Is anyone else concerned that the Internet is becoming a walled garden on Facebook, encouraging people never to leave the facebook site? People are more likely to read the Guardian now it’s a Facebook app. No doubt this is due to having to install the app to read content “read” by others – frictionless sharing as they call it. It means a lot more traction gained for Facebook, and a less neutral web experience.

Net neutrality is already wishful thinking, now that Google & Facebook dominate so much – do you even have a separate Instant Messaging / email app outside of Outlook at work? Are you aware that most of what you listen to and read will be shared automatically with your friends?

‎”As well as increasing traffic, the app is making our journalism visible to new audiences. Over half of the app’s users are 24 and under – traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organisations. The Facebook app is one of a number of successful launches by the Guardian in recent months as our ‘digital first’ strategy gains momentum. We’re delighted with the results.”
– Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group

I must be an old grumpy git, since being on Facebook is frighteningly efficient at appealing to the younger demographic. I do get nostalgic about plain-text email with properly nested quoting wrapping at 74 characters, web pages that are visible anywhere on any device, and music that comes from analogue encoding on physical objects. Will appealing to the younger net users without embedding your content on Facebook be possible soon?

Happy New Year too!

Every time a major site with a big audience changes, there are always going to be detractors. Especially a site like Facebook. People spend a lot of time there, so interface changes are almost tantamount to moving stuff around in their lounge/den.

I think there are a number of issues with the new Facebook homepage. I’ve seen it before. It’s called feature creep. Lots of stuff all clamouring for your attention. Chat, realtime updates, top stories, the rest of the news, adverts, suggestions for friends, app updates, messages (FB-ized email) and notifications.

Clever use of AJAX saves FB a heavy, slow loading user experience. Unfortunately it also allows stuff to get very busy. Progressive loading is an interesting technique and FB has evangelised it well. They’ve added a new design pattern I’m less of a fan of into the mix, inspired no doubt by a pattern I’ve seen on mobile terminals: revealing scrollbars on mouse over.

For some time you have been able to set overflow:auto on <div> elements so that scrollbars – regular, OS managed scrollbars that look different depending on whether you’re a Mac or a PC – appear if the content goes outside the bounding box as defined for the div. FB are presenting to the masses a funky new way of doing it. A grey rounded scrollbar, as seen on your iPhone / Android terminal when you touch a screen full of text that can scroll, appears when you hover your mouse around each of the blocks of content on the right hand side (and in some other cases too).

I have a big beef with this, because scrollers are now everywhere on the page. You still have your regular scrollbar if you’re still using a desk/lap-top machine to access the site. Very close to it you now have other scrollable elements that don’t follow the same rules. They don’t work the same as OS scrollbars. If like me you often scroll with the keyboard once the area has focus, they’re a PITA. The target for scrolling is not very wide. The screen looks a mess if you leave all the different boxes scrolled at different points. It’s not intuitive to know which zones really will scroll or not if text inside them aligns perfectly with then edge of the scrollable zone. So you have to mouse over them, which isn’t good for an addict of the PgUp, PgDn, Ctrl, Shift and arrow keys like me. I only click to give a zone focus or to position the cursor far from where I am currently.

Other bad karma effect for me: I was assaulted with little bubbles and tutorial messages when the version change happened. Not a discreet “learn about what’s new” that I could easily dismiss, but (IIRC) something like 3 or 4 different notifications all around the screen which meant I had to dismiss them all before getting back to my usual FB timewasting / networking activity.

There is a personality type that resists change, and with group effects in play this gets amplified. I’ve already seen groups campaigning to get the old back. I could care less about that, by all means go and change and organically improve. Just be careful about the over-riding experience, because a site as popular as FB has a real responsibility to keep design patterns sound, so that people don’t start getting used to bad practices. FB may have more reasons than most to cram stuff into a central page, but what they’re doing is making a one-page experience as they remove more and more reasons to leave the main page. You can now comment on people’s walls straight from the home, and read comments not currently on screen with new fly-outs from the right hand column. I can imagine other sites doing the same, and how difficult they’d be to navigate.

And of course I can hear them now in boardrooms around the world. “Why don’t we just make that a scrolly box, and stick like four of them together in the right column…”. Like as if somehow, the page no longer scrolling has solved the old page fold debate, and instead lots of individual blocks will be scrollable. Or not.

On holiday this summer in the Vendée region (near the Loire valley), I was pleasantly surprised by my till receipt for my holiday shopping. Instead of a list in simple order of items scanned by the cashier, the receipt was both grouped by department, and ordered by highest priced item first. At a glance, you can see which items from each department are the most expensive, and which departments you bought the most goods from.

In the past, till receipts were printed line by line first mechanically – possibly with mechanical tabulation (addition of next item to subtotal) inside the machine – then by fairly dumb electronic calculators which would do much the same. More recently, bar code scanning meant the machines queried a database for the item price. Later, the item name would be queried and printed (initially a few characters per item) and yet the basic running totals and chronological ordering have still to change in many supermarkets and other stores where you buy a lot of items.

Behind the scenes, no doubt accounting has been done by department for some time. It’s a relatively small jump from a flat database lookup to allowing classification by groups of products. This, to my knowledge, is standard practice for any self respecting supermarket manager / category manager. I’m fascinated to see just how long it has taken to expose these groups to the customer in a useful way. Buffering the data scanned and making a single printout at the end has surely long been within the technical capability of many point of sales devices, since back office equipment and even individual tills have been able to do it for some time. Fast printing of hundreds of lines of text has been possible for well over a decade.

I see several advantages to this approach. Customers get a clear receipt, even if errors are made while scanning or products are cancelled (these need not show on a final receipt, but will create ugly correction lines on “print a line after every item is scanned” receipts). If any goods are bought in multiples, they need not be scanned together at the same time and relevant multi-buy discounts can be neatly added in the same place. Most of all, you leave the store with a feeling that you might want to keep the receipt a bit longer and look at your purchases a bit more carefully. Perhaps even in store, you might notice that you have been billed twice for expensive items because of scanning error. You may be on a tight budget and readable receipts surely help money management at the end of the month. Most of all, errors at tills are commonplace but it’s terribly difficult to see the errors while stressing to pack up your shopping. Kudos to Super U (France) for this little innovation which I think is a real customer pleaser. Now if only the database people could put decent descriptions in for products, instead of “ENM PAST 32%MG U BIO 250G”.

I love the series of sketch notes from Eva-Lotta Lamm, someone who attends a lot of conferences and makes notes with amazing visual impact.

I could have chosen one of many different images that she has uploaded, but this one is recent, colourful and contains perhaps a few things that are less technical – though you probably need to work in a company with an active website to really “get” the overall message. I’d love to know if you get anything out of reading them if you’re completely outside of web marketing / user experience / web project management.

They’re available as a book and there is a fantastic presentation on how sketch notes work

Do you sketch in meetings while taking notes? Did you realise that it’s a good thing to maintain your attention span? Or that it helps you to memorise what you hear?

User centred Design at XING @ UX Camp Europe
Originally uploaded by evalottchen

I have been doing a bit of writing lately, and might even get an article or two published in an online technical publication. Which led me to thinking about the separation between technical stuff I write, often close to my profession, and the more personal items I write at other times. There are bits of photography and music in here too.

Many successful blogs stick to one subject, and treat it well. Some bloggers who want to scratch several itches therefore launch several blogs. I’ve always preferred one place to do everything, especially given that I don’t create anything like a useful volume of work to really get a following going anywhere in a given niche subject. I quite like the notion of an eclectic mix, and that has been my sub-heading ever since this blog was launched.

I may gain from better categorisation and taxonomy (tagging) though. Good categorisation allows a visitor to find related content easily. It may also allow separate blog entry points with navigation options per category. Perhaps I should code a top navigation with a few main category entry points (tech, photography, music & film…) which would allow different “views” of my blog based on different interests. I’m not exploiting that enough. Good tagging of each article creates little bridges between articles that share particular keywords. With WordPress you can assign multiple categories and tags to each article. Restricting the number of each you use makes all articles have tight interlinking which is good. Using lots of different tags and categories may cause the interlinking to be too spread out. This causes attrition on the usefulness of tag and category efforts in the first place.

In this blog’s case, after several years without any tags and a few set categories, I will have to go through all the old articles and reclassify them for any new taxonomy / categorisation to really work. What do you think about mixed-up blogs? Do you ever even look at blog navigation and try to find more content that is like the article you most liked on a blog?

I surf around quite a lot of blogs, thanks mainly to blog exchanges like Expose Your Blog which are like StumbleUpon but based only on blogs, and have the added bonus of gaining you reciprocal traffic. I used to surf on other exchanges too, but they are all losing traffic and are poorly maintained. Expose Your Blog is relatively new and quite a small but vibrant community of those enthusiasts of personal blogging that haven’t defected to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others.

I thought I’d share a few reasons why I might be put off by blogs, and tune out if I land on them again. If you can think of anything else, I’d be pleased to hear it in the comments. Feel free to share your pet peeves too .

Reading: If your blog is hard to read, then why read it?

• Don’t use busy backgrounds that interfere with the foreground text, especially if that foreground is not separate from the background because it’s semi transparent.
• Don’t use super-small text or change text size, colour or font mid posting. A different style for quotes, captions and other elements can work, but stick to one style per type of content and make your main text as simple and easy to read as possible.
• Don’t make adverts obscure the key content you’re trying to push. Your blog will not make you rich, get over it.
• Don’t have too many wacky widgets all over the place. Pick the ones that best represent your personality and stick with them if you must have a couple. Try to keep them aligned so that there aren’t loads of different widths of widget all higgledy-piggledy on the page.
• Don’t have so much fixed content at the top of your blog that it’s not obvious where the fresh, unread content starts. This last point is particularly important on blog rotation sites because someone who’s already read your blog wants to identify what’s new since last time!
• Do make sure there is good contrast between your foreground and background. Some people have awful screens; some people are not blessed with good eyesight.
• If you are going to use teasers, make sure I get a good idea of the article content before I click a link to read more.

Writing: that’s what your visitors are here for.

• Don’t apologise for the lack of posts, or make promises you might not keep like posting more often soon. It will only look worse as the most recent posting date recedes into the past.
• Do set a reasonable rhythm of posting and stick to it. No point being one post a day for a while then nothing for ages. Better to set a reasonable goal for yourself and stick to it. I try to make an update about every ten days, I can’t manage more. If I have a great idea for a post a couple of days in a row, I store them up as writing prompts for the next post.
• Commenters: they might want to write too. Don’t make life difficult for them by requiring them to have a specific website ID like Blogger or OpenID. Let them post anonymously, using either a CAPTCHA or moderation to stop spam. I’ve actually typed nice comments to people only to find that I can’t post them anonymously. The nice comment is thus wasted, and my time with it. Yes, I have a Google account but I don’t want it all over the blogosphere.
• Crazy punctuation, over-use of quotes, lots of exclamation and question marks. Tough one this, because some people can do it and it totally fits in with their character and works. Other times it just looks like filler and detracts from an otherwise interesting read.

I edit myself a lot and try to be as good as possible, but obviously I am guilty of some of these crimes. I’m happy to hear your suggestions if you have constructive criticism of this blog.

I have added a new plugin, W3 Total Cache, to improve performance on this blog. It seemed that pages were taking a bit too long to load according to Google webmaster tools. Solutions for caching nearly always make a difference, but you have to be careful about the parameters you set. However, with minimal adjustment to the defaults on this plugin, I now have a working configuration. There are plenty of options as you can see with the whole new “performance” panel in my WordPress admin screen.

Slow loading pages can really turn visitors off. Most surfers have a very low attention span – until they’re captivated by something of course. Improvements in page loading speed have been shown to improve user engagement and site traffic on sites as diverse as Amazon, Google and travel websites. Blogs are probably not as important, but that only means that tolerances are wider. Just because everyone has higher speed internet access, doesn’t mean they want to wait any more than a second for a page to start displaying. I’ve seen a few blogs on rotation that are a bit slower than that. Make sure your blog loads progressively if you can’t reduce overall page elements easily.

I have been wondering for a while why my jokes pages don’t list in search engines. They are WordPress pages which have some PHP in them to read from a separate database table containing my jokes. Every now and then I’ve tried to fix the problem, and I think I’ve finally found the issue. I’d like to explain how I didn’t solve the problem too, so you can see the troubleshooting steps I took.

First of all, I wondered if the content on the pages was too similar. I have a page that lists the categories for jokes, and for each link on that there is a page with a list of jokes in that category. I thought maybe the list of links wasn’t search engine friendly enough. So I added a bit of introductory text, and changed the <title> of each category list page to include the name of the category. I also added links to the next joke in the category on each joke page and changed the position of the breadcrumbs (e.g. Jokes by Category > True Stories jokes) to after the joke so the top of the page wouldn’t always contain very similar data. That didn’t work, but the pages are now a bit better to read and each joke in a category links to another joke which allows for better navigation. Perhaps people will read two or three jokes rather than being stuck in a dead end especially if they land on the site on a specific joke page.

Then I wondered about submitting a sitemap of the joke category pages so that Google, Yahoo and Bing would know about them. It didn’t work either, but having a sitemap listed in Google’s webmaster tools allowed me to see that none of the category pages were actually being listed.

I scratched my head for a while on this one, before realising that perhaps the use of a querystring (e.g. in the URL the only thing that changes is the bit after ?CAT= or ?JOKEID=) as the only difference in URLs was a problem. I even went so far as to set up a .htaccess file to rewrite URLs from ?JOKEID=123 to /joke/123/ where 123 would be the actual number the joke is referenced as in the database. Funnily enough, that made no difference either – and it was difficult to get it to cohabit with WordPress because there are internal rewrites within WordPress and my custom joke pages are kind of sidestepping some of that.

Webmaster tools in Google were still saying my pages weren’t listed. I tried another content update, going so far as to add a paragraph describing each category on the initial list page, and then re-using the category description on the pages that show jokes from only one category. This too was in vain, though the pages now look a lot more interesting. Perhaps they’re slightly busier and less easy to read but they have extra unique content which is a bonus for those two people who want to work out how I categorised the jokes.

Somewhere along these two last steps, I also noted that Google allow you to specify which parameters in your URL you don’t want them to ignore. It’s in a section called parameter handling – these parameters refer to the querystring I mentioned before. So I set up CAT and JOKEID not to be ignored. Still no joy.

In a final step, within which my eureka moment was to come, I thought that there was perhaps too much guff in the <head> section of my joke pages. The standard stuff that WordPress adds to each header is useful for the homepage and perhaps posts, but not for my custom pages. So I set most of it to display only on the homepage (a lot of it isn’t of enormous use elsewhere) by changing the template files to include a condition to add that data only for the homepage. When I was testing that on my jokes pages, I suddenly noticed something in the source code which made me shake my head in disbelief. How could I have missed it? There was a line in the <head> which said :

<link rel=’canonical’ href=’http://www.caperet.com/joke-database/’ />

WordPress automatically adds a canonical reference to all pages, so that there is one master URL which the search engines will use to index the page. This makes sense to avoid having the same page listed multiple times. Except that my custom pages all display different content depending on whether CAT or JOKEID is in the URL but WordPress was effectively saying they are all the same – to search engines. I soon found a page on how to disable canonical links but I didn’t want to apply it to my whole blog, just the jokes section. Since my jokes pages are all “Pages” in WordPress and not “Posts”, I added the code at the top of my Page template, and was pleased to note that it works just fine there.

So now my jokes pages should, next time they are crawled, finally all be listed. All that work so that a few people each month might find a joke in my database. At least I’ve learned something, and perhaps given you an idea of how I’ve troubleshooted this issue.

[ED] The pages were finally listed in Google on the 19th October, about 3 weeks after the initial modifications.

Image: Search-Engine-Marketing
Originally uploaded by Danard Vincente

Now you can really take the kitchen sink with you. This amazing folding kitchen sink is from Sea to Summit, a camping and outdoor equipment supplier. It comes in 5, 10 and 20 litre sizes and can hold hot water and detergent. Full marks to Sea to Summit for the segue between a sink and “small size makes a great dog bowl!”

It’s actually easier to pack than most other things you might take when travelling. Perhaps the good old English expression “taking everything but the kitchen sink” could be endangered. Just like the expressions “I’ll lend you the CD” or “I’ll call you when I get home”.

On Facebook, you have a status which is limited to something along the lines of 140 characters, rather like a tweet in Twitter, which has a similar character limit. I often update this with a link, a story I have read in the press, or a mundane observation about how awful the weather is lately. Having already linked Facebook and Twitter with the official Twitter Facebook app, anything I post to Twitter (a “tweet”) is now published to my Facebook status and will also appear in the sidebar of this blog.

I spend most of my spare minutes on Netvibes and Facebook these days. Netvibes allows me to follow – in one place – the news (The Guardian, BBC News, New Scientist…), Geek sites (Slashdot, Metafilter…), French bloggers (Fred Cavazza, Stratégie Interactive…), podcasts (Guardian Science Weekly, BBC Material World), comments on my stuff (Flickr, Twitter, this blog…) and my own work projects (Basecamp RSS feed). From a total of 44 feeds loaded on there I may go off to different sites, or spot posts in blogs that I otherwise would never have the time to visit. Facebook allows me to keep in touch with friends – at least those that actualy use Facebook to publish and share things – and its value is in the ease with which you can react to news by commenting on things whether they be status updates, photos, videos or posted links.

While surfing around I used to find more time to post fully here, perhaps with an article on Flickr or something I had heard on a podcast. That being said it’s not like blog posts have ever come thick and fast.

So I’ve decided to activate a weekly tweet digest, which means there should be something going on here most weeks. Visitors may have noticed that updates have dried up in 2009, mainly because it’s just so hard to find time to write a good article. There’s stuff worth reading in the archives though, but it doesn’t always get the exposure it should. So now by combining the blog with the latest internet fads, I should be able to keep things up to date a bit more often just by having Twitter radiate out my comments to all the places people catch up with me .

p.s. Sorry for the awful diagram.