Most hairdressers have rubbish haircuts

I think it's one of those natural laws. They spend all that time crafting awesome hair cuts for people that when it comes to their own they either procrastinate so much they look like an extra from The Mighty Boosh, or they have a self applied buzz cut and look like a skin head. The same applies to web designers portfolios - having procrastinated for so long that I have the web version of Noel Fielding's haircut, yesterday I gave myself a digital buzz cut, threw out the old design, and put up some text, slightly prettified with some nice fonts from TypeKit. I had half an hour to kill whilst waiting around at WP-Brighton (great conference BTW), so I deleted the site, kept the blog, got @CharleeSays to write me some nifty new copy and I'm away.

Good points

  • No more dead links
  • Latest portfolio pieces are on there

Bad Points

  • No more graphics
  • None of the extra features I have been musing about for years
  • Portfolio looks smaller, as I have taken older sites off

All in all - I'm pleased, at the very least it will motivate me to take some time out of my paid client work to work on my own site. Difficult as I don't get paid to do my own.

I'll be moving the entire site to be WordPress based in the next few weeks, integrating this blog ( the /blog/ part ) in tot he root of the site and using WP as a CMS.

Hope you like it.

v0.3 of HTML5 Boilerplate for Shopify theme has been released. Blog templates updated.

Which is nice, quite surprised I have managed to do so much on it already. This release covered the reworking of the blog.liquid and the article.liquid, which is the blog front page and blog story pages respectively. I spent a long time trying to make sure that the <time> elements had the correct date time attributes in them, pretty sure they're right but I'd appreciate any feedback.

I also spent quite a lot of time struggling with the nesting of article, heading and section on article.liquid. I settled for something that looks like this:

<article> <header> <h1></h1> <p>Posted by <span rel="author">Miles Cheverton</span> on <time datetime="2011-09-01T13:52:32EDT" pubdate>Thursday, September 01</time></p> </header> <section id ="article_content"> <h1 hidden>Article content</h1> <p>article content</p> </section> <section id="comments"> <h1>Comments</h1> <dl> <dt><span rel="author">Author Name</span> said on <time datetime="2011-09-01T13:52:32EDT" pubdate></time></dt> <dd><p>comment comment comment</p></dd> </dl> </section> <section id="comment_form"> <h1>Add your comments</h1> <form method='post' action='/blogs/news/3944982-first-post/comments' id='article-3944982-comment-form' class='comment-form'> <label for="comment_author">Name</label> <input type="text" id="comment_author" name="comment[author]" size="40" value="" class="" /> <label for="comment_email">Email</label> <input type="text" id="comment_email" name="comment[email]" size="40" value="" class="" /> <label for="comment_body">Comment</label> <textarea id="comment_body" name="comment[body]" cols="40" rows="5" class=""></textarea> <input type="submit" value="Post comment" id="comment_submit" /> </form> </section> </article>

dConstruct 2011 - A Sad Disappointment

I attended my fourth dConstruct yesterday, looking forward to the usual encouraging, stimulating and inspirational ideas. Instead, what I left with was a new set of bathroom scales (the Withings set of WiFi scales mentioned in Kelly Goto's talk), keen motivation to steal the typographical style of two presentations and the vague feeling that some over paid speakers had stood on stage, barking buzz words and sound bites at me for a day. (I had paid the reasonable sum of £125 to be there, by the way, plus the less reasonable sum of a day's lost pay.) It was good to see from the #dConstruct Twitter stream that I certainly wasn't on my own in thinking this (the stream isn't particularly clear, since any positive comment about dConstruct has been immediately retweeted by @dconstruct themselves). The stream was pretty revealing; the most popular Tweet on there is:

Don Norman: "Don't design for the user experience: design for the memory. Memories last for years."

Well that's a stunning insight. I'm not sure what it means but it certainly has all the key ingredients for a popular Tweet. This comes from the same man who stood on stage and announced to us, as if he was revealing a secret hitherto known only to the monks half way up a mountain who trained Batman, that "Google's product is [wait for it...] you. And their customers are the advertisers".

I can tell you, it was a good job I was sitting down.

There seems to be a smell of The Emperor's New Clothes about this year's dConstruct. You might notice that it's got no substance, but woe betide you if you say so; it's the underdog, the upstart, it's cheap, it's in achingly-cool-Brighton, it's run by Clearleft...you don't say bad things about dConstruct.

Don't get me wrong: I've enjoyed previous dConstructs enormously. Sadly, this one was content free and a waste of my time.

Shopify & the HTML5 Boilerplate

On the 24th August I received the first issues of HTML5 Weekly, a "free, once–weekly round-up of HTML5 and related technology news and links". There's a few other bits and pieces in the email you may be interested in (go subscribe) but what caught my eye was "HTML5 Boilerplate 2.0: One Year Old, Many New Improvements". I've used the boilerplate code a few times times, and have been meaning to work it fully into my new site routine for a few months. Parallel to these thoughts has been the idea that I really should write a good base template for all the Shopify shops that I keep building for people. I have one about to go live for a clothes shop, another about to be started and a few more on the horizon. I have plenty of off the shelf components that I use on all my projects nowadays and they all need rolling in as well.

The HTML5 Boilerplate code gives me the ideal starting point and after mentioning it on twitter and receiving at least some enthusiasm, including some from Paul Irish, co-creator of HTML5 Boilerplate, I've decided to give it a go.

There's a few blockers, for one, although I've worked with Git & Github on a lot of projects, I've never actually had my own project there that I have run myself, I've also, never released any open source code. I'm wary about being quite so open for criticism from my peers but I suppose I can only get better by doing so. Also - I am thinking of the cost implications, although I want to do this for free, and frankly, I was going to do it for myself anyway, there is an overhead of running the project, keeping up to date with the master HTML5 Boilerplate project, adding docs etc. I do have a mortgage to pay and a baby to keep in (expensive, you realise the minute they stop drinking milk) pots of blended food. I'm considering just putting up a small site with all the info and DL links, along with a (optional OFC) PayPal donation link, or my affiliate link through to Shopify - would that be acceptable in the open source world?

Looking forward to some feedback and discussion on this one.

Signal / Noise / Internet / Grrrr

It's so easy to connect with people. There's no cost, no overheads to being "friends" with 500 people. You connected circle is a great big opportunity to chat, swap opinions, discuss, comment, promote, sell, bug, pester annoy... ah I'm tailing off into my real feelings about these things. In the past month I have reduced the number of people I follow on Twitter from 288 to 162. Reduced my 'connections' on LinkedIn from 181 to 107 and reduced my Facebook account from 160 'friends' to 0 (deleted).

Coincidentally in the last month, I have:

  • Set up my Google Reader account properly and installed Reeder on my Mac, iPhone and iPad
  • Committed to (and followed through) on 30-60minutes of training from Lynda.com per day
  • Dug out all the ebooks I've bought on web dev & design and started reading them (Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte first)
  • Directly connected with co workers at The Skiff & picked up work with Michael Bailey of This Is Deliberate
  • Spoken to half a dozen potential clients about exciting projects
  • Moved forward with two major commerce projects that are going live in the next few weeks.

I suppose I'm saying something quite obvious but from the other side I never realised quite how much mind clutter all of my pointless connections were causing.

LinkedIn - all recruitment consultants have been stripped out, I'm not looking for work, at least not the work they were offering. If I had a pound for every back end, permanent PHP job in Northern Ireland I was offered I'd be a richer man (nothing against PHP devs in Northern Ireland OFC, just not what I'm after)

Twitter - the signal / noise ratio on Twitter is insane at the best of time but cluttering up your timeline with rubbish from Stephen bloody Fry or Lady GaGa does nothing to help you with your day. There's nobody left on my stream who isn't directly related to web dev - I look at it a few times a day, follow some links, post  few questions. Never look at it when I'm not working.

Facebook..... well I'm not ashamed to say I think I was a little addicted to that tiny red mark with a number in it. In reality I think Facebook just let me know too much about the lives of people I'd barely consider distant connections. Nobody has 500 friends. Nobody has 160 friends (my last count). You have a handful, the rest are just faces you know and frankly I have other things to think about than what they had for dinner, what they'd do to sort out the recent riots in London, what they think of my updates and a dozen other useless scraps of information.

Clutter - there's too much of it. Declutter your life and prioritise the things that are genuinely important to you.

  1. My Family (Daughter, Wife, direct family)
  2. My hobbies (Reading, painting, modelling, social board gaming)
  3. My work (Getting good work done, keeping clients happy, getting more work)
  4. My Career (Learning new techniques, optimising best practice)

There isn't enough space in life to give these things the time they need as it is - so all those other little distractions are best left behind.