diamond geezer

Saturday, May 19, 2012

I got Reddited again yesterday. Which was uncomfortable.

Some people who never read the site but know what good website design is, discussed what good website design is and wondered why I didn't realise that.
» Web developer here. I think his points about making his site work best for big screens is probably a bit short-sighted, although without seeing his web stats maybe he's right. More and more websites are being built "mobile first" now, meaning they should look good by default on mobiles and small-screen devices, and "progressively enhance" to match the user's browsing context. You don't have to be a web genius to do this kind of stuff, there are a billion Wordpress themes that can do this. But if you're sweating over your content to make it engaging and well-written, why would you treat it with contempt and throw it onto a difficult to read and fairly ugly template, then respond to criticism by effectively saying "well, it works on my screen"? Just my $0.02 [guitarromantic]

» Agreed. These principles are unified under the handy term responsive design. [Deku-shrub]

» "I'm continuing to make the fatal assumption that you're all viewing my blog the same way I am, and it still looks fine to me. Only when I buy myself a smartphone and start to view my blog through different eyes might things begin to change. Until then, sorry, the terrible-looking site lingers on."
» This is a pretty ignorant attitude to take, especially given the valuable free insight of people's impressions of his site. As guitarromantic pointed out, there are tons of wordpress templates and the like which are so easy to configure and at the same time able to keep the depth of content. If he's only doing the site for his own benefit, why bother publishing it online at all. [lookatmeme]
My occasional irony may have passed lookatmeme by.
» I guess this guy is not aiming his website to bring him any famous nor the capacity to claim he got crazy amount of readers. Hence his regular posts turning down marketing offers for free stuff. He probably just discovered that he was reddited and gave his 2 cents about the comments he read. My personal opinion is it seems to be a rather popular blog among londonish network websites and people obviously follow his posts for their interest to the content itself. My advice : Read it through a RSS reader, you'll get rid of the interface stuff and would be able to focus on content :) [whyoji]

» I read his blog everyday, it has great content (most of the time) but if you look through it you can see that he clearly likes writing and is not trying to build an audience or make money. [somabc]

» I've been reading DG for many years now, and for the most part have been doing so through something like Google Reader. It makes it infinitely more legible, and I have to admit that I've not even thought about the design of the site in a long long time. Equally, I can think of loads of my feeds where I have no idea what the current site design actually looks like. Nice, clean Google Reader interface for me, thanks. [gooneruk]

» I have to say, my initial post mostly directed at the specific post that was linked which was so badly formatted I gave up trying to read it. The rest of your site isn't as bad as I suggested it is. [eastlondonmandem]

» I look forward to tomorrow's post where he addresses all the concerns we make today. [somabc]

» Oh god it's never-ending! [Xenc]

» It's funny because you're blaming mobile
browsers, yet your site is hard to read on my
22" 1080p screen. All that's down to poor
typography, and general design wise, it's very
1990's. Could be much worse, but it's still
not very readable. There are plenty of
typography guidelines out there, particularly
with regards to line length. [foetuseofexcellence]
Nice to know, thanks.

posted 07:00 :

Friday, May 18, 2012

Olympic update
Lockdown approaches

As July gets closer, public access around the Olympic Park is being inexorably closed off [map]. Additional fences are going up, gates are clanging shut, and final cups of coffee are being served. Yes, it's the turn of the Greenway past the Olympic Stadium to be sealed off, with lockdown commencing at 8am tomorrow morning [photo]. If you want to get up close to the stadium you've only got today, after which any view will have to be from rather further away.

Part of me is very pleasantly surprised that they kept the Greenway open for so long. It runs right through the heart of the Olympic Park, with long-term building sites on either side, and yet some kind soul decided that the public would be permitted to retain access. Initially there were security guards with dogs posted here, then they threw up high metal fences and left electronic sentinels to do their job. At first the public barely came, just those of us who live round here and people cycling through. It took a cafe and observation deck in a stack of lime green containers to draw the wider population in [photo]. But by the end, on a typical weekend afternoon, you could barely move for inquisitive souls and tour parties corralled by Blue Badge Guides. A crowd by the map board, several families slurping drinks, even the occasional purchase at the London 2012 shop. Not any more.

The View Tube served its last bacon sandwich yesterday afternoon. They waved the final customer out onto the decking, locked the doors and then filed off to the kitchen for a last round of washing up. Somebody inside popped up to the observation deck for a zoom lens photo, one final opportunity to record the changes taking place a few hundred metres across the ring road [photo]. A small group of foreign tourists stood outside by the railings and pointed across at the Olympic panorama, while a mother sat patiently as her two small children let off steam. The View Tube's flowers were looking nice, especially those planted in the leftover canoe, although several beds look set to burst into bloom only after everyone's gone [photo]. And in the long metal shelter, half-shuttered, the London 2012 shop was closing down. Staff stood counting the leftover keyrings (yes, rather a lot) and packing their stock away into "Made in China" boxes [photo]. Then it was onto the trolley to be pushed carefully down the ramp, and under the railway, and forever off the site.

The mute security guards are still there at the bottom of that ramp. They've shifted position a few times over the years as the main road into the Olympic Park has been rerouted, but remain ever alert in case some Greenway pedestrian might veer off the zebra crossing and sneak into the park. Closing down the path tomorrow means the guards can finally leave their stations and go protect something more important instead. The new perimeter gate is already up and ready, a few feet to the north of the railway, and a favoured spot for rats from what I saw last night.

A short dead-end alleyway will remain beneath the arches, twisting round to Pudding Mill Lane DLR. This remains open until early July, and then suffers the same fate as the View Tube. It's all for the construction of the South Spectator Entrance and associated transport hub, which can now continue without interruption from an annoying public right of way. I'll recommend Pudding Mill's platform to you as the best remaining spot from which to view the Olympic Park, at least for the next eight weeks, but it's not as good as the Greenway panorama, sorry. The final backstage mega-prefabs will be erected unscrutinised, and the last spruce-up of the parklands will be unseen [photo]. You have 24 hours to get in and see what your taxes have paid for, unless of course you're fortunate enough to have tickets for the main event. Whatever, pencil in your next View Tube cappuccino for sometime around Christmas... assuming anyone's still interested in the aftermath of the Games by then.

Future closures
» Saturday 19th May: The Greenway past the Olympic Stadium (reopens in December) (sheesh, a seven month closure, that's bad)
» Tuesday 3rd July: The Lea Navigation Towpath from Hackney Marshes to the Bow Flyover (reopens 10th September)
» Saturday 14th July: Pudding Mill Lane DLR (reopens 13th September)

Photos of the Olympic Stadium from the Greenway, 2007-2012
My full set of 45 photos, taken monthly-ish, is now complete (slideshow)

posted 08:00 :

Thursday, May 17, 2012

I got Reddited yesterday. Which was nice.

Reddit, if you don't know, is a long-standing online community where users add links to an ever-bubbling noticeboard. If they like something they vote it up, and if they don't they vote it down. What with Redditors being just a trifle nerdgeeky, they liked my list of station usage data and voted it up. Hey presto, well over a thousand of them clicked over, which was nice.

And then they went back to their own site and left comments. "I thought Clapham Junction was the busiest train station in the U.K." said one. "It's the busiest because lots of trains go through it, but this list is busiest in terms of passengers using the stations" said another. "Stratford... it's crazy busy. I travel from there every morning. Sometimes I've been on a completely packed train to the point that West Ham and Canning Town folks can't really get on at all," added a third. And then somebody said this.
» What a terrible looking site. [eastlondonmandem]
Oh, I wasn't expecting that. The feedback continued.
» content over form isn't necessarily a bad thing [Scary_]
» Pretty sure it's been the same since 1999. The content is great, but I agree that it could do with a facelift. [Larwood]
» OK - the aesthetics might not be "modern", but is that really a reason to change? The Golden Syrup tin hasn't changed since it was designed and is now considered a classic. [geekchic]
There then followed a wildly tangential geekbitchfight debating the merits (or otherwise) of Javascript and Ajax, because that's what Reddit's like sometimes. But I was left thinking, oh, does my website really look crap?

I'm still using a Blogger template from ten years ago. It used to be a vile shade of green, which I soon updated to silver (or, OK, grey). But other than that it's still pretty much the same layout and design as ten years ago, mildly tweaked, with added bits embedded here and there. It's fairly simple underneath, and I understand how it all fits together, so who cares if it's little more than two ashen strips with text in? I'm betting you're here for what I've written, rather than how it looks, so I place all my effort there.

But, looking afresh, I'm probably doing myself no favours. Those thousand plus people who surfed in yesterday, many for the first time, may well have formed a snap judgement on my site based on one page of ugliness. They won't be back. And yet perhaps leaden grey clunkiness is the least of my problems, maybe it's screen size. It used to be that most people accessed the web via a computer with a big screen, but today the driving impetus is portable miniaturisation. I don't yet have a smartphone, so it struck me that perhaps my blog might look godawful on a mobile, even to the point of illegibility. Ulp. So I unearthed a few emulators online and, ah, oh dear, maybe that's not good at all.

On an iPad, seemingly, no problem. I stuck diamondgeezer.blogspot.com into a iPad simulator and it looks fine, even quite swish, with all the greys and blacks and indigos blending well. But on an iPhone, if these emulators are anything to go by, it's not so hot. My dark grey sidebar's only 180 pixels wide, which is nothing on a normal screen, but on a thin mobile screen it's much too over-dominant. There's not enough space to the left for the main text, so far as I can see, which then becomes much too titchy to easily read. Or maybe I have a scrolling problem. Using this emulator the text comes up full size but runs straight off the edge, back and forth, which you'd need the patience of a saint to coherently read. In the upcoming futureworld of mobile browsing, it seems, my blog is several different types of unreadable. Sorry.

To confirm this sorry state of affairs I tested my blog for mobile-readiness using a couple of validation sites. They weren't best pleased. I'm doing lots of things wrong, apparently, which makes my blog almost as mobile-unfriendly as it gets.

The size of the document's markup exceeds 10 kilobytes. Er, yes. My mark-up's 167.6KB, apparently, so it takes an age to load. Too long, or too data-expensive, for most people to bother.
There are more than 20 embedded external resources. Er, yes. I let readers see up to a fortnight's posts all in one go, which is a lot of photos for one page. No problem on a broadband PC, but a fatal choking error in your pocket.
A "javascript:" link is used. Er, yes. My comments pop-up via Javascript, but mobiles hate pop-ups with a vengeance.
There are nested tables. Er, yes. My entire template is a two-column table, rather than a seamless CSS stylesheet, which is appallingly old-school.
The document does not validate against XHTML Basic 1.1 or MP 1.2. Er, no. And the list of failures goes on, and on, and on.

What I ought to undertake is a complete template redesign. Something swish and modern, something off the shelf, rather than a creaking internet dinosaur that's unfit for purpose. Websites like Londonist and Ian Visits have already upgraded to mobile-friendly templates where you can only view one post at a time, never two, which makes them much easier to load. London Reconnections now has an alternative mobile format which strips away the sidebar and leaves the main content perfectly legible, just like magic. Or perhaps I could retreat to dumbdown geezer, my April Fool from last year, which I deliberately slimmed down to simplistic levels for readability's sake. As another Redditor says...
» It could do with a lot more contrast in the content area, as well as a smaller column size for the main content (we aren't reading on 1024x768 any more!) [r3m0t]
But stuff that. I want to flaunt the depth of my content, not hide it away. I'm a webpage purveyor, optimised for the big screen. I'm a child of 2002, still doing landscape while the world's going portrait. I'm a miserable coding stick-in-the-mud, happy with what I've got until someone proves it's broken. I'm continuing to make the fatal assumption that you're all viewing my blog the same way I am, and it still looks fine to me. Only when I buy myself a smartphone and start to view my blog through different eyes might things begin to change. Until then, sorry, the terrible-looking site lingers on.

posted 07:00 :

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