Alex Muller

If I had more willpower, this would be enough to get me off Twitter forever. I wish I could leave.

Is this really what’s happened to the social network that used to have so much promise?

I’ve spent the last couple of months working on a site for a new company, Bedouin® – it was great experience, and really good fun. The site isn’t particularly extensive, so it’s based on flat files rather than any kind of content management system or database; though as it grows, that’s definitely something to consider. The artwork was done by Zeke Wade, the design and layout by Silas Grant, and the coding (PHP, HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript) by me. The site works in IE6 with surprisingly little work – my favourite part is it serves a not-as-pretty GIF background if you’re using Internet Explorer 6 or older instead of any other browser. And as any web developer knows, if it works in IE6 it’ll work in just about anything else. Except IE5.

Feel free to check out the live site now, and make sure to admire the beautiful illustrations: Bedouin®.

When your ‘title’ field affects so many parts of your site and you fail to spell correctly, I laugh at you. This is made even funnier when you’re trying so hard to be taken seriously.

CWU: Post strikes for w/c 14th “Septmeber” 2009

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.

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.