Puffbox

I’m in the market for a UK hosting arrangement, which will allow me to offer clients end-to-end WordPress-based solutions: design, build and somewhere to put it. I’m not looking for anything special – just your basic Apache / MySQL / PHP5 arrangement with a do-almost-anything admin front-end. Don’t need to worry about huge storage space (yet anyway), but I’d rather avoid anything that imposes a traffic limit. UK-based, naturally. Under a grand per year, and ideally, well under.

Basically I’m looking to pay someone to take the whole hosting worry off my hands, so I can do my thing. They look after the maintenance, monitoring, etc etc etc. If it goes wrong, they fix it first, then tell me it went wrong but they already fixed it. I’m dealing with some v-e-r-y high-profile clients, so not only do I need to be confident myself, I need them to be confident in my confidence. If you see what I mean.

At the moment, Heart Internet seem top of the shortlist, but there are plenty of players in the reseller field. So, over to you guys. Who would you recommend? Or indeed, advise against? If you don’t fancy using the comments, there’s a feedback form over at puffbox.com. Convince me you’re genuine, and I might even quote your affiliate code. 😉

The next time I get into that RSS argument – you know, the one where people say ‘yes but only a tiny number of people use it’ – I’ve got a great response. It only takes one.

The area I’m getting most excited about just now is RSS-based syndication. Yes, actual syndication. Putting your content on my website, and vice versa. Better visibility for your material, and better usability for my users: instead of telling them they’ll get ‘the latest news’ from your site, I show them what that latest news actually is. And even better, it manages itself: neither of us has to lift a finger.

It’s getting easier and easier to do this. The PHP development language now includes a ‘simple XML’ function, which lets even a non-expert like me write some lines to process it. There are several excellent ready-to-go functions written in PHP: I’ve had good experiences with lastRSS. An RSS widget comes as default on something like WordPress. Personalised homepages. Desktop sidebars. The list goes on. But it’s all dependent on you providing an RSS feed to process in the first place.

Of course it would be great if more people were using RSS as their primary ‘front end’ for the web. But if your feed has only one ‘user’, with that ‘user’ displaying your latest headlines to dozens, hundreds, thousands of visitors to another site, it’s more than paying for the development effort you’ll have to put in.

At long last, Media Guardian has had its facelift, following the formula of other recent Guardian redesigns. It’s wide, it’s long, and it looks like it’s having a few (entirely forgiveable) first-day hiccups. It looks fine… much like every other 1024-wide news site redesign I’ve seen recently. But you know what? I find myself barely caring. I almost never look at the site’s homepage, and I almost never use its in-page navigation. With all their content coming to me courtesy of their RSS – sorry, ‘webfeed’ – I never need to. (Maybe that’s why Jason Deans seems so matter-of-fact in his write-up on the OrganGrinder blog.)

Incidentally: I note the site’s individual sections now have their own separate RSS feeds… and they’ve moved the Media Monkey gossip column into a blog format, so it’s got its own RSS – although, er, actually it’s Atom – too.

The most interesting development, I suppose, is the addition of a ‘video’ channel: Flash-based streaming courtesy of Brightcove, in a larger-than-usual 460×345 window. A rather odd mix of offerings so far: a few ‘proper’ TV news packages, a few stupid behind-the-scenes things, a few clips / trailers / free adverts. I’m sure it’ll work itself out in time.

Delighted to see Sky’s Tim Marshall has joined the ranks of the channel’s bloggers. Very few manage to mix serious news analysis with a down-to-earth style as well as he does… and again, it should be a tone which is tailor-made for good blogging. I still rank him as one of my absolutely-must-watch TV news correspondents, even though my lasting memory of him will always be when he once lay flat-out at my feet, in a bid to stretch out his bad back. A great bloke, and that’s despite his Leeds United affiliation.

A few weeks back, I pointed to David Wilcox’s piece on ‘the new politics’, and his point about publishing material in a way which helps the blogosphere engage with it. I think his point goes much wider than just government consultative material.

Having been otherwise occupied at noon, I didn’t see what turned out to be a fiery PMQs – so I went looking for video coverage. Surprising even myself, the first place I looked was Sky News. Video highlights would be easy to find, and would play instantly, thanks to their Flash-based delivery method. Wrong on both counts as it turned out, but interesting to find myself making that choice nonetheless. Sky, your biggest asset is currently video. Make more of it. (Clue: I’m about to suggest how.)

So, over to the BBC – who did indeed have the key five-minute extract as a ‘clean’ video clip. Exactly what I wanted, except that being the Beeb site, it was in a popup window, in RealPlayer. Extra desktop clutter, extra load time, extra hassle. I know it’s only a few seconds, but it simply doesn’t have to be that way.

Neither, though, would have given me exactly what I’d wanted: the video extract, as a Flash clip, which I could embed in my own blog, and write about. Take the example of the writeup on Iain Dale’s leading political blog. He begins: ‘I don’t know how other people saw it…’ So…

Q: What’s the one obvious thing that’s missing from his blog post?

A: The ability for us all to see it.

There’s an opportunity here for both parties. Sky could start offering more uncut video like this, and offering it in a Sky-branded Flash video player. It could easily be justified on commercial grounds: increased clickthrough to their site, maybe even a built-in advertising space, online promotion of their TV coverage, or even just to do it before the Beeb does.

The Beeb, meanwhile, could – or arguably, should – do something similar, justifying it as part of their civic and cultural enrichment effort. They have a new strategic partnership with Adobe (PDF), not just to rework iPlayer, but to provide ‘the majority of streamed video and audio content on bbc.co.uk’ via Flash. If this is in the works, can I suggest embeddability is included on the list of requirements. BBC Trust guys, please take note.

PS: Apologies for the awful pun in the title, but once I’d thought of it, I couldn’t resist. Don’t put me down as a Dire Straits fan or anything.

Rules, even golden rules, are made to be broken. Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox article puts forward a remarkably strong case for prioritising the first two or three words in any headline or paragraph. Usability studies show that the eye scans down the left edge of any text; so you need to get the most relevant keywords into the opening of your sentences. And if that means breaking the golden rule of web writing – active voice, rather than passive – then so be it. He advises:

Words are usually the main moneymakers on a website. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations.

Writing the first 2 words of summaries runs a close second. Here, too, you might want to succumb to passive voice if it lets you pull key terms into the lead.

I’m used to SEO advice clashing with good writing guidelines, but this is the first time I’ve seen it happen with actual usability.

Top 100 rankings are always going to attract attention; all too often, the underlying ranking mechanism is a bit suspect. UK website Blogstorm has tried to calculate a ‘Top 100 UK blogs‘ based on Technorati and Alexa data: and leaving aside the limitations of those sources, it’s only working off a relatively small ‘universe’ of just 1,400 UK blogs. Some odd ones get included in that elite bunch; a large number of obvious candidates get excluded. But I suppose it’s a start.

Is Dave Winer’s ‘outline’ view (ie ‘expand and collapse’) of the New York Times, based on its keyword tags, worth getting excited about? Possibly, although maybe not for a while yet. Dave’s first attempt is proof that something can be done here. Precisely what that ‘something’ is may take some time to emerge. (It’s surely crying out for some kind of ‘tag cloud’ view, though.)

I was a bit surprised to learn that the first major clash / head-to-head / love-in in the latest Lib Dem leadership race was only up the road in Newbury; I hadn’t heard a peep about it. Further research led me to a Lib Dem site I hadn’t seen before: Flock Together, a Google Map-based mashup of local ‘social events, policy discussions, campaigning sessions and forthcoming conferences and by-elections.’ Very simple, very effective. Even better, you can get RSS feeds out of the central engine, feeding information back to your local site.

(The Tories have something similar, more directly focussed on by-elections, and not quite as friendly.)

Labour have traditionally been seen as lagging behind in the online stakes… but one innovation I’ve just spotted on their site is Labour:Central, which seems to be a ‘members only’ version of del.icio.us, based primarily on a Google Toolbar add-on. It’s prettier than del.icio.us, which might be reason enough for it existing, although it completely lacks a ‘personal touch’. Just a bunch of links with (frankly) pretty uninspiring excerpts, most too short to be meaningful. In fairness, it is labelled a beta – but I wonder if it’s even the right project to be trying.

So is Labour trying to get its online act together? There’s good and bad in this report from one local activist’s attendance at a recent party seminar. Tangent Labs are Labour’s main online agency: their boss was apparently ‘focused, personable, coherent and passionate about the possibilities of web based campaigning for the Labour Party’… but then revealed that the day’s main purpose was to sell them ‘the new WebCreator package, the ‘official’ Labour Party site creator. Priced at £411 per year!’

Blogger Ricky asks an interesting question: is it better for all local party sites to look the same, or different? Consistency would reinforce the sense of voting for a party, and a candidate for Prime Minister; and of course, for many people, that’s what elections are about. But would unique sites for each candidate be a boost for local campaigning? There’s no need for a single CMS these days, in a world of RSS feeds, mashups, APIs, etc.