Freehold

Kitchen/Diner 14′8 x 14′2

Front door, fitted base units with solid oak doors and work surfaces, large inset butler sink, integrated washer/dryer, integrated fridge/freezer, inset halogen hob with electric oven under, windows to front and rear aspect, wall mounted electric heater, door to rear garden, ceiling and wall beams, original tiled floor, inset original bread oven in corner wall (not in use) and working fireplace with Aga multi fuel burner. (Fully lined).

Lounge 13′5 x 12′5 max

Windows to front and rear aspect, wall mounted electric heater, working open fire with tiled hearth, ceiling and wall beams with a solid wooden floor.

Landing

Carpeted stairs and solid wooden floor on the first level and hatch to loft area.

Bedroom One 14′2 x 9′8

Window to front aspect, wall mounted electric heater and wall, ceiling beams and solid wooden floor.

Bedroom Two 10′10 x 8′9 reducing to 6′0

Window to front aspect, wall mounted electric heater, ceiling beams, solid wooden floor and feature chimney breast.

Bathroom

Superb re-fitted white bathroom suite with steps leading up to corner Jacuzzi bath with shower attachment, low flush WC, pedestal wash hand basin, window to rear aspect, chrome heated towel rail and built in airing cupboard housing large direct hot water tank with linen shelving over, solid wooden floor and halogen spotlights.

Outside

Paved area, shared access from next door neighbour, two small steps leading to raised garden area with timber decked seating area, separate gravelled areas, raised walled flower beds, gated side access and brick built bin and wood storage areas with integrated barbecue.

Local Amenities

The village of Great Staughton has its own primary school, church, post office and doctors surgery and butchers shops. The village is located five miles from St. Neots and three miles from Kimbolton.

Further information about Great Staughton

Click the pictures and use arrow keys to navigate around…

The Flash Player and a browser with Javascript support are needed..

Adobe AIR Download Manager using Flex

Tim — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:38:29 +0000

I have been investigating and designing an MP3 download manager built using Flex and delivered as an Adobe AIR app. Its a really interesting area, since desktop application development and web development is finally becoming a relatively easy activity and OS compatibility issues are becoming a thing of the past. AIR apps can be built in a number of different ways and there are tons of tutorials and resources on the net to help you get started. I will share a few helpful articles and my experiences getting the grips with the platform as we go through.

Competing against the various piracy options available is nothing new. iTunes and Amazon are both formidable competitors and as the price of music is forced down, legitimate online download propositions are becoming more and more feasible. The key is to offer features that make downloading legally a significantly better user experience than downloading via torrent or Rapidshare and any of the other emerging black holes that appear each day. One way is through the bundling and management of music downloading. Often someone may want the entire back catalogue of an artist, or a collection of music from the same label, or a playlist of tracks put together by someone authoritative. This is something that is not always straightforward when taking the illegal route. For this to be possible we need an application to do it and what better way than to use Adobe AIR with all its reusable components and simple architecture to enable fast development that will support this fast changing market.

Both Beatport and BBC iPlayer have already taken the AIR route to manage downloads. Although neither are established enough to gauge any success. Both apps are not stand-alone and have significant integration points with their respective web sites. AIR takes this in its stride and components to allow web applications to control the AIR app and initiate downloads are documented in this Adobe article. Those who have yet to install an AIR app should do so, just to see how nicely they have integrated the install and update process.

This sample downloading class can hopefully be used to simplify the core download element of the app. Although I have yet to work out how to combine various components from the various samples I have found. Its always reassuring to see that various bits of functionality is possible before adding it to the design or requirements though. Something like bandwidth throttling seemed more tricky so I am going to leave that for the server-side components.

More updates once I get a bit further through…

Outlook HTML Email Renders Poorly

Tim — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:10:53 +0000

What a lovely textured spash screen. Those were the days.

I was working on creating an HTML email today and found that it was next to impossible to achieve compatibility between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. There didn’t seem to be much material to help me out except this interesting article, which explained the problem.

It turns out that in Outlook 2003, emails are written and displayed using MS Word, but when you view HTML it uses the IE rendering engine. Makes sense I guess. Outlook 2007 on the other hand uses MS Word 2007 rendering both both. This is good in terms of consistency, but dreadful in terms of flexibility. Not only will an HTML email written for outlook 2003 look awful in outlook 2007, but Outlook 2007 simply doesn’t support full HTML, meaning you have to resort to using tables to ensure compatibility.

no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
no support for forms
no support for Flash, or other plugins
no support for CSS floats
no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
no support for CSS positioning
no support for animated GIFs

But these are all the things that make it worthwhile doing an HTML email. Otherwise the whole internet would be basically a big web of Word documents linked together by a giant desktop full of broken shortcuts. In this world I do not think the WWW would have caught on….we would probably still live in a Nielsen world of 1 line CSS files and revolting 90’s design.

Microsoft helpfully gives us help with all of these problems. This is one of the least useful pages ever. It supposedly give you a link to an HTML/CSS validation tool, that not only requires Microsoft’s Visual Studio but also requires changes to registry settings and goodness knows what else. They should have just provided a tutorial on nested tables, colspan and cellpadding and we would be away.

SEO & URL Ambiguity

Tim — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:39:56 +0000

Pixelation due to poorly calibrated URL?

I have been looking at URLs a lot recently and trying to work out how much they really matter. The quality of URLs is one of many parts to the whole SEO debate that is difficult to negotiate because of so many different views on topic, all with different levels of authority. I have no authority at all really so am keen to investigate using sources that do.

Google’s own SEO starter guide (Pages 8-9 are most relevant to URLs), has some useful insight but doesn’t answer all the questions.

For example, it list 3 best practices for URLs…

Use Words in URLs – sounds sensible, since words are easier to read than numbers. But how relevant do those words need to be?
Create a Simple Directory Structure – This deserves a little more discussion, see below…
Provide one version of a URL to reach a document – This also makes sense given the various rules around duplicate content

In terms of keeping a simple directory structure Google states…

“Avoid having deep nesting of subdirectories like ‘…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/’ “

Google doesn’t explain the reason behind not having a deep nesting. But notably they do not say they do not index pages with a deep structure. One way to get round this would be to have a series of pages that deep link to your content to help the indexer get the the lower levels more quickly.

There is more information here from Google’s Official Webmaster Blog:

Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short

This is discussed further is an interview with some Google Boffin called Matt Cutts. He says that…

“If you can make your title four- or five-words long - and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

But I think what he is talking about here is URLs that just spam keywords to try and artificially improve their page rank…

“The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?” - because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out. So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users - and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.”

Some commentators get bogged down with “parameters”, such as www.something.com/anothing/thing?text=3435&id=dsamm, but many URLs don’t have these rather ugly looking code suffixes since dynamic pages can cut up and generally rummage around with URLs without the need for any kind of directory structure or query string. I can’t yet decide whether Google makes any differenciation between query string parameters and URL directories.

Google also says in their starter guide “Avoid using directory names that have no relation to the content in them”. This suggests items that have no relation to the content are allowed but but will detract from your page rank and it encourages webmasters to use descriptive terms in their URLs.

I recently did some SEO analysis on the site of a leading electronics retailer. They have appalling SEO practices, both in terms of code structure, URLs and accessibility. However if you compare the rankings of a selection of their products with their competitors you actually find that they win every time. This is likely to be due to other factors such as external linking, brand popularity and their established internet presence in the market.

This little tool is quite useful (although this assumes you trust the creators) for seeing if your URLs looks ok. It does not rely on the URL being public, so you can try out different things to see if it looks like you are spamming or not.

Perhaps we should all get less bogged down in these kind of details and spend more time improving the quality of the site (removing all the cardboard?), its content and innovative functionality, which should drive influential sites to link through. That will have far more of a difference than some minor tweaks to the URL.

ClickHeat Randomness

Tim — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:05:42 +0000

The rather random clicking habits of the average user or sabotage of my new click tracking gadget?

ClickHeat is an interesting open source script that can be used to track users clicks on your website. I thought I would stick it on since it gives a slightly more detailed view than Google Analytics and would be interesting to compare to more costly products such as Omniture and its ClickMap feature.

After the cake traffic increase fiasco of last week, I finally had enough data to actually see if it was of any use, but was somewhat confused by the results. Either everything on my site looks worthy of a click, (possible considering its complex, and some would say annoying design) or the average internet user is a moronic drooling zombie clicking their mouse in a frenzy and hoping they manage to avoid real links long enough to read any content displayed to them. There is some obvious patterns of heightened clicking around my navigation items. This underlines my findings at commercial clients that shows that users like horizontal navigation and are often more likely to click on one of these links than any exciting looking promo.

After thinking about this I have decided that this must be because its really rather tricky to provide compelling content to all visitors of a site in only a few promos/blog posts. This means that in the hope of finding something of interest, people click on links where they may find something better. Links like “Photos” and “Craft” and not specific enough to put users off and are general enough to give the hope of something interesting on the next page. At least thats my hypothesis. I many ways this form of click tracking is just not very helpful on a design with a blog form-factor. There are just not enough areas to click on. Each post takes up a fairly considerable space. Many users may just scroll down the page looking at the pictures and reading the text that is visible rather than clicking on each post. Certainly with the hopeless performance of this site, people are even less likely to explore further in their zombie like state, or otherwise. Really the usefulness of this kind of analysis comes when you have a more portal like homepage that can show which areas of the page get more attention than others. This to can be misleading though, since changing content is not taken into account by ClickHeat and so what is popular one day and garners plenty of clicks, may be very unpopular the next. The result is probably something not dissimilar than the results shown above.

I suppose I will keep ClickHeat enabled for now. It certainly would be far more interesting if I ever get a substantial number of readers. Even just from an ethical note, I feel happier knowing I know as much as possible about the readers of this blog since if the BBC or any other popular broadcaster/website started implementing these slightly more visual tracking solutions they would probably get compaints.

Problems with Apple’s Airport Express

Tim — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:49:39 +0000

There is often only praise for Apple’s products. I have a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, a Time Capsule and an Airport Express (APX) and am mostly sold on their benefits over the alternatives. This is fine, since in all cases I have generally paid more than the alternatives and so expect a better experience, but when things do not work it is far more annoying.

The APX is designed to stream music from iTunes over a wireless or wired network to a stereo, thus avoiding the need for unnecessary wires coming out of the Mac. It just doesn’t seem to work though. Connecting to it is slow and in some cases impossible. Songs cut out or deteriorate in quality and often stop streaming in between songs.

I wasn’t completely sure whether to blame the APX at first. I thought it may be a problem with one of the many other components of my network or setup. I streamed directly from my mac to see if the time capsule was guilty. That worked fine. I tried wiring up the Airport by ethernet. That didn’t work. Trawled the forums for advice on what wireless channel to use, the type of wifi security, the wiress protocol etc. I even tried reverting to an earlier version of iTunes. Any version before 8.0 seems popular. Although there is no consensus on the subject.

Yesterday I changed my Wifi security from WEP to WPA2. This screwed most things at first. Not least the internet, which seemed to only allow me to go to certain websites. I fixed this with some MTU reconfiguration on both the airport settings and at the router. Interestingly my router, (A Belkin N+ F5d8635) supposedly runs on 802.11n, but operates on b/g or n frequencies and connects to the APX over the N protocol specifically. It connects to the Time Capsule differently though and I suspected that may be to blame. After setting the router back to operating only on 802.11g, things seemed to work fine. Although I have yet to test at multiple times of the day and over a significant period of time.

How much is a spot on Google’s Official Analytics Blog worth?

Tim — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:02:29 +0000

Larry in-particular is partial to a slice of the analytical stuff

So having assumed my little baking stunt was a one-off foray into the world of SEM and blog popularity I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find my cake atop Google’s official analytics blog. So I thought it was time to go a bit meta and investigate the whole thing. Google didn’t exactly give a full in-depth account of my activities, which turned out to be ideal really. People were coerced into investigating my sugary creation to the full without realising it. People truly are wowed more by icing and baking than any ridiculous cardboard construction or wrap.

My site traffic increased over the course of the day while I tracked the figures using a mixture of GA and Flickr stats. The Flickr stats were particularly good since they are updated far closer to real-time than GA. Unfortunately you cannot drill down into much detail so can only really rely on headline PVs and some other crumbs.

A poor man's Google Analytics for pictures

The next thing I did was to google for “Google Analytics cake” to see how the rest of the web had responded to my cooking (though mostly icing) skills. Typically there were a few tweets throwing people in the direction of said curiosity. Tragically they were mostly to the google blog rather than my own… They were thanked nonetheless on the off chance they found more treats of note amongst my array of blogged about trinckets. The most reliable search here was to filter on the past 24 hours and various little morsels cropped up. Found one blog hosting the picture on their own server with no track-back to either Google or my blog. I couldn’t comment since their commenting functionality doesn’t work.I would usually put this down to robot activity if there hadn’t been some human crafted throwaway prose attached. James Wallace and co will hopefully learn how to credit people for their work in later posts. The cake was only his third post. Still maybe it’s better to get the image out there than to try and get any control over it.

Another unexpected side effect of this analytics equivilent of a prime-time TV spot was a large increase in comments and even one user of my contact form. Brilliant. There was a sort of cryptic can-you-help-me-make-website request, at least I think there was. Will have to wait and see if they get back in contact to clarify what they are after.

One user managed to single handedly up the average pageview per user count to over 6 in Austrailia. He was one of the few to appreciate the cardboard stuff. So in summary, I am not sure if I have really answered the original question. I guess the rule to live by is, if they come for cake then give them more cake. Clearly a gap in the market here. Thinking cap firmly on for related mini projects here.

How to temporarily increase traffic to your website

Tim — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:28:28 +0000

Everything is impossible until someone does it

So your blog is ticking along nicely at 2-3 visitors each day. People don’t stay long. Many have got there by mistake through mistyping the URL, some are not even human and read the content you slaved over purely as a means of helping others consider not reading it when it appears in search results. This is a common complaint and surely the reason behind why many bloggers pack up and go home after a short time, leaving poorly thought through crusts at the arse-end of the internet.

There is a solution, but it is not one that will work for everyone, nor can it be easily defined or described. I am of course talking about viral marketing. This involves tapping into the deepest and most easily amused section of a person’s brain and rummaging around until people feel the need to share their amusement. This has of course been popularised by various videos on YouTube, low quality emails forwarded to the point of exhaustion (think FW:FW:FW etc) and tv programmes like “You’ve Been Framed” who has been doing it for years. Luckily ITV viewers hadn’t got email yet in those days and probably spread word using graffiti or by screaming. Although I think it was never entirely clear whether public clumsiness, freakery from Beadle or poorly scripted obesity was the real draw.

Yesterday I posted about the cake I made based on a Google Analytics dashboard. This was typical of the pointless but gratifying activities I get up to that most people class as “too much time on your hands”, “childish”, or “a bit girlie”. Now somehow this caught a lot of people’s attention because I got many hundred visitors in the 24 hours after it got posted. Although this is brilliant, I am keen to understand what it was exactly about this stunt that caused so many people to look, so that it can be repeated and I I can further extend the reach of this site. Sky News have cottoned onto to this phenomenon of viewer excitement for the strange and regularly accompany their main headlines with scenes of people falling over, people surviving horrific accidents and pets with mildly human traits. They might as well ditch the news altogether, but then we would come fall circle and be back in Beadle territory.

If you correlate cakes with page views, this is the shape of things to expect

Now the cake in question was not overwhelmingly popular in reality….it didn’t even get finished. But then I suppose looking at a picture is far more passive than having to actually operate one’s jaws and eat the cake and most people would rather go for the easy option. I guess that makes sense. The tweet to Avinash over at Google clearly played a big part here, since he emailed out the link to many in Google on all accounts. Good job. Perhaps all I need to do is create some kind of odd looking item vaguely related to a product or service that has plenty of press and then lots of traffic will be guaranteed?

A simple search for “Google Analytics Cake” doesn’t yet return a link to my site, although my tweet does appear fairly high up. Typically, a picture someone else took of the cake ended up top in Google, although I’m not entirely sure why. I guess not many people are likely to search those keywords anyway, so maybe this isn’t too much of a problem. I tried to sneak in a few links into a few other random blogs in reference to comments they made that included both “Google Analytics” and “Cake”….but I doubt this will have much impact. The key is to tap into the brain of a key influencer on the topic and get linked to from somewhere that plenty of people go. Problem is of course, these people are probably allergic to cake.

So I am back to 2-3 visits each day and thats fine by me, at least until I release the next crafty virus of content. The fortune cookie I got yesterday at a chinese restaurant I went to (Review to follow shortly) just said “Everything is impossible until someone does it”. It applies here somehow I think.

Google Analytics Dashboard Cake

Tim — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 20:04:41 +0000

Content Management System Cake, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

This weekend Clarkson and I decided to build a cake based on the Google Analytics dashboard. It was a fairly complex construction that ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. It was based around a Waitrose Lemon Drizzle cake recipe, with lemon butter icing filling. I actually had to bake three separate cakes. One for each layer of the main body of the cake and another to use for the 3D elements on the top.

The cake contained a number of the most important elements of a typical dashboard, and also ones that are tastiest to eat. I included a bounce rate chart, traffic sources pie chart, page views vs unique visits motion chart and the following top content area bar chart…

Here are all the ingredients I used including a whole host of various icing and cake decorating products. Not quite sure why anyone would actually make icing given how cheap the ready rolled stuff is. The coloured icing was extra good, because you could mic it together to create other colours. I also had a whole host of icing brushes, pens and coloured tubes for the more detailed bits. Probably the best accessory of all was the sugared letters, which slightly unbelievable contained Kiwi. Although I think the makers, Dr Oetker is imagining things.

The cake making process was relatively uneventful, although using an electric whisk while mixing the butter and sugar was definitely the messiest way to get things done. I somehow managed to lift the whisk out of the bowl and accidentally sped the thing up, throwing nodules of buttery sugar all over the kitchen like some kind of fatty explosion. Another component of the cake was the “Google Analytics” title. This was created with gingerbread, which is the quickest and easiest way to create biscuitty stuff ever probably. I luckily have every type of biscuit cutter imaginable including the whole alphabet, so it was relatively easy to create the letters. Or at least it was once I realised that letters cook much quicker than normal biscuits so I got a few burnt ones.

So all in all a successful weekend of baking. Hopefully it all gets eaten when I take it all into work tomorrow. On reflection, I wondered if it would have been better to have based the cake on a dashboard created in excel from an export of Omniture data, but with all the various problems this week I decided it was best to base my design on the easiest option. Maybe a ClickMap cake can be the next project?

UPDATE - Who says cakes are not a great way to meet analytics evangelists? Not me….

FURTHER UPDATE - See what a spot on Google’s Analytics blog is worth here.

Quantitative Easing Of Mobile Bandwidth (Useless 3G)

Tim — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:54:46 +0000

Shrine to signal strength

I can never get a decent signal on my mobile, well not enough to download email or view webpages quickly. Perhaps I am too impatient, easily irritated or just unlucky? I have decided none of these apply, since 3G is one of the most ridiculous marketing ploys since the inception of pyramid selling schemes and the ability to charge £3 for a ringtone.

For years we have been promised broadband speeds and a whole host of other services while at the same time devices have got more and more advanced. But why doesn’t anyone ever mention the fact that these little magic machines are next to useless without a decent network. The usual excuse is that things improve when you are at a wifi hotspot. They don’t. Mainly because the very concept of needing to be somewhere inparticular defeats the whole concept of mobile technology.

I would understand patchy performance while in the middle of nowhere but even Willesden Junction doesn’t fall into this category. Yes, even in the grimmest and probably most industrial area of London, they can’t find room for an aerial or two pumping out mobile phone waves or whatever they give out. At the very least the networks should be bolstering their services in London and other large cities. People won’t care about massive aerials and unhealthy levels of radio traffic. We are all more likely to be raped and murdered than feel a bit itchy due to excess data spectrum.

3G Broadband for the home is another aspect of the problem, where for a fairly low fee people can use their laptops over the mobile network. This too is a dreadful experience and is the Internet equivilent of buying your computer in a supermarket or surfing the web using your TV and some cartoon keyboard designed by morons. People who have this actualy think it is good?

I am fairly sure 3G doesn’t actually exist. It appears to download things faster but it’s all an optical illusion, a 3G placebo affect if you will. In the future this will get worse, as claims get bolder and bolder, the networks will have to make these mind-altering airwaves all the more potent. Children will die and run around in circles aimlessly, and household pets will crumble into a furry mess.

The idea of all information at your fingertips is a fantastic one and has so far fooled many people. I think it’s gone too far now. On starting this article I thought that no one else had seemed to notice this elephant in the room problem, but even the New York Times seems to agree that the mobile networks are about as old as their typeface. So now this is saved I might as well save and post this. But no. My signal cut out half way through the publish and all I get is… “invalid post id”. Is that it? Is that all 3G can muster?

Twitter / Google PageRank Absurdity

Tim — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:59:15 +0000

iPhone: A poor man's print-screen

I have only been tapping out rambling nonsense on Twitter for a matter of weeks and only with any real regularity over the past few days, but already I seem to be appearing fairly prominently in Google. Clever me.

I noticed in my Google Analytics report that someone had arrived at my ClickMap post as a result of a fairly basic Google search. On investigation, there I was at 10th place on the first page of results for a query of “Omniture click map”. How can this be? Was it my initial scathing comment? A freak act of Google strangeness? Or just standard Twitter hype waving its long heavily disfigured arm around?

I am not exactly complaining but am keen to understand how this works, not least so that i can take advantage for tweets I actually want people to read. Firstly, a lot more than 10 people have written authoritatively about ClickMap is far more than 140 characters, so that is odd to start with. Secondly, a tweet is just a tweet, once its out there it is soon forgotten. Or at least that’s what i thought. It’s not like there is ever much content for anyone to warrant linking to, so i can’t be benefitting from that kind of popularity.

All the lessons of good SEO seem to be thrown out of the window here. A few retweets and a bit of meta data might push me above Omniture itself. I am sure they would love that. The might of a corporate website, dwarfed by the 140 character meanderings of my own creation. Perhaps Twitter content is weighted more strongly than other pages. the test would be to add similar comments to forums, blogs and other influential sources and see who wins.

Yesterday i was amazed at the fast response of the Omniture care team. But in the context of this bizarre occurrence it is hardly surprising they would want to come to my aid, which they were able to do again today. Brilliant. if only all corporates were able to get back to you in less than a minute regardless of the time of day or nature of the question, things would be much simpler.

Omniture ClickMap & Twitter Debacle

Tim — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:03:42 +0000

I mentioned briefly before that I had failed to get Omnitures ClickMap working but today I had a flash of inspiration and had another go. It is fairly well documented how it fails on the latest version of Firefox, but IE7, surely they would have fixed that? They had, I hadn’t restarted due to my alternative stance on environmentalism. Idiot!

So what is the fuss about? Web Analytics is all about the creative display of information and ClickMap (plus other providers in the field ie CrazyEgg) goes one step further to show your data in context of the page being reported. This is tremendously powerful because the insight drawn from this visualization of user behaviour can far better drive intelligent design decisions than any graph or scatter chart.

I could see straightaway that the most popular links were not what I expected. People do not particularly like large images and instead head for text links. The horizontal navigation was popular as indeed was the footer. Unbelievably it appeared that people were clever enough to know what they wanted and were not being swayed by fancy design. It is worth noting here that this is unlikely to change my choice of background images. They are here to stay. Sorry.

Then I delved in further. Perhaps I can identify trends over different times as the design changes. Hmmmm problems. No matter what range I selected I never got a click figure above 1000. Even when looking over a year period. I tweeter my frustrations and was surprised to hear back rather randomly from OmnitureCare. They were obviously trawling Twitted for negative tweets or messages that indicated that customers were having problems. This really is an example of fantastic customer service. I had already exhausted Google and forums and every other type of search worthy of my time. So getting answers directy from Omniture was exactly what I needed.

Anyway, they explained that since the ClickMap report relies on clicks, it records the x/y coordinate of that click. A design change will move those clicking goalposts and adjust the figures accordingly. In a way this is what you want because collecting figures across redesigns will disrupt your trend analysis. Each design change should be a response to actionable data from your ClickMap. Eg Problem: Video page with high exit rate Clickmap shows: people appear to be mostly clicking on the video link again even though they are already there. Solution: People may be expecting a video there and then, not just links to other videos. They are easily disappointed when not presented with what they have been promised. Stick a video on the page and hope that drives traffic to other related videos.

Anyway, a productive day on the whole including more site insight than many other reports combined and maybe more importantly a real business use for twitter?

Google Analytics IQ Qualification

Tim — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:16:45 +0000

Only the two hundred and thirty fourth member with this mighty title

Today I was invited to take the newly introduced GA IQ test and passed with a fairly reasonable 85% (You need 75% to be assured of the award). It tests you on a variety of the subjects covered at the so-called “Conversion University” and is actually pretty tricky. You can only take the test once and have about 90 minutes to scrabble around dredging your brain for answers. I became increasingly worried as I went through due to how hopeless I was being with the answers. This was made far worse by the onset of time passing by. I kept doing annoying mental calculations for how long I had for each question and due to some truly awful arithmetic it seemed like I had not long for each. In the end I had about 30 minutes to go over everything again and change a few things around.

I recommend heavily reviewing he conversion university material before taking the test and keep a few Google windows around for some of the more tricky areas. Notably around Regular Expressions. Its certainly a test of both your analytical ability and technical web concepts. Like with the driving theory test, I think this should be ideally backed up with a full practical test….maybe even in a car.

Its certainly a good idea on the whole since it gives at least a certain reassurance to Web Analytics customers that the consultant they have brought in is not completely rogue. Unfortunately knowledge of the tool and it’s implementation is nothing without a creative mind and perception of trends, insight and a love of motion charts. Maybe the practical test could be a group exercise where you have to work as a team to recreate a motion chart of page views over visits over bounce rate over goal conversion using large foam balls being thrown from a balcony manned by Google boffins.

Status Reports are like Nuclear Weapons

Tim — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:52:35 +0000

Status reports are a necessary evil these days. I accept this and produce them as thorougly, concisely and candidly as I can. This does not mean of course that I like this task. It may well be one of the worst of the week.

Last week I had every status reporters worst nightmare, a blank template to fill. This is bad on a number of counts. Firstly last weeks items are not there to jog your memory and remind you of such banalities as a verb at the beginning of each sentence, the date format and the things actually promised the proceeding week. Secondly, what to write? The blank page of doom is troublesome in any profession, but in this act of aimless literature it is twice as tricky because there are so many variables to consider.

I usually begin thinking about how I would give the status of my projects verbally. This starts off great then I remember that the voice in my head has no particular audience and that the written missives I am struggling to put together may be entirely inappropriate for the manager, colleague or unfortunate soul to find a copy in the printer if I accidentally print too many.

The more I write the less I feel anyone else is going to read. Summary headlines are a good way to encourage the reader to become interested in the content of the report but these are also infinitely difficult to define. The very concept of headline suggests breaking news, important stories, something to inspire and catch the attention of the reader. More often than not these contain dry, but strangely unimportant details about things not finished on time, information or requirements not complete or just a copy and paste of a few items from the mess further down the page.

I certainly do not want to give the impression that I do not take these vital writing exercises seriously because they can become vitally important come dispute time and to cover yourself when things go wrong. I doubt it ever comes to this. Status reports are like Nuclear Weapons. Essential for all sides to have and built in ever increasing numbers as time goes on, but effectively never used due to the destruction they could cause. To continue the analogy, it would be best to keep status reports underground and sign some kind of treaty to get them reduced over time, maybe the world and hence the office would be a much safer place.

Omniture Site Catalyst

Tim — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:18:41 +0000

Had my first real go creating Omniture reports and graph shaped things today. It gave me an interesting perspective given the free Google alternative that I have far more experience with.

Getting started was pretty easy once I started using the right version. v13.5 is extremely clunky and slow. v14 is much better and let’s you do some cool things with the data.

I couldn’t get the ClickMap plugin to work in either IE or firefox and it doesn’t support chrome, so I gave that a miss. Next I started to play with some of the reports… All the usual stuff is there and the different graphing options are really great. When google integrates their chart API with their analytics package things will be really fun.

The ability to pull in data directly into excel from omniture is really useful, although I am fairly sure I can do more computational analysis from within the tool. Also it’s very quick to see how difficult it is to group data unless custom properties are recorded at the outset. Filtering URLs is just a pain. I managed to get some good stats about top pages but not without significant excel formula manipulation. Really the only way to track top pages within different areas of the site is to add in some custom tracking.

The other discovery today is the usefulness of ratios when judging trends. So far I am fairy sure this cannot be done within site catalyst but is essential to drawing sensible insight. For example, the returning visitors report shows an interesting spike for a given month. This unfortunately correlates with a similar spike in page views. When showing the percentage of returning visitors as a percentage of total visits I can see that the proportion of returning visitors has been consistent for at least the last 8 months.

Another target of my investigations today was pulling in data from YouTube and iTunes. Although data is available it can’t be pulled in to excel like Omniture data and this will mean significant manual effort to prepare the final executive dashboards. I am hoping Omniture may be of some use, at least with YouTube buy iTunes is likely to be more tricky.

More Omniture insight as I work it out. Going to spend the rest of the week trying to run different stats against each other to try and draw some useful insight.

Faces of…

Tim — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:02:31 +0000

At work, in their attempts to build communities between otherwise very separate business units, they send out “Faces of…” emails. These consist of short biographies and work histories of the person to somehow bring them to life a bit. There are always a few semi-amusing anecdotes and the line “I love travelling” plus at least one grinning alcohol induced picture.

I think it is a great idea and one that should take place more. At the very least it gives someone with the least creative job ever a chance to express themselves in an alternative and interesting way. It does pose it’s risks though.

People with unnecessary taglines below their email signatures may see an opportunity to extend the dreadful paragraph beyond what anyone could tolerate. Equally those who havnt been traveling, never go anywhere or never take any pictures are left with a tricky dilema.

My humble obiturary, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

I have written a couple of these. One was done in the style of an obiturary. The slightly subversive format seemed to perfectly mirror the requirements albeit with a few references to everything in the 3rd person. I really hope I can think of another format like this. The only other time you get little reviews of peoples lives is on the back cover of a book. Just need to work out what kind of a book I might write.

The other faces of has yet to be sent out. I tried to keep to the required format as close as possible and actually thought I had been quite restrained. On reading it back I then realized that it is full of general cynicism and negativity and will probably never see the light of day. All the more reason to post here and revel in my efforts.

How can we really learn about our colleagues and show any individualism if we are forced to stick to such a rigid format?

So Wrong, Its Right with Charlie Brooker

Tim — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:24:51 +0000

Last night I went to see a recording of a new radio 4 panel show pilot. These are generally always good and seeing them live and in their entirity is even better.

Given the recent popularity of twitted there were tons of people there. Far more than ended up getting in. It would have been too much for them to turn people away at the door. Oh no we had to wait at the bar for an hour like waiting for a plane to board with ever increasing numbers called to get people seated in the auditorium. Rather unluckily for me I discovered that the capacity for blue wristbanded individuals, ie me, was 188, and since I also appeared to share that numbered ticket with someone else, I didn’t get in at first. Like some kind of prize-less careless lottery we stood for a few minutes fairly nonplussed before finally let in to take up the last few pirches.

In addition to Brooker the guests included David Mitchell, Victoria Coren and Marcus Hound. The format was pretty loosely tied around wrongness an failure, but really it was basically a panel game version of Room 101. It was a bit hit and miss and although Brooker had some good lines, David mitchell saved proceedings with excellent rants about the Internet, notably (moreorless) “is it really worth throwing TV on the bin for the ability to find out the names of the wombles in less than 2 seconds”. Also when Brooker suggested that celebrities will soon be filmed in the toilet, Mitchell retorted “that’s progres is it?”

So pretty worthwhile on the whole. Or at least better than a night working out how technically to implement google analyitics over multiple domains. For some reason I am convinced that question will surface in my google interview later. Who knows?

Unnecessary Obsession with Word?

Tim — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:02:25 +0000

I have been working as project manager to help build a website for a local school. There have been various difficulties, not least the obsession by some to send any if not all content in word documents.

Your in the supermarket you buy some stuff, it goes in a bag….but hang on, the bag cost 5p. Hmmm maybe I won’t take that bag after all. I think microsoft need to levy a similar charge when people reach for the word icon. They should probably be charged a £1 when using the medium exculsively for pictures… Just to cover network costs.

But why this obsession. Word files are no different to standard files. Why can’t the individual Jpg or gif be attached to an email. There must be ecameras, probably Kodak easyshare ones, that take pictures directly into word? Or perhaps on some PCs, notably those bought at supermarkets, Word is the default operating system. Fuck windows… All you need is the ability to make things bold, change text to comic sans ms and do a word count every 10 mins or so.

Sending pictures aside, surely when sending an email you write hello. Seems sensible to throw the rest of the content in there. The internet is not some sprawling word document tied together by dodgy tabs and misaligned paragraphs.

Anyway I have most of the content now but have all sorts of ideas to incorporate this habit into perhaps a key feature of the site. I could design the site entirely in Word and link the main URL to it so that the download starts straight away. It would time out half way through because of the file size exceeding the browsers buffer.

At some point some training will be necessary. I fear that the concept of a complex CMS may be too much. Today I connected excel directly to a mySQL database through ODBC. If the same could be done in Word to CMSmadesimple then I think they would be sorted. In fact, what started as a ridiculous post may have some merit after all.

Adobe Acrobatics

Tim — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:56:52 +0000

What is this obsession with PDF? Read by the idiot masses, created by the mysterious few, available to download all over the place. I needed to edit an application form yesterday for Clarkson and it took hours just to enter even just a single word. Why would an uneditable format be used for something that is next to useless unless edited in some way. Perhaps they are expecting a series of job applications, all the same but for a scrappy covering email and a descriptive filename.

Of course their real thinking is to print the form out. Yes, get on Internet, download form, download associated viewing software, print form and then after getting that far, start scibbling.

There are ways to avoid submitting a scrawled mess of smudged biro. You could print-screen and import into word as an image and then type over it, but this has it’s own problems of lack of space and text alignment oddities.

Searching on google for solutions to this dilema revealed a whole cottage industry for PDF converters all of which promise much but deliver little, given the unnecessary nature of this task.

Unbelievably even Adobe Acrobat Professional, the package presumably used to create the form in the first place was of little use. It transpired that although the form had been drawn/typed or whatever, but no actual form in the input field sense of the word had been created. So I had to add about 50 fields into the gaps using Acrobats horrid interface presumably designed to trip up anyone with a passing knowledge of microsoft word or equivilent.

Anyway once I had ‘enabled reader features’, the most important of which was to give the reader the ability to write, I was away. Bloody thing.

Flash User Interface Design Jiggery Pokery

Tim — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:16:58 +0000

Still working on a detailed functional design for a content management scheduling system. Having torn my hair out trying to find some pre-built components to barstardise I resorted to designing it all from scratch.

Often when designing a user interface one may turn to Powerpoint for wireframes, Visio for flow and logic diagrams or even HTML to mock up a simple prototype. I decided to shun all these options in favour of flash…

Initially it seemed like a fairly bad idea since things like drag & drop, frame control and scrolling windows are all a little complicated thanks to ActionScript 3.0’s attempts at being a proper programming language. Luckily I soon brought my Flash 5 skills into the 21st century as I juggled event listeners, mouse events and sophisticated function calls.

The tool basically allowed an editor to select spots on a page, then choose an item from a pool of content, schedule it and then edit or modify their settings as and when necessary. To start with I allowed the user to drag content directly from the pool onto the page. This was very usable, but tricky to do technically without heavy customisation on some JS frameworks such as MooTools or Scriptaculous. In the end I settled for a simple overlay system to let users select spots and content.

Within a day I had a reasonably complete interface (with a bit of smoke and mirrors) and I was able to review the design with stakeholders before moving onto the next iteration. The core look and feel as even overhauled twice before settling on a workable arrangement.

Once done I will add in an example since I think it’s useful to see what can be done in a day even by someone with limited experience with flash and actionscript (still managed to rack up nearly 500 lines of code somehow)l. Ideally in projects with experienced flash integrators, a design mock-up like this could be turned into the finished product thus saving valuable development time.

If I get a chance I will update with a list of tutorials for all the components I used to get the crucial bits and pieces in place.

Brightcove Fun & Games

Tim — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:06:56 +0000

Started working to integrate Brightcove video players with a third party ad agency today. Should be done pretty quickly so there will probably be few points of interest for me to bang on about here. Still, this kind of thing is relatively new so any problems I encounter are probably worth documenting.

The Brightcove tool is pretty impressive and has a slick flash interface, but is let down a little because it is not that flexible. Not to matter though… A few clicks here and there and I should have some ads popping up where people least expect them to.

The original system was set up by me before christmas by writing a 3rd party ad translator to integrate ads. This tool is still relatively new so not all ad providers have integrated their systems with Brightcove and so you need to work with the Brightcove API to get things working. The process was a little complicated and my hopes that things would just work were not realised. The silver bullet in this case was to use Adobe Flex builder instead of Flash to compile the actionscript SWF file. Once I did this, all worked perfectly. Another issue was getting crossdomain.xml files in place on both the client and 3rd party sytems. Flash is none too forgiving when running scripts between different places but it does not always visibly complain either. Needless to say, 3 months on and ads are still not getting served. Not great but a perfect opportunity to change provider and monetise some of these videos.

UPDATE
Got ads working pretty easily thanks to Acudeo’s tight integration with Brightcove. For some reason though, the ads fail in IE6… But who uses that browser now anyway, well, only all the people who are most likely to be idiotic enough to click on the ads in the first place probably. Fix due soon I hope.

Content Management System Cake

Tim — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:26:34 +0000

Content good enough to eat should be managed properly

Content Management System Cake, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

In trying to document here all the various technology/craft related nuggets of productivity i have been responsible for over the years I have decided to release the Content Management System cake based on a custom build I was involved with at AOL. There are plenty of geeky impressive cakes around, and this one is certainly not one of them, but I did spend a while putting this together a couple of years ago. I am probably most proud of using skittles in the top right-hand corner as colour-picker icons. It was the inspiration behind the whole thing really.

I wasn’t sure about actually baking the cakes themselves that make up the finished product, since I wanted everyone to actually eat it. I used blocks of iced madeira cake from Tesco and then added the various sugary accoutrements.

I am planning on making an executive dashboard later this year and hoping it will be a little more impressive than this. Its quite difficult to fill a cake of this size with useful content when all you have to contend with is chocolate drops, sugar twirls and the odd cola bottle.

JavaScript Scheduler with Drag & Drop Functionality

Tim — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:07:14 +0000

Busy Busy Schedule

A good usable interface is the holy Grail of all good web applications. Sites like Google and Flickr amongst others have excellently designed sites with good use of the latest JS and AJAX technologies. For mere mortals the only option to achieve similar levels of usability is to use the various JS frameworks and toolkits such as Scriptaculous, MooTools or Dojo.

Going one step further it would be useful to make use of tried and tested components built using these frameworks for integration into the site. Examples of these include calendars, drop-down navigation and forms. This way the only task is to integrate the components with the back-end system and customize to meet all the requirements.

Today I was looking for a scheduling component. Basically a calendar but with the ability to have multiple instances for each module on a page and the ability to drag items onto the calendar and resize for various time periods. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that anything even close exists. There are plenty of calendars but not any that would meet these requirements.

I am going to do some more investigation and see if something can be built. There seems to be a number of Flex resources that might be suitable and I will try and get them working. Integrating a Flex application could be much more tricky. It is going to be a long 3 weeks ahead of me.

UPDATE
I investigated all methods and given the simplicity of the requirements it would just take too long to integrate any of the components available. The Flex example (pictured) certainly holds the most hope for this sort of things. Lets hope some developers push forward the development and add in some additional features. Then it might be worth integrating it into some real systems.

Dodgy Belkin USB-Wielding Router

Tim — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:00:03 +0000

What it would look like if I got too close

I bought a new ADSL router at the weekend. I am not that impressed, but it will have to do for the moment since there does not seem to be anything better around. Rubbish.

I got a Belkin N+ (F5D8635) mainly on the basis of fairly sound reviews and a feature that enables you to plug in a USB hard drive so that you can share media such as music or films across the network. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work as expected, more on that later.

The set-up process was unnecessarily arduous, given that the software supplies asked you for your ISP so that it can auto-populate settings. Typically my ISP was not listed, and so I selected “other”, but this then meant that the screen to enter the ADSL username and password was missing so I ended up having to abort the connection process and set up things manually.

Once things were up and running I tested the internet and all appeared fine. I ran a speed test and saw a good 20% increase in download speed, although I attributed this mainly to the fact i removed a lengthy phone extension cable in the process of setting up and this must have improved the connection. Despite this theoretical increase in speed, the internet was still being a bit weird. Websites stalled when loading and the status bar just displayed the dreaded “Contacting Google…” etc. I am still monitoring this, given that there seemed no reason for it.

Next I set up the USB hard drive, which was the main reason for getting the router in the first place. Set-up was simple using the included Storage Manager software, although I later realised that this was unnecessary and I could connect to the drive via a SMB share along the lines of smb://[ipaddress]/[HDDName]. I copied some large files over and it looked like the transfer rate was about 1MB/s, not that great given that the router has a headline speed of much faster due to the draft N standard it connects over. This should be enough for streaming video and music and so next I tested that.

Video, both hi-definition and standard seemed fine. Music was a much bigger problem to test, seeing I had to rebuild my itunes library due to the different path to the music. I really should have just done a search and replace in the library XML file, but didn’t think of that at the time. Idiot. Adding the files took ages and crashed itunes due to the annoying file scanning that itunes does, which can neither be run in the background or stopped. Once the music was in place there was a slight delay in selecting songs and sometimes the music cuts out. Annoyingly I am not sure why this is, since most of the time it is ok. I think it may be more to do with the OSX implementation of the SMB protocol than anything else, but my investigations continue.

Either way, I now do not have to plug in the hard drive directly to the laptop to listen to music and it can be streamed directly through the router to the airport express connected to the amp. All I need now is a reliable way of streaming from Safari or Quicktime. Airfoil by the curiously named, Rogue Amoeba seems to just crackle and hiss when I attempt to use it to stream any sound outside of itunes to the airport. Also did some investigation to see if I could stream directly from my iphone to the airport, but it doesn’t look like anyone has worked that one out yet. It seems like an obvious application or upgrade that even Apple should make to their “Remote” software.

Other things of note that I didn’t seem to find elsewhere is that it comes with this rubbish plastic stand that is moulded to the base, ie you can’t remove it. This means you have to have this black flickering gate to the internet upright and it is more difficult to hide it away somewhere. This also reminds me, why all the flashing blue lights on the front. Belkin had added a series of “icons” to represent various goings on in the innards of this thing. I presume to give the idiots something to stare at once they get bored of ITV2, but for me these are a little annoying.

Eco features. Yes this router has eco features. WTF?

Brent’s Best Kept Secret

Tim — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:33:29 +0000

Clarkson on the shores of squalor, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Usually brown signs direct you to areas of natural or historical interest, in the case of the Welsh Harp, this could not be further from the truth.

Although a little off this blog’s topic, I randomly went to see if this reservoir and nature reserve could be walked round since I often see boats and people milling around it when driving past on the North Circular. It was probably the least inspiring place to go ever. There were more empty cans of stella kicking around than on a landfill site and the level of general waste was quite unexpected.

No-one seemed particularly put off by all the rubbish embellishments lining the footpath. There were plenty of families having picnics and children playing around the water’s edge. I would imagine the reservoir is a breeding ground for a whole generation of alcoholic wildlife tuned to the taste of dregs from the world’s least finest breweries.

I did not manage to walk around all of it, as it gets a bit boggy in places according the various tired notice-boards. I wonder if Brent spent less money on resurfacing pavements pointlessly and more on these kind of recreational areas, Brent would be a much more appealing place to live. Perhaps they can just replace the Welsh Harp brown signs with directions to the borough’s best kept pavements and leave the the birds to their dregs.

Saatchi Middle East Adventure

Tim — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:39:52 +0000

Visited the Saatchi gallery today to see the new Middle East art exhibition. The quality was high as usual although there was not the ridiculous shock factor of multiple waxwork dead bodies like at the last collection.

My favourite piece was this large concrete building block. Looked pretty boring from a distance, but up close there were all sorts of interesting details such as cracks and window frames and wirey bits sticking out.

Other works included some excellent scribbly messes that appeared to be quite violent in nature but very satisfying. Also a huge room full of praying lumps covered in foil.

The wheelchair-bound wax work OAPs still remained downstairs. I think they must have a residency there now.

Choosing a decent Amplifer

Tim — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:18:44 +0000

Bought an amplifier today after much research and investigation and decided to write about the general difficulty of the whole thing.

Where can you go to see hi-fi equipment?

Not long ago John Lewis sold a decent load of hi-fi equipment. Now those little listening rooms, stuffed with good equipment has been replaced with TVs and over-priced supposedly scientifically engineered home cinema systems. This is a shame since John Lewis has the right level of service to help make the rather annoying decision of whether to go with a Cyrus or an Arcam or a Marantz or some other random make that they may stock. You could always arrange to have a listening session and they usually let you listen to many different arrangements without any kind of “i am better than you” attitude that you can’t seem to escape at the little shops.

There are of course plenty of independent hi-fi stockists, such as Sevenoaks or Richer Sounds. Only they are not that independent at all. Richer Sounds is the only one who stocks Cambridge Audio and don’t do either Arcam or Cyrus. (plus they have the most irritating splash page ever, what happened to a well designed homepage with all the offers. Idiots) Sevenoaks get all excited about Cyrus and Arcam but not a lot else. How can one make a decision is you cannot compare all the competition?

Some independent shops claim to stock hi-fi but on further investigation stock 1 product, with another that can be ordered if required. This one in particular is one of the most dreadful examples. It also has one of the most pitifully disappointing and dreadful websites in recent memory. This is the kind of place your grandparents go to replace their Ferguson TV every 30 years or so.

What does the internet tell me?

Not too much either. There doesn’t seem to be a good resource on the internet where all this equipment is explained and reviewed in detail. What Hifi has a fair number of reviews, but its best buys are quite large amounts of money apart and I question the independence of a magazine. AVForums is a good community site, but the quality of posts is low. Someone may as a questions about what is the best equipment to get for £500 or whatever and then the majority of replies are unhelpful ones pointing the poster in the direction of something entirely different or just pointless snobbery.

Price comparison sites seem to fail to compare the prices for most of the high end equipment because it seems that not that many stockists are available. So either the equipment manufacturers are ensuring that people go to shops to buy the kit, or they are just partnering with rubbish shops that can’t put a website together to save their lives. I havn’t found a single website with a broad range of products that has community features such as reviews, recommendations or buyers guides.

There seem to be virtually no blogs on the topic either. Blogs like this one or this one appear top of google, but seem to not have been updated for ages. Am I missing something? All others just seem to show upcoming products or ridiculously expensive items that probably sound the same as a fairly standard Matsui mini system from dixons.

What next then?

As it is I got a Cyrus 6vs2 from Sevenoaks, partly because it seemed good and partly because it was reduced from £700 to £449. But even this was tricky. I ended up paying for it to then be told that the shop had none in stock. Idiot. What is the point in running a shop with no stock? Anyway, I am very happy with it so far and look forward to “running it in”. I have no idea how an amplifier can be anything like a car…but it says so on the box, so it must be true.

Obviously what is good can often be down to what sounds good to the listener, but that should not stop someone putting together a website recommending sets of various components that are known to sound good together, or that are often popular. This needs to be done by an independent with no ties to the manufacturers. I guess maybe that sort of independence is virtually impossible when people favour certain breeds over others.

Cake Competition Part 1

Tim — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:36:20 +0000

IMGP1224, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Last year, Clarkson and I embarked on a cake making competition. Needless to say, she won, but here are our two entries: a cake version of my cardboard car made by Clarkson and the Millennium Dome/Canary Wharf at night made by me.

Cakes are notoriously difficult to make well, since not only do you have to follow a recipe carefully, but you can’t just sellotape things together. Everything used needs to be edible in some way and edible things are just not very good for making interesting structures.

My initial plan was to make a teacup cake, but they went badly wrong when my attempt to stack cakes on top of each other failed after a collapse around the edges. Luckily I had Askeys tube things sticking out so I was able to swiftly change the type of cake I was making before the end of the competition.

Here are some other examples of impressive cakes…we clearly have a long way to go before matching their skills:

This years cake making competition is coming up next month and so hopefully my abilities will have improved.

VMWare & Oracle UCM Image Installation

Tim — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:25:45 +0000

A collage of file transfer hell

Today I had the pleasure of getting an 15GB image of RedHat with Oracle UCM installed up and running on one of the development boxes we have in a data centre, deep in the guts of the building. It should be a relatively easy task, only I do not have access to the data centre and so have to send files and operate it remotely. It is quite ridiculous the steps that have to be taken to get even close to getting this up and running.

To get at the image, I needed to install VMWare 1.08. I tried with the latest version 2, but it failed due to various windows server 2003 bugs. It kept saying “The System Administrator has set policies to prevent this installation”. Very annoying. Despite having over 1Gb of free space, I couldn’t seem to get the installer going.

But to even get to the point of actually installing stuff I had to get files there. This is probably the single most irritating thing to sort out. Accessing machines you cannot see is laced with trouble. I even installed Apache on my local machine due to lack of ping traffic to the remote server and tried to download from mine own PC having logged in remotely. To no avail.

I installed DownThemAll download manager extension in Firefox to get an earlier version of VMWare, since their website would never let me download more than about 1MB, then spent the next 3-4 hours transferring the image over the network. Needless to say, this did not work. Multiple GB image files are unhelpful to say the least.

Once I got the images over to the server, getting VMWare to load them was pretty simple really. I just pointed it at the .vmx/.vmdk files and it started booting up. One hiccup was logging in to the system once it booted up. I tried various different things, but luckily found that both the username and password was “oracle”.

Once in there wasn’t much to look at. I will look at the installation of UCM itself another day.

Cardboard Woodburner

Tim — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:50:08 +0000

Its Valentines day, and time for a strange construction for Clarkson. This time I tried to think of the things that are important to her. Tea came top, but then I already built the teacup last year, next was her Aga Little Wenlock woodburner. This seemed like an excellent thing to build, although I needed some kind of Gimmick. For example, the teacup was about 100 times the normal size and contained 100 teabags. For this project I got electricals involved.

IMGP2961, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Ingredients

Cardboard
Desk Fan - tricky to get at this time of year, Argo came through of course
Flashing red lights - preferably in their 100s and from China
Gaffa tape, Sellotape, masking tape, silver tape, parcel tape
Tissue paper - Red/Orange/Yellow
Brass fasteners
Black paint
Filler
Door stop

The first task was to mount the fan on its back into some cardboard to form the base of the burner. I would then be able to attach tissue paper to the fan cage and attach a message to Clarkson. Unfortunately all the air from the fan seemed to be shooting out of the side. Rubbish. So I proceeded to tape up the whole cage until only the top was open. Still the air went in the wrong direction and I realised I needed to provide air access to the fan from beneath the fan itself. Once I did this things were back on track.

I started to build the body of the woodburner. This was also tricky, because I was keen to get a very good likeness to the real thing. Without this it would just look like a mess. Once the container was complete I attached lights to give a red fire-y glow and started attaching the silverwork.

The best accessory is the twisting bit at the base of the woodburner used to let more air in. Although on my cardboard version it does nothing of any note, it does spin round on a brass fastener. Nice.

Qlikview Mutterings

Tim — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:53:02 +0000

I might be doing a course all about Qlikview later this month, so I thought I best do some research into what it is first and share my findings here.

This is an image from their website, showing just how important iliteration can be when communicating a message.

So what is Qlikview?

Looks like a way to present data, gathered from multiple sources in a series of interesting ways from which insight and analysis can then be drawn. Kind of like a super-executive dashboard generator I guess. These sort of products always frustrate me, things like Cognos, SAP etc. It is very difficult to define in a few sentences what exactly they do. No amount of searching seems to uncover that magic sentence that reveals why I should care.

On their website they say the following “QlikView provides fast, powerful and visual in-memory business analysis – without the limitations, cost or complexity of traditional BI tools. QlikView can be deployed in days and users trained in minutes.” Sounds exciting, but what does this mean?

After reading an article with the former CEO of Qliktech I am still none the wiser. There are constant references to keeping things simple. Well if it is so simple what is actually involved? I suspect I will find out more during the training.

Having searched further I have found that compared to SAP and other BI competitors, Qlikview has no direct comparison. Gartner even suggests they rate quite highly as industry visionaries. Unfortunately they have not proven themselves at enterprise deployments so cannot claim to be leaders in their field, despite dramtic growth over the last year.

In terms on business uses, this interesting article explains that often an entire team of skilled BI specialists can spend all their days producing custom reports for management, that end up as modified excel spreadsheets that are very difficult to maintain. Qlikview offers a similar interface to excel but makes things much easier to create new or custom reports. So basically, the work of creating reports can be shifted to some extent from IT resources directly to management or other non-technical people.

Whatever they are doing, they clearly have very high customer satisfaction, as noted by this Gartner report…

“The passion of QlikTech’s customers was evidenced by the number of references willing to complete the survey, which was higher than for any other vendor”

Mobile iGoogle improved on iPhone, but not perfect

Tim — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:03:39 +0000

Having removed the iPhone-optimised iGoogle to the distress of all obsessive users, such as myself, Google has redeemed itself by improving the interface it left us with slightly. A screenshot can be seen below…

The key difference to what came before is that when initially loading the page you can opt for showing a brief description of each feed before then going off the the actual source or viewing a Google hosted mobile version of the content. This is, in some ways, better than the previous version, since with just one page load you can get far more information about all your feeds, especially if you opt to add many to your homepage.

The problem is that the interface to then read the full text of the feed is a bit clunky. It just seemed like before it was only a small page load to display the content within wach feed tab. Now it has to load a whole new page and then to go back you have to reload the original homepage again.

All Google need to do now is give an additional “More” link so that you can expand the content still further. The use case for this for on the tube. I get on and load my iGoogle home page, then 2 mins later I am in a tunnel and then there is patchy coverage/am in a tunnel pretty much until I arrive at work. This means that I want to be able to load all of the feeds first and then look through them without further loading.

I know there is a BBC app that does this, but it downloads all BBC content and is not selective, and hence I would need to do this preferably on a wifi connection at home, giving enough time for it all to load. Even then I would only have BBC content. Feed readers also require continuous downloads as you browse through their feeds. Hmmmm. Rubbish.

Yahoo Analytics Slow to Launch to the Masses?

Tim — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:21:37 +0000

Last April, Yahoo announced that it had acquired the leading web analytics specialist IndexTools and then in October last year it announced the beta of Yahoo Analytics available only to Yahoo small business customers. Since then things have gone very quiet. The website appears to promise much in the way of features but availability is still limited.

Now in the grand scheme of things noone will be very fussed by this. Google Analytics now offers heaps of enterprise class features with their free analytics solutions. Also there are plenty of open source solutions such as Piwik or Woopra, that provide a half decent service, also for free. But Yahoo is missing a trick here. A decent analytics package certainly can drive marketing spend towards each vendors PPC services, (In Google’s case, AdWords) and in a world where online advertising spend is increasing a a proportion to total dollars this is an important strategy.

Finding resources on Yahoo Analytics is tricky, since few have written on the topic since last year. What we do know is…

Yahoo provides real-time, or at least very near to real-time data. Google purports to provide real-tim data, but in reality it takes a few hours to come through.
IndexTools, the company Yahoo purchased and branded as their analytics solution, has a level of features typically referred to as 80% of Omniture at 20% of the price.
In addition to faster data, Yahoo will also provide all analytics data in raw form, instead of a periodic aggregation of things like total visitors to a page as suggested here.

There are various places that say a wider release is imminent, but no definite news yet. Why?

Cardboard Teacup

Tim — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:50:15 +0000

Below is the teacup I made for Clarkson’s Birthday.

IMGP1902, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

It was a complicated project, much like all of these sort of constructions. It was not entirely obvious from the beginning how to go about making the spherical shape of a teacup. I knew I couldn’t just use cardboard or paper because it would need to hold about 1500 teabags.

The basic premise was for it to be like a kind of tea cup themed lucky dip, where presents would sit within the cup surrounded by cheap Tesco Value teabags. I did extensive research on tea-bags and regardless of any Buy One Get One Free offers, the Value tea-bags won on price every time. I suspect not on taste.

I decided on using chicken wire to make the basic shape and then cover that in papier-mache.

The wire was a little tricky to hold in place. It was better than cardboard on its own, but it was very sharp and bits stuck out all over the place. A good pair of pliers came in handy here.

Once the basic shape was there I covered it in lots of masking tape. This was because the holes between the bits of wire were too big to support the wet paper. Also masking tape gripped the paper better and helped the process along. After about 2-3 hours of application I started work on the handle, also out of cardboard. Soon my neighbour, realising what I was attempting crafted me a handle out of wood. Brilliant. This was then attached using wire and a good amount of sellotape. It certainly wasn’t strong enough to support the cup, which by now was actually rather heavy but it looked the business.

The last part was to decorate it. I wanted it to look like one of those old pieces of china decorated in blue, but when searching for this on google, I found only very complicated and intricate designs. There seemed to be no simple almost cartoon-like equivalent to draw from. So I just made it up….looks ok though?

The presents themselves were wrapped in special tea-cup wrapping paper. I am sure this is something that should be easily bought from any decent card or wrapping shop. I was wrong. I ended up getting it from some place in America called Gifts of Gratitude. They were very helpful and waived their admin fee due to the distance it was being sent. Here is their website, I am sure I will end up buying from them again…

All New Imbimp Redesign

Tim — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:03:30 +0000

No sooner had this site been built, but along comes a fancy new theme. This was always my intention, but it takes time to rip all the cardboard and photoshop all the remains.

Its all gone a bit meta

There are obviously a number of things still to do, notably

Create something fun for the breadcrumb
Style the comments and quotes sections
Include different styles for posts in different categories
Fix mouseover events
Put in some silly animations around and about in places you would least expect

The whole process was fairly straightforward. I started with the iNove theme, which is one of the most popular wordpress themes available. I figured, so long as I am starting from a good base, then I can add in everything I need.

I then built all the different bits using my questionable art & craft skills and photographed them. Once all the cardboard was digitalised I was able to piece things together into a design using photoshop. Layering all the different elements was important so that I could see what the final site would look like, but to give me the flexibility to cut out various bits for use as background images and such like.

Photographs were taken using my Pentax K10D SLR…more about that another time….it performed fairly well, although it was tricky to get a consistent tone for each of the bits of cardboard and so some tinkering was needed using Photoshop (CS3).

The theme itself was fairly simple to apply. I used CSSEdit 2.5 to do all the CSS, since it nicely updates the page as you apply things. I also used Smultron for editing the PHP files. Not quite sure why….it was just the first text editor that came to hand.

The trickest bit was styling the widgets, since they work in a slightly more complicated way to the main body of the page. I had to do some extensive debugging to work out quite where all the mark-up was written out to the page. The key tool to my disposal was firePHP, a PHP debugging tool, which allows you to output PHP debug to the console. I do not have much experience with PHP, so it was not immediately obvious what was going on.

I spent about 4 hours just on my link widget. Annoyingly I had already applied a number of plug-ins and suspected that this had complicated the process slightly. This meant searching for things like “wordpress widget styling problems” yielded few tips. It turned out that the link widget refused to apply my additional style markup because it caches the html. Clearing the cache fixed the problem.

I probably need to do something to cache the whole site really, since it is a bit slow. The hefty background images do nothing to help matters, but I am planning on changing the transparent GIFs to JPGs and then hosting them somewhere like Flickr, where things should load faster.

I plan to post some more information about useful plugins I am using and some how-to guides on the slightly more complicated ways I have got things to work.

Cardboard Car

Tim — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:21:51 +0000

DSC00658, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Inspired by “The Science of Sleep”, we convered my car in cardboard, drew odd slogans and ventured into the city to catch the sights.

It took about 3 hours to completely cover the car, and was quite a gruelling process, since we had to cut sections the same shape as parts of the body work, stick it with masking tape to the car itself, and then a mixture of masking and parcel tape to the other cardboard around it. I never envisaged having lots of white bits all over it holding it all together, but the final product did look quite funny. It was important that everything was taped down securely as we didnt want any air to get under the cardboard and rip it off if we went a little too fast or the wind caught it.

Decorating was a more tricky job, since once the cardboarding had been done we were a little unsure what to put on the sides. Award for best slogan went to Haj for “World Contribution”.

Here is a video of us leaving base and zipping into London. Note the cartoon wheels. We made sure the cardboard hubcaps were slightly off-round so that when spinning at speed they went a little higgledy-piggeldy.

Unfortunately we did get into a spot of bother with the Police just near Tower bridge. Luckily nothing came of it since they really did have nothing on us. They even followed us as we drove round Westminster Green. Award for best premise on which to arrest someone went to the Police for “Driving with an unsafe load”.

The best picture of the day was taken right in front of Big Ben. The best part is on the right hand side, where tourists are actually taking pictures of us instead of the main attraction.

60 SEO Tips, Tricks & Hacks

Tim — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:12:42 +0000

SEO is now a critical requirement for any website. Without consideration for SEO, a site cannot expect to compete for vital search traffic. While important for any webmaster, SEO is also a minefield of information, some good and some bad. Not to mention that the things you need to know are hardly ever all in one place.

The following is a list of the 60 key things you should consider. Most are built into any modern content management tool, but some are not. Any SEO consultant will only go through a list much like this one and investigate to what extent your site meets these obligations, there is no other mystery to it.

1 - Images should have appropriate alternative text – For example, images often have the ALT text “image”. Where possible, the ALT text should contain a brief explanation of the image

2 - Make sure page sections have their own headings – The page content should be visually separated into sections for ease of reading, but if each section is not introduced in markup by an

or

tag as appropriate, screen readers will not recognise that a new section is starting.

3 - Ensure headings are correctly nested – In HTML markup of page and section headings,

should follow

,

should follow

etc.

4 - Make sure link text makes sense when read out of context – Common link texts like “click here” do not provide enough information. “Click here to view shopping cart” provides contextual information for a screen reader

5 - Make sure the file name of the image itself provides a description of the image

6 - Breadcrumbs - Include breadcrumb trails as they provide a method of back-linking to a page and provide some form of structural hierarchy of where a page sits within a site

7 - Link to related pages on the site to improve the user experience and add to the number of internal links. Strategically linking within a site can lend credibility to page

8 - Title Attribute - Provides a way to describe the link much the same way as alt text does for images. The text attribute should describe and include keywords of the destination page.

9 - Sitemap - A site map lists important Web pages of a site and links to them directly, where possible. It also visually represents the website design hierarchy, either in a topological (or outline) view or as a chart

10 - XML Sitemap - It is also advisable to created an XML index of main content inventory such as articles and picture galleries for example and generate updates to this frequently so that Google has an up to date index of all site content. Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can’t reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface. For example, any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap
A Sitemap does not replace the crawl-based mechanisms that already operate to discover URLs, but will help the crawlers do a better job of indexing the site. Sitemaps should be explicitly submitted to search engines to ensure that they know about the content sooner and there is no ambiguity regarding how the site is structured by pointing to a file submitted by a webmaster

11 - Broken links can be defined as any link that takes a user to a page not found or that does not load. Broken links not only prevent the visitor from navigating cleanly through a website but also hinder the search engine spider from moving deeper into a site to index its pages

12 - A good housekeeping habit is to try to follow the links within your pages, and remove any which is broken

13 - 404 Page - Always capture broken links by returning a user to a 404 error page. This page can contain links to help the user find the content they were looking for to ensure they are recirculated into the site. Search engines may index a page that later turns out to be removed. In this case, the 404 page is key to capture users clicking on that link

14 - Use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robot

15 - For example, the User-agent: * means this section applies to all robots. The Disallow: / tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site…
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

16 - If duplicate content exists on multiple domains, robots.txt should be used to ensure the web robot only indexes one instance. Otherwise the duplicate content will effect PageRank

17 - A DOCTYPE can be used to enforce coding standards on a page to ensure that it is well formed and therefore more accessible for search engines to spider

18 - Search engines are more likely to favour well structured HTML documents which adhere to W3C standards since it is easier to extract the key content and keywords from a document that is well formed and structured

19 - Use a validator to ensure you HTML is syntactically correct and identify problems: http://validator.w3.org/

20 - All content that needs to be indexed must be available without the need for cookies, since spiders do not support these. They will only index the default content available without cookies

21 - Designing for as many different browsers and operating systems as possible will ensure that the page is viewable by as many people as possible. Although this does not directly impact SEO, the wider the access to page, the more likely people are to visit regularly

22 - The heading tags provide different levels of emphasis on the content. For example, H1 content will be considered more important by search engines, and will be given more weighting.

23 - Ensure the H1 tag appears only once per page and is as descriptive of site content as possible

24 - Title Tag should be included on every page and describe its content, including any keywords which match up with the page meta keyword tag

25 - Title tag is similar to the description meta tag, but it is given more weighting when calculating search result relevance

26 - Title Tag should be optimised to between 60 and 64 characters – any longer and the relevance becomes diluted

27 - Although page meta data is of less significance to determining search engine rankings, it is still important to include it within the head of an HTML document

28 - Use keywords which describe the content and match the main headings and URLs of a page. The order of the keywords is also important, and so best practice dictates that the more suitable keywords should be listed first. For example, Description is often displayed in organic search results

29 - Each page should have one “targeted” keyword phrase with “secondary” keyword phrases associated with it. This “targeted” keyword phrase should be relevant to the page it is mapped to, and should be a term highly searched by Internet users

30 - All of the major search engines place emphasis on the Web page title, visible HTML text, text placed above the fold, and text placed in and around hypertext links. Search engines do not use meta-tag content to determine relevancy, but they are encouraged for other reasons.

31 - Link Popularity (the number web pages linking to a website or another web page) is a key component in SEO success. A link from page A to page B or C is a vote or recommendation by the author of page A for page B or page C. The greater the number, and the higher the quality of the links pointing to page A, the more “authority” page A has on the web.

32 - Search engines utilise targeted keyword phrases in the body copy on an individual page to help determine relevancy

33 - For any site to be visible in search engines, it is necessary to have static pages of relevant content. Put simply, textual content on a website is what feeds the search engine spiders. If there is little or no content on a page, the spider has no theme to associate with the page.
More content translates directly into more real estate on the Web, more opportunities for rankings, and therefore, more visibility and traffic

34 - Use a variety of keywords and key phrases, which describe the main themes of the content

35 - Consider which words the audience is most likely to use to access the content

36 - Include keywords within the page content and links – approximately 2% of total word count

37 - Include keywords near to the top of the page, at worst in the first half of the content

38 - Do not syntactically re-order or over repeat keyword phrases otherwise their relevance will be diluted

39 - Create vanity URLs which match the content of the destination page. Examples such as: http://www.domain.com/article/liverpool-inspired-to-victory-against-united/14387087

40 - The URL should contain the headline of the page, however this is not the physical location of the content but the id appended to the end of the URL is used to identify the content within the CMS and displays the relevant page to the user.

41 - Words can be joined with either – or _ but should be separately to improve readability

42 - URLs should ideally be consistently in lowercase. Using a mixture of cases could mean a page is indexed twice under different URLs, confusing analytics figures

43 - Improving the quality of the site and its content will encourage others to link to it

44 - Links from other sites that have a high PageRank are weighted more than those that may be deemed spam sites that have no real content but just lists of links

45 - Paid ads do not count towards your PageRank since Google wants to avoid people paying their way to a higher position within organic results

46 - When using external links of the site use the rel=“nofollow” attribute if you are unsure of the site’s content. This will tell the google spider not to follow the link. Good use of the nofollow attribute can ensure that only quality links are included in your PageRank

47 - The extent of duplicate content that exists will determine its impact on your visibility
Usually created to capitalise on ownership of many domain names, essentially increases Internet real estate (i.e., mycompany.com and mycompany.net)

48 - Spiders finding duplicate content will penalise the sites. The form of penalisation is constantly changing, with a shift towards complete exclusion of sites for such practices. It is not good for your online presence and can have a drastic impact on your traffic from search

49 - If there has been an HTML page names change, ensure that the old name is removed

50 - Make sure your pages contain substantively unique content. For example be weary of including content from feeds that could be ingested by multiple different places

51 - Some search engines also determine the relevance of content based on the last updated date of a page. It is therefore important to try to keep content up to date and revisit and update older content to make the timestamp more up to date

52 - Cloaking: Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users

53 - Splash pages / Entry pages - These do not typically have very much descriptive content and may be flash or image based
It is more intuitive to display your home page first to help users get to your content as quickly as possible

54 - While Web browsers can display Flash with the addition of a simple plug-in, search engine spiders cannot fully extract, and therefore index, content from Flash files

55 - Even if Flash provides a better user experience, Flash-heavy design often works against the Search Engine Optimisation goals of the website

56 - Ensure there are elements on the page that are not contained in the Flash file that the spider may crawl and index
In some cases it may be better to convert Flash to DHTML

57 - Search engine spiders do not support JavaScript. Therefore, most links and content housed in JavaScript are not crawled or indexed in search engines and are ignored

58 - Where JavaScript is a required feature, non JavaScript methods of rendering content (i.e.

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or

tag as appropriate, screen readers will not recognise that a new section is starting. 3 - Ensure headings are correctly nested – In HTML markup of page and section headings,

should follow

,

should follow

tag as appropriate, screen readers will not recognise that a new section is starting.

3 - Ensure headings are correctly nested – In HTML markup of page and section headings,