Someone I follow on Twitter was one of 41 people who retweeted this yesterday from Jacob Harris. I don’t know Jacob, but his tweet got me thinking. On the one hand, his point it spot on. ‘Liking’ things online is hardly a way to add value to the world. What it made me think, though, [...]
Anna Pickard writes a lovely and entertaining blog called Little Red Boat. She recently had the BRILLIANT idea of ‘the snailr project‘, which entailed travelling around the US by train, sending postcards to people who’d requested them. She describes it as: One journey of almost 7000 miles, six new cities, eight trains, fifteen days, and [...]
In the early days of blogging and the internet, it was considered very important to create a page and leave it there for all time – changes after publication were frowned upon and had to be declared. This was important so people could reference the page reliably and was also considered ‘honest’. This is still [...]
Today we launched the new version of NakedTranslations.com, a website for my friend’s translation business. The site is entirely bilingual, including a blog, and raised some technical challenges. Here’s how I did it. Defining ‘bilingual’ We wanted to be able to do the following: give the user a clean experience in their language of of [...]
Ocassionally I forget just how clever Google can be. I went to the search bar and started typing Wimbledon. Google suggested ‘Wimbledon 2009′, which I selected. It then gave me live scores. Of course.
I went to Google with the intention of looking for I forget what, starting my search with ‘ways to’. I got a bit freaked by Google’s suggestions: I am encouraged that “ways to say I love you” comes above “ways to kill yourself”. On the other hand, you’d sort of hope that people could work [...]
It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then I come across something online that makes my colleagues worry. I’ll be sitting quietly at my computer, and suddenly start saying “oh my God. That’s so clever. Coooooool. Wow.” Yesterday, this happened when I came across the G24 on the Guardian website. G24 brings you the [...]
URL: https://sales.oystercard.com/oyster/lul/entry.do Site purpose: To allow customers to research and buy tickets, including top-up, for the Oyster card used on London Transport. Overview: This site has serious usability problems that hinder the customer’s experience. The following points should be addressed. Further issues exist, but these points would dramatically improve the site in the short term. [...]
My sister Octavia has been taking part in this year’s NaNoWriMo, the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, and she’s done it! She is a NaNoWriMo winner! Her novel came in at 50,250 words (but, for some reason the NaNoWriMo word count squeaked her in with a word count of 50,080), [...]
I’ve just been looking at Webcameron, the new website from the Conservative Party bringing lots of videos of David Cameron, leader of the Party, to an internet near you. I’d heard about it, of course, but hadn’t thought much of it until a Labour MP made a (really bad) spoof and put it on YouTube. [...]