- Week 351
-
This is late, it’s about last week, the beginning of which seems a long time ago, before I came away to Austin, TX last Thursday.
I was very busy before leaving. If I count Pepys as work then I managed to fit 12 quite intense working days into the ten calendar days before I came away. People have worked much harder, but for someone who generally manages to avoid working evenings or, especially, weekends, it was enough.
I wrapped up, mostly, the bit of work I was doing for BERG on El Morro - it could have been more complete but it was OK, I think. And I finished a bunch of static HTML/CSS pages for the project with Somethin’ Else — that was a rush as they were needed for some early testing the day I get back to London, so had to be done before I left.
The rest of the week, after a long and tedious day’s travel, I’ve been at SXSW. I may write more on that when it’s completely over. The conference itself is frustrating, trying to be too many things to too many (13,000? 17,000?) people. But it’s been a good trip aside from that.
On 16 March 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- SXSW & NY
-
Just a quick one as in a few minutes I’m off on the Heathrow Express of the slow now (the Piccadilly Line) and then on to SXSW. I’ll then be in New York from 17th to 21st. Do come and say hi or something if we should/could talk. I’m rubbish at that but do enjoy it once I get going.
I went to SXSW last year, but before that the only time I’d been was in 2000, when it was smaller and less OHMYGODTHERE’SSOMANYPEOPLE.
It was quite exciting then. Blogging was fairly new (crisp Blogger t-shirts were handed out to a lucky few) and it was fun to meet a whole bunch of similarly-minded people for the first time. I’ve bumped into several of them at a few points over the past decade and although we’ve spent little time together overall, it always feels like seeing a really old friend.
Last year it all seemed a bit more, I don’t know, overgrown as a conference. Way too much going on to have a handle on it all, way too much “maximising your personal brand through social media” type stuff. And way too much having to please too broad a selection of people. After ten, fifteen, whatever years, there are people who are old hands at this, and people who are dipping their first toes in. It’s impossible to run a show that satisfies all of them. It was still fun though, hence this year’s return.
I recently did a nostalgic search for stuff written about SXSW 2000. Cameron Barrett’s report is still there and, in the wake of a memorable and spirited informal session about the merits or otherwise of blogging, things like this MetaFilter post were written. Ben Brown, who made a passionate plea at the time for long-form online writing wrote a lovely piece about his SXSW which I loved reading again.
Finally, there’s this other thread which, again, seems like ancient history, but I also liked Rebecca Blood’s description of the sociable aspect of the conference:
we talked about lots of things. I spent a good deal of my time getting to know the various people I met: where do you work, how do you like it, what are you planning to do when you graduate? that sort of thing. I’d say that there was a good deal of that kind of general socialization throughout the conference. I was meeting a large number of people whose work I’ve followed and admired for a long time, and it was a real pleasure to sit down and talk to them face to face.
we talked about what went on at the various panels. we compared notes on our reactions, reported on panels others hadn’t attended, that sort of thing.
and we talked about the web. we talked about ideas that the panels and the company inspired, we threw ideas around, we speculated on where the web is going… one night several of us talked into the morning about the value of weblogs and tried to come up with schemes that would enable us to support ourselves with this kind of work.
we talked about lots of other things, too: personal philosophies, how one conducts oneself in the world, why isn’t there a quiet place in this party so that people can just talk? the people I met are interested in lots of things, so we talked about everything under the sun.
I came away from it all very pumped up, with ideas for new projects, memories of stimulating conversations with interesting people, inspired by the interest and enthusiasm the people I met had for the web and its potential.
I would go again, and I would recommend it to anyone with a sincere love for the web and its potential.
Ten years on, I still hope this is true. More of that please.
In Misc on 11 March 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Week 350
-
A busy week. I was due to continue working on the project I previously code-named Project Humphrey but that was delayed by a couple of days. So the start of the week I continued at BERG on their El Morro project, bringing a technical specification up to date.
Wednesday to Friday I started work on the next phase of Project Humphrey at Somethin’ Else — I spent a week wireframing the project’s website last month and I’ll be spending chunks of the next couple of months doing the front-end development.
Although that was my day job, I was back to BERG in the evenings to get the PHP thing I was working on in Week 349 up to date with the new spec. BERG are busy folk at the moment, so the office was always busy into the evening.
On top of that, I’ve been trying to keep up with Pepys by preparing the diary entries in the office before work. It’s easier to do there, with a big monitor, and I’m trying to avoid doing it at home on weekends. But, with lots of work on at the moment, there’s no other time than early mornings. Up betimes, indeed.
Next week I’m continuing with Humphrey, and probably squeezing in more on El Morro, and then I’m off to Austin for SXSW. Which means I’ll need to get ahead of Pepys even more than usual, which probably means spending much of Sunday at the office. Busy busy.
In Week notes on 6 March 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Week 349
-
This past week I’ve been working with BERG, the other side of our office’s internal wall, on their El Morro project.
The first three days were spent continuing the wireframes I began the previous week, outlining a non-public part of the system.
Wireframing seems to work like this: I arrive on a project that’s been underway for a while and turn the team’s ideas into something concrete. At this point they’ve usually thought through the details enough to create sketches and common mental models about how the website should work. I have to tease out the knowledge that now seems obvious to everyone else so that I understand it well enough to be clear what the pages look like, what information is required when, and how everything fits together. The process always unearths problems that have been overlooked, or things that different people have assumed work in varying ways. It should result in a document everyone can agree on as depicting what the website should look like, in terms of information and functionality, but not design.
That’s now done, barring small tweaks here and there. Thursday and Friday I was working on some PHP to demonstrate a particular feature of the project. It’s code that will be superseded by something more robust later but we need something to expose potential issues early on. I really enjoy this kind of coding — demo things with quick results, but that don’t require the same level of robustness and future-proofing and scalability as live, public code. Fun and satisfying.
It seems to make more sense to write weeknotes at the end of a week, looking back. And I’m happy to look back at this week — working on an interesting project for good people, in “my” office surrounded by friends. Yes.
In Week notes on 27 February 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Week 348
-
It turns out I’m no good at blocking off time for my own projects. I managed to resist earlier in the month, but now the next fortnight, which was going to be nicely open, is chock full. Thankfully, it’s all good stuff.
Last week I got a set of wireframes done for Project Humphrey, which are now with the client. At the start of the week I didn’t fully understand the project and, even for those more immersed in it, there were many vague areas that hadn’t been decided yet. Specifying exactly what’s on every page helps everyone confront the hazy bits and decide what happens where and what needs to be built.
This week… There are a few tweaks to make to those wireframes. Wednesday I’m going to my alma mater, UWE, Bristol, to talk to Dan Dixon’s web design students. I plan to talk about practical stuff: the kind of work I do and the problems and benefits of freelancing. I plan to talk about that, but I need to work it out yet. Thursday I have a conference call with some potential international clients (which, for someone like me unaccustomed to international “telcos”, is quite exciting). On Friday I’ll be at The Story conference which should be fascinating.
Around all that, and continuing into next week, my time is suddenly filled up by working with the clever folk in the other half of the office, BERG, working on on the “El Morro” project, which I’m unusually excited about. It takes a lot to excite me, international telcos aside, so this is good.
In Week notes on 16 February 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Week 347
-
Weeknotes always seem to be written by people who are extremely busy and/or enthusiastic. Let’s look back at last week (346) and momentarily buck that trend.
I knew that my news project was both vague and ambitious and that I might fail to produce anything useful or interesting. But I did expect to produce something. Unfortunately, after two days I was even more lost than when I started. And, adding two solid days of reading news websites to a few weeks of pondering the problems, I was sick to death of thinking about news.
So the whole thing ground to a halt and I spent the rest of the week doing other odds and ends while trying not to feel like an aimless, over-hyping failure. I had no idea what I’d been trying to do. One of the problems with working on solo projects is finding a way out of the holes one digs without help.
I would like to return to the project in some way, but with a more manageable scope. Maybe focusing initially just on an interface that would make me keener to read news online than I currently am, clicking through one slow, cluttered webpage at a time. In the meantime, sorry if you were looking forward to me revolutionising the world of news.
Back to week 347, this week… Some client work came up at rather short notice, and I’m spending the week helping with the planning and wireframing of the project I was already going to be working on for much of March and April. In good Weeknotes tradition, I’ll give it my own codename: Project Humphrey. It’s good to be working with other people again, batting ideas around and slowly making amorphous ideas more concrete. The final website should be both fun and worthwhile, which is always a bonus, and I know I’ll find it useful.
Onwards.
In Week notes on 8 February 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Replace comments with letters pages
-
I like this, a CSS file that hides comments on many popular websites. It feels a bit like we’re very slowly turning a corner when it comes to how we think of commenting (unless it’s merely my wishful thinking).
Comments can be great of course. I generally find comments on my own site useful, pleasant, interesting and ego-stroking. Because my site isn’t very popular so I don’t get many. But we all know that any hugely popular site will generate dozens, hundreds of comments on any page, which almost no one will read through.
(I like to think The Diary of Samuel Pepys sits at a lucky point on this continuum: popular enough to generate a bunch of interesting comments from nice people every day, but not popular enough to drown in noisy idiots.)
Comments on YouTube are a standing joke for their dumbness. BBC News’ Have Your Say has a site dedicated to highlighting its worst nonsense. Engadget recently turned off its comment system for a while because things had “gotten out of hand”.
Over the past decade or more we’ve developed many systems to allow the good comments to bubble to the top. Some work a bit, some don’t. Often they’re a little too complicated for the mass-appeal sites that have the biggest problems.
So maybe popular sites should simply turn comments off.
If I was an attention-seeking, “controversial” columnist I’d be saying this is the only solution. ALL comments are bad, the internet is RUBBISH and ALL commenting should be BANNED! Bring back Web 1.0!
I’m not saying this, just that maybe comments don’t always help.
I expect many stubborn, old-media institutions have only recently come round to the idea that such “user-generated content” should feature on their websites. Maybe they were right to be cautious. Comment sections on most popular sites provide an outlet for people who become noisy, aggressive and egotistical online. I don’t know how you’d decide when comments will add to a site and when they’ll just provide a place where a tiny community of people will get shouty. It’s tricky and there’s no one solution for everybody.
But here’s what I’d like to see more of: letters pages. Edited, curated letters pages.
I enjoy reading letters in print publications. People who have something worth saying have taken the trouble to write or email in, and the best have been chosen to be printed. This doesn’t preclude discussion among the readers: the back-and-forth can go on for months. And the letters can, online, be added to the original article. For example, this London Review of Books article about the @ sign features a great, but brief, discussion spanning four months. All signal, no noise, and worth waiting for.
So maybe something more like that would be a more interesting solution for high-traffic sites. Replace moderators with editors who select submitted comments and then collate the best ones into a daily or weekly article for the site. It’s not as immediate, but that’s nice sometimes. A breather. Room to think.
I’m not sure it would work for something like YouTube, but maybe it would be best for more focused sites with their own content. I go to them to read their content, after all, not to hear from every fellow reader with something to get off their chest. Maybe, for sites that originated in print, it would merely be an expansion of their current letters pages.
Anyway, I just thought it would be far more civilised, and interesting, than the usual knee-jerk morass of comments threads in which the few valuable responses get lost.
In Misc on 4 February 2010. Add a comment. Permalink