Puffbox

Me, Cath, Hugh and Namibian expat Rob from our rendezvous in Newbury yesterday. Not Reading, as Cath notes. Their national tour actually began on Groundhog Day (2 February), and I guess it’s starting to affect them…

Anyway, I think I know what the ‘Secret Evil Plan‘ is… and yes, it’s going to be memorable for one or two people at least.

Quick update on the wine itself: the entire bottle disappeared in a single sitting, which is unusual for us these days. We were awoken a few times during the night by Screaming Baby, and my head was a little foggier than I had expected. No undue aftereffects by morning, though. I think that’s a positive review..?

It’s quite a strange experience to find yourself in a conversation which quotes Doc Searls, standing by the discounted CDs rack in your local Tesco’s. But with Hugh MacLeod passing through on his 12-day odyssey to promote Stormhoek wine in time for Valentine’s Day, I felt obliged to down tools for an hour or so and meet a man who almost counts as a celebrity.

Hugh’s a man on a mission to find a Valentine; to convince Tesco’s to stock his vineyard’s fine produce; to make a mini-road movie; all of these and, er, whatever tomorrow brings, by the sounds of it. Regardless, it was great to chew the cud with a truly influential figure, someone who really ‘gets it’ – and to come away with a legendary business card.

Oh, and I had a taste of the wine itself. If you look closely at the Stormhoek push, you’ll notice that it’s the one thing they don’t ever talk about. I asked why: the answer, which is fair enough, being that you inevitably find yourself getting into ‘whoosh of hollyhocks’ territory. Suffice to say, I tried the new ‘Big Love’ rosé and found it to be very nice indeed; not at all bitter, and with enough depth to satisfy my red-wine-only preference.

Hi to Colin and Cath, Hugh’s partners in crime… and good luck all, with your continued quest. I hope you can get the stickers off the Land Rover OK.

I’m actually staggered by the comments of Steve Busfield on the Guardian’s organgrinder blog: ‘the Mirror site certainly gives Sun online a run for its money and makes the Sun’s site look, well, a little bit tacky.’ —briefly speechless— We are talking about the same Mirror site, Steve, aren’t we?

Roy Greenslade is a bit nearer the mark:

Since I started this blog in early summer last year I have visited hundreds of newspaper websites across Britain and across the world. I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. But I have never come across one quite as inept as this new Mirror offering.

Well Roy, I’ve been following online news for over a decade – and I can’t think of many worse myself.

To his credit, Mirror web editor Steve Purcell acknowledges there has been ‘good and bad’ reaction to the new design – although only after an earlier piece which claimed ‘on the whole the response has been very positive‘. You’re kidding, right?

Steve, the bulk of this isn’t about ‘biased sniping from others who appear to have forgotten that they live in glass houses’. I have no connections with the newspaper business, and I have no axe to grind. There are some really bad examples of web practice, from an objective and scientifically measurable viewpoint. Failure to ensure it worked satisfactorily in two out of the three major web browsers, for example – that isn’t a ‘teething trouble’, that’s just plain negligent. Or the total lack of image compression: your ‘welcome’ graphic on the homepage weighs in at a staggering 88k. OR YOUR TOTAL RELIANCE ON CAPITAL LETTERS, WHICH IS A BASIC USABILITY NO-NO.

OK, being entirely fair, it’s a little less bad today than it was yesterday. At least the video streams don’t all fire off automatically any more. But it’s still appalling.

There’s a new-look website over at The Mirror too… and this one’s even more bonkers than the new Times site. Load up the homepage, and on my Firefox setup anyway, two video streams fire off at once. Hey guys, by all means take inspiration from the success of MySpace… but not this! (Doesn’t seem to affect IE, though.) And that’s before we mention the fact that the first video content you see is American… and way out of date. A Superbowl preview, chaps? Er, that went out of date at 11pm on Sunday night. Not exactly ‘up to the minute’, as the editor claims.

In their defence, there are RSS feeds a-plenty, Digg and del.icio.us buttons, a load of blogs (powered by irBlog, the same engine as at the Telegraph), and – apparently – the full Daily Mirror archive ‘going back 103 years’, although I didn’t see it anywhere in the navigation. But I’m afraid it still feels very, very rough round the edges – just like the old Mirror site. A LOT OF CAPITAL LETTERS, and no real sense of (true) design.

How they justify their claim to be ‘the best newspaper on the web’ is simply beyond me. It looks like a site which is desperately trying to copy bits from each of its various competitors, without really knowing why. And none of it successfully.

Er, is it me or does the new Times website look a lot like the fairly new Telegraph website, only not quite as professional? Both ultra-wide, both very black-and-white… but the Telegraph site just pulls it off better. I’m afraid the Times site just doesn’t look finished… with some glaring problems that surely shouldn’t have got through any serious QA process, like the multi-line headlines running into each other, and the Newsvine / delicious links showing without spaces.

OK, so let’s assume it’ll get better over time. All eyes now on the Guardian… which still hasn’t brought in the Berliner-style masthead. How long do they need?

Looks like something interesting coming out of Cowley Street: ‘For the next election the Liberal Democrats will produce a web-based interactive manifesto, which will use audio-visual communications as its centrepiece rather than the written word.’ Makes a lot of sense… I mean, did you ever read a printed manifesto? It’s party members only, but a quick glance at the source code shows it’s been done in WordPress 2.0.5, so you know what to expect.

I notice, though, that there’s a bit of a security hole in it? You aren’t meant to be able to get in unless you’re a party member, but it’s possible to see the latest postings and comments via the automatically-generated RSS feeds, which are currently unsecured. You can only see the first few words of each posting, but the comments are shown in full.

Did you catch Huw Edwards’s toady performance with Bill Gates on the Ten O’Clock News? He did ask the ‘killer question’ of why we were paying double what the Americans are being charged for Vista… and clearly had The World’s Richest Man on the ropes. But no knockout blow. A clearly unbriefed Bill’s best answer was that: ‘We try to keep our prices largely inline from country to country.’ Well, Bill, you clearly aren’t trying hard enough.

And you can’t get away with blaming exchange rate ‘drift’. Amazon.com has Vista Home Premium Upgrade for $153.99 (equivalent to £78.63 at today’s exchange rate of $1.96-ish). Amazon.co.uk has the exact same item for £144.99. That would equate to an exchange rate of $1.06 to the pound. It hasn’t been anything close to that low since March 1985 (as this US government data proves). That would be eight months before the release of Windows 1.0. You’re either the world’s greatest forward-planner, Bill, or… well, you tell me.

Incidentally – I’ve checked the recording, and Bill definitely said: ‘You’ve always got to obsolete your old products’. Aside from the inherent crime against grammar there, I’m with the Green Party on this one. We’re looking at ever more power-hungry components, and lots of perfectly adequate machinery being chucked in the nearest landfill. Your current XP machine simply is not obsolete, no matter what the Vista Upgrade Advisor thing tells you.

But while we’re at it… it’s generally A Good Thing to see a UK translation of the Apple ‘I’m a Mac / I’m a PC‘ ad campaigns from the States, featuring Mitchell and Webb. Internet-only apparently, although I did see a poster at Oxford Circus tube station earlier today. If only Apple would like to consider applying the same transatlantic conversion principle to its prices. Based on today’s exchange rate, we should be paying £561 for a MacBook. Not £749. ‘And that’s a bad miss,’ one might say.

A few weeks back I interviewed for a possible new contract. It wasn’t a bad interview, but we didn’t really click, and I didn’t get the offer. But one of the questions I was asked – and it was clearly the interviewer’s ‘killer question’ – was this: what are the three key qualities to a good website? Er, not one I had a stock answer for.

I’m actually quite pleased about the answer I gave ‘off the cuff’; even if I’d had time to prepare, I don’t think I’d have answered it differently. But I’m interested to hear if anyone’s got any better ideas?

Standards, formal and informal. I hope I don’t have to make a case for the use of formal standards: it’s good citizenship, and it should pay dividends in the long run. But informal standards matter just as much. There’s a reason why most websites have a logo in the top left corner, and a search box in the top right: because we (virtually) all do. Visitors will simply refuse to spend time learning your innovative new metaphor for navigation, and will go elsewhere. Make it easy for them, by making them feel comfortable.

Plain speaking. Yes, ‘plain English’, avoiding tech jargon and all that – but I think there’s more to it. Most people spend most of their online time dealing with friends and family (even at work?). Email, instant messaging, blogs, whatever. They are used to a certain tone of communication when they sit down in front of keyboard and monitor: casual, informal, chatty. I’m not saying that FTSE100 companies should have a homepage saying ‘hiya mate, how ya’ doin?’ But if you’re looking for one-to-one engagement, and most of us are, then you need to adopt that informal tone. Lose the pompous authority, lose the vague marketing-speak.

Know your statistics. It never ceases to amaze me how little attention people pay to their usage data.  In there, you will find everything you need to know about your user base. What do they like? What don’t they like? What did they want, and did you supply it? Cost just isn’t an excuse: your website is churning this stuff out free of charge, and a powerful analysis tool like Google Analytics is also free. Any decent web manager should be able to recite details of his/her traffic levels and trends without even hesitating. And then doing something about them.

If anyone agrees or disagrees, or has any better suggestions, that’s what the comments box is there for. 🙂

Yesterday it was News 24’s new graphics, today it’s BBC coverage of Celebrity Big Brother. Somebody at Media Guardian has clearly been tasked with monitoring the BBC’s blogs, and turning each day’s pieces into a shocking exposé. Please stop it. It’s unquestionably a good thing for editors to be prepared to engage with their audience, and take the criticism as and when it arises. And hey, guess what – if you invite feedback, sometimes it won’t be praise. This in itself is not a story.

Regular readers may be aware of my little side-project, Findless – which aims to provide shortcuts to frequently sought information. We’ve done a few Google-based search engines with a ‘whitelist’ of recommended sites, tailored for the health & safety and education sectors. There are a couple of map-based mashups, featuring English and Scottish Premier League football news, and your local MP.

Most recently, I threw together a quick inflation calculator called Inflation Buster, which lets you compare prices for any two years – as far back as 1750. I’ve used a few javascript tricks to offer slider-based date selection, and in-page results. It’s not pretty, but it’s really just a technical proof-of-concept.

Just to let you know that Inflation Buster has just been updated to include the new 2006 inflation data, and I’ve fixed some IE7-related presentation problems. So for example, if you’re wondering what level to set your kids’ pocket-money, based on what you got as a child, we’re here to help. I also upgraded the project blog to the new version of WordPress, which was remarkably quick and straightforward. It isn’t often that an upgrade or installation routine manages to make me smile, but WordPress did. Love those guys.