alex.mullr.net/blog

I’ve installed these great Dropbox Snow Leopard Services on my 10.6 MacBook. If you haven’t seen what the services improvements in Snow Leopard can do for you, check out some videos from the PixelCorps.

My single favorite improvement in Snow Leopard is the overhaul to system-wide Services.

— John Gruber, Daring Fireball

There’s no substitute for this kind of marketing, this direct contact with customers. They’re not even employees of the company; the Twitter bio reads:

We are Former Managers for IN-N-OUT BURGER, we are not from the corp. office

California beckons, and I can’t wait.

In-N-Out: you have a pretty big reputation to live up to, and I really hope you taste as good as you tweet.

Hey, First Capital Connect – we need to talk.

You know databases, right? Those things that can store a whole load of data for you? Yeah, start using them properly. Don’t send me my password cleartext in an email, and don’t send it all uppercase when that’s not how I entered it. Do you even support case-sensitive passwords?

Oh, and find the guy who designed this part of your UI, take him out back and beat him up a little:

…simply untick the box.

Which box?

Last night, my redesign of the internal Maths department VLE at the University of York went live. When I started at the department in October last year, it looked a little like this:

Click the image to view it in all its glory. I'm not going to draw your attention to some of the things I've come to love most about it, because frankly it speaks for itself.

As you might expect, looking at that got boring and started to hurt my eyes pretty quickly. In May, I went to see Henning Bostelmann, the guy who looks after all things Maths & website there, and offered to try my hand at creating something. This is what's happened over the last couple of months:

Leaving Henning's office last week, he remarked how there would now be “600 happy users” in the department – thank you, Henning, for your help testing, fixing, testing, updating, and more testing.

I love university; there's so much freedom to do anything and everything to improve departments, societies, colleges, the list goes on. I hope I don't sound too much like a naïve little first year, but I really do think it's the case – here's something which will (hopefully) outlast the time I spend at York, and that means something to me.

The boring interesting stuff: it's a fairly hacky CSS job (so no judging my [lack of] coding skills from here, please), using the gorgeous Silk icons from famfamfam – so many thanks to Mark James for providing his icons free of charge, they're such a great resource. Moodle, the open-source (!!, ♥) learning environment that we're using, is actually impressively easy to mess about with. This seems to be one of those “20% of pages used 80% of the time” situations, so it's nowhere near finished and there's always room for improvement; might do the same thing again next year to just tidy it up.

What follows are a few parts that I'm really happy with…

Dear National Express,

Brill, you’ve finally failed. Now instead of money-grabbing like you’re so used to, why don’t you think about cost-cutting for once? For example, I was having a think about those great tickets of yours…

This is what gets printed for me if I book a return journey from London Kings Cross to York:

So, how about we rejig a few things. Even if you guys don’t save any money from printing, you’ll get that fuzzy warm hippy feeling from using less card or paper.

See, what I did there is applied a very complicated design process called “make the stuff that people actually care about really big”. Unbelievably, it doesn’t matter to me what that long number is, so I made it small. Are you catching my drift yet? “What’s a ToD?”, I hear you cry. I have no idea. I also don’t care.

Using the first, we’re down from five tickets per return journey to three. Now let’s suppose you make the collection receipt optional (I’ve been on your service every couple of weeks since October last year, and I’ve never needed one) and uncheck the box by default. Two tickets per return journey instead of five.

The second’s probably a little ambitious, but wow, imagine the possibilities of a company actually removing stuff that isn’t useful on 99% of journeys (this statistic was very accurately calculated using a technique known as “making it up”).

Yes, I’m sure there are reasons things haven’t changed. National Rail probably set up some beautiful unified system in 1994 that every train company can use to print tickets, or whatever. Once again, I’m reminded of how big business and IT (or the web) are a match made in heaven.

While talking to Adam last night, he mentioned that a certain online bookmarking company had been particularly unhelpful when he was emailing their tech support. Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to find ‘Luke’ had updated my Twitter support ticket. I’m not sure whether it’s the person, the coders or the company, but something’s crap here. This is the story…

On the 8th of April I opened a ticket to let Twitter know that they’d spelt Twitterrific incorrectly on their downloads page. Fine, it’s a tiny problem, and an easy fix, but nonetheless something that should be fixed. ‘andr8a’ replied within a day, and was very grateful.

Thanks for the heads up! We truly apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Andrea

Poking around towards the end of last month, the problem still hadn’t been sorted. Fine, another support ticket opened, how tough can this be to fix? After jumping through hoops (they now close your ticket with a list of FAQs without even reading it, sigh), this is the reply I was left with this morning:

Thanks. This will not be fixed at this time.

What the hell? How hard is it to fix one typo on their own site? And I didn’t need an essay back, but did he have to sound so pissed off when I was clearly trying to help? Thanks, Twitter. You guys rock.

You know what the stupidest part of this whole ridiculousness is? Twitter did it (ok, for technical reasons apparently – but we didn’t find that out until later) so that we wouldn’t see fragments of conversation. It’s right there in the original post:

However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable.

Except they haven’t even prevented that. If my friend replies to somebody I don’t follow, I now don’t see it – when I would have previously. If one of my friends then replies to this reply that I haven’t seen, I end up getting a fragment (only seeing half of the messages). Stupid.

So, tell me this… why has Flickr not implemented Facebook profile tagging on its photos, the same way it does with Last.fm or Upcoming events?

Tagging a photo with, say, facebook:profile=012345678 would add a link to that person’s Facebook profile, and could then be used (effectively in reverse) on Facebook profiles.

June 6th: Since writing this post, I’ve come across a really cool Flickr machine tag browser that you should check out.

It’s the day before exams start here at university, so needless to say I’ve got my priorities straight and am messing around with things on my blog.

There’s been big discussion on the Internet for a few weeks now, I think, on rev=canonical. If you need to get up to speed, take a quick look at Jeremy Keith’s post titled Revving up. I’ll wait, it’s ok. You can even skim or speed read if you’re desperate to get back here.

So, the benefits should be obvious. Providing short URLs from a domain that you have control of, so as not to rely on a third party service. That’s how I interpret it, anyway. It’s important to note that big sites like Flickr are already implementing this, taking links like http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexmuller/3473217214/ and turning them into http://flic.kr/p/6hV9tq. Cool stuff, definitely.

I have an incredibly short attention span. There, I said it. If you’re like me, with the concentration of a tired racoon, here’s what you need to do. Readers, consumers, everybody: grab the rev=canonical bookmarklet created by Simon Willison and use that to find short URLs before other services. Creators, bloggers, people with a website: if you’re using WordPress, install the WordPress rev=canonical plugin which will provide shortened URLs for your blog or site. Everybody’s trying to reduce the impact that linkrot could have, one step at a time.

And there you have it. Every article on this blog now has a short(er) URL, which you can find using the bookmarklet I linked above. Those links will be good for as long as this blog is around, which is potentially longer than URL shortening services. The link for this post is http://mullr.net/blog/pap.

Small update

The plugin broke fairly soon after I implemented it this morning, possibly because of a 301 redirect I have going on from mullr.net to alex.mullr.net. Duncan Robertson, the plugin’s author, replied to my plea for help within half a day with a fix for the issue, so massive thanks to him. I’m sure an updated version will be released on his site that sorts this problem.

I took the photo below as a bit of a joke (hey, Vaio stickers are a joke… right?) but it’s interesting to have a record of the "old" Google Reader which was on my screen at the time. When it recently changed, I remember quite a few people complaining at how the layout seemed less intuitive; now, of course, I’d easily vote for the new, cleaner look.

Sometimes, I guess you just have to get through a few days or weeks of your users complaining at change – especially in this fairly new space of constantly evolving online software. And other times, the change isn’t so great and your users might actually have valid concerns (hey, Facebook, look over here).