My blog

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to implement timeboxing, an agile technique, wherever possible. I’ve started to find myself becoming much more productive.

Timeboxing is where you set yourself a time limit on a specific activity. For example, you decide to spend an hour on adding twitter to your blog using an API, when the hour is up you must stop and do something else. If you didn’t finish the task it might be because it will take much longer, and you need to reconsider wether its worth doing or allocate more time to the task. You might have been close to finishing, thats fine - allocate more time at a later date.

Timeboxing is especially useful when applied to programming, where you can end up wasting an hour or two trying so solve a problem that would be better off left for a few hours. It forces you to focus on the most important stuff first, and ensures you get ’something’ done in that period.

Timeboxing in software development also cuts down on the amount of time spent ‘polishing’, this very blog shows that off well - I allocated myself 3 hours to do the template, no time left for any polish, but the blog is live and works. Perhaps I will allocate myself time to polish at a later date.

Timeboxing can also be applied to other areas of your life, its amazing how much tidying and cleaning can get done if you only have 20 mins to do it in.

I’ve only just started timeboxing, so I’ll give an update in a few months once its become one of my core lifehacks.

I’ve just relaunched my blog with a simple clean design, and some very basic features. Over the next few months I hope to add more bits and bobs, to enable this to be a portal connecting all the services I use. Perhaps Flickr integration, delicious links, and some other stuff. For now it doesn’t matter - all I want is a place to put some tutorials, and a few notes. The site isn’t finished, but it is usable - release early, release often is my moto.

One of the reasons for the new blog is my new job at Ribot, where I will be their first full time developer. They specialise in mobile, and its a new field for me, so I expect to be very busy over the coming weeks, hence getting some stuff out of the way such as this blog relaunch. Looking forward to lots of hard work and fun with the Ribot guys!

This is interesting - a software letting you run IE 5, 5.5., 6 and 7 (beta) on your Mac without needing parallels. This could be great for testing.

Its called ies4osx and requires OSX tiger or leopard, and an Intel machine. On tiger you need have to installed X11.

Download it here.

I found the download process pretty simple, a few things to do, but nothing too time consuming.

I’ve had a number of comments recently about my blog, and the fact it uses the default Kubrick theme, when I am currently selling my Wordpress theming services. I thought I’d add this post to explain my rationale.

The main reason is I’ve only been freelancing for a short time, and have found myself rather busy, so rest assured its on my todo list.

Some people have suggested I install someone else’s theme - but I think its important to go with the right theme, so that would take time to select. I also think people would expect to see a theme I had developed, so that might well be time wasted.

If you are interested in the kind of thing that can be achieved with Wordpress theming, take a look at handsonphysiotherapy.co.uk - a simple site I built without a blog element, using Wordpress as its back end. In the next few weeks I’ll be putting a portfolio together to show some of the other Wordpress integrations I’ve been working on, and I’ll be giving a talk on how to theme Wordpress to manage a simple site at The Werks on July 24th, so come along and find out more.

Just to let you know I have had a new article posted on Freelance Advisor - How to remember everything you need to do with Remember The Milk.

I need to work on shorter titles, but basically this article is aimed at GTD beginners and gets people into the habit of writing everything down.

I attended a wine tasting event tonight…the geek wine thing. its a wine tasting event aimed at the Brighton tech community, run by Danny Hope on an occasional basis. The format is, a speaker comes who has specific knowledge of wine, or cider, or some other drink, and there is a tasting along with some education about the drinks being sampled.

Tonights expert was regular host Henry Butler of Butlers Wine Cellar in Brighton. The focus was on wines from Europe, and the choices were a little different to the usual French and Spanish instead focusing mainly on Eastern Europe and Italy. Henry was an excellent host, providing first an introduction to wine tasting in general and following with some information about each wine along with the essential tasting.

Of the wines tonight, 4 stood out and actually prompted me to take advantage of the 10% discount and make a few purchases. I’ve listed each, along with the price from The Butlers Wine Cellar.

Le Salette Valpolicella Classico 2006 (Italy) - an excellent red, light and easy to enjoy mid week with a meal. One to share with friends and get drunk on - £8.95

Alpha Zeta Amarone 2003 (Italy) - this was a really rich and gorgeous red, the sort of wine to enjoy with cheese, and perhaps have just the one glass. Its not the kind I get to try too often, generally purchasing in the lower ranges of supermarkets selections - £20.00

Oremus Tokaji Late Harvest 2004 (Hungary) - a sweet wine, but not too overpowering. One I could drink a lot more of than the average “desert wine” - £10.50 per half litre

Biddended Gribble ridge Rose 2006 (England) - this one tasted a little like cranberry and apple juice, but thats no bad thing. A light refreshing wine, perfect for summer - £7.95

So in summary, a fascinating and eye opening evening. No more cheap wines for me! (well, not so many anyway)

You can visit Butlers Wine Cellar at 247 Queen’s Park Road, Brighton, open 11 - 7 Tue - Sat. They also run regular wine tastings on Friday nights.

Catch the next Geek Wine (or other beverage) Thing by subscribing to the Twitter Feed.

Oh yes - and Andy and Henry from Butlers Wine Cellar will be cycling through some of the wine regions of France to raise money for The Chestnut Treehouse Children’s Hospice, which is nice. More info at www.MadDogsAndEnglishWine.com

When setting up a new Wordpress installation you ought to have some purpose for the blog, and there will probably some features that will enable you to achieve this purpose.

For example, I am working on a blog for someone who sells coffee, he wants to minimise spam comments and have great SEO.

At work, we use Wordpress as an easy way to manage documentation and tutorials, so we need highlighted and coloured output of example code, and the ability to put H1 and H2 in the posts.

Luckily there a plugins that help us to achieve these goals, so here, under the desired features, I have listed the best plugin’s for Wordpress.

1. No spam

Whatever your working on you won’t want spam clogging up your posts.

Install Askimet to get around the Spam problem. It comes preinstalled on the latest versions of Wordpress.

2. Advanced features of the tinyMCE editor

TinyMCE advanced takes care of these.

3. Control of title tags

Use SEO Title tag plugin to enable you to choose your own titles and not have to put up with defaults.

Don’t forget to put this code between your title tags when setting it up (in Presentation -> Header)

4. Change permalink structure

Ensure redirects from the old style with Deans Permalinks Migration

5. I need a contact form

The Wordpress Ready Contact Form is easy to set up (so long as you read the documentation) and fully modifiable.

6. I want to include photo’s from Flickr

Use the Flickr Photo Album for Wordpress plugin

7. I want regular wordpress database backups emailed to me

Use the Wordpress DB Backup plugin

8. I want to use Google Analytics

The Google Analytics for Wordpress plugin lets you quickly add the analytics tag to every page and automatically tracks downloads and outbound links

What is £5 app?

£5 app are meetings for Web Developers which take place in Brighton roughly once every 1 - 2 months.

At each meeting people pitch their ideas for web applications, and someone who has built or is attempting to build a web app speaks about their experiences. Sometimes speakers talk about other related issues too, so you can be sure a varied programme over the course of a few months.

£5 refers to the amount of money these applications are supposed to cost - basically your time and nothing more. It should probably be called 200 hour app, or free app, but that doesn’t sound as good.

They are organised by Ian Ozsvald and John Montgomery.

Where was it held?

Tonights event was held in at The Quadrant Pub near Churchill Square. It was smaller than the normal gorgeous venue - The Regency Town House, it did however mean we were already in a pub, and therefore resulted in much more drinking taking place than normal. It was a bit cramped, and there was a large piece of art on the wall where the projector was pointed, meaning a cloth had to be stuck up, giving the event a slightly shambolic bohemian feel.

What was the turnout like?

The turnout was very impressive, around 30 people were there including renowned author and public speaker Andy Budd of Clearleft, local man of the moment Mikel Maron of Open Street Map (he’s just launched Open Street Map Brighton - more comprehensive than Google Maps), people from exciting small local companies like Jonathan Markwell of Inuda Innovations, plenty of freelancers and also people from a diverse range of well established organisations such as Madgex, American Express, and Comic Relief.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of expert knowledge in the room!

What were the speakers like?

DaoConsumer

First up tonight we had Annesley Newholm who spoke about his IE plugin DaoConsumer, which informs you of the level of ethics companies have as you shop online. Its a great idea, but with a few flaws. Firstly, its only based on limited data, secondly nearly all the companies are unethical so its a case of picking the best of a bad bunch. That said some knowledge is better than none.

Technically I do have issues with DaoConsumer, its an IE only plugin at present. People that use IE do not tend to be too technically minded, and would perhaps balk at the idea of installing a plugin from a source they are unsure of. I certainly can’t see my Dad using this, nor my ethically minded friends, who all use Firefox anyway cos Microsoft is ‘evil’. Also, early adopters and geeks tend to use Firefox and Macs.

The audience for this product I would predict is ethically minded, slightly techy people who use Internet Explorer. Hmm. Shame he didn’t develop for the Firefox market first, taking it into the mainstream IE market second, if it took off.

Beenz

Second up was local artist Neil Forrester and Martin Redington, founder of Mild Mannered Industries.

Neil is a former TV star (he was on The Real World back in 1994, one of the first ever reality shows), and he co-founded Beenz, a dot com attempting to establish an internet currency based on a reward scheme. He was later joined by Martin and together they formed the backbone of the technical team.

The talk explained how this small company grew to around 300 employees in around a year, opening offices all over the world. They then described how they went from this state to having nothing and closing down after the dot com bubble burst.

The presenters managed to be both interesting, clear in their delivery and amusing, and this felt more like watching a live documentary than a techie talk.

This was a fascinating insight into a world which may just be repeating itself with the explosion of startups and money being poured into sites like Facebook. Lets hope this is not the case, but with a potential reccession on the horizon who knows what is around the corner. Luckily these days people are far more aware of the pitfalls involved with running a company and these days people are more careful, no longer spending the ridiculous amounts of money that the dot commers and their investors in the 90’s spent.

How can I attend the next one?

They have a website - fivepoundapp.com which lists upcoming events.

Upcoming.org is the place to sign up, just create an account and search for events in Brighton, or follow the links on the £5 app website.

Ians blog gives you some idea of what goes on behind the scenes as well.

Average time on pages and average time on site are popular metrics, used in Google Analytics and other software. I use it to see how long people spend on my pages, and my site. I was disappointed to see most people spend 0 seconds on my pages. These same people tend to visit only one page. Today I realised that connection was not a coincidence, and that the metric average time on page is nonsense.

Google analytics and other javascript analytics software works like this:

• Person loads page, message is sent to the analytics server saying person loaded page.
• Person goes to another page on your site, message is sent to the server saying person loaded another page.

When someone leaves your site there is no message sent. The analytics server has no idea.

So how do they measure how long someone spends on a page?

Easy, person loads page, time is recorded. Person loads another page, time is recorded. Difference between the times = time spent on the first page.

So what about when someone leaves the site? Server does not know how long someone spent on the previous page, so time spent is measured as 0 seconds.

This means analytics software does not measure the time spent on the last page a user sees, and if the user only visits one page on your site nothing is measured either.

In google analytics, average time on site and page is calculated based on ALL visitors to your site regardless of whether the time was recorded or not.

So if 1000 people visit one page for 2 mins and then leave, and 500 visit one page for 4 mins and then another, only the time for the 500 is recorded, but the average is based on all 1500. Heres the math:

Average time on site = total time on site / number of visitors.

Total time on site (only the 500 are counted) = 500 x 4 = 2000 mins

Googles incorrect average time on site = 2000/1500 = 1.3 min.

Average time on site (based on the data google has, if it calculated properly) should be 2000/500 = 4 mins

And if google could know about everyone the average time on the site would be 4000/1500 = 2.6 mins

So - why doesn’t google fix this? Well, they did but people complained so they put it back. As a result, you can forget about your average times as being a reliable statistic.

There’s more on this at http://imediaconnection.com/content/16342.asp

I have been reading a great guide on current web design trends. Check it out - here are some key points:

• Simple layouts, 1 and 2 columns
• Centered layouts, no more liquid and left aligned
• Design content, not the background
• Subtle gradients and drop shadows
• Plain white background, perhaps with greyscale fades
• Few simple 3d icons
• White space
• Big text