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.

A Unified Experience

Before attempting to unify the look of most of the fusedreality websites, I opted to keep each website seperate and of it’s own content.  However, this ’split’ cause my visitors confusion when jumping from one to another.  So far, visitors have become more likely to visit differing sites and stay for longer as the websites have been unified.

Extending Knowledge

Before this project I had little knowledge of CSS3 and jQuery–which has changed since then. CSS, or ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ are the web’s way of stylising pages.  Their latest change to the specification now allow for many needed styles such as opacity, rounded corners and multiple background support.  While there are browsers that do not yet support the new specification, those who keep their browsers up-to-date now get a much more pleasant feel for the page.

jQuery is very different and allows browsers to modify content on the page.  I suited this tool to act to aid the style of the website, providing sliding hidden sections so users would not have to change pages abruptly for small-content changes as well as several opacity changes for linked content.

Overall I am pleased with the end result, but as always, there is room for improvement which will be implemented in later revisions.

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!

If you don’t have a website that does both of these things you’re assured that your website will either not be visited, or will be abandoned with little hope of resurrection.

The Orchard came to me looking for a simple website which they could build upon in the future to share news and information to their prospective and current customers. Not only did they want to keep a menu they could easily update–but have a news area that would allow them to tell their customers simply what’s going on.

A table for two at eight please…

Another feature The Orchard wanted to tap into was the ability to allow reservations online for those in a hurry.

While I was able to feed up a variety of different methods of delivering the information to the staff at the bar–my client chose a simple yet effective solution.

With music always playing throughout the eastablishment it was found best to create a subtle sound notification to alert the staff. Reservations are sent to an email address which ‘dings’ their music device–and a one-click option allows them to approve or deny the reservation very quickly.

Working with the City of Edinburgh Music School was my first ever client-centric project.  Their passion for their craft was brought forward when visiting their school back in 2006 and it was something I wanted to show in their project.

The music school is based as part of Broughton High School and has been the force that have brought forth many great artists such as Martyn Bennett, Tommy Smith and Lisa Kerr.

What was done?

Designing a simple website with a method of updating their content simply, I built their website on top of the Joomla content management system–giving them as much, or as little, control over their content as desired–as well as providing photographic expertise to show the music school in action.

Assistance in finding hosting and domains at an affordable and appropriate cost as well as off-site support for some time after was included.