Design Specification Roadmap

February 15, 2008

There is always something nice about creating milestones and to-do lists in Basecamp, when you’re not quite sure what to do next with the incoming design specifications. In truth, of course, defining what I am expected to do next is a neat way of putting off what I’m supposed to do next, but at least I know in what order I’m not getting around to things.

I do find that, even though the end result can be reasonably consistent, the way I set up each project is usually markedly different. This is normally because I’m putting milestones in the order that someone else’s project plan has them laid out, and then I’m building the to-do lists to align with those milestones. In actual fact, this is probably the best way for me to work, as I am a completely hopeless project manager. I’ve done a course and everything, but I fear it’s application to the task that makes a good PM. Thankfully, I’m able to bank on the support of any number of project managers around here who are scarily efficient, so I’ve not yet dropped the ball completely.

Needless to say, as I’m writing this, I’m supposed to be checking a box marked “complete audit of user stories & user flows”, but this is multitasking. Well, its multitasking as I know it, which is doing multiple tasks, but not necessarily at the same time. Or in the correct order. Or today.

Listening Post: Shelby Lynne: Where I’m From

Rolling Over & Dying

February 13, 2008

We just recently resolved an implementation issue that had been going back and forth between Greg, Andrew and me for a good few weeks. It wasn’t a big thing, but sometimes the simplest things push the boundaries when I try to do it myself.

For a long time, we’ve had invitations to talk directly with sales advisors on sun.com, whether you want to chat, call, email or even have sun call you back directly. These invitations have been reasonably prominent in the right-hand navigation of specific pages. More recently, we’ve been able to embed these invitations by deploying inline rollovers, at the point where customers commit to a call-to-action, making the invitation much more relevant and immediate. You can see the current deployment on some of our promotions, like the Uniboard Upgrade Promotion (until April 1st, which happens to be my birthday, by the way). As you rollover the ‘Start Saving Now’ call-to-action, our rollover appears, with all the options you might need.

Nice as this is, its actually a pretty cumbersome implementation. When I say cumbersome, I mean, its elegant code (as all our web components are), but the way in which we had to deploy it in the short term left a bit to be desired. Our ever-patient publishing team reluctantly agreed to hard-code the components into specific pages, knowing that that was a huge backwards step, and a potential maintenance disaster – they know we’ll change our mind about what’s in the component and expect them to find and update it in all the places we asked them to deploy it but never actually kept a record of ourselves. What we all really wanted was a separate source file for the component itself, which could be referenced by a standard piece of code that would be provided to content owners to use as they require.

This, unfortunately, is where I, as usual, said “I can do that, don’t worry”.

I do know my way around html, CSS, javascript and most other basic web technologies (I expect someone will now point out that it should be HTML, as its an acronym, and JavaScript, or something, just to prove, before I even get to where I’m going, that once being a developer, doesn’t mean always being a developer, and in terms of knowledge assimilation once you gravitate to marketing, all your code is belong to us), but sometimes, when you put them all together, and then call it ‘Ajax’, then I start to lose the plot. What I actually needed to accomplish was quite simple, from an abstract view. I have a self-contained web component (snippet of sun.com source), that exists in 1 source file, say, source.html, and I have a parent page, say, parent.html that contains a reference to that source file as part of an Ajax call which renders the component code so that it can then be referenced by a CSS-implemented rollover and magic fairy dust scatters over the page and the share price goes up or something. If you’re still with me, and super-interested, I was actually trying to include a K02v1 DHTML Popup Component, saved as source.html), by calling it from a G32v0 Onload Ajax Include (in parent.html) and then invoke the Popup by using the Popup div id as a class attribute of the invoking anchor in parent.html.

Needless to say, despite my best efforts, I simply could not arrange 10 lines of code and a couple of hash references in the correct order, and ultimately I prostrate myself at the altar of the web design church for forgiveness. Happily, for me, they couldn’t either (for about 10 seconds), but eventually resolved the issue with a flourish of staged content, and I took their code and stuck it into my development site. Of course, it didn’t work when I tried it, but another couple of hours (and a few gin and tonics by now) later, everything was as we wanted it to be.

The trouble is, it took me so long that Neal probably doesn’t even want the rollover any more, but, you know, its useful to ‘keep your hand in’ with this stuff (not for the developers and publishers who have to clean your mess up, naturally, before they point that out).

Listening Post: Outlaw: Nothing Else To Say

Spam Me Gently

February 8, 2008

I normally get a reasonable amount of unsolicited offers for make her saTisfy you wanT prescription cheap online! and insurance I will never need via email. They even filter through the sun.com domain occasionally – congratulations to them – but they are, almost without exception, meaningless twaddle or borderline abusive. What a nice surprise then that this morning I got 38 emails forwarded from a) the blogs.sun.com comment system and b) the sun.com postmaster replying to bounces from the comment system sending to people who don’t work here anymore, that were all rather, well, polite in their spamness.

I’m sure others got them, although I didn’t check, and Igor was kind enough to let me know what was going on, but the basic message was something like “thanks you very much”. There were a couple of variants, like “That is nice”, or “thank you admin”, but overall, there wasn’t anything unpleasant in there. They were only trying to generate traffic back to their domains, bless ’em. I was kind of glad to help out, since they asked so nicely. Of course, after a few minutes, I rang Scotland Yard, replied to the sender with some vicious cease-and-desist, blocked their IP and did a reverse DDOS spam bucket mangle attack, which brought down the entire internet connection of Turkey, after which I felt better. Then I sent then a nice message saying “thanks you for your spam”.

I didn’t really do all that, of course. I’m a designer, not a programmer or a system administrator. I just looked at the comment system and thought “that’s table cell’s not aligned correctly”.

Listening Post: Primal Scream: Shoot Speed/Kill Light

amen to that

February 8, 2008

couldn’t think of a better title although I’ve had 3 weeks to come up with something so it seems appropriate that actually someone else should provide the inspiration when I can’t quite put my finger on it thanks. my dad died.

everything was carefully crafted in the end and none such a production would have done finer gathered in the woodlands to say goodbye just as was planned as there was a long painful time to plan it doesn’t take you slowly. cancer. there was a peculiar grace in which the last breaths of life came from his body and he slept painlessly for the first time in many months and that weight of life lifted from his shoulders just a strange soft shuddering in his veins which I had never seen before shall never see again we just said goodbye. I quietly delivered the last messages I had carried through corridors upon corridors just as the light was fading but barely spoken so that I don’t know that I even heard myself speak and then we were gone just as was he.

there’s no joke in the last paragraph

Where Designers Go

February 6, 2008

As Jen McGinn relates, there’s something going on at the Santa Clara campus, at least, there was, for the last couple of days. I know this, because everyone I work with has disappeared, including my management chain and at least 5 other people I was thinking about working with (well, I say working with, I mean checking their Facebook status). It was the annual Design Summit at Sun and there was a healthy focus on our online presence and a key note from Curtis. I believe there’s another summit going on somewhere, so it’s all pretty summitastic right now.

I’m not there, however, so I’ll miss out on those conversations about design tools, publishing processes, community engagement, calls-to-action, component sets (“no, we use this one, it’s a bit like your one, but it’s not the same, even if it looks like an application, which its not, its a web venue, even if it does do kind of application-like things, yes I know its a thin line”), and suchlike. I find those conversations are usually the most enlightening few hours you can have with people gathered together in a room for once a year. You might even get to see what some people look like, which is often enlightening in its own way (“your org chart picture must be really old” etc.), which, in itself, is a design consideration I agonize for hours over every morning.

I’m hoping Marilyn and Chris come back all enthused with some tangental web design direction and exciting feedback, but there’s always a danger that they’ll simply come back saying “they’re trying to do exactly what we’re trying to do” or something. Perhaps they’ll have seen this, and just decide we should all lie down in a dark room for a while.

Listening Post: Aimee Mann: Goodbye Caroline

jazz mangle

February 5, 2008

following a a referral by company girl to a referral by rolling stone that I came across while browsing a feed in google reader that I was alerted to by the gadget I was looking at in igoogle that is the aggregation of anything I look at these days I signed up to musicovery and let it loose in a kind of ‘slightly positive and quite calm’ kind of way. result: jazz!

now, if you’re just past 40 you probably have some internal switch which goes off inside you. that’s the jazz! switch. I think I’m supposed to get a hankering for art blakey and stan getz all of a sudden, but christ on a bike if it’s not just impossible to know where to start, considering that everything ever recorded ever is probably no more than a reasonably carefully crafted search away. having just ordered up a couple of tickets for supergrass at the uea and holy f**k at the arts centre, I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for too much chin stroking, even if it’s up tempo kid ory or something and god forbid I end up in the back alley of easy swing or suchlike with kenny g robbing me of all my gibbering faculties with his saxophone.

so this is where musicovery comes in. without any warning, it’s recommending I listen to lou donaldson’s ode to billie joe and artie shaw’s moonglow, and they’re just about perfect. I can see from the slippery slidy and slighty odd flash interface that I’ve got a good helping of jelly roll morton coming later but I’ll make do with peter tosh and lalo schifrin until then. and when was the last time you listened to the alan parsons project anyway? even if I change my mood everso slightly to, um, DARK, you get a healthy dose of sarah vaughn, for which I’ll probably need a large gin and tonic in a minute. you only slip out of the jazz! boundaries when your mood is more, well, DARK + CALM, but I did get ornette coleman’s all my life and billie holiday’s gloomy sunday squeezed in there, but by that time I was just lying on the floor with all the lights off murmuring about funerals.

I fiddled about with the mood selector long enough to find the point where your mood approaches null. it was all radiohead.

House of Flying Blades

January 17, 2008

I kind of like this video. I mean, I probably should like it by default or something, but I actually like this one. I particularly like how happy everyone is and how sunny it is. As I look out of the window on a drab January day in the east of England, watching someone put bottles into a wheelie bin, watching this video instead is a much better option. As well as everyone in it being sickeningly healthy and pretty much oozing vitamin supplements, I’m always happy to see those shots where you pull back from a scene as far as you think is possible until the disappearing frames turn into dots on a whiteboard and you overlap into an office scene where people are pointing earnestly at things and you continue to zoom back, right out the window, where you see something relevant on the roof or something and you zoom back, a bit like that movie that zooms into the earth’s core and back to space again, right back, until the earth is a dot on the screen and it morphs into a dot at the end of a sentence that is so rammed with clarity your eyes hurt.

You know what I mean. The best bit, however, is the house of flying blade servers (about a minute in). I used to occasionally go down to the server room in Bagshot to reboot the remote access modem pool, but it was all pretty static. I don’t know how any sysadmin survives in this place though. These guys in yellow shirts must be some kind of ninja sysadmins, or watch the Matrix too much and are able to dodge flying hardware or something.

Listening Post: 808 State: Magical Dream

recursive links for 2008-01-16

January 16, 2008

always happy to be part of a social networking trend just as its gone out of favour with those who started doing it months ago, I thought I’d do a very occasional series of links that caught my eye, even before they were links.

recursive links for 2008-01-16
“always happy to be part of a social networking trend just as its gone out of favour with those who started doing it months ago, I thought I’d do a very occasional series of links that caught my eye, even before they were links.”

comment 1
amusing comment from the blog owner regarding his obvious lack of real work to do.

comment 2
a barbed retort from the same blog owner basically telling himself to get on with some work instead of trying to be so clever

etc.

Web 2, Content 1

January 15, 2008

Obviously there should be some clever dot nomenclature in that title to make it more obvious, but that would have made it it just, well, too obvious, and besides, I didn’t fancy the idea of what the permalink would look like and since when have I written a meaningful title anyway.

Maybe you’ve read this far. Maybe you only got the first line in your reader and so you haven’t seen this line and I wasn’t interesting enough to make you get this far. I’ll probably end up putting some screen grab or other in here later to make it look nice and as for the Sun template, that makes everything I write look nicer than it really is, which makes me seem more authoritative, when obviously I’m not. But you might not see that either.

If you grew up with the ‘content is king’ mantra stuck on your huge CRT monitor with a post-it note in the late 90s, and you were devising a strategy for your web content that was focused clearly on what you had to say, rather than how it looked, then welcome back to relevancy. As we’ve (the royal we’ve) integrated web 2.0 capabilities further into our core publishing architectures, and in many cases, foregone ownership of publishing technologies altogether, we’ve willfully opted back into html 1.0. Sure, we have open, distributed platforms that mean we can write once, publish multiple and aggregate endlessly (how fun was it to make recursive feeds of yourself on natuba, before it turned into some weird iphone freakshow?), but how can I squeeze my multimedia in there, or my flash-based corporate profile? Answer is, you can’t. Not really. Not without accepting that things will end up a bit, well, not exactly how you want them. Of course, you can publish a bookmark to your 1.0 web site, which looks as fantastic as it ever did, and even has all the pixels in the right place, if you’re using the right browser/OS combination, natch, but an RSS feed? What kind of losers want to read that stuff?

If you’ve spent 17 hours updating your blog template, like I often do, to get the icons left aligned and the text justified and just the right size, then you’ve just fallen into the pit marked ‘waste of time’, where you’ll find me. Of the 17 people that read anything I ever write, about 16 of them have probably subscribed via google reader or bloglines or something, which means that all formatting has disappeared and my carefully crafted font is now 19 inches tall and my in-line images are not in-line at all, but a huge page break in the middle. Mind you, of those 16 people, only 6 of them are actually reading, the others are just marking it as ‘read’. In fact, I’m the only one who cares, but even I don’t care anymore. I’m writing everything with html 1.0 as the lowest common denominator, which means at least I get to right-align my images, but not much else. It’s quite nostalgic. I might dig out my copy of Mosaic and see how things look. And then take a ride on my space hopper or something.

Listening Post: John Martyn: Certain Surprise

Things what I writ