I’m spending the longest day of the year in a darkened hall at Alexandra Palace. Mashed is an event for software and web developers. The general idea is to get together with like-minded coders and ‘hack’ or build some kind of application in 24 hours. We’ve had some presentations from the BBC, Yahoo, Lonely Planet (who are today releasing their API exclusively to Mashed attendees before it goes public in 48 hours) and others, and there are prizes on offer for the best hack that utilises some of the data or APIs on offer.
These people are serious. There are around 300 guests, lots of whom have come from across the country and brought sleeping bags. The BBC is here, and several film crews are roaming around. Microsoft is here, but everyone’s on a Mac. It’s a recipe for productivity: geeks have been left alone in a room with their machines (and free food and coffee). There’s even a soldering iron in one corner.
Personally, I’m a little confused, being a bit of a front-end fairy. But Si is having a good time. He’s planning an app that mashes the Lonely Planet image library with data from the Hadley Centre for climate research. I might go for a lie down in the ’soft zone’.
For the past month or so I have been working on a big project for Castle Gibson, the restored furniture retailer. Castle Gibson have decided to close their bricks-and-mortar treasure trove on Upper St in Islington and move their business online.
In collaboration with Sheridan at Wall Creative, who designed the visual layout, Simon and I built a catalogue and shopping cart system. The user interface is clean and simple: browsers can click on an image from the thumbnail grid to view larger images in the main window, or use the catalogue menu. If they’re interested in an item, they can add it to their enquiry, then click submit.
The user-friendly admin area is arguably the pièce de résistance though. It makes the business of uploading images to the catalogue and choosing how to display them a breeze.
Full project profile.
Probably when we should have been working, we were tumbling.
A tumblelog is essentially a blog without the baggage. You set it up for free in seconds, then publish your links, images, movies, quotes, whatever. For me it comes into its own by serving as an RSS feed aggregator: you can publish your del.icio.us links into it, as well as your Flickr photostream and loads of other bits - then feed it all back out again.
Projectionist is reliably offered as the daddy of the tumblr, while Max Wheeler’s Penguin Classics tumblr had many of us wishing we’d tried it first. For the record, here are mine (which switches between colour-riot and ultra-minimalist about every 5 days) and Si’s.
Following on from my post on Flat-hunting with Flash, I’ve just noticed another odd usage of Flash on the Curzon Cinemas website. In this case it isn’t so much about Flash not being the right tool for the job; it merely highlights an unnecessary cosmetic application of Flash on a site that really doesn’t need it.
On the site, try switching to the non-Flash version via the link in the bottom right-hand corner. The non-Flash home page looks pretty similar to the Flash version, except:
- the content is constrained to the viewport and the four columns of info become scrollable
- the image blocks at the bottom of the page are thus kept in view
- there’s a cascade effect as the page loads and the text drops into view
My angle on this is:
- if the main reason for wanting to constrain the content to the viewport is keeping the image blocks in view - why not bring them further up the page?
Curzon has a perfectly functional HTML website with a nice URL structure that helps its performance on Google. Each HTML page can be viewed in Flash or non-Flash - but if you’re in Flash mode and you navigate away from the original page, the URL doesn’t change, which is potentially confusing for the unsavvy.
The point is that Curzon didn’t need to deploy Flash. Improvements in the home page structure would remove the need for keeping all content in view at once, by prioritising more popular content (i.e. what’s on now - not what’s on in a fortnight). The cascade effects are initially cute but actually become tedious when you’re really looking for information. There’s no value added by what would have taken extra time and expense in development.
The very presence of a non-Flash option implies an awareness that some visitors might find it annoying, or inconvenient, and would prefer to view the site normally - which is not great web strategy.
For a good example of a beneficial implementation of Flash, check the superb Barbican home page.
A favourite of mine, this page displays ever-changing content inside a set of 6 vibrantly colour-coded windows. In this case, Flash is used to add visual dynamism to a rigid HTML table grid; it’s effective and attractive, but it’s used sparingly.
Pictobrowser is a nice Flash slideshow tool for your Flickr photos. Thanks to Times Emit for this tip. More →
I’ve just cleared up another aggravating problem with integrating Zenphoto albums into a Wordpress blog. This is for anyone who has implemented Ruzee’s method and found that album and image links randomly trigger a 404 in Internet Explorer 6 and 7.
Although I initially thought it must be something to do with either the Zenphoto or Wordpress theme files, what finally solved it was turning off mod-rewrite in both the .htaccess file in the Zenphoto directory, and in zp-config.php. Perhaps there are some tweaks I could have done in .htaccess to remove the IE bug, but my programming skills didn’t stretch to it!
Surprising that this hasn’t come up in Ruzee’s comments. In case it matters, which I imagine it might, the website in question is hosted with Heart Internet - who, incidentally, I would recommend unreservedly to anyone looking for a decent, good value, well-supported, UK-based hosting package.
Searching for a new house or flat is not my favourite pastime. It tends to be a long-winded, nerve-racking process that fills your leisure time with a fog of facts, figures and phone numbers. As in so many other areas - how did people operate before the internet? Cold-calling? Pen and paper? More →
Recently I was invited to have a gallery at Jason Pogo’s website photographii.com. Pogo has long offered his own work via this site - fantastic stuff involving lots of quirky angles, close-ups, textures, black & white, as well as people, actual people (a place I’ve yet to go with my own photography) - but has now decided to make it a community site for photographers he invites to take part. My pics are now live. More →
This is a tech one. Please run and hide if this is not your bag. More →
The brains behind Zenphoto has created a new beta theme based on Google’s PicasaWeb image albums. And I’m now using it! More →