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This is Your Life (company manifesto)

October 2nd, 2010 | Comment | Personal

This is the manifesto of a clothing and accessories company of all things. A nice bit of writing and typography.

Surf’s Down: Lessons Learned from Digg

October 1st, 2010 | Comment | Personal

I have been out of the loop for the last month or so. I’m not casually surfing the web the way I used to.

For three or four years I’ve been a nearly daily visitor of Digg. A recent redesign of the site has left many features broken, and all my precious diggs lost! The site is a foreign seemingly untrustable shadow of what it was.

There are some great lessons here.

Background

Digg is essentially a user submitted news site with a democratic system of ranking stories. I find in particular their tech section does a pretty great job of being on top of latest events. There is also a decent smattering of silly news which I like.

Digg has always boasted a large audience, but what may be the most unique thing about the community is the cynical biting nature of the comments. Paul Boag (former Boag World podcast host) once cited Digg founder Kevin Rose as a possible cause for setting this tone on his laid back and flippant podcast Diggnation – a tone echoed all too well on the boards.

This crude, often irreverent audience isn’t one you want on your bad side.

Early Lesson

Kevin Rose is a passionate evangelist for web communities. I first took notice of him in an interview in .net Magazine. I think it was in this same publication he made a brilliant comment on the “Release Early, Release Often” approach to web apps: I have seen clients fall into that classic pit fall of wanting to wait until a site is perfect before launching it – this can lead to many delays and a lot of agonizing. Rose argues that it’s the Internet; a medium that can be changed easily and on the fly. There is value in taking a risk and putting it out there, gauging reaction and changing accordingly.

I’ve often thought of this, and thankfully Digg is here to show me the second part of theSu lesson before I had to learn it the hard way…

Hard Lesson

Risky launches are risky (yeah, sic). Digg launched the fourth iteration of their site and it’s arguably been a disaster. Though the new version was in beta and tested, on launch a lot went wrong, and a lot of the site became unusable. On some computers live text is rendered in gibberish, all of my 4000+ diggs (which I used as bookmarks) are gone, the layout was so foreign (and I was so discouraged) that I lost interest in relearning how to use the site. Surely if I felt even a little irked by this the rabid throngs would be totally up in arms about it.

Currently the site is seeing something like 30% less traffic. Developers are working to fix the issues, but surely they’ll lose some of these users permanently.

Ironically, the same .net issue that had the interview with Rose had an excellent article on evolving sites with small redesigns rather than huge alienating changes. Cameron Moll summed it up perfectly in his article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign.

So?!

Two lessons from Digg; Take risks, but don’t go crazy. Everything in moderation. There’s nothing better than a good plan B, am I right?!

I hope Digg gets everything sorted out, we’ve had some good times, but this site owes me nothing.

What Motivates Us

September 30th, 2010 | Comment | Personal

I think I’ve maybe found a vein of gold with these RSA animated videos… one of the glorious things about having a full time job is the ability to pursue some personal projects that capture my imagination. In doing this I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle of what motivates me and what kills all motive, and drops me into a spiralling pit of procrastination. The horse analogy in this video is perfect; there have been simple tasks that I have basically served as a pair of hands on – these are the simple 15 minute tasks that I can stretch into a 3 day ordeal (thankfully those jobs are behind me)

Where Good Ideas Come From

September 29th, 2010 | Comment | Personal

Lately creativity and the ability to expand upon ideas and thoughts has been inspiring me.

“Chance favors the connected mind.” ~ Steven Johnson

Idea: Papparazi Papparazi

September 27th, 2010 | Comment | Personal

I don’t follow the entertainment scene, but I do shop at grocery
stores; so naturally I’m regularly accosted by images of celebrities
taken when they’re unaware, unprepared, or not consenting. If I was a
celebrity, I’m not sure I would take this kind of treatment.

One thing movie stars / rock stars have that paparazzo’s likely don’t
is millions and millions of dollars. If I was one of them I would
start my own rag about these dirtbags following me around with
cameras. I’d hire a PI to take lots of pictures of them, dig up some
dirt, and then publish it. I would give this magazine away for
nothing. I bet within celebrity circles you could get some excitement
going and get friends involved with making these lowest of journalists
miserable; maybe get egg-raiding their homes added to Hollywood Star
Tours.

I actually don’t care if this ever happens, so long as all the
nonsense stays far away from me.

Function before Form

September 24th, 2010 | Comment | Personal

I’ve been a designer for years; and I’ve only just been coming to realize that Function is more important to me than Form.

As a designer I have some habits (likely annoying for those around me!) that I can’t let go: when I get a menu at a restaurant I instantly start thinking about typography and colors. When I’m sitting in a car for the first time I like to think about the use of the space, dashboard layout and how we fit in. When I look at graphics I even try to decide where the vector nodes are. I’m really a nerd for this stuff.

There is a difference between an artist and a designer; a design is supposed to marry beauty with purpose (I can’t place who I’m quoting at the moment). To me that purpose is way more important that the look of it. This is startling for me since I have been thinking I was a designer before all else (as far as careers go anyways). User Experience is the most important aspect of a project by far. I plan to gather some examples for a future post.

I have also come to realize that I’m way more passionate about brainstorming ideas and abstract problem solving than actually making designs! I have recently just filled an entire Moleskin with ideas and experiment fodder. Hopefully this will all be executed or discussed in some form on August Lark some day, but I’m more interested in starting a new notebook.

Being Creative is fun, and is my favourite thing about me.

Rory Sutherland on Intangible Value

September 21st, 2010 | Comment | Personal

TED talks are a bit hit or miss with me. The Technology, Entertainment, Design subjects are often right up my alley; and every now and then a really great talk will stand out. This video by a long time ad man offers some insights on how advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself.

We could be way more satisfied with things in our lives if we just change the way we look at things.

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.”
— G.K. Chesterton

How Massive is Google?

September 18th, 2010 | Comment | Personal

I love a good infographic, and I love Google.

Click to enlarge.

Via computer school.org

John Cleese on feeding Creativity

September 14th, 2010 | 1 Comment | Personal

Here’s a brilliant talk by actor and comedian John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) on how creativity works – and the fuel it needs. It’s a lesson I’ve been hearing a lot of lately from a varied number of sources: I need to make time and space for myself void of technology. We all do.

JohnnyA Misery; a post mortem

September 10th, 2010 | Comment | Personal

As was better publicized elsewhere, in early July or so there was a massive hacking onslaught on the Media Temple* gridservers by a mysterious source often referred to as “JohnnyA” (the name of the admin account that was added to WordPress sites). I personally had over 20 sites hit by the attack – and it could not have come at a worse time. I was putting in heavy overtime with work for a series of deadlines, and I was in the throes of the Dad thing (first born child being born that week and all). The hacking wasn’t limited to WordPress sites either, the damage was pretty rampant – even on single page sites like ◉.ws.

Sadly I couldn’t react as quickly as I would have liked. I hired my brother to make a series of updates and obvious fixes for me to buy time and prevent something possibly worse from happening.

Somehow in my bleary sleepless state I would find time to Google the issue – several bloggers wrote about their experiences and some lengthy discussions were sparked in the comments. No doubt this would be invaluable reading – but there was a lot. The time investment aside, I also wasn’t relishing the prospect of SSH command prompt type of work which was the thrust of a lot of the talk.

What my simple Googling didn’t produce as a result (and thus my reason for blogging about this now) was the easiest way of finding the problem: Google Webmaster Tools, which I’ll come to in a moment.

First things first though: if you’re having this issue what is the source? I have no idea if the vulnerability was my own, or if it was possibly someone else hosted on my server (read about some vulnerability in TinyMCE used in Drupal). I have no idea how this hosting works. Best practice though is to upgrade everything. For me this was a load of WordPress sites and plugins. I also deleted any unused sites as well as every JohnnyA admin.

Next, I made a list of all my affected sites (sites triggering the red warning screen of malicious content) – this is where the priceless Google Webmaster Tools comes in. Adding the affected site would bring a warning of the site being in violation in some way. By clicking some kind of a “more info” link you could see exactly what the offending page was! This made clean up a much simpler process.

I hope this helps some other tired Dad somewhere out there.

*by the way Media Temple has in no uncertain terms made it clear to the universe that this exploit was in no way their issue, but that of third party software etc.