But I’m not too sure why Google it trying to bring this network together… but I see how they’re trying to make it successful.  Simply put, they have millions of users in Google Mail.  By bringing them into Buzz whether they like it or not (as it’s not exactly optional to start with), they’re growing a user base of forced users.  It’s the ‘if you throw enough stuff at a wall, some things are going to stick’ approach.  I don’t like it, and I don’t see why others would.

They’re using this approach because any other way they’ve tried to connect users has fallen into the pit.  Half of you have probably not heard of their social network, Orkut. For me, Google Wave is becoming less and less of a feature of my day and day work approach.  I hope this fails as well, so Google starts realising they can’t do everything.

It’s a new year.  Time to get organised and to be more productive.  I’m going to use the tricks David Allen shares in this video, given in a presentation to Google.  If you’re going to be joining me–good luck.

There are a few things you’re going to need to get started:

• A Twitter account, duh.
• A Plurk account, duh.
• A self-hosted version of wordpress, brand-spanking-new and hosted somewhere you’ll never visit (such as fusedreality.com/twitter in my case)
• This custom version of wp-plurk plugin by Herdian Ferdianto (keep it in it’s zip file.  Wordpress won’t mind.  [All I've altered is allowing {{content}} tag as well as doing some automated is.gd url shortening])

After that, just follow the screencast below and in no time at all you’ll have your tweets coming to plurk!

As always–feel free to share this around, comment and do other awesome things with it.

In his second video of the overnight success series he notes that it’s not all fancy but it’s all about taking action and making projects happen… even if it means getting up at 5.30am.  That’s the thing that most don’t understand or do.  I am one of those with many projects on cards (I spent about an hour looking through them all today)–and this has sparked notice in myself that my love of sleeping in and watching too much video at times can be worse instead of better.

I’m going to sum up what I’ve learned from this.  It’s simple.  Get off your backside and if you want something, work for it.  When you reach what you want, you may not be sipping margaritas on the beach–but you’ll have made it.  That’s enough for me.

Do you think the way you’re doing things is hindering your ability to succeed?

The problem is that most people aren’t suited for writing content specifically for the web. Those of us that live and work on the net often feel surprised when someone can’t write their views and shorten it to 140 characters. We get insulted when the outside world looks oddly at a blog and ultimately insulted if they feel that it’s no way to make a living.

Let me digress. What the problem is that the web is a different medium which many have not yet grasped. It was only invented 40 years ago and it is constantly evolving. Our clients and others need to find out how to use this well as, just like we couldn’t write a book if given a typewriter, neither can others.

I provide to you these tips on writing for the web not as commandments. These are things that I have picked up on over the years that has made my life on the web easier and has ultimately helped in terms in the readability, interest and even in terms of search optimisation.

Short & Sweet

Publications, magazines and books often have long paragraphs. This doesn’t work on the web, and if you’ve not caught the user’s attention in the first 30 seconds–they’ll be off the page with no hesitation whatsoever. Try to keep your paragraphs short, sweet and to the point so that us of the information age can get what we need to know quickly as easily.

Titles, Titles, Titles

Not only does separating your content with titles assist with the readability and accessibility of the content, but it makes it easier for search engines to properly index your content. Search engines such as Google take more interest in titles and will often use them as keywords which will help new visitors find relevant content quicker.

Understand your audience

It’s no use writing like a pretentious university lecturer if you’re aiming to get the attention of children. Write like you would to your audience, and try not to sound too over-the-top by using overly-complex words when something simple can do. Nobody will think of you any better and you will do yourself worse by distracting the user.

Pictures are copy too

Images work as a great separator or descriptor of content. It allows people to see what the post may be before we even start reading it, or adds to current content by providing more depth to a post or page.

Just as having to many of one thing makes it worse, try to limit your images so they are meaningful without becoming distracting.

Oh, and for accessibility, ensure you provide decent ALT and LONDESC tags when required.

Anticipate your users questions

There are a few questions your reader has that you should answer on each page.

• What am I doing here?
• How do I do it?
• What’s in it for me?
• Where can I go next?

If your design and navigation don’t make the answers to those questions obvious, which they should, then you should use your copy to explain them.

That’s a wrap.

Hopefully those quick tips will help you write better for the web in no time.  If you have any tips of your own, please feel free to add them in the comments.

The speakers overall were very well picked–with a culmination of local and national speakers that were both really good.

“Hi my name is Doug & I get far too excited about micro formats”–Doug Aitken

The most interesting morning speaker was @drewm who discussed with us the in’s and out’s of Microformats–something that I have personally have been wanting to try out for a while but the microformats wiki, at first glance, makes it seem like a monster waiting to devour you.  But… by the end of the morning break… I was coding vcards into a couple of things.  Not a problem at all.

I’m sorry to say that the Microsoft Silverlight presentation, as well as the Adobe Air presentation by the Fuzzy Orange guys did little to interest me–but we can’t have it all, can we?

What came after lunch was a real treat–with @patrick_h_lauke of Opera teaching us all about the keyboard navigation and how CSS can actually affect the usability of your website for some users (Presentation available here).  Not only that, but @drewm came back to tell us about Cost Effective Web Development (Presentation available here) and our local speaker, @colinhewitt, brought us all a few ideas about his presentation– Design, Release, Iterate: The Importance of Acting on Feedback.  Last but not least another Opera guy, @brucel, showed us how HTML 5 is coming along and what we can already use to spice up our own projects.  If the amount of laptops open are the sign of how captivated you have your audience, @brucel had us caught up in his web (mind the pun…).

If there was one thing that seemingly disappointed the crowd what that the things that were on offer seemed much more developer oriented than the name suggested.  Being a developer, I didn’t mind this too much–but I would have loved to see a little more diversity against it’s counterpart.

It was nice to meet or see once again a lot of like-minded fellows–such as @fitzfrusciante, @gpirie, @dougaitken, @dennisjcoughlin, @sambrown and @mr_nil.  I just wish I had the time to meet the rest of you at the after-party!

If you ever have a chance to visit a Carsonified Tour then I definitely recommend it.  It’s cheap, it’s informative, and the after-parties are always fun!

p.s. Sam Brown has an excellent write-up of the event as well as creating yet another of his interesting Experience Graphs for you all to enjoy (his has pictures too, so it’s a lot more interesting than mine).

Focus

My focus has shifted dramatically since I launched fusedrealitystudios.com back in 2003.  It’s even changed in the past six months!  Back then I considered myself as a student with little worries and when comparing myself to my peers–and I thought it’d be fine to sit back and watch things go by.  I’ve had the cold water splashed onto my face, and I’m doing my best to work on my freelance career.

There are other things;  things I’ve been meaning to change for a long time.  The site is much easier to update and above all, is tied in much better with the CMS of my choice.  Essentially the time for a redesign had become essential; it’s happening because I was frustrated.  But this is a good thing, since it means I’m redesigning out of necessity and not just for the sake of it.

It’s not finished yet

Although the site’s live, my work is far from over.  There are numerous things that have either not been implemented or tweaked and most if it hasn’t been tested at all in any version of IE.  But apart from that usual post-launch stuff, there’s some specific things I do have planned:

• Store. It may sound a little weird to have a store built into my website but there’s a purpose for everything in this little world.  I intend to expand and do more work on premium Wordpress themes as well as a few other products and services–of which I will soon be providing.
• Extra-cirricular activities. I hope to be able to have some aspects of other websites that I use and what I’m doing.  But I’m trying to find a way of creating this without impeding on the use of the site with prospective clients.
• Improved comment display. I still need to do a little tweaks to make inline comments work in a way that I feel looks good.  Soon.
• Better navigation between posts. Journal entries don’t even have previous/next links yet.  I hope to add a few features so people will find posts that are similar and popular.
• First Contact. The contact form I was creating isn’t ready yet, but I’m making it fit with the rest of the website’s aesthetics.
• Search. It needs to be implemented, but it’s on it’s way.

I ain’t afraid of no criticism!

I’ve talked enough.  I’d love to know what you think, and if you have any requests or feature suggestions, so please leave a comment!

Yesterday I spent multiple hours with quite a few developers and folk at Sun Microsystems in Linlithgow for Carsonified’s Future of Web Apps Tour – Edinburgh. Overall, it went great.

Morning Talking Points

While most of the morning felt quite like a product placement, the information dealt with scaling an application was quite interesting. This was the main info dealt from both Microsoft and Amazon but I found Amazon, one of my little crushes on the web, did their service justice. They discussed their EC2 virtual servers that helped build scalable applications on the web, and their methods of ensuring uptime made me feel assured about who I’d probably go with if the time came by.

The virtual servers work by a ‘pay by the hour’ principle–starting off at $0.10 and going all the way to $0.80 with many different platforms to choose from. Data storage was provided by their EBS service, which gives up to a terabyte worth of space on a single store. Not too bad.

The big idea

Interesting talk at #FOWA – focus on a SMALL target audience, getting 4000 consumers to pay £20 a month for a service = profitable business! – Dave Gardner

Roan Lavery from FreeAgent brought a bright spark in the lunchtime to wake us all up and made me think about how I really should turn my ideas into a business. One surprising thing he mentioned was the change of wording from “Free Trial” to “See Pricing & Plans”. Overall, they saw 50% more people join thanks to leaving notice of the trail up. Not what I would have thought. He went on to talk about pricing as well, and stating that business apps can often charge up to 10x what people are paying for a personal app due to it’s usefulness.

Moo

Building Moo wasn’t as easy as you’d think, or was it? It took 3 hours worth of developing time to get Moo US up and running. It was interesting to see how they managed their business, and shared the one secret that some will relate to–”Simplicity trumps features”.

Oh, Ryan

Ryan Carson’s talk focused about marketing on the web, and how it’s changed since the old days of print media. It’s no longer about branding & control but rather it focuses on conversation & empowerment, as well as on the honesty and openness of your business.

He’s a big user of Google Analytics and says that we really should spend at least two hours per week looking at the stats and measuring our conversions religiously.

In terms of twitter, he even had his own way of marketing yourself. If you have to, only market yourself every 10 tweets or so. Nobody likes a marketer who makes it obvious. Make the rest of your tweets interesting and relevant, but also make it about yourself.

Then, he left with three little tips to get more marketing interest:-

• Trade Flavours. Another site that’s similar? It wouldn’t hurt to share.
• Write Content for others. Just ask around, it won’t hurt.
• Make a PR Stunt. Maybe it’ll get you noticed?

Network fast, party long

One thing that Carsonified was trying out this time was a little speed networking. Just like speed dating, you had about three minutes to talk about who you are, what you do and any other interesting bits and bobs. I met some great people in my little circle, many with interesting start-ups that they are making. Not all were great though, as while I was switching my next guy just walked away. Manners!

Thanks to, I think, Amazon there was a tidy little tab started at the bar for us all to get started on the after-party and for me to meet new people in my much more sociable, inebriated, state. I manged to talk to Ryan Carson and got his views on using Coldfusion as a teaching aid over open-source development language. He was not wearing his trademark hat.

The only other person from Carsonifed who managed to stay the night, and get acclimatised to drinking Tennents, was Louise. It was nice to hear about the odd move she made from being a producer in live television to working as the events manger, but if it works… I spent most of my time after that talking to Gordon and Dennis while the football caught most people’s interest. Nice guys, and I enjoyed my time being there!

Points of Interest

• Sun gave us a tour of their complex before lunch with some really awesome pieces of technology. I definitely liked their ‘Black Box’ which was a server system set up in a regular shipping container. Seeing the applications and how they’ve managed to force all that tech, which can use 40KW worth of power, is kind of astonishing.
• Sun, in themselves were very hospitable. Free lunch, drinks and WiFi? I never expected that!
• Their main server area was loud, and I have the video to prove it.
• I can’t wait till the next one.

Now, the bad news

Before I even started thinking about attending FOWA Tour Edinburgh I had a plan of redesigning and reorganising my site. I took my time with it, but never really liked that I came up with. They say that you are your own worst client, and I sure was. I’d contradict every style I chose and I could never stick to a colour style. Plus, I’ve lost some of those design skills I used to cherish.

I’ve been working on the web since 2001. I’ve even been around since <marquee> was a popular HTML tag. Well, if you ignore myspace, that’s long gone now. Things have changed and people are slowly, but surely, understanding what the web can do for them. I try my best to create good things to make people feel better about staying here.

“surprise surprise,”johnny last minute” faced with an other hard and fast deadline for an important project. why do i do this to myself????” John Greene

But, if things can go wrong–they will. That’s exactly what happened as I found myself playing around with a design the day before FOWA due to some unexpected delays. If I could remind you all that it is now a good idea to build a website the week you’re about to move–then you’ll understand my predicament.

Anywho, back to more interesting topics.

Living with a deadline

While some deadlines can be pushed, the quality of the content will more than likely be degraded due to this. Since I was on a tight deadline to get something up by this morning–I have taken the unfortunate action of not including what clients would consider an important aspect of anything I do–my portfolio.

While I hope to get it up as soon as possible, there’s not much else I can do until it’s up. This means for the next few days I’ll be acting like a code monkey adding more features to this site, new content, and even a few little easter eggs for those of you that feel the need.

What do I do until then?

Well I guess you’ve made it this far in life without me. I just hope you’ll make it the rest. If you feel that you haven’t had enough of me, feel free to visit my portal that will take you to my blog, twitter, etc.