Blog Standard Stuff

It has to be said, it’s been hard to find many negative comments about my beginners’ HTML & CSS book (the evidence speaks for itself), but one comment I received early on, from a work colleague no less, was this:

“That plane wouldn’t fly.”

Oh yes … so it wouldn’t. In choosing a child’s toy for the cover, the aerodynamics of said toy would guarantee that the plane depicted would never take off (judging by the top wing, at least)! Thankfully, the same can’t be said about the book. So it’s with great pleasure that I unveil just a slight hint of the forthcoming second edition. And look! No dodgy aerodynamics this time! Just a set of very useful tools with which to ply your trade.

First things first, let’s just say that I’m not a big stadium concert goer. I usually prefer the smaller gigs where you can see the artists and actually feel the speakers shaking a few feet away from you. However, this year I have attended two mega gigs and they offer very good comparisons, because the artists themselves are often compared and contrasted. The first one I went to was Kylie’s X show at the O2 Arena just last month. Despite being at the very top/back row at a far corner of the arena, and thus looking at a tiny Kylie, it was, nonetheless, a great show with a fantastic atmosphere.

The second one, as is is evident from the title of this post, is Madonna’s only London date from her Sticky & Sweet tour at Wembley Stadium. It was a bit of a manic drive up there (I allowed 4 1/2 hours to get from Swindon to London, which should have been plenty of time, but for the traffic snarl-ups that occurred seemingly from the moment we passed the M25 turn-off and immediately regretted following SatNav’s ‘through’ London route!). She was due on at 8:30 and that was pretty much the moment we were got to the multistory car park on site, so we arrived in our seats a little stressed! In the end, she didn’t start until after 9pm which would have been a relief for the many other people we saw stuck in different traffic queues leading to the event.

As we sat in the stadium waiting for her to start, comparing it with O2 Arena (it looked, to me, like it was wider than the O2 and had mores space for the standing masses below, but otherwise not massively different), I commented to Manda that I was surprised about the number and size of speakers hung from the rafters. I’m no sound rigging expert, but for a venue of that size they just didn’t seem to be big enough or in sufficient numbers, but perhaps they were deceptively powerful?

Apparently not.

From the get-go, it seemed like the sound was going to be an issue. Perhaps the sound was good for those people directly in front of the stage, but the vast majority were not down there, the vast majority were reliant on these speakers. The effect was that the sound comprised a low - but loud - rumble and Madonna’s voice often screechingly loud over the top; there was nothing in the middle or top ranges for the music. It sounded very poorly mixed and was, at times, really quite uncomfortable (largely depending on how well Madonna was singing at that point). I read one person comment that it was difficult to tell what she was singing until some way into the song. I don’t know about you, but one of the things I really enjoy about concerts is listening to the lead-in to a concert gig, recognising the tell-tale chords, melodies etc as they hint to the song that’s about to start. For this gig, there was none of that - it was often a few lines in that I recognised the song, because the melody was not there in the music (because of the missing mid and high ranges)!

I did wonder if this was anything to do with the fact that the stadium was open air - perhaps the wind that occasionally came in and made an appearance was messing with the sound, but I suspect not. I still think it’s down to poor rigging/set-up, not atmospheric conditions. The O2 Arena sound was brilliant, in comparison.

Still on the topic of the sound, another thing that irritated me was not really one of the technical set-up, but artistic choice - Madonna’s insistence on doing mash-ups of older songs with new. The best example I can think of is when she did a ‘version’ of the vocals of Vogue over a backing track of ‘4 Minutes (to Save the World)’. Perhaps good in theory, but what with the sound problems we experienced, it sounded very flat. People wanted to hear some hits, and there was a brief moment at the end where the familiar piano riffs from Vogue were dropped in and the effect was instant ‘yay!’. Comparison time - when Kylie performed, she did some alternative versions of here song (e.g. an a cappella version of ‘I Believe In You’) but didn’t try to be too clever, and for her final song? The original, not mucked-about-with ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. Yes, it’s cheesy, but boy did it hit the right spot, and the atmosphere was fab. There was none of that sheer exuberance and joy at the Madonna gig, I’m afraid to say.

And now on to the stage setting. Once again, probably very good if you were in the minority who were at floor level or at the back of the stadium looking straight on. For everyone else, it wasn’t great. There was a big screen showing the pre-production graphics and video clips, but it was inset on the stage - if you were viewing from the side, it could not be seen. There were additional screens at either side of the stage which were used for the camera close-ups of what’s happening on stage, but these were not really big enough and were set far too low for everyone to see - they absolutely should have been rigged far higher up. If anyone in the seating area stood up, the people behind would also have to stand to get a chance of seeing the screen, and so on it would go until everyone was standing. Perhaps the argument is that seats are optional and that you should be on your feet anyway, dancing. Fine - give us some decent sound and an atmosphere to go with it and that might have transpired! Cue comparison time … At the Kylie gig, the screens were bigger, brighter and easy to see and as for the stage graphics, if your vision of the graphics behind the artist and dancers was obscured, the entire stage floor area was also lit up and displaying graphics - so no-one got left out. Just look how good it was here!

Final comparison time - the end of the show. At every gig I’ve been to, there’s been some kind of encore. Kylie absolutely excelled with hers, while Madonna didn’t ‘play the game’ at all. When the screens showed the phrase ‘Game Over’, it really meant over.

Finally, we had the fun and games of getting out of the venue - it took me an hour just to get out from the multistory car park and on to the street! While I was expecting a delay, I didn’t think it would be quite that bad. I have read that because of the late start, many people who used public transport to get there were unable to leave by the same method because stations had closed, causing the streets around to be clogged up with masses of people which, in turn, seemed to stop the flow of traffic exiting the site.

All in all, this was a disappointing concert, mostly because of the sound problems which led to the lack of atmosphere in general. Madonna didn’t appear to be on top form, either - screechy and often out of tune vocals and arrangements that seemed to lack pizazz.

Manda (my wife) had always wanted to see Madonna live, but this wasn’t the experience she had hoped for, for sure. "The thing is" she said, "I know that she can sing, but this set-up didn’t seem to give her the opportunity to show that fully." We might give ‘her Madgesty’ another go in the future, but it sure as heck won’t be at Wembley Stadium. One thing is absolutely without question - the dancing and choreography is excellent and you have to take your hat off to the woman (I nearly said girl), she is supremely fit.

The irony of this is that having seen Mrs Ritchie’s latest offering, tomorrow we’re going to see Mr Ritchie’s latest offering. Given the reviews of the film so far, and having seen her offering last night, I think it’s fair to say that Madonna’s concert will be ‘Swept Away’ by Rocknrolla as this year’s must-see Ritchie extravaganza.

In summary then … Kylie: Wow! Madonna: Ow!

So, I said that I didn’t know if I ever wanted to write a book again. Apparently I lied.

As the image at the top of this post suggests (assuming that you are looking at the blog version and not a feed), I’ve been working on something new for SitePoint – what they are calling ‘The Ultimate HTML Reference’. I couldn’t possibly use the word ‘ultimate’ without getting all terribly uncomfortable and just so darned British and bashful about it. But hey ho, that’s what it’s called, and it has taken enough evenings for it to be getting close to ultimate – and it’s definitely been an ultimate pain the arse to put together! Please, if anyone ever asks me to write a reference book again – that’s to say one where you have a formula to follow and templates to complete rather than writing free-form as you would with a normal book – be sure to stop me signing on the dotted line ;-)

Writing a reference is not an easy task – this has taken about 5 months on and off, mostly late in the evening when my wife is asleep, the dog has (mostly) calmed down and I can concentrate on the task in hand, but only for as long as I can physically stay awake. And you can forget about such frivolities as playing Nintendo Wii! But now that the job is pretty much done, excepting a few minor amendments that may be passed my way to address, it feels pretty good to see the end result on SitePoint.com, all searchable and just waiting for the likes of Google and co to start indexing it. Once the initial rough edges are all smoothed out and all the in-house editing has taken place, it’ll then be printed in (their words) a ‘sexy hardcover’. Yay! A hard-cover author, no more of that second-class ‘trade paperback’ malarkey for me, I tells yer! For the next one I want to gilt edge, embossed and with some kind of fancy lazer-cut emblem on it, no less. Which is fine, because there will be no ‘next one’, or at least not a book of this format (ie, the reference kind).

In recent days, as I’ve been telling people at SXSW Interactive about the work I did on this, I used the analogy of having a child. When a mother has her first child, sure it’s hard work – and for a long time, too – but in most cases once the child arrives, the stresses and hardships get quickly forgotten because the baby is here, so never mind all that. And later, the parents think “Let’s have another child”, conveniently forgetting the hardships they faced before. But before long, the memories come flooding back. And so it was with this book. I’d mentally blanked any of the difficult moments from writing the first book, forgot that it can take over your free time when deadlines come around and technically this was a much more challenging book than the first one. But, like I said, the baby has arrived and I feel a bit like a doting father.

So, please do have a poke around the HTML reference and feel free to add comments (need to be a SitePoint member to add comments to any topic file). But if you feel like leaving a comment here, then that’s all good too.

Now, as I’ve no longer got to write about stuff, I’m going to settle back down and watch a nice film. And it’s bliss!

Earlier this evening I decided to post something to the local Freecycle list - a mattress that we’ve had kicking around, never used, but is just a bit on the lightweight and (for me at least) not very comfortable side. I used the ‘message maker‘ - a web page that has a form you complete which generates an email with all the necessary bits required, including something called the fair use policy. I didn’t read what it involved, but clicked the checkbox anyway, as it seemed like the right thing to do. After sending the mail, I realised that it had added this to my outgoing message:

Fair Offer Policy: I agree to wait 24 hours to see what responses I
get before deciding who to give my item/s to. This gives members on
Daily Digest, or those who don’t have continual access to the
Internet a fair chance to reply.

Wow, that little phrase there really changes the responses you get. No longer is it first-come, first-served. Instead, the responses are all about who’s most deserving of the freebie. Here are just a handful of the responses I got (all typos are theirs, and I can’t be arsed to tidy up for them):

hi if this is still available i would be very greatful for it as our
matrress (passed down from family) has got the springs sticking out and half of the buttons missing,its very uncomfortable to try and
sleep on but cash is tight so cant afford to buy one new for quite a
while.we can collect anytime over the weekend sunday would be better
for us but if saturday would be better then im sure we can do that.if
you want it gone before that i could pop round after school
hours.many thanks lisa

A good one for starters. A mattress that has "passed down from family", like some kind of heirloom? "Here you go, son, this was my father’s and my grandfather’s before him, and now I’m letting you have it". My heart bleeds. Probably because of the those vicious sticky-out springs. It’s uncomfortable but there’s no cash to buy a new one "for quite a while" - evidently they’ve calculated how long they need to save up for a new one (but the broadband and computer obviously gets funded - much more important than sleep, after all). Fail! So, I thought this response was atypical. How wrong I was:

I would be so very grateful of this for my sister, who is having to use a blow up matteress at the moment. Due to a serious incident her mattress was taken away by police and she has not been able to afford to replace it yet. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

Now it’s the sister who’s suffering, and on a "blow-up mattress" too. But what’s this? "Due to a serious incident her mattress was taken away by police". ? And again ? WTF? Let’s hope it wasn’t anything serious, like a stabbing incident which caused the police to remove it for DNA testing or something. And if it was, let’s hope it doesn’t hapen again - it’s a blow-up mattress, after all, and wouldn’t take a puncture very well. Anyway, if I am to give away a mattress, the last person I want to invite over to my house to collect is someone who admits in their begging note that their last mattress was in some way involved with a "serious incident" that required the police to take it away from the scene of the crime. Who are these people? Fail! Who’s next?

Hello I hope I am not to late to ask about this. I would like to ask you if I could have it please I am disabled and on a very low income my Husband is a large framed man and he has killed the mattress that is on the bed. It does not have any spring in it and I cant even lay on it these days with out being in pain. even to sit on it the mattress is uncomfortable. This would be so welcomed in my home please.

I think this one might be genuine. But the husband "a large framed man" has, apparantly, "killed the mattress". Perhaps it was the same man who was responsible for the previous lady’s mattress which appears to have met an unfortunate end? Anyway, they didn’t get the mattress on the basis that I know that if I find the mattress squidgy and not up to supporting my 13-stone carcass without giving me backache in the morning, it won’t be any good for said disabled lady and her large-framed husband. So, who’s next in the queue?

Oh, YES PLEASE!!! We desperately need a new mattress as ours has
outlived its lifespan and I’m waking with backache. I prefer a
softer mattress. My husband and I keep meaning to go look for a new
mattress but with a very hyperactive little boy we foster, we just
never seem to find the time to go looking and buying one!! You would
be saving us an ENORMOUS effort if you would allow us to have it! We
just never seem to have any leisure time at all!

Suffering from back pains? Check. No time to get a new one? Check? Tugging at heart strings by letting me know that they are good people who take on foster children? Check. Again, might be genuine, but who knows for sure. Finally:

hello, i would really love this as mine has just about had it with
the springs sticking through, and i dont seem to be able to get one on
here always gone before i can ask , or as i dont drive and have to
arrange it with family, i think they give it to first to collect. but
never mind if its gone i will keep trying, but i would be very grateful
of it.

Another person suffering from deadly sticky-out springs. Seriously, does this happen anywhere other than Tom & Jerry cartoons? Apparently it does. Swindon seems to be plagued with inferior-springed mattresses, by the look of it.

Oh. Wow. This is just perfect. I had said ‘finally’ a moment ago, but just as I finished the last paragraph, another response came in. Perfect timing! And this one has it all:

do you still have this available please? as a single mum i cannot afford to replace the one i have (which has springs poking out all over lol)..we have just moved to your area,we are in newhall street….my eldest and i could walk it round the corner at your convienience …
please please please…. i am so desperate to get a good nights sleep but what with christmas and my 3 children needed new ones when we moved alas mummy gets overlooked lol

In the end, I decided to offer the mattress to none of the above. The winner simply wrote:

yes pls can i collect it patricia

To which I replied:

As you replied with the most straightforward and non-creepy ‘woe is me’ tale, I’m giving you first dibs on this.

So, FreeCyclers, the lesson if you want something from lloydi is to cut the crap and keep it simple. Oh, and a bit of punctuation, spell-checking wouldn’t go amiss, either. Tsk tsk.

Now I don’t claim to be – and nor will I ever claim to be – a good logo designer. In fact, you could omit the word ‘good’ from that last sentence and it would still be truthful. But I recently ended up doing some logo work as a favour for family.

Some of Manda’s relatives have gone into a business venture together (a Chinese Buffet in Swindon, Wiltshire), and I offered to help by building a web site for them. I knew that they had enough financial outlays, and didn’t want them to get someone else to do it and either be charged too much or get a shoddy product, or both! I knew, also, that it didn’t need to be too involved – just a web site to give people an idea of prices, what’s on the menu, a booking form (Christmas bookings much welcomed!), all fairly simple stuff.

But the original logo designs I saw were not great. The ideas were created in PowerPoint by one of her family and I couldn’t help but think "That really shouldn’t go up out the front of the building", plus there were other considerations like letter headings, menus, flyers etc. Admittedly, these are things that I’d not thought of before, as I’d never had to.

Knowing that that Photoshop is not the best tool for logo design, and acknowledging that it would take me an age to get something half decent together in Illustrator, I ended up using the simple drawing tools in Skitch, a program that’s really only designed as a screen grab tool, with some basic tools for annotation/highlighting etc. But I have found them to be a real joy to use. And so I ended up creating the main logo and other related images entirely in Skitch. The image can output as SVG - it’s all vector-based.

Last week the restaurant opened for business, and I couldn’t believe how good the logo looked in place on the front of the building. The simple black background contrasting with the backlit red and orange was so effective – from a distance, it was clear to see that there was something new at the site, and I really hope that it draws attention to random passers-by, just as it did to me. Naturally, I hope that they are able to make a success of the business and if they do, I can feel happy that I may have contributed in some way towards that goal.

‘cos I paid a man to iconize me … and I’ve either aged a few years (e.g. 10) or I really have a false self-perception!

I had all these great ideas about how I was going to approach this. I thought of looking into patents, to see if I could document my idea, protect it and then get someone to build it. But I realised fairly soon that this was a whole can of worms that I did not want to open and I’d never quite get my head around it anyway.

So I then considered the possibility of offering some money to a savvy Mac developer to go ahead and built what I was after, for a fixed price, and I take the gamble on making enough sales and not getting screwed in the process. But I realised soon after that bright idea that software that you sell requires ongoing support, support that I would never realistically be able to provide myself and would be over a barrel for a retainer to the developer. So I’ve decided to just put my big idea down in writing and hope that someone sees value in this and makes it happen. So, here it is:

The Problem

I was presenting the other day and was using Keynote with presenter display on my laptop and the big screen showing the proper slides. I was using my Sony Ericsson phone with a Bluetooth connection to advance the slides. This all seems, on the face of it, to be a good approach. But there were problems:

• When I enable the Bluetooth remote on the Sony Ericsson, it disables/hijacks the mouse trackpad on my MacBook Pro, so I was having to turn it off and back on again when I needed to take control of the laptop
• The setup of the room was such that I could not see the presenter display showing on my laptop screen unless I stayed anchored behind the lectern (something I hate to do), and hence I didn’t have the prompts I wanted/was hoping for
• At certain points during the presentation I needed to take control of multimedia elements on slides (the scrub bar - progress of a movie), but in presenter display mode, these elements are not accessible, so I was having to crane my neck to see what was happening on the main screen to locate the mouse cursor (once I had switched off the Bluetooth, of course) - basically, I could not see the mouse movements in front of me because of the ‘helpful’ presenter display. Bah!

I worked out that there could be a way to solve all these problems with a really slick application for the iPhone. I am going to label it the Keynote Buddy. Here’s how I see it working.

The Solution

• The iPhone has Keynote Buddy installed on it and becomes an extension of Keynote on the Mac.
• The iPhone is used to control the slide advance (and back of course) using touch screen controls.
• The display on the main (projected) screen would be the full screen affair, while the iPhone would give the presenter’s display, similar to the existing Keynote presenter display but because it’s an iPhone it probably should be sexed up with a Coverflow-esque appearance ;-)
• Controls on the Keynote Buddy would allow for changes between presenter display and the audience’s view on the fly so at any time the presenter can see exactly what the audience sees without having to turn around and turn his/her back on the audience
• When embedded multimedia, e.g. a movie, appears on a slide, the presenter should get a nice fat thumb-friendly overlay on the iPhone screen so that he/she can pause and restart the movie, while the audience sees just that the movie has paused, with no distracting overlay
• The Keynote Buddy software will, by default, automatically disable the phone from ringing/vibrating during presentation mode - no embarrassing moments
• Finally, and this is a nice to have, for moments when the presenter needs to exit the slides for a live demo, the iPhone should allow the presenter access to the host Mac’s desktop so that with a few double-clicks, he/she can navigate around to a demo file.

Something like this, in fact:

So that’s what I want. What about you? Are you a seasoned presenter with Keynote? Got an iPhone? Long for something that ties the two together in the way I’ve described? Please, tell someone who can make it happen. And if they do make it hapen, and if they want to thank me for suggesting the idea, I’d be happy to take a shiny new iPhone as a form of payment. As long as it’s got a copy of Keynote Buddy installed. Because I’ve got this need, you see, and it’s for a modern-day presentation prompt card thing …

Having been on sale for just under a year and a half, I recently got the second sales report for my book and it’s done better than I hoped. Sure it’s not a seller in the region of JK Rowling or anything, but the sales figures are pretty respectable for a book of this nature, and people are still buying which is a good sign. However, I did wonder just how big the sales were in a physical sense.

• Would it fill up a bus?
• A double decker?
• Would it fill up the space in my office?
• What about my whole house?

I tried working out the volumes but couldn’t believe the figure that was staring back at me, so I gave up on calculating volumes and assumed I’d made a mistake; instead I went for the old ‘how big would it stretch if … " routine. What I discovered was:

• If I were to stack each and every copy of the book that was sold up until June of this year, one on top of each other, it would reach a height of 393 metres.

So, naturally I then went searching for something that was about that height and discovered that my tower of books would be just 20 metres taller than the Empire State Building (actually the Empire State’s top floor tower – there’s another 230 feet from the top floor to the top of the lightning rod).

Now I just need to go to New York to see for myself what that really means. And as for that JK Rowling, I think hers would basically equal the volume of all of downtown Manhattan!

This may seem like a bizarre question, but someone out there might have a suggestion on this one.

I can’t add pages to del.icio.us at my place work because the login page is blocked - actually anything beginning https is, unless you can make a business case for it to be unlocked (and del.icio.us doesn’t really classify as a ‘business critical’ tool). So I’ve gotten into the habit of routinely emailing interesting URLs to my personal email address and then adding the pages to del.icio.us at home in the evening in a batch. Frankly, it’s a pain.

I was thinking of using del.icio.us on accessify for adding quick links to useful stuff to avoid having to do a full post about it (which always seems like overkill) and thought that with all the WordPress plugins that there might be one that would allow me to add directly from within WordPress - it’s my server, and hence the wp-admin side of things, is not blocked for me at work. Alas, despite the range of plugins, there does not seem to be one that allows this kind of functionality.

So can anyone suggest another way around this annoying little problem?

Following a very successful event in Birmingham a little while back (despite Bruce’s vivid imagination), the people behind Public Sector Forums have recalled the same team to put on another show in London . That team includes Bruce Lawson, Ann McMeekin, Patrick Lauke, Grant Broome, Dan Champion and myself. We’ll be speaking at the Barbican on the 8th of August and would love to see you there.

Don’t be mistaken by the ‘Public Sector’ part of Public Sector Forums – this time around the organisers are opening the event up to anyone – you don’t need to be working in some dingy council office to apply for this one, anyone’s welcome!

I will be doing a general show and tell, finishing up the day’s events with plenty of real world examples of people getting things wrong-diddly-wrong, including many web sites you know and possibly love.

Interested? Find out more on the PSF site and you can book your place here (and please mention ‘Accessify’ in the booking form when asked how you heard about it, even if you did read about it here - thanks!).