Yahoo! have just launched a new Style Guide online and in print. Now style guides are not new – newspapers have had them for decades – but these invariably have their roots in print and there are many differences online.
The Yahoo! guide is written with digital publishing as the focus, concentrating on things that make writing for the web different to print. While most of what Yahoo! have collected isn’t new, it is good to see things collated in one place.
The guide also contains prompts for things organisations can do to build their own style guide, for example forming a style committee (one might say a Style Council, ha!) to make decisions, and maintaining a word list.
With an increasing demand for everyone to be able to publish to the web, a formal style guide may be required to ensure our high standards are maintained and advanced.
This week’s budget gave a good opportunity to see how different news organisations handled live reporting on their websites so I did a quick scan through a few TV and newspaper websites and screen grabbed what I could see.
The reason I’m interested is that the 125 anniversary has provided an opportunity for a large number of events on campus for some of these like the Manifesto for Change event to have a remote audience engaging online via streaming video and live chat.
Last week I mentioned that while I couldn’t give a definitive list, our initial focus for a mobile website would be higher end devices. One thing we do know is what people are using at the moment to access our sites on the move:
Data for the above chart is taken from 14th April – 13th June 2010 and the usual warnings apply to statistics sourced from Google Analytics – it only includes browsers executing JavaScript.
What is clear though is that Apple’s devices are massively more popular than anything else – over 75% of page views are from iPhones and iPod Touch browsers.
Mobile usage is fast moving so we’ll be continuing to monitor trends and statistics will drive much of what we do in our forthcoming developments.
“These are new shipping containers where, in very simple terms, we’ve taken the front of the container off and we’ve put a glass screen in with glass doors.
“We’ve fitted them out with carpet and supply power and broadband connectivity and the tenants bring their own furniture – very simple and very affordable.”
There’s been quite a lot in the news lately about a backlash against Facebook’s privacy settings with many people believing their attitude to personal information security is too lax. This isn’t a new issue – nearly three years ago I blogged about it – but now that Facebook is so huge across the board and not just amongst university and college students the debate has started to reach further.
Facebook have responded by trying to be more open about what configuration options are available and explaining how to control what you share. They provide shortcuts to restrict the level of information shared to “everyone”, “friends of friends” or just “friends” along with a comforting-sounding “recommended” settings. I imagine most people will choose this which is pretty scary. Take a look at what that means you will be publishing:
Choosing the recommended settings means everyone – not just Facebook members but the general public – will be able to see status updates like the ones you post when you’re mad with your boss or photos you took at the end of a night out or biographical details like where you work. Information available to “friends of friends” opens the door to the 1200 “friends” your 17 year old cousin has and do you really want them all seeing photos of you?
We shouldn’t be too critical of Facebook – they have a business to run and shareholders who expect them to maximise profit from advertising which means persuading you to be as open as possible with the information you share. The onus is on individuals to carefully consider the information they share and the implications it might have on their life. More importantly this isn’t a one off job – you should be reviewing privacy settings on a regular basis.
What do I do? I have a set of custom settings which generally means only friends can see what I publish except the groups “Limited Profile” and “Colleagues”:
On the other hand I use Twitter, Flickr, foursquare, delicious and many other services where information I publish is completely public but I understand the risks involved and am constantly aware that everything I write online could come back to bite me.
The collection contains photos, illustrations and documents all released copyright-free. Here’s a few examples from the collection to whet your appetite:
Argleton might have been wiped off the main Google map but it’s still there in Street View as you can see in the above Street View of Argleton Aughton Village Hall.
Edge Hill’s St Helens Road and Ruff Lane entrances are present but you can’t (yet!) look around the campus or Ormskirk Town Centre:
Strangely on Ruff Lane the section immediately past the entrance is missing. I don’t think this is a conspiracy, it’s more likely the route the Google Street View car took.
Post links to any interesting things you’ve found on Google Street View.
There’s been quite a lot of talk in the mainstream news about Internet Explorer 6 – Microsoft’s browser released in 2001 along side Windows XP. IE6 has a long history of security vulnerabilities and has been linked to the Chinese attacks on Google.
More recently French and German governments have advised people to upgrade and there is a petition to make the UK government follow suit. For Edge Hill’s corporate website, 7.5% of visits are from people using IE6 – higher than Safari, Chrome and Opera.
As web developers, life would be so much easier if we could relegate IE6 to the lower divisions and would encourage uptake of new techniques like those in HTML5. This isn’t necessarily because they can’t be done along side IE6, but supporting it is one more thing we have to do.
is it your place to do anything about it? they may have good reason (e.g. access from school where IT Dept locked won to IE6)
This to me is the heart of the problem. There will almost certainly be people who can’t upgrade and we need to ensure we don’t annoy them too much. But there will also be people who simply don’t know and those that may have no direct control over what browser they’re using (maybe through inexperience or company restrictions) but can be helped to change.
Another suggestion with potential came from Matthew Walton:
Implement an incredibly compelling new feature which doesn’t work properly in IE6.
I don’t want to go back 10 years to the situation where “you must be using Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape Navigator 3 to enter this site” but there are ways to introduce new functionality while still offering something for older browsers.
But prizes (no monetary value) go to Alex Mace and Martyn Davies for the following suggestions that I wish I could get away with:
alexmace: @MikeNolan Pop a lightbox over the screen that says “OMG, SECURITY FAIL – please hand in your internet access license”
and
martynrdavies: @MikeNolan I’m recommending going to the house of every user and upgrading their browser whilst informing them of their failure.
More questions than answers? You expected anything else?!
When the BBC announced Digital Revolution, a new project to create a programme about the rise of the Web, I had high hopes that it would be something genuinely different to the way documentaries about computing are normally made.
The whole production process was put out in the open with a blog, a Twitter account and regular releases of the “rushes” from interviews. Guardian journalistAleks Krotoski was to present and father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee was on board to drag in the crowds.
I’ve not kept up with the making of the series as closely as I’d have liked – I’ve watched the odd video and heard about some things on Twitter – but last night I saw the first episode in the four part series, now renamed The Virtual Revolution. Part One “The Great Levelling?” (repeated Monday and available on iPlayer now) tried to introduce the series and talked about the early beginnings of the Web – its academic origins, San Fran free living culture and the commercialisation of it.
The list of names they’ve interviewed for the series is impressive: Gates, Fry, Gore, Jobs, The Woz – people so famous they don’t need first names. Connecting them is a narrative attempting to explain what’s gone on for the last 20 years but it’s this that for me doesn’t work. While I get the basic concept – the web is a leveller – it fails to link together the examples in a way that tells the true history. It jumps from a bloke who spends quite a lot of time on Wikipedia to an obscure American bulletin board system pre-dating the web all interspersed with arty shots of Aleks sat using a laptop, stood using her iPhone, walking using an iPhone, sat using a laptop and an iPhone… you get the idea.
While the flow of the programme could be better, many of the interviews are interesting. Most have been distilled down into mere sound-bites, for example Stephen Fry on Wikipedia:
I challenge anybody to find a better, faster source of perfectly acceptable knowledge for almost all purposes you would require as a normal citizen.
Pretty much sums up my own views on the site. These clips are too short though – it may be that the rest of what people said could be plain dull but it will be interesting to see the rest of them, and since the rushes have been made available, it should be possible.
This episode tries goes a limited way to put the web into context. It explains that the web is not the same as the internet and Bill Gates can be relied on to bring it back to Microsoft:
The personal computer was the template on which the web had to be created. You had to have millions of these common machines in order for it to make any sense.
Other interviewees aren’t so great. For some reason TV programmes keep asking Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen on to spout his views (I’ve mentioned him before when he appeared on Newsnight). Andrew Keen is like a Dementor of the internet – he sucks the very soul out of it while offering nothing of value in return.
I think it reflects the fundamental intellectual bankruptcy of the internet that someone like Arianna Huffington [co-founder of the Huffington Post] should have come to symbolise the supposed revolutionary qualities of it. I mean she’s an interesting woman, but she’s about as revolutionary as my dog.
The Virtual Revolution is an interesting blend of new and old characters. The old guard, represented by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and other pioneers of the personal computer have, arguably, a far more interesting story to tell which can be found in another documentary from 1996. Triumph of the Nerds, presented by Robert X. Cringely goes right back to the beginnings of the PC industry and goes into far more detail about how we went from typing pools to the point where everyone has a computer on their desk. It’s worth getting hold of a copy.
Don’t get me wrong, the web has changed the world (and I really shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me!) but The Virtual Revolution could do a much better job of saying how it came about, what it means to us and promoting the geek origins of the web. I’d be interested to hear what other people think of the programme and I’ll certainly be watching the next three parts and trying to catch up with some of the interview rushes.
I started working at Edge Hill around the same time IT Services launched the GO portal and there was talk in the office the first Christmas about how many people would be logging in on Christmas day.
We don’t have the stats for Christmas day 2006, but we do have last couple of years so now you can check out how many people were logging in a year ago today (except I’m writing this in November so it’s not a year ago for me).
Last year GO received 840 visits on Christmas day. Here’s an hourly breakdown – thick blue line is 2008 stats and the thin green line is 2007:
The main Edge Hill website received even more visitors. Again, thick blue line is 2008 stats and the thin green line is 2007:
I wonder if either site will beat those figures this year!
That’s all for 25 days of blogging – I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts and thank you to everyone who’s commented. See you in 2010 where we’ll start it all again with some very exciting projects on the cards (well, on the product backlog actually!)
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