Blog Standard Stuff

As spotted in a feed somewhere in my masses of news feeds this morning, the new AOL page - looks quite a bit like Yahoo!, doesn’t it?

Click on the thumbnail to see a comparison (it’s a 2.8mb animated gif).

[Note - I was accessing AOL’s site from work and it appears to be missing some content blocked by the firewall, but you can still see the similarity]

Another fine example of BBC news editors for the website using related images without thinking beyond the obvious. In this piece about wireless security, we learn that WPA security can be cracked but only through brute force attacks (throwing all manner of words from a dictionary until you get the correct answer). So they helpfully provide this image:

The caption reads ‘Long passwords can thwart dictionary attacks’

What, long words like ‘home’ and ’straight’? or ‘home theater’? Ooh, ooh, I got it! ‘Homesteading’ - nobody will ever get that one.

Looks like a case of "We have space for a picture, just put any old crap in there", to me!

Well, that’s what I always use to say to people: "You have got to check out the Boost bars in Aus - they are to die for." I’ve oft lamented the fact that back here in the UK we don’t seem to have anything that quite matches up. Sure, there are fruit juice and shakes bars, but somehow they never really seem to have that extra special something that I remember from when we used to have them in Aus.

But this weekend something wonderful happened - while taking a walk through a shopping centre in Oxford Manda spotted a familiar looking logo: "It’s a Boost bar!" I had to do a double take, but yep, there it was, no copycat affair, this was the real thing!

It turns out that the outlet had opened just over a week ago and is only the second to open in the UK (the first being in Manchester). The guy on the counter gave us all the sales spiel (including one particularly cheesy line about some people considering it the ‘eighth wonder of the world’) but I cut him a bit short by explaining that he didn’t need to sell to us - we were already well and truly sold on the concept! He added that ultimately they want it to be as big as Starbucks. Sounds a bit pie in the sky at first, but when you consider that the brand started in 2000 in Aus and has had phenomenal growth since then - "the fastest-growing juice business in the Southern Hemisphere" - that may not be all that unlikely. The guy who’s brought it to the UK is Richard O’Sullivan (no, not the actor), and he can thank his daughter for the tip-off:

It was his daughter who came across Boost Juice on her gap year in Australia. She phoned home to tell O’Sullivan, “Dad: you could do this.” He got straight on a plane to judge Boost for himself. “It stopped me in my tracks. It was an explosion of flavour, tasted great, and you just knew it was good for you.” O’Sullivan, 44, now believes the UK juice bar market is ripe for an Aussie invasion.

And the thing is, I can remember thinking exactly the same thing: "This is such a great business opportunity, why aren’t there any in the UK?". It’s just a shame I wasn’t able to phone up a fabulously wealthy entrepreneurial father to come out to see what I was on about, as it looks like I’ll have to shell out the full price for a Strawberry Squeeze from here on in. But I’m happy to do that :-)

So, I can remove that ‘you must do this if you’re in Aus’ from my list, or at least I will be able to once they’ve established more of a foothold in the UK. Perhaps I should be sending people to Manchester or Oxford instead?

Read more about Boost in this article in the Independant

Shortly after SXSW Interactive wrapped up this year I received an email from someone asking if I’d be willing to answer a few questions about my web design processes. It was kinda funny in that I’m not usually all that methodical where process is concerned (!), and most times I’m hard pushed to call myself a designer (even though it’s what’s on my job title). I think of myself as around 70% coder, 30% designer. Regardless, I filled in the blanks and answered all the questions.

Out of curiosity I checked the online web magazine out and thought "not bad". Since then, I’ve noticed it appearing more and more in the social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and so on. There are lots of comments on the various postings they have - it seems like almost overnight they’ve built up a large readership by providing - shock, horror - good, well researched content on a regular basis.

So, what is this site/magazine I speak of? It is Smashing Magazine, something that my heading alluded to (as well as alluding to a catchphrase from a certain TV Show from days of old). The feature that I contributed to is entitled 35 Designers x 5 Questions:

35 designers. 5 questions. 5 precise answers. Result: 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world.

Anyway, enjoy - there really is some good stuff here, even if I do say so myself :-)

It’s been a while since I looked at how my book has been doing. It arrived in printed format just over a year ago, so it’s a little off the radar now, if you catch my drift. Today, though, I had a look on Amazon.com for something and my book came up as a recommendation, and I clicked through out of curiosity to see if there any new reviews. I was pleased to see that the reviews are still coming in. Not quite as thick and fast as they do on Sitepoint’s page for the book (9 pages of mostly positive, 4-5 star reviews), but it’s still selling, and with the reviews on both sites looking good, hopefully it will continue to. But I have to say that I was particularly pleased with the 5-star rating :-)

A little while ago I received the sales figures for the book covering the March-December period. I won’t say what the figures are, as I’m not sure if it’s something I’m allowed to state publicly, but at the time I wasn’t sure if the figure was average/good/excellent (I was later informed by on person that what I’d sold with this book was more than what they had sold with two different books, so that was encouraging). Because the book is a beginner’s book, it comes with a lower retail sale price than others published by SitePoint and as such I just missed out on making enough in sales to cover the advance but we don’t do this for profit, right?

I do actually enjoy the writing process and have since contributed to other books (Pro CSS Techniques and Web Standards Creativity), but there’s still nothing quite like having one all of your own and be able to say “I did that”. I’d definitely be interested in doing another complete book at some point, although right now it’s nice not to have to worry about deadlines and have to put other stuff (general life things) aside when there’s a chapter due!