Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Myows is a service for helping creatives to protect the copyright on their original works. It launches soon and I was lucky enough to get an interview with the founder, Max Guedy, about this valuable new service.

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Current discussions around the “Support IE6?” debate have elicited strong opinions on both sides. I’m not going to repeat my position, since I’ve documented that elsewhere, but I thought it would be worth taking a step back to get a sense of the bigger picture.

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IE6update is a script you can add to your web site that will detect if the user is running IE6 and recommend that they upgrade.

The intent is clear: get people off IE6 (a flawed and outdated browser) and onto a more modern browser. Their web experience will improve and the lives of developers will be made easier.

I understand the intent, but the shameful way it’s been executed is so wrong it almost beggars belief.

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UPDATE 14th Jan 2010: While the IE6 usage stats mentioned in this article have dropped, my views about IE6 support remain the same.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), a web browser released in August 2001, is currently touted as the bane of the Web due to inadequate functionality and poor security.

Many web developers now think support for IE6 should be dropped, citing its lack of features and security problems as good reasons for upgrading. In this article I’ll discuss why I think this is wrong, and why you should continue to support IE6.

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Twitter is great way of sharing information, but the way some of that information is shared is more damaging than useful. How can you improve your Twitter behaviour to make sure you give real value to your followers and don’t annoy them?
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Twitter is a micro-blogging application that allows you to share, in real-time, pretty much anything you like. Want to share an article of interest? Just had a successful meeting with a new client? “Tweet” the information through the application and it’s out there for all to see — well, your “followers” at least.

Twitter works because of the relationships you build. You “follow” people you’re interested in and others follow you back. The more people you follow, the more information you’re exposed to. It’s therefore crucial to find what’s valuable and what isn’t.

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It’s been long overdue, but I finally moved my web host from Memset to EZPZ Hosting.

Back in September I wrote about the Memset Miniserver not being good enough for my site, and it’s only finally now that I had the time to make the switch elsewhere.

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Waking up to Gmail this morning gave me a nice surprise — they’ve finally implemented two long over-due features: assigning labels and archiving in one function, and assigning multiple labels to posts.

The original ‘Labels’ drop down was a bit clunky:

• You could only assign one label to a message at a time. To do more than one, required you to keep going back to the drop down and selecting the next one
• You couldn’t assign a label and archive it at the same time

The new labels features have now been split into two buttons: Move To and Labels.

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Managing email can be a time consuming and soul destroying task, particularly if you receive a lot of it every day. I’ve never been great at this and have wanted to improve it for ages.

So I’ve been reading some of Merlin Mann’s articles on Inbox Zero which have helped enormously. I also watched this entertaining video of Merlin sharing his tips at a Google tech talk.

There’s a lot of information here, but the main thing I learned was the importance of quickly determining the action required for an email, and doing that action straightaway. Merlin has a five point checklist to help you: Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer, Do.

Since I’ve had them in mind, my email management has improved drastically. I now operate much more efficiently:

• Delete: I delete much more than I used to, even things that I once used to archive I’ve now learned are mostly useless and if I know I’ll never act on them, they go straight in the bin. Within “Delete” Merlin also notes that this applies to archiving too — if the email doesn’t require a response, but you might later need the information in it, then archive it immediately. The point is to get out of the inbox.
• Delegate: I don’t need to delegate anything because I work for myself, so this one’s easy!
• Respond: I respond immediately if the response is trivial. If I need more information to reply (perhaps I need to do some research), then I will…
• Defer: Flag the mail so that I can come back to it at a later date
• Do: If the action required of the email is something I can do immediately, then I do it. Simple.

These 5 things really do help — though they are only going to work if you also create and maintain a schedule for checking your email. I haven’t yet determined what’s best for me, but I’m thinking it won’t be more than three times a day: once in the morning, once at lunchtime and once late afternoon.

It also helps that I recently switched to using Gmail instead of Outlook. Gmail has a much better way of organising mail using labels rather than folders and psychologically this helps too. As I’m no longer seeing a huge list of folders, I’m less threatened by my inbox, and by using the five rules above I can pretty much get my inbox to zero everytime.

Thanks to Merlin for his tips, this has helped me a lot.

I recently switched hosts from MediaTemple in the USA, to Memset in the UK. Initially happy with their low-end Virtual Miniserver, I’m beginning to think it’s just not up to the job.

I host two sites here, both powered by Wordpress. One has virtually no audience, but the other — this very site, Frisk Design — has reasonable activity. Since my redesign, I’ve had a fair bit of exposure and two rather large traffic spikes crashed the web server and required a reboot.

I’m not happy.

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