Blog Standard Stuff

Following on from the Simply Google idea that he came up with a little while ago (which I re-coded for him in nice standards-based markup with unobtrusive scripts) Chris McEvoy has done the same thing with the BBC. Predictably entitled Simply BBC, it’s another one-stop entrance to all things BBC. And once again, it’s based on the CSS-based version that I provided for the precursor. As with the Google idea, what it’s done for me is reveal sections of the BBC’s site that I never knew existed (or at least wasn’t that bothered about going out to find). In other words, it’s all about improving the discoverability factor. Try it out, see what you think.

In the vague chance that someone other than a family member might be reading this post, I wanted to share a little gem with you …

When I did the round the world trip, a quite significant part of that trip was spent in Australia. A quite significant part of that significant part was spent inside my van listening to one of three things:

• A Harry Potter audio book
• Whatever happened to be on the iPod’s playlist
• Nova 969

The last of those three was possibly the funniest radio station I have ever heard. In particular, I was hooked on Merrick & Rosso who did a morning show and consistently pushed the boundaries - I can’t recall how many times I thought, or said out aloud, as I was driving through Sydney traffic "How the hell did they get away with saying that!". I miss that part of the trip, but thanks to the magic of the Interweb I can re-live this ‘cultural experience’. It’s possible to listen online to the show (but of course you have to factor in time difference if you are listening from abroad), but even better is the fact that Merrick & Rosso have made their best bits available as a podcast.

So, on the basis that I have just spent another hour at work giggling to myself as I catch up on episodes, I wanted to share this with others. Why not give the show a go - you’ll soon pick up on the Australian vernacular and have a bloody good laugh in the process. What’s to lose?

Check out Merrick & Rosso Show - The boys best bits daily » (also available at Odeo)

Update: It looks like Flickr has changed slightly since this was done and the script no longer works. Feel free to adapt it though!

Flickr provides a lot of tools and ways to change meta information about photos that you have already uploaded but one facility it has not provided is to be able to batch change descriptions. When I began uploading whole sets from the various locations I visited during a round-the-world trip, I used the comments field in iPhoto (which directly maps to the description field in Flickr) in which it is possible to batch change comments. This is great, and it allowed me to include a general description about the photos to say that they were "from a round-the-world trip, and here’s the section in the online diary that it relates to" and so. The problem is that I later changed the location of the web site that had the travel diary on it, so all the descriptions in Flickr contained invalid links. With thousands of photos already up there, I couldn’t do it one-by-one. So I decided to post a question on the Flickr help forum and see if there was a way to do it. And lo and behold, someone came up with a solution. And bugger me if this isn’t just the coolest little bookmarklet (or favelet, if that’s your preferred moniker). So, with this in mind, I thought I’d share this really useful tool.

First of all, go grab the bookmarklet from here (and be sure to read the instructions there).

Now, here’s a visual guide to using it:

1. Pick a set that you’ve already created (this bookmarklet will apply to a whole set, not selective photos within a set. If you need the latter, you’ll need to temporarily create a sub set with the pictures you want to affect):
   
   
2. Type your description in the first Description field (this can include HTML)
   
   
3. Then run the bookmarklet (I have it here in the toolbar in Safari). Note that this may not work in all browsers - I found that it worked with some sets in Firefox (on the Mac), but not others. In Safari it worked perfectly, no matter how large the set was.
   
   
4. You’ll see the description has been copied into all subsequent description fields:
   
5. Scroll down the page and hit the Save button - don’t forget this important part!
   
   
6. Now, when you look at any of those photos in Flickr you’ll see the changes to the description field have worked like a treat :-)
   

I recently mentioned on this blog that I was experimenting with a novel method for listening to my iTunes library. Yep, that revelation was that I was gonna listen to every damns album I have, one-by-one, and in alphabetical order. It turns out I missed one in the early days (still on B), that album being Back to Bedlam by James Blunt. It was not one I bought (ooh, naughty), but one that I ‘borrowed’ off my brother as I wasn’t sure whether it was my cup of tea. Turns out it’s not tea at all, but some other insipid kind of concoction. Whatever it is, it’s definitely on the wet side.

Honestly, I cannot see how it is that crap like this manages to break in America - the man has a really weak voice (and to think he was in the army once, something that surprises me no end), whatever way you look at it. But the funniest thing for me was when listening to ‘Beautiful’ on the album I noticed that the version there is the ‘rude’ version. Yep, he swears on it and it sounds so out of place, in fact I almost laughed out loud as I pushed the shopping trolly aroud Asda Walmart, listening to it as I was on the iPod. Luckily I managed to stifle the laughs. Compare and contrast:

Chart version:

Yeah, she caught my eye,
As we walked on by.
She could see from my face that I was,
flying high

Album version:

Yeah, she caught my eye,
As we walked on by.
She could see from my face that I was … [pause for effect]
fucking high

Sorry, it just doesn’t work for me. Combined with the dramatic pause it just seemed like an attention-grabbing ploy and made it seem like he was trying too hard. Is this really the best the UK has to offer the US? Or does the US prefer a wet blanket to some proper music?

My esteemed colleague Chris McEvoy apparently had ‘one of his moments’ (he has these, you know) last Sunday evening and decided he was fed up with having to search Google for some of Google’s more hidden features (oh the irony!), such as Answers, Suggest and so on. So he created Simply Google.

Is it simpler?

Mmm, debateable. The very thing that people say makes Google work is its simple interface. Wanna search? Here’s the search box, people! What Chris did was put all the various different Google search options on one page, making it far easier to learn what options are available, but it’s not for everybody. Whether you like it or not, you cannot deny that he’s ticked off that ‘findability’ box on the checklist.

The CSS makeover

Just as the Simply Google page was getting noticed by various people, Chris approached me to ask for some help in kicking it into standards mode (it was a table-based layout with non-breaking spaces and various examples of markup abuse to achieve presentational effects). Ironically, I had thought of doing just that and was going to approach him with the idea of creating a ‘Simpler Simply Google’! So, that’s what I did. There are a few points I just wanted to make about the CSS make-over:

• I didn’t redesign the look and feel in any way. I kept to the blueprint (with just one exception - changing the location/style of the footer text)
• My aim was to rebuild without tables and make it 100% valid XHTML, strict (achieved)
• The biggest issue I had was with the search forms not having label elements. In the original version, there was a direct link to the site that the search facility related to. I could have replaced the link with a label. Instead, I decided to use both. For screen reader users, the label element provides a little more contextual information than before, but for sighted users the link will take them to the web site. The problem would be for users who try to click on the label and expect it to give focus to the search input element. It does this, for a second, but then the link behaviour takes over and loads the page requested. My feeling is that if it looks like a link, people will only click on it to use it as a link. Is this wrong? As I said, I did this with the intention of keeping to the original design.
• The labels for the search are after the input. This is another thing that I would normally not do, hence I wanted to explain:
  • The intention was that when this page is viewed on a handheld device that does not apply the CSS (or any other browser that does not get CSS for whatever reason), the search boxes should line up nicely. If the label elements were in front of the input boxes, with no CSS they would create an unsightly ragged effect :
    
  • A downside of this is that the tab order is a bit strange on a fully CSS-capable browser (try it out for yourself). Should I have placed higher importance on the tab order or on the appearance of the page with no CSS?

So, that was my CSS make-over of Simply Google. I’m interested in your thoughts/feedback.

‘Cos I’m on the scrounge! I put together a site to promote my forthcoming beginners book on building a web site (with web standards) and thought it would be good to add some quotes. Now, until the book is out it’s a little difficult to know what to put there. Most people I know haven’t read any of my books - because I’ve not written any! - so no-one can truly comment on how good or bad (it won’t be the latter, honest) the book is. Having said that, if you feel you know me or enough about what I do to come up with something nice that I could use, then please let me know!

Thanks

I posted this over at webstandards.org earlier, but thought I’d cross-post it here for my approximate 2.3 average daily readers (hi sis! Hello, erm , me!): April 5th is CSS Naked Day, and this site will be bearing all. To be honest, all I’ll be showing is the markup that *someone else* created for this page (it’s an off-the-shelf CSS design that I’ve used here). All the same, I feel like I should join in here as well as at Accessify. Who knows, maybe seeing my nudey bits here will encourage me to get some new threads. And by that convoluted phrase what I’m really saying is this - Ian, redesign this frickin’ site already. There, that told me.

I wonder if Dustin ever considered hosting CSS Naked Day on the 14th of March