Panic also creates Coda, a text editor for Mac, and Transmit – the only FTP client I have ever felt willing to part with some cash for.

On investigation, I discovered Apache was using most of my available memory and pushing the server to capacity.  With help from some of the Slicehost documentation I discovered the difference between apache2-mpm-prefork and apache2-mpm-worker and their configurations. But how to switch from one to the other was not so obvious, until I found this article at PHP hints.  In short, I needed to install Apache again with mpm_worker, and install PHP as a FastCGI module. (Ubuntu makes this all so easy with apt-get install). Apparently this is not the recommended way to run PHP for production servers, but then neither is running your server with 256M of RAM. So there you are. My memory usage is down enough for things to run a little faster around here (for the time being, but an upgrade to more memory is on the cards).

I borrowed a few tips from around the web. Notably the HTML5 doctor, where you can find some accessible articles and help for all your HTML5 questions, from conceptual to implementation.

Combined with the HTML5 reset CSS recommended by the HTML5 Doctor,  I am using a grid based on the CSS and grids builder at YUI.

Other than that it was the WordPress documentation, and the odd peak a how things are implemented in twentyten the default theme for WordPress 3.0.

It’s another new start.

So I have a default layout with a shoe-horned header image.

Todo, tofix.

If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

One thing that always confuses me is how, as creative people in this industry, we are somehow often convinced to base our decisions and channel our energies around corporate structures and managers’ whim, like somehow that is something cool, something to aspire to. I see it all the time in studios where developers, designers and account directors alike lap up the promise of higher management, client or wider industry affirmation. Instead of thinking about the people who will use our products  decisions about product behaviour are made in a boardroom full of management egos.

It really winds me up.

I will admit that I like developing with both ActionScript and JavaScript/HTML.  I think both the Flash Platform and the Browser show great potential for different purposes. And each has its problems when misapplied. So what’s new? As developers we face these choices with our technology every day. So Flash isn’t on the iPad or iPhone. Does it matter that much? It’s a single device platform with a visionary design. It should be applauded. But we are not creating interactivity for a monoplatform world. Innovation will mean there is something that outwits the iPhone OS. Necessity will require us to adopt new, unchartered and non-standard solutions. Interaction design and communication technology is not all about LED screens and input devices.  Principles will still be the same: make things for people not for technologies.

There is so much to say on this subject, it opens up so many juicy channels of opinion, debate and evidence. Is this about openness? Is it about innovation? Is it about standards? Is it about winners or losers? Ultimately the debate is good for the web development community, and it’s time we all had a chance to define some thinking about these issues in this landscape. The launch of the iPad may be a watershed moment for more reasons than innovative touchscreen technology and eBooks saving the publishing industry.

I think the ball is in Adobe’s court right now. They could really turn this around to their favour. Open source the Flash Platform completely? Support the development and adoption of the HTML standard by giving developers more great tools? Make Flash  better and more essential to everyday browsing? Make a FlashPad device?

Ray Valdes on Gartner probably offers the best and most balanced overview of the issues that face us as media producers for these platforms.

I was finding it difficult to use effectively anyway and to tag entries effectively -  I needed to clean up my delicious.com bookmarks and tags. They were a particular mess from when I let the delicious Firefox extension import all my thousands of browser bookmarks.

My meticulous offline browser bookmark filing system – a methodical and hierarchical and usable top-down organisation structure – fell down when it was converted to a soup of tags. I ended up with a collection of tags like work_-_site_redesign_examples (from some research at work) and Pattern_Group_D:_Writing_and_Managing_Content (some resources I’d bookmarked from a book I was reading a few years back – The Design of Sites) and _curr (my current reading bookmarks list, which was no longer very _curr). My labelling system for storing and browsing my tags was good for reading through the list in my browser sidebar, but for topic tags, it was pretty useless. And there were thousands of them.

No problem, I thought. delicious is a good product – well designed and tech-friendly. I’ll get in there and consolidate my tags, rename them, delete the ones I don’t like. Maybe with a bit of help from the delicious API and some scripting with regexes. It will be fun!

How wrong I was. The delicious ‘bulk edit’ interface is less than friendly, allowing you only to bulk edit bookmarks, maximum 100 at a time. The tag deleting and renaming interface allows you to do one tag at a time, with a painful select menu and multiple click interface. The pain of this interface is nicely documented here. I can’t be alone, I thought. And indeed, a google search reveals I am not the first to curse over this issue.

I discovered some scripts and tools that could possibly help. This merge tool looked good, and clever, but didn’t quite work for what I was trying to do. Scripted Re-Mark looks sophisticated, but I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted either. This multi-step use of tag bundles looks like a potential winner, but I had already completed  my job by the time I stumbled on that link.  I looked at the Delicious API, and considered writing something that would at least get rid of the worst offending tags (those over a certain length, those starting with an underscore, and some date-specific tags), and I would write a timer to fire every 2 seconds to get around the limits of using the API. Not as fun as I thought it would be, but educational, and a good exercise maybe. I even considered dropping delicious for another service. Diigo.com was the best alternative I found, and I set up an account and did some tests,  but I wasn’t convinced by it, although its tag editing interface is better.

But in the end, before I deleted my delicious account and recreated it to start again from scratch (apparently the quickest way to reset your account),  I solved it with the following bit of manual labour (It took a couple of runs to get right, each step has it’s caveats and just my luck, delicious actually crashed in the middle of my work):

• Backed up all my browser and delicious bookmarks.
• Removed all the imported bookmarks from a copy of the delicious backup file by searching for and deleting all private bookmarks. (I had followed the default in the import process and marked all imports as private, which was lucky). This allowed me to keep my Real Delicious bookmarks I had collected over the years.
• Re-organised my browser bookmarks with folder names suitable to tagging and backed up to a new file.
• Manually deleted all my Delicious bookmarks, 100 at a time, using the ‘bulk edit’ tool. Thankfully delicious doesn’t keep  zero-count tags with no bookmarks associated with them, so once I finished this, I had an empty account with no tags or bookmarks.
• Reimported my Real Delicious Bookmarks and my Reorganised Browser Bookmarks.

Caveats:

• Doing this in Firefox if you have the delicious add-on –   it thinks you want your browser bookmarks and not a file when you choose to import. Use a different browser for this step.
• Importing from the Organize Bookmarks panel in Firefox – it doesn’t take your folder names into tags from this interface
• Remember to give a unique tag to all your imports, such as “imported” so you can isolate them later if you need to delete and redo the import. Once you’re happy and complete, you can delete this single tag. (It will show up with some prominence in your tag cloud otherwise

And hey, presto:

On Saturday 24th November I popped into the Science Museum for the launch of the Cosmic Collections website competition to learn about their new API that they have launched to the collection for this exhibition. It was a fun day of meeting astronomers, other developers, a few designers and of course the museum people themselves. Everyone is so nice. Apart from the technical info, we workshopped a few astronomical ideas by literally connecting concepts with pieces of string, and were given a tour of the exhibition, some drama, and an introductory talk on astronomy. Overall a good time, I enjoyed it.

On Thursday I went to the monthly London Flash Platform User Group meeting at the Cosmo Bar in Clerkenwell Road. I’d been a couple times before and really enjoyed the talks, but not this time. The topics were interesting (Design Patterns and Appliciation Frameworks), and the speakers were knowledgeable, but either that part of my brain was switched off, or the lack of microphone and length and detail of the talks and high turnout in a venue too small all combined to make it a less worthy event. I’m not complaining though – I think Tink and the LFPUG and all the speakers do a great job at putting on these events every month, and I will be back later this month for the talks on Red5 and Augmented Reality in Flash.

Friday was Playful 09. I was very excited about going, and I was not disappointed. Here are my initial thoughts on the event. I am planning to write more here about what I learned over the next week.

It’s been a good week for a geek.

Playful 09 was billed as “a day of cross disciplinary frolicking“. I liked the look of it when it turned up on my blog feeds – but what really hit home for me was the quote on the booking page from Jonathan Follet’s 2007 article:

Playfulness, like usability, refers to a quality of user experience that can span many disciplines—information architecture, information design, interaction design, and graphic design. In our minds, however, many of us have relegated play to the realms of gaming or kids’ stuff and don’t consider play daily when designing. Though, in the digital space, satisfying the desire to play can be integral in determining the success or failure of a digital product or service. So it’s time for user experience designers to take play seriously. (And stop being so darn boring.)

The idea of playfulness is an essential element of User Experience design that often feels overlooked by both practitioners and those who write about UX. It doesn’t get a look-in on seminal works like Jesse James Garret’s diagram and book, and Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb. These are both excellent models that help us understand the User Experience, but neither discuss playfulness explicitly. Understandings of UX are being extended and adapted to the new social media landscape, and the people-centredness of everything we do in Web 2.0. A common theme I have seen emerging is ‘what we can learn from game design in creating engaging user experiences‘. Rachel Glaves, Jesse James Garret’s colleague at Adaptive Path, writes about it, and it crops up in various forms at conference talks (mp3), slide presentations and articles. Each of these pieces are valid explorations of game design approaches to UX and interface design and make worthwhile listening and reading. But they don’t seem to get to the essence of what it means to include playfulness in your designs. Maybe that’s because play is such an elusive concept not meant for methodologies and models.

Playful 09 was a refreshing approach. It was a satisfyingly irreverent and fun conference with a good amount of interesting stuff presented. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact gems of knowledge that I gained from attending, but I left feeling inspired, notebook full of scribbles, head full of new ideas, new angles on design, and having met an active and exciting community. It really made me feel good.

I agreed with the powers that be at work that I would, in exchange for the day off to attend Playful 09, share my newly gained knowledge with anyone who cares to hear it. So with that in mind I’m looking to compile a summary of it all in the next week or so, and debrief with a few our designers. I will post here too for anyone who cares to read…

Stay tuned.

One of the biggest problems is finding developers who are comfortable in the creative agency environment. It’s noisy, it’s open plan, it’s unstructured. Many developers prefer to work to tighter processes than we could ever hope to run, and prefer not to think about how to meet the overall project goals, but want meet the narrow detailed requirements spelled out for them in the technical spec. They want to get their headphones on, and get on with code code code. Fortunately it’s not the way we work. We are not a cubicle mentality, or a software development house. We are mostly a bunch of designers and managers with varying technical understandings and abilities. I’ve grown up as a technologist in this fuzzy definition environment, and as a developer I am happy with it.

So we found our guy (it’s always a guy, I look forward to the day we hire a technical gal, but in 3 years far I’ve only seen one CV of a female developer), and so far so good. He’s taking a bit of management from my side and I need to give his work at this early phase more attention than I have had the time for. Watch this space…