Brendan didn’t really have as structured a talk, and one wonders if perhaps he relied more on gimmicks in his slides than the message he was trying to convey. The method he calls ‘Boil, Simmer, Reduce’ is basically his three part plan in creating a product. Frankly it seems a very logical, if not slightly fluffy minded way to work.

Boil
This is basically filling your head with stuff. So it’s just about throwing anything and everything in to the ideas pot. When you embark on a development process you are already indirectly thinking about it all the time, whether you are watching a film, reading a fictional book or just contemplating the meaning of life. The premise is just to be grabbing ideas from all over the place and throwing them all in.

He also pointed out when discussing shots from films he likes that symmetry in itself makes things pretty.

Simmer
This is looking at all considerations of what you want. It is important that you’re not considering technical restrictions, but rather getting down to the nub of what you’d like to do. As with the Boil stage, there are no rules, you can really just do whatever you like.

Around this point Brendan suggested that good design can breed good behaviour. He spoke of work he did for a tourist information office using Microsoft Surface as a map display. There were discs which they would place on the surface which would represent hotels, and by placing that on the map it would create a ring around that item with dots showing where the hotels are in that surrounding area. By turning the disc it would amplify the area of interest. This was in Manchester and it was quite a rough area of the centre of town – “a high proportion of scallies”. The place was concerned that the discs would get stolen. But it was a beautiful space that they created through design, and nothing was stolen. He argued that this proved his belief that “good design can bring good behaviour”.

Reduce
“A design is finished when there is nothing left to take away”. Take the iPhone. It’s such a simple design, one button, an absolute minimum and it’s the sort of thing where anything can be placed on it. It can be anything you want it to be.

You should justify everything shown on a screen. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything must serve a purposeful action. His favourite thing about the iPhone was that when you scroll up and get to the top, it creates a little bit of space with nothing underneath which simply springs back when you let go. This doesn’t really serve a purpose, bar perhaps a small mental indicator. It is just a little piece of aesthetic satisfaction. It’s just nice. That in itself can justify the feature.

He talked a bit about how he made something for the iPhone which was born out of a need. He wanted to watch a film on a train journey and couldn’t get his iPhone to sit in a good position, so he made a simple piece of cardboard that evening that would just clip onto the side. They thought it was sell-able and went through a few iterations. There was one which was so close to being right but it just wasn’t quite there. They then decided to apply Da Vinci’s Golden Ratio to the position of the cut in the rectangle. That was it. Fixed.

He also mentioned how he thinks the pencil is absolutely wonderful in design. A few of reasons he mentioned were:

1) It has a big arrow pointing to which end you use.
2) Built-in progress bar.
3) You can cut it up, and make many more of the same with it.

New ideas like this still apply to the old and best designed products.

I went to four talks on four very topics, which is perhaps a little surprising considering the focus of the day: Non Profits and Tech engagement

Social Monitoring

This was a two part talk with the focus being on monitoring information within social media. This could take the form of following discussion on a topic relevant to a charity’s engagement, or could equally be applied to monitoring a brand activity. I noted two tools in the first half which I thought could be of use. The first was Social Mention, which is best used for tracking social sentiment on the various social networks (Twitter, et al). The second was Board Tracker, which can be used for checking various forums for keyword mentions. There was also discussion of using the advanced mode of Google search. The second half was a brief discussion of a theoretical Twitter filter that would allow someone to summarise the important points of conversation using an quasi-AI approach. The interested parties of which broke of into a group to discuss the implementation of the project.

FLiP

This was a talk given by my boss Dave Fletcher. I was involved in the projects inception at the Jailbrake weekend hosted by Social Innovation Camp, so I was very interested to see how the project had progressed. I was pleased to hear that even after talks with various authorities and forthcoming pilot runs, the project had retained its original good ideas; to get friends to help you identify your key skills in a structured and playful format which will hopefully aid you in gaining employment. This is such a promising project and I feel really proud for even the small part that I played in its creation.

Giving What We Can

Well this talk absolutely blew me away. It was one of those ones that starts interesting and makes you chuckle and finishes with you feeling shocked at what you’ve learnt. The presenter, Toby Ord, has actually appeared in various mainstream media publications discussing his project, but as he readily pointed out, it isn’t a message designed for the 140char social conversation. I think it would be difficult for me to do him justice. This is a man who has such belief in the difference he can make to so many peoples lives that he is pledging to donate a significant portion of his income for the rest of his life. His argument is convincing and I sincerely hope you will visit his site, givingwhatwecan.org and take the time to read what he has to say.

Music, The Ultimate Non Profit

The last talk I went to was actually more for fun than engagement, but considering my rock background I really can’t be blamed This was Ben Walker of Twitter song fame discussing his life as a niche geek semi-celebrity. Fun and quirky.

All in all, I had really fun and interesting time. I will certainly be going to another Barcamp at my next chance. Barcamp Non-Profits will be coming back, perhaps in spring and probably in London next time. You can find out more by going to barcampnonprofits.com or by following them on Twitter @barcampnfp. If you get the chance make sure you go.

So I’ve spent this week moving our company hosted SVN from Beanstalk to Springloops. I feel I’ve been swinging between hell and zen, but the learning has been awesome. As a summary of what I’ve found I thought I’d give a quick walk through how I did it.

Most of this stuff was the usual dump/load cycle, but there are a couple of things which needed some extra attention.

Firstly, both Beanstalk and Springloops have the ability to export and import SVN dumps via easy-to-use web interfaces. This really could be as easy as download, upload. Try that first.

We had a couple of problems though. Previously we had a mishmash of company repos and project repos; these had to be merged and sorted. We also had different usernames on each system(!) which meant that during an import previous commits were not matched to current system users.  The author attribute needed to be updated for all previous revisions.

This was all done on OS X, but should be applicable to any Unix-like with the appropriate libraries, etc.  So we’ve got our dump from Beanstalk, now we just need to create a local repository to do our work on (always work on a backup!!).

$ svnadmin create --pre-1.4-compatible newrepo

We use the pre 1.4 compatible flag to overcome files system changes within SVN between versions. These changes can potentially cause errors (svn: Expected FS format ’2′; found format ’3′) when propset-ting revision histories, in my case, author/committer names.

Next job, import your dump file.

$ svnadmin load newrepo < dumpfile

If you’re looking to do the merging, as I was, then you want to make yourself a directory in your repository (usual ‘svn mkdir’ commands) and then load it in the following fashion:

$ svnadmin load newrepo --parent-dir myfolder < seconddumpfile

Ok, we’ve done our merging, now we’re going to update our author histories.  Now the SVN manual gives you information on doing this one version at a time with a propset.  It also talks about other recursive actions such as deleting files, which isn’t our concern.  For changing authors, I found a tidy script called svn-author-tweak.py from CollabNet.

If you want to give your repository a check before you upload it, just checkout to a local test.

$ svn co file:///path/to/newrepo /path/to/test/repo

Once that’s done, dump the file.

$ svnadmin dump newrepo > my.dumpfile

Upload

???

Profit

I’ve decided to do a blog hack in a day and here you see the result. I was struggling with Drupal as a blogging platform, and frankly an anything platform, so I decided to move to the decidedly easier WordPress. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with Drupal, it’s a great platform. The problem is that it’s built for so many tricks that you have to give it a real shove when you want something simple. For example, handling images. On a content sytem one would have thought that would be an obvious feature, but with drupal you have to go get a plugin. Madness I tell you! Not that getting WordPress means I’ll be bloggin frantically, but it makes life a lot easier.

So here is how I got from Drupal 6 to WordPress 2.7 in a day:

1. Backup the Drupal database & import the data into WordPress

Moving around between platforms is quite common, so you’ll often find a script to aid you in moving database info from one structure to another. WordPress has many such scripts built in for many platforms, but for Drupal I got my assistance from Mike Smullin. I had to make some minor changes, for example I added this SQL statement to change my Drupal post_type ‘story’ to WordPress’s ‘post’

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_type = REPLACE(post_type,’story’,’post’);

Pretty easy stuff really. If you’re going to do it yourself, make sure you do it locally on backup copies. I hosed a few before I got it right.

2.Theme Hack

Ahh yes, the inevitable theme quandry. I had thought about what I wanted Skinofstars.com to look like for a while, but I wanted to do it reasonably quickly as I hate it when these things hang around. My layout plan was simple enough. Only one or two blog posts on the front page with info on my other nettyness, like tweets. I also knew that I’d want access to other pages (as you find in the Further section.. not sure on that name). So I searched some WordPress themes and came across Grid Focus. It seemed to have the right level of minimalism that I was looking for as well as reasonably suitable layout. In order for it to work for me though I had to make a few hacks including some JQuery magic to include my further section (hope you like the transitions) and some layout hacks for the differences between a narrow and wide content column (you’ll see if you view this in single/comments mode).

3. Content Update

Probably one of the most time consuming parts. Much of my old content was Uncategorised for no reason and lacked any tags. Many posts from back in the Blogger days didn’t even have a title. I went through almost all of them (I’ve taken a break from the 1996 stuff) and finally managed to put these years of outpourings into some kind of order.

4. Update to server

Well, that’s just a bit of FTP and MySQL. Job done.

http://boxfire.co.uk

First thing that’s worth noting, users rarely spend time looking where you want them to. They tend to follow common patterns, the most notable being the F pattern (a couple of quick horizontal scans of the page as we head down it). This means it is for us, the designer, to be aware of this and place our most important content in these areas. One might argue that a regular visitor would know where the most important information on a site is held, yet anyone with any sense knows that we want to make a site clear for everyone.

Now for banners and adverts/promotions. I’m not going to say how to get people to read them (in fact, I’d recommend getting AdBlock Plus to just cleans the web of them!), but if you want to ensure people read all information on your page then make sure that it doesn’t look like an advert. Users have an automatic tendency to ignore anything that looks like a promotion.

Next up I’ll point to Nielson’s study on how pages are read. The key point is that people don’t read, they scan. If you want to make life easy then you could put important anchor words in bold to aids the reader down the route you’d like them to take. When you’re marking this up in HMTL consider whether you should use the ‘b’ or the ‘strong’ tags. Are you merely creating a visual guide (b/i) or do you want to emphasise a word (strong/em)?

The final point I’ll pick up from Nielson is his discussion on screen sizes. Nothing surprising here, most people use 1024×768, that’s a laptop widescreen. One thing I’d like to add to is the misconception that laying out a web page is like laying out for a newspaper or a magazine. Screen sizes and resolutions are not fixed, there is no ‘above the fold’, like we find in newspapers. Even different choices of preferred system fonts or different browsers have an impact on where the cut-off will be on different machines. Interestingly, Neilson does point towards making site layouts fluid for different. Though I don’t consider this such a hard n’ fast rule, I’d like to point you CSS monkey’s 456 Berea St’s article on elastic layouts.

That’s it for this week folks. Happy building.

Some further linkage:

* A wordpress clickmap: http://www.rogerstringer.com/projects/wpclickmap

* A more general use clickmap using PHP and JQuery: http://css-tricks.com/tracking-clicks-building-a-clickmap-with-php-and-jquery/

* Strong or Bold? http://www.think-ink.net/html/bold.htm

If you want to host your own site (not a GooglePages type thing) and still keep your site up in the rankings then then you really need to use a UK hosting server, especially if you are using a .co.uk extension. Maybe then consider shared hosting like 1&1, who have UK servers. Naturally we are spiraling up in cost here, next steps are Virtual Private Servers (VPN) from £15 a month all the way up to dedicated servers where the sky really is the limit. It really depends on whether you are serious about visibility or thinking of this as a business or hobby.

Lets take a look at http://oonagi.co.uk which has been around for eight years, they are hosted on shared server-space with Dreamhost in California, a google search for “oonagi” brings them top, a search for “Thanet music” brings them in 4th, for “Thanet gigs”and nothing till page 3! That has cost about £40 per year, it would probably be a little more but the cost is offset by sharing its space with other sites. Now there are some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) issues there to start with which could bring them up the rankings, but still it provides a gauge as to cost/visibility balance.

If one thinks about it though, where does traffic come from on a local focused site like a club or society. It is going to be links from other local sites, like Active Thanet or some of the blogerratti (EastcliffRicahard, BigNewsMargate). So to conclude, you can do yourself a free site using any number of web services, just contact some people, get yourself linked and they will come.

I’m now in the last few weeks of the rundown to the end of the semester, which means I’m crazy busy. This also means that I don’t really have anything prepared for todays post. I’ve decided to just post a collection of what I thing are cool links and you can spend your time there:

http://www.maninthedark.com/

http://www.xkcd.com/

http://www.activethanet.com/

http://www.digg.com/

http://www.delicious.com/