strangerpixel

Probably a really easy one – but, being a command-line newbie, I had to guess this after several fruitless Google searches.

When using Terminal to navigate your folder system, you will occasionally run into a folder with a space in its name, like /Application Support. Trying to access a folder, e.g.:

[Alastair-Mucklows-Computer:~/Library] alastair% cd Application Support

will trigger the error:

cd: Too many arguments.

The solution is to wrap the folder name in quotes, like so:

[Alastair-Mucklows-Computer:~/Library] alastair% cd "Application Support"

GQ.com gets a makeover.

Girls gallery page.

There are a lot of things to like about the new GQ web design:

• great black, white and gold colour scheme (with yellow highlights)
• a well-ordered grid
• elegant, uncluttered navigation
• chunky footer
• plenty of whitespace and breathing room around the text

One thing – and leaving aside the xbox ad currently turning the home page background into a sea of green bubbles:

I’d be interested to know the rationale behind not using a similar jQuery carousel on the individual feature pages as implemented on the section pages. A fresh page-load for every image just feels so clunky these days, and there are surely AJAX solutions to allow a more fluid browsing experience whilst maintaining reasonable loading times.

So what’s the reason? Extra pages for serving extra ads? Image bookmarking? Concern about presenting high-quality images without a performance hit, especially on slower connections?

Finally – the typographical double act of Georgia and Arial is undoubtedly a classic combo (used by the Guardian and many, many others). But my guess is that with the gradual evolution of web typography, embracing the potential of the @font-face CSS rule and of Cufón, sites that use this staple set of traditional web-safe fonts will begin to look dated over the next few years.

Having flat-hunted previously, lately I’ve been flatmate-hunting: searching for a replacement tenant for my room in Highgate, north London. As a rule, during the 5 years I’ve lived in the city, I’ve found finding new flatmates fairly easy; but, since I’ve ended up moving out in the quiet month of January, I’ve been encouraged to get the most out of a few key websites.

Gumtree

Gumtree, ‘the UK’s biggest website for local community classifieds’, has changed a fair bit since I first started using it. I really admired the major redesign that happened (I guess) at some point in 2008: the familiar colour scheme and branding were incorporated into a much smoother experience, preserving the community feel whilst making everything a whole lot easier for the individual – whether posting, buying or selling. As I write it looks like the ‘classic’ Gumtree is again being superseded by a sexier incarnation.

The clean and effective Gumtree UI.

Is Gumtree the last word in classifieds? Sure: you post, the customers/tenants come running. But this time my response rate has been quite low – 2 physical viewings from 300+ hits on the website. Aside from the fact that this is January and the coldest winter for 30 years, and my room doesn’t have a radiator, what could it be?

Map view

I blame the gradual demise of the map view for property searches. Formerly on Gumtree, you could view a Google map displaying as many properties as your search terms allowed, with a little red tree marking each house, flat or garage. You could type in ‘London’ and get literally everything on offer. Admittedly, it used to make Safari go wonky, but it was more useable than not.

[Gumtree should correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is my hunch.] In the redesign, with the advent of monetised customer interactions (like paying £4 to have your ad ‘bumped’ up the listings), the universal map view was replaced by a map that only showed 30 properties per page (by default the top ones in whichever list), leaving the user to click to the next set. Clearly, this privileged the newer posts and incentivised posters to pay that £4 in order to get more hits.

The new Gumtree map view - now with green blobs.

I would like to see Gumtree reinstate the global, un-paged map – because I think it allows greater flexibility of search. Let’s say I wanted to view all properties, however recently posted, in a small area near Hampstead Heath. Instead of being able to zoom the map in and see every property, I would now need to page through 10 or more pages of results before a green blob popped up where I wanted it to. Not only that, but every time I load a new result set, the map zooms right out to accommodate all blobs – from Walthamstow to White City.

Sure, I could make my search terms more precise, but the beauty of the global catch-all map is that you don’t have to refine anything and thus risk missing somewhere that falls just outside of your terms – you just browse.

Globrix

If Globrix did flatshare, they would be my first choice. Theirs is the best property search interface bar none:

• awesomely granular search filters
• global map search (properties pop up as you drag the map)
• draggable price slider

Not to mention an abundance of stats and graphs on individual property pages, which display everything from median house prices in the area to typical crime rates.

Globrix's property map interface - with sliders!

The only problem with Globrix is the trade’s apparent lack of confidence in it. Being a search aggregator, it inevitably takes longer to update than estate agents’ own websites.

Screengrab from soundcloud.com

I had a great online experience recently with Soundcloud. It provides a beautiful solution for quick and easy music distribution.

Problem: I’d asked my DJ friend Chris to spin some tunes at my birthday. We sort of discussed what I liked, and what he tended to play, but sharing a mixed playlist of tunes that he might play on the night was something that involved either burning discs, or using an FTP dropbox – and I couldn’t be bothered with either.

Solution: Soundcloud. Chris recorded an hour-long mix, and uploaded it to Soundcloud. He then invited me to listen and comment – not just a single comment on the whole thing, but multiple comments attached to different points in the music. I created an account on Soundcloud, so now I can follow other users’ uploads, and return to listen again whenever I like.

The whole site worked really well – it was a totally surprising and seamless 15 minutes on the internet.

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 focus mainly on location hire, with a small selection of hand-picked props and furniture for sale via their website.

In collaboration with 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.