Puffbox

One of the blogs I read regularly mentioned this list of ‘pithy insights for startups‘. I know a couple of guys who have just gone down the startup route, so I had a look in case it might interest them. In fact, it’s a good set of rules for the web team inside any large organisation.

In the rush out the door this morning, I noticed another new blog being offered up by the BBC – but this time, there’s a twist. And not a good one.

Breakfast programme business presenter Declan Curry now has his own blog – but for some reason, they’ve built it at Google’s freebie Blogger service, rather than the Beeb’s Movable Type-based platform. Why would they do that?

I can’t believe the corporate platform wasn’t able to host it. I’d be more than surprised if the Breakfast guys weren’t aware of its existence. Perhaps it’s an over-eager junior member of staff not thinking ‘big picture’, or an over-eager senior member of staff demanding an instant response to an out-of-the-blue brainwave.

It’s a perfect illustration of something I was planning to mention here anyway; the inherent risk to Corporate IT Projects posed by freebie web services.

Expectations are high and getting higher. Company employees, even the most junior – in fact, especially the most junior – know what technology can do for them. They do it ‘out of hours’, running their own blogs or online groups, sharing their own photos or videos, IM’ing and VoIP’ing and all that. They ask the company IT department for the same kinds of tools – and the IT department says no. Or more likely, ‘not yet’ – which effectively means the same thing.

Are they going to be good corporate citizens, and park the idea? Maybe initially, but frustration will soon triumph. A few clicks later, and they’ve got a ‘company blog’ hosted somewhere like Blogger or WordPress.com. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s free. There are no barriers to entry. And with a bit of IT skill, they could make it look as good as – or indeed, better than – the ‘official’ website. Indeed the more ambitious rebels might even download MySQL and PHP, get a bit of free web space somewhere, and build some seriously rich online applications.

The genie can get out of the bottle any time he wants. It’s up to the corporate IT department to persuade him to stay in there, by giving him no reason to escape.

Update: the plot thickens, by the way. A post at declanbizblog.blogspot.com says: ‘Declan Biz Blog is being moved to the much easier to remember BreakfastBiz.blogspot.com.‘

They’re removing Declan’s name from the URL… does this hint at the imminent removal of Declan himself? And more to the point – if they want to move the blog, wouldn’t this have been a good time to join the BBC’s corporate platform?

It comes up during every web design project: how do we handle page width? Do we fix a number of pixels, or do we fill the browser window? Many people opt for the latter, in a (mistaken) belief that it’s inherently better for accessibility. Many designers prefer a specified width, simply because it’s easier. Who’s right?

Enter Jakob Nielsen, usability guru. His latest column on useit.com rules that we should ‘optimize Web pages for 1024×768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800×600 to 1280×1024.‘ So there you have it.

Of course, liquid layouts mean getting out of the habit of ‘full screen’ browsing. For many of us, it’s just instinct now to expand the browser window to the full desktop. But there is a limit to the width of page that the brain can take in – in my experience, 1280px is more or less it.

A word of advice to web designers, by the way: don’t rely on javascript to tell you the browser window’s width. All too often, this ignores the possibility of on-screen sidebars. I’m a Firefox user who chooses to keep various things permanently on-screen using a sidebar. Does your javascript test take that into account? If it doesn’t, I’m going to have to scroll horizontally. And that’s so 1990s, guys.

By the way… read Jakob’s piece to the end. Is it really true that ‘big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity’? Can your brain handle a resolution of 5000×3000? – I’m not sure I can. Still, if you’re looking for an excuse to buy an HD TV, it can’t do any harm to quote Dr Nielsen: ‘There’s no doubt that big screens are worth the money.’

With very little fanfare, the Guardian has launched G24, its rolling PDF newspaper service announced just over a month ago. Depending on where you’re coming from, it’s a no-brainer that any CMS should be able to do… or a stroke of editorial genius. Probably both.

The G24 page lists five editions: Top Stories, World, Media, Business and Sport – each updated on a rolling basis, generated from the content added to the Guardian Unlimited network of websites. The idea, of course, is that you print off a 10-page edition as you’re heading to or from the office, and you have a bang-up-to-date ‘newspaper’, on actual paper.

I’m not sure how automated the process is… but there are a couple of rough edges, which imply that humans were not involved in the page layout. Certainly there’s a more than close correlation between the top stories listed on sport.guardian.co.uk, and the stories included in the Sport PDF, for example. Same stories, same order.

You only have to look at the numbers of people fighting for a free copy of Metro each morning at any Tube station entrance, to see there is an appetite for this sort of thing. It won’t appeal to the most tech-savvy, though, who are probably already reading the various news websites over the airwaves. (Apart from when they’re underground, obviously.)

But yes – being blunt, it’s the sort of output you would expect any decent CMS to be able to do. There are plenty of tools to turn plain text and/or XML into PDFs automatically. But innovation isn’t always the ability to do something… it’s having the idea to do it, too.

I like it, but I don’t expect to use it much. Consuming live news on-the-move is precisely why I bought a web-enabled PDA. But definitely, good on them for doing it… and don’t be surprised if other newspapers decide to follow suit, very quickly.

The fantastic Gmail Manager extension for Firefox reaches version 0.5 – and includes what could be its killer function. Namely, the ability to check Gmail accounts which use ‘hosted domains’. What this means, in practice, is that you can have a web-based 2GB email account running with your own .co.uk domain name, for barely a couple of quid a year. So much more professional than an I’m-a-cheapskate email address, for loose change.

Citizen journalism guru Dan Gillmor points to a relatively new feature in online magazine Slate, called ‘Hot Documents‘. They are posting scanned versions of ‘primary source’ documents, annotated to help you understand the significance and subtext. Dan rightly points out there’s a problem in how they have executed it… but if you want to achieve the same effect, you can do so – and avoid the tech glitch – by posting any documents to Flickr, and using the ‘add note‘ function.

Personalisation used to be the future of the web. Then it wasn’t. Now it is again. The search engines have led the way, with My Yahoo, Google‘s personalised homepage and Microsoft’s live.com. Now the content sites are pitching in, with BBC News adding a ‘beta’ personalised component to their homepage.

To their credit, it’s extremely well done. Initially just a box to enter your postcode, and bingo – local news and weather. If you want to add headlines for a given sport (or football team), you get an additional option to do that too. (Not tied to your local area… shall we call this the ‘Man Utd factor’?) No need to register. No username or password. And a ‘hide’ button to (more or less) remove it if you don’t want it.

If anyone was going to offer this, and make it worthwhile, it could really only be the Beeb. Nobody else has the breadth and depth of content.

But it isn’t a huge step forward; as Paul Brannan writes on the Editors’ Blog, with admirable restraint, it’s about making the site ‘just a bit more convenient’.

We have the toolset for the truly personalised web, in the form of RSS feeds. I take several feeds from the BBC site, and combine them with many others into ‘my personal view of the web’ within my chosen RSS tool (currently Bloglines). But it’s nice to let people reduce the amount of clickage from the homepage. And if it’s easy enough to do, at no additional expense, hey – why not.