Posted: Sat 3 February, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
Over the last three weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of work on a new site. The basic premise is that it needs to be very user-friendly, easy to use, quick, smooth, and useable. I’ve got my own ideas about a lot of this, and on the initial development work, I’ve been applying quite a few of them to what I’m doing.
One particular thing that drives me crackers when I’m using a website is – to use the example of on-line banking – when I have to go through a seperate page to ‘select an account’ when I’ve only got one account. To me, if that’s the case, I’d far rather that the system had some logic, and effectively figured out for itself (OK, was programmed to ‘realise’) that if I’ve only got one account, I don’t need to select that account, it’s fine to go straight through to the account details page.
Anyway, I’ve been working to a similar kind of idea on the site, and while in theory it’s simple, it actually turned out to be (in some ways) a real pain. Yes, the logic is also simple, it’s just that it does take a couple of extra steps in order to get it to work.
But when it does work, it’s really nice, and makes life a lot easier.
Why is it, though, that making things simple to use can be incredibly complex in the back-end, whereas making things really complex and obstructive is actually dead easy?
Posted: Tue 10 October, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, News, Security, Thinking About..., Weirdness |
On the subject of numb-brained persons, and their inability to deal with common knowledge, is it really a shock to know that a large number of people are still total twunts when it comes to computers? No, not really.
Fair enough, this entire story is about “honeypot” PCs and seeing how long it takes them to be attacked – but by definition these honeypots are unprotected – no firewall, no anti-virus, and (most importantly) a complete numpty at the keyboard.
The survey found 17% of people had no anti-virus software and 22% had no firewall. A further 23% said they had opened an e-mail attachment that came from an unknown source.
I’m sorry, but if people can’t be bothered to use an anti-virus tool, and to activate either Windows’ own software firewall, or get one of their own, then they bloody well deserve to be taken for a ride. As for opening up email from unknown sources, I kind of wrote about this over the weekend, but still, nearly a quarter of people have opened random emails with (one assumes) a subject line that makes them think it’s OK to open? I despair. Mind you, again, people who do that just deserve to be ripped off – it’s like an idiot tax.
At home our broadband connection comes through a box with a built-in firewall and router. There’s also at least a software firewall on all the machines in the house. And all of them use AVG’s anti-virus as a matter of course.
After all, it’s not like it’s difficult to get a decent free bit of anti-virus software like AVG. And OK, while my favourite software firewall has now disappeared (thanks to Symantec, who always were a bunch of scum-sucking weasels anyway) it’s still not difficult to find and install the likes of Zone Alarm, or even to use the entire anti-virus/firewall combinations released by companies like Norton, McAfee, et al.. It’s just that the “Oh, it’ll never happen to me” attitude still prevails, and it’s likely to continue to do so for the forseeable future, and for one prime reason. People are numpties. Simple as that.
Personally I think that all broadband connections – be it ADSL, Cable, ISDN, whatever – should use boxes with at least a basic built-in firewall. I know Windows XP SP2 activated the software firewall by default, and I think that’s a good thing too. I would like to see new PCs come with a decent (and free) anti-virus scanner – although of course Dell et al probably get a huge dollop of cash for pre-installing shit like McAfee on the computers they provide – so that everyone has access to the basic protection, from Day One, without having to shell out extra money.
If PC makers, Broadband providers and so on simply work on the assumption that people won’t bother, and just provide these simple things as a built-in, then a whole load of these problems would go away. Most standard PC users don’t bother uninstalling what comes with the PC, they want to just plug-and-go. So give them the security straight away. Don’t assume that either a) people will know they need this stuff or b) that they’ll go and download and install it as the first thing they do. They won’t. They’ll leave it ’til the PC is a heaving festering lump of viral content, pop-ups, and email shite, and then complain…
The computer’s gone wrong! I didn’t do anything! It’s the computer’s fault!
Posted: Sun 17 September, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Green, Sweary, Thinking About..., Thoughts |
I wrote about this fucking idiot before. A man “addicted” to branded clothes, he’s now going to burn all his branded possessions, and then write a book about his experiences of trying to live brand-free.
What an utter, utter cunt.
There are plenty of ways that this tosser could use to get rid of these items instead of burning them. He could give them away to charty shops. He could sell them off to one of the companies that re-sell second-hand clothes, particularly those with designer labels. Hell, he could just go and shove them all in a clothing recycling bin.
But no, this fucker has to make a show of it, so he’s going to burn them. Not content with being a shallow-minded cunt in the first place, he’s now tagged himself as an egotistical self-centred cunt who’s still shallow-minded as well.
Tosser.
Posted: Tue 15 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Technology, Thinking About..., Thoughts, Travel, Web Development, Work-related |
Since getting the job offer a month ago, I’ve made a lot of changes in the way I work. Primarily for my own security (i.e. so the passwords and data for the other sites I work on aren’t readily available) I removed all my private work and data from the work PC, and instead stuck it on a USB stick. I also now have Portable Firefox and Portable OpenOffice.
What I don’t (currently) have on a portable stick is all the text editing stuff, photoshop, and that kind of thing. That doesn’t really matter, doesn’t really need to be portable. But the information itself is all now held on portable devices.
It’s been interesting working this way too – plus it means that effectively I can do my stuff on any old PC, wherever I am, and it won’t even affect the PCs settings.
I’m currently debating upgrading the USB sticks (At the moment I use two 512M Sticks, mainly because of a fuckup I made earlier in the year) to one or two 1Gb sticks, and at that point I can also put on portable XAMPP as a complete development environment (database, PHP, Apache web server, the lot) and portable NVU as a text editor, and then I’ve got everything I need for my work on one or two USB sticks. Of course, with a bit of rationalisation (and a bit of “dump the old crap on the portable 30Gb drive”) I could do it with the two current 512Mb sticks. One for the tools, one for the data. Hmmmm.
Anyway, I find this kind of thing interesting, because it does change the way I work. It makes me wonder about logical extrapolations, where you have a complete operating system on a USB stick/disk, and PCs go towards being dumb terminals that don’t have their own drives/storage at all. Instead, you carry your ‘computer’ around with you, and just slot it in (or connect up the USB cable) and bang, your own operating system wherever you are.
Posted: Thu 10 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Photography, Technology, Thinking About... |
Yes, I’m afraid I’m going to be banging on about iTunes, Picasa, JPEG vs Raw, and so on again. Because it’s all come up in the last week, Workflow has been on my mind a bit (and there’s some work-related stuff behind the scenes as well) so it’s all ending up as a bit of a brain dump.
Personally, I can be bloody disorganised. Well, that’s not strictly true. I usually know where things are, what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, and how I’m going to do it. It’s just that I can be very “last minute” about things – particularly when it’s all to a deadline. It’s something I know – and acknowledge – about myself, and that I know I need to fix, or at least learn to handle better.
So anyway, I working on organising myself a bit better. But that’s not what this post is about. Oh no. Instead it’s about file structure, and file organisation instead. You lucky people.
You see, Gordon has said a couple of times that certain bits of software (iTunes, Picasa etc.) mean he no longer needs to know where files are – the software keeps track of it for him, and – for him – that’s fine. Unfortunately, doing that kind of thing drives me utterly fucking crackers.
Because I know where I put stuff, and I know (pretty much) what is where. I know that all my music sits in c:/music, but then I know that under that it’s kept in a file structure, so it goes c:/music/[band]/[album name]/[tracks] , and I never, ever have a problem finding where the stuff is that I want. To me, that’s organised, because I don’t need to fuck about thinking “is it in that folder? Or is it (iTunes, I’m talking about you here) in ‘compilations’? Or in some utterly random other place?”. I don’t need to use Google Desktop Search, I don’t need to Search for files. I think I use the “Search for files” function in Windows maybe once a year. If that. I know where my stuff is.
With photos it’s similar. Everything sits in c:/photos. I know, it’s unimaginative. But it’s easy to find. Then I name folders with where I was, or the subject of the photo series, and all the photos from that session/day/trip go in. If it’s been a holiday, you’d find it in c:/photos/[trip name]/Day [number] . I’m bad in that I don’t rename the files individually to say what’s in them – I should, but I don’t. But I know what’s where, and I can usually find the images I want when I want them. And again, to me that’s what being organised is about.
Yesterday, Gordon wrote
WHERE the files are doesn’t matter. HOW iTunes structures the folders doesn’t matter. As long as you can find the MP3s in iTunes (which is where the ID3 tags come in) then why do you care that an album is stored in ‘compilation’?
To me, it does matter where the files are. I want to be able to find them, to use them outside of that one specific application. For my music stuff, I can play it on the PC using RealPlayer, but I also use another program to write the music files to my MP3 player, or yet another one to write them to the phone so I can use that. For my photos I can use one program to view the thumbnails so I can select what I want, I can use Photoshop – or Paintshop Pro, or ImageMagick, or Corel, or whatever – to edit those photos, I can write them to a CD/DVD as backup, or I can transfer them using FTP to another site. Because of the way I work, I do need to know where the files are. I don’t want to be wasting time figuring out where Application A has stored them so that I can find them with Application B, C or D and use them in that.
So yes, it’s my workflow. Maybe I should be more flexible, or something. But because I do use different programs for different things, I want the files that I use to be in the same place, in my own organisation. Not in some arbitrary thing that one program uses, and then insists I have to use because it uses it. It’s a personal perspective, but I don’t like having workflows and decisions forced on me, whether it’s by Arsehole Bosses, or programs.
Maybe I’m a dinosaur. Maybe I’m a control freak. I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that at no time soon am I going to be letting a fucking program tell me it’s storing stuff according to its own structures where I can’t find the bloody stuff easily without using a search to do so.
Posted: Sun 25 June, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Thoughts, Web Development, Work-related |
I worry about myself sometimes. Today, for example, as if it wasn’t enough to be wading through a whole bundle of stuff and ideas to do with various sites, I also have to end up going and getting another one because of an idea from Friday that seems to have frown grown legs and already started running.
Aarrgh!
I need to stop having ideas – just for a while, so I can catch up with the ones I’ve already got…
Posted: Thu 18 May, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, General, Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve continued working as and when I can on Where’s Good. It’s beginning to come together nicely – of course, it’s still woefully light on reviews and recommendations, but I’m looking at making the site a success on a long-term basis, rather than just an overnight flash in the pan. If I’m right, it’ll all come together.
Anyway, one of the more fun bits of work I’ve done on the site has been to put a blog on it. Yeah, very sad, and very much in keeping with the Web2.0 checklist, but I figure it’s something that might be useful in keeping track of what’s going on, what’s being worked on, etc. etc.
It also gave me a chance to work with WordPress 2.0 , which so far I’ve resisted using on D4D™, for a number of reasons. Mainly, I haven’t had time. But also I know that my WP install is hardly “normal” so it’ll take time to merge it into WP 2.0’s formats. And frankly, I can’t be arsed.
Anyway, it’s all slowly working out, and making steady progress. And I think that’s pretty groovy, all things considered.
Posted: Sat 6 May, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: General, Own Business, Thinking About..., Work-related |
OK, another in my “this is a slightly odd request” line of posts.
I’ve got an idea, involving setting up some electronics (nothing complicated – probably (bear in mind my lack of knowledge on this score) but I know sod-all about it) along with some ultra-bright white LEDs. Probably 4, or maybe 8, along with a power source (I’m thinking probably AA batteries) and ideally a touch-sensitive switch.
Although the touch-sensitive is the nice-to-have part, and a normal thumbwheel switch would probably do the job just as well – it’d just be slightly more work than figuring a capacitance-based touch-switch.
Anyway, if anyone who’s good at knocking up that kind of simpleish circuitry were to leave a comment, I’ll get back in touch with the idea, and we can see where it goes from there.
Thanks.
Posted: Tue 25 April, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Getting Organised, Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
OK, even though the site has now gone live, Where’s Good? is still having bits done to it.
Yes, as one person suggested, perhaps I should’ve waited another couple of days to fix everything. However, in some cases the bugs were ones I didn’t know existed – and never would until it got released into the wild. And on a couple of bits, well, I just forgot something still needed doing. Mea culpa on that one.
Also, I’d said I’d release it yesterday, and I don’t like going back on what I’ve said/promised I’ll do. It’s a flaw.
So over the next few days I’ll probably still be adding stuff, fixing bits, and generally keeping on working on it. Yes, in hindsight perhaps I should’ve waited, and launched the thing properly on May 1st. But I wanted a soft(ish) launch where people would log on, try things out, hopefully tell me if something wasn’t working, and carry on like that this week.
At the end of the day, everything’s got to launch sometime. Yesterday was the day for Where’s Good. And May 1st is likely to be the “full” launch – not that that’ll mean much, there’s not going to be champagne, fireworks, and celebrations or owt, but it’ll be up, running, and hopefully not too buggy…
Posted: Mon 24 April, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
OK, well, it’s time to do the deed. I’ve been working on this idea properly for a month now, although the URL has been in my grubby little mitts for a while longer than that.
So. The site is called Wheres Good, and (logically enough) it’s at http://www.wheres-good.com . Nice URL, eh? The basic idea is to build up networks of people reviewing pubs, restaurants, shops, hotels, blah blah, and to then be able to rate other reviews (and users), building up a decent reference model of what’s good, where’s good to go, etc. etc. Along the way, you can set up a “hotlist” of places you want to remember/bookmark, and also set up events and stuff, so in theory blogmeets and so on could be arranged, including where to go, all on one site.
It’s still in beta (hey, like there’s a shock) but should all be working, which is a good start so far as I’m concerned. Anyway, let me know what you think of it…
Posted: Thu 20 April, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
Well, I’ve decided.
As of Monday, [the site which has currently not been revealed] will no longer be unrevealed.
In other words, this weekend I’m going to be putting some finishing touches to it, fixing a couple of things, and hopefully sorting out a couple of other bits that really should be done, but I was thinking might not be immediately. However, leaving the launch ’til Monday should give me the necessary time to do so.
Obviously it’s still really going to only be Version 1.0 , and there’ll be improvements, additions, fixes and so on along the way from there, but it’ll be good to have it at least out there, and usable. Although I’m kind of edgy too about getting feedback and so on. But I’m sure I’ll figure it all out, one way or another. Should be fun, anyway…
Posted: Fri 24 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
Gah, sometimes I swear I’m my own worst client.
On The Other Site (and I promise I’ll be letting it out into the wild soon – promise.) I’ve been working out how to get the necessary information into the bloody thing, and it was becoming more and more complex. Countries, Regions, Towns, and at least two other bits of information before we got to the crux of the matter, and so the page was hellish.
Mainly this was because I was trying to do it all in a way that makes sense for the long-term, and minimises the amount of data that’s repeated in the database. For instance, if you’ve got an address table, you don’t really want a buttload of records with the same town, county, and country – you’d want to have a “location” table that will hold those, so you can say in the address table “location=10”, and then in the location table, record ten has “town, county, country” in it. Makes sense.
Anyway, the way I’d done this was becoming incredibly complex, and so this morning I’ve been looking at it again, and figuring out better ways to do it. Well, by “better” I mean, of course, “simpler”- both from a coding point of view, and a usability one. All the same, it’s enough to make my head ache quite a lot.
The annoying bit is that I’d got it all to a point where it was actually pretty much working. It just took too long to get anything done, so the re-plan was necessary. And maybe when I develop things a bit more, I’ll come back to this way, and do it all with AJAX or something to make it nice to use. But I’m not convinced…
Posted: Tue 21 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Security, Thinking About..., Weirdness |
In today’s “local” news on the BBC, it appears that police are warning drivers not to leave sat-nav units in their cars when unattended. To me, this really isn’t rocket science. Apparently to a lot of people it is.
When I walk anywhere, I tend to notice what’s in cars. I don’t know why – I guess I’m just nosy, really – but I do pay attention. And it’s quite amazing the number of people who do leave expensive stuff out on view when they’ve parked up. Now yes, maybe it is “only for a couple of minutes” – although a lot are at least overnight – but still, you’ve got to be pretty bloody dumb to leave the sat-nav in it’s cradle, with only a window to “protect” it. Same applies for the people who strong leave their phones in their cars, and even their wallets.
All in all, the “don’t leave valuables in the car” message has now been circulating for at least a decade, if not two. As we carry more and more valuable stuff around with us, it would seem sensible to be more aware, but instead people seem to still make use of the “It’ll never happen to me” mentality that drives me utterly bananas.
So far as I’m concerned, if you leave valuable stuff like sat-nav, mobiles, money, cameras etc. visible in the car – and a lot of people do – then you should be prepared to lose it. And of course if you’ve been a numpty and left it there visible, the insurance won’t pay out for it either – in fact, it’s like a tax for idiots. Works for me…
Posted: Wed 15 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Security, Thinking About..., Thoughts |
Now here’s a scary development – BioBouncer (although it’s a bloody horrible name) Basically, it’s a facial recognition system for bars – it scans each customer’s face as they come in, and then can check it against a list of “undesirable” customers.
Using advanced facial recognition biometric technology, BioBouncer™ quickly and accurately identifies these potentially dangerous people as they walk in the door – so they don’t even have a chance to ruin someone else’s experience. Powered by a combination of patent pending performance enhancing software intricacies, BioBouncer™ captures facial images of all club patrons as they enter. These images are then matched against a database of individuals who have broken club policy in the past and who are not welcome anymore. Maybe they are known to carry a weapon, have been removed for violence, or violate the club’s illicit drug policy.
Should a match occur, an alert is sent to your security personnel via wireless network and informs them of the alert location, accompanied by a photograph of the individual. Depending on club protocol, your staff can react quickly and effectively to either remove the person or at least be aware of his location. And speed? BioBouncerâ„¢ matches against 1,000,000 faces in less than one-second.
And if you’re just an innocent punter, out for a night? Supposedly those images that aren’t needed or referenced are deleted at the end of the night.
As Bruce Schneier says in his Crypto-Gram email (which is where I got this from),
Anyone want to guess how long that “automatically flushed at the end of each night” will last? This data has enormous value. Insurance companies will want to know if someone was in a bar before a car accident. Employers will want to know if their employees were drinking before work — think airplane pilots. Private investigators will want to know who walked into a bar with whom. The police will want to know all sorts of things. Lots of people will want this data — and they’ll all be willing to pay for it.
And the data will be owned by the bars that collect it. They can choose to erase it, or they can choose to sell it.
It’s rarely the initial application that’s the problem. It’s the follow-on applications. It’s the function creep. Before you know it,
everyone will know that they are identified the moment they walk into a commercial building.
Posted: Tue 14 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Thinking About..., Web Development |
Over the weekend, Pete pointed out a piece about “mystery” navigation on websites that doesn’t tell people where they’re heading. He suggested it might be rather relevant to me, seeing as d4d™ does exactly that. (And I recently discovered that the rollovers for showing where you’re going when the mouse hovers over the button doesn’t actually work in IE – I’d always kind of assumed it did, and thus hadn’t tested it. Mea culpa)
Anyway, it’s something that I started off as a project on here, something where I was interested to see how people used it. Initially it actually had the look of buttons – using nasty Javascript rollovers and images – where you only knew where you were going once the mouse was already over the button. But it was ugly, so when I went over to CSS for the main bit of the site, I just kept it with text but still on the same theory, not knowing where you were going ’til the mouse was over the button.
You see, my theory is that most people actually navigate based on position, rather than necessarily reading the button that tells them where they’re going. (And yes, I realise there’s a fallacy to this for first time visitors – just bear with me, OK?) I’ve worked on sites where the navigation was truly dynamic, and altered itself so that the “most used” buttons for user ended up at the top of the navigation tree (Man, you should’ve seen the database behind that bugger) and so the nav was different for every regular user, and also changed as you used it.
However, it turned out people hated this – about 75% of the regular users would already have their mouse pointing at the place on the screen that held the button for where they wanted to go, and when that changed, it annoyed them. It’s the same kind of theory that annoys people when supermarkets change the shelf layout, or store position for certain items. People like patterns. People stick to patterns (for the most part) and thus reinforce those patterns.
So d4d™ went the other way – if you knew where you were going, it didn’t matter what the button said – and in fact it could say nothing at all. In many ways it’s an experiment that’s worked – but it’s also one I wouldn’t put onto a commercial site I was doing. When it’s commercial, you really pretty much have to make sure you’re open to everyone, with a particular focus on the first-time visitor. If they don’t like what they see, or find it hard to get round, then they won’t become a repeat visitor.
(I’ve currently also been trying to persuade work about this one, that dynamic nav might sound cool and look cool, but long-term it pisses people off and is epically counter-productive)
Posted: Mon 27 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Work-related |
Gordon made a comment recently that made me think a bit. Basically, he said that I still appear to have a “contract” view on things, and in a lot of ways I think that’s actually a pretty fair assessment.
I can’t deny, going back to being properly “employed” rather than self-employed has involved a lot of changes for me – some good, some bad. I find it very difficult to switch off the “business” side of my brain, the bit that looks at decisions and can see they’re bad, the bit that doesn’t understand those decisions or why they were made, the bit that makes me want to stand up and shout “For Fuck’s Sake!” in exasperation. Herself keeps on trying to train me in the mantra of “It’s not my problem” and “It’s not my business, it’s theirs, and they can do what they want with it”. It works, but only up to a point. And once that point is passed, I just don’t like seeing a business – whether mine or one that I’m involved in – going tits-up for no good reason. I can’t help it, it seems stupid, and I have little to no tolerance for stupidity.
However, on the plus side, being employed means I get fun stuff like sick pay, and holidays. I don’t have to be responsible for every little thing, for all the paperwork, legislation, hassle, finance, worry, and guff. But it does mean I have to deal with other people’s ideas of how a business should work, rather than my own. And at the moment being employed is part of the plan – it’s easier to get a mortgage when you’re in a “proper” job, rather than going through all the hoops and hurdles they put in for the self-employed : “We want six years of certified accounts” “But I’ve only been in business three years, and my turnover’s less than the Companies House figure that requires certified accounts, so I don’t have them certified” “Tough, we want six years certified accounts”. So it means I’ll most likely remain “employed” for at least this year, while we see what we’re doing, where we’re going, and all that gubbins.
Of course, when you’re self-employed you need to deal with people still, and their ideas of how their business should be run – and in most cases that’s fine, I can handle that because they’re doing it to their own business, not mine. And they’re paying me. And before anyone else says it, yes, I know that in effect that’s the same thing as being employed by someone. But for some reason, in my head it’s just not the same.
Would I want to go back to contracting, necessarily? No. Do I want to go back to being self-employed, and working on my own stuff, for my own business? Hell, yes.
Posted: Sat 25 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
In what I suspect may just turn out to be a theme on this stuff, page-widths are quite a bone of contention among web designers.
Basically there are two schools of thought – fixed-width and fluid . Fixed width is pretty self-explanatory – the page is designed to fit a certain size, say 800 pixels, or 1,000 , or another arbitrary figure. In general this is fine – the BBC does it this way, as does the Guardian, and many many others. It’s probably slightly more “standard” for commercial websites than fluid, but not by all that much.
Fluid, on the other hand, still tends to be used primarily on smaller-size (readership-wise) sites, blogs, that kind of thing. Not that it matters, but it’s also my general preference. Fluid widths fill the window, regardless of the size of that window. It doesn’t matter if it’s 600 pixels or 2,400 – the site expands to fit. D4D™ does it – if you’re lucky enough to have a dual-monitor set-up or similar, expand d4d to the full extent of the screen. Look, no blank space. It’ll shrink right down to about 450-490pixels before things break. That’s why I like fluid – because it doesn’t care whether you’re using a monitor that’s only able to use 800 pixels, or whether you’re all the way up at 2,400 (or more) or anywhere in between.
I suspect that a lot of it, as with colour, comes down to personal taste. The BBC site annoys me because it only uses half the window width I’ve got open. The Guardian annoys me for the same reason. However, people who like fixed-width (and again, I wonder if this is related to book or newspaper page widths being fixed, and thus “normal”) argue that if the text isn’t handle correctly in a fluid layout, it can end up being almost unreadable. And in fact I agree with this on occasion – if you’ve got lots of short paragraphs, they can look bloody awful in a fluid layout.
I suspect that the sites I’m currently working on will end up being fluid layouts – I’d rather see the space used for site content, instead of just being blank, wasted space. There’ll be space within the layout, though – I think that it’s the lack of space that can make a fluid layout feel cramped, and so I’ll be using as much space as I can for it.
We’ll see, when it comes to time to test it all out.
Posted: Wed 22 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
OK, so I was about right in what I figured, regarding website colours and so on.
As with most things – some people like it, some people hate it, and the majority don’t seem to care one way or t’other. Figures.
However, the experiment between “Worksafe” and “Inverted” wasn’t just about people’s reactions to colour, it was also about which produced less eye-strain after a while using it. My personal preference is still for light text on dark backgrounds, whereas most people seem to prefer dark-on-light. I’d guess that’s down to being used to newsprint, and print in general, with black ink on white/whiteish paper.
I do find that after a solid day of looking at a white background to work on, my eyes can be quite tired. It’s the constant “glare” of a predominantly white screen day in, day out, that seems to have an effect. And on that score, light text on a dark background seems to produce less eye-strain, and less headaches.
But from the look of it, on the commercial things I’m doing, I’m going to have to go with dark-on-light as a preference on the colour schemes. I might put in a colour-switcher similar to d4d™ though, just to give people the option (and, of course, so I can have my preferred light-on-dark scheme for working on the bugger x hours a day!)
As always, any thoughts or responses will be greatfully received…
Posted: Tue 21 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development |
As with yesterday’s “Thinking About…” post, don’t even bother if you’re not interested in web design and so on…
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Posted: Mon 20 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development |
DISCLAIMER : If you’re not interested in web design/ development and some of my thoughts and plans regarding it over the next few months, don’t even bother clicking on the “more” link underneath – you’d just be bored!
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Posted: Sun 19 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Thinking About... |
Just as a bit of slightly advanced warning, as of tomorrow I’m going to be starting to do a string of “Thinking About…” posts. They’re based around web development and the movement of my own business plans, and as such will have their own “thinking about…” category.
As time goes on the theme will probably diversify a fair bit, but for now it’s going to be primarily about web development and business.
Whether they’re interesting or not is something that remains to be seen…