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More Blog Housekeeping And Some Thanks

19 Jan

First the ‘thanks’.

I wrote a series of articles I collectively titled Project: New early last year. I wrote them to try and disseminate the idea of web standards to web developers who weren’t yet taking a standards based approach. The series takes you from taking an initial brief to cutting over the final project to the client – all with web standards, usability, accessibility etc to the fore.

After launch a few people emailed me to ask if they could thank me by way of making a financial contribution to which I replied that that was much appreciated but that I didn’t do it for the money but that if people really wanted to then they could buy me a little something from my Amazon wish-list.

Every so often then a little surprise package from Amazon drops through my letterbox and yesterday was no exception. I got back from work to discover a copy of The Elements of User Experience awaiting my return and a friendly anonymous note thanking me for my hard work.

So thank you Mr/Ms Anonymous, I’ll enjoy having a read of that, it was very thoughtful of you.

On a related note, I’ll shortly be starting work on Project: New Part II and will be again looking for expert contributors. I know Pierce from Distorte is up for it but if you, or anyone you know is also interested then I’d love to hear from you. This one’s going to be looking at server and client side scripting. You don’t need to be an out and out expert who knows everything – I want to discuss ways these things work for people new to them and how they can help a web designer/developer. Familiarity with Javascript or ASP or PHP or RoR is ideal.

Lastly, I’m afraid that I’ve been absolutely deluged with spam over the last few days. So much so that I considered turning comments off for a while but I think I’m getting on top of it now. This means that comment sensitivity is pretty high and thus you might stand an elevated chance of your comment being auto-deleted (in extreme cases) or moderated and placed in a queue. If your comments seems to disappear then give it a day in case I don’t get to it straight away. If its not there after a few days then its almost certainly been eaten – sorry in advance.

Blogging Housekeeping And David Kirby

12 Jan

I’ve been in email communication with David Kirby over the last week or so. You may remember that I wrote awhile ago about how a New York Times interview quoted Kirby as saying that if the amount of cases of autism didn’t decrease before the end of 2005 then that would be a severe blow to the autism/thiomersal hypothesis.

The confusion stemmed from Kirby claiming 2 months later in an email conversation with blogger Citizen Cain the exact same thing but this time with a date of 2007. I wondered why Kirby had moved the goalposts.

At the time I was predisposed to put it down to trying to wriggle out of a stated position but the more I thought about it, the less likely that seemed so I mailed David Kirby to ask him. He responded:

Many thanks for your note. The Times misquoted me. I actually asked for a correction, but did not receive one. What I told the reporter is that “we should know in the next few years.” I believe this is also what I said on Meet the Press.

Which is true. The transcription shows that thats exactly what happened. Kirby went on to say:

The Times wrote: *Because autism is usually diagnosed sometime between a child’s third and fourth birthdays and thimerosal was largely removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, the incidence of autism should fall this year, he said.* When I said “the next few years,” I meant by around 2007. I would never say “this year,” and that is why I requested the correction.

All in all then, I think I have to apologies to David Kirby in this instance. Its pretty bad of a prestigious newspaper like the NYT to actively mislead people like this and its very perplexing as to why they wouldn’t issue a retraction or correction in such a vitally important matter but thats not Kirby’s fault any more than it is mine so I think we have to take Kirby at his word here and go by what he wrote in Evidence of Harm and repeated on Meet the Press.

What we can do is take Rick Rollens to task though. He actually _did_ state that the first fall off would come last year. David Kirby again:

I did, however, quote Rick Rollens as saying “the first impacted birth cohort should start showing up in 2005.” But that is Rick’s opinion, not mine.

So – confusion alleviated. We can all go back to watching 2007.

A Very Autistic Xmas….

30 Dec

….hurrah!!!

First off, its traditional to talk about what your stash was so here’s mine. First up was the traditional Dad pressie of socks. A nice 3 pack of Pierre Cardin beauties. I’m wearing them right now and can report positively on their efficient and comfortable foot covering qualities. I don’t think my socks will ever reach the same heights of fame as some socks have in the past but hey – they work for me.

Next up, my kids each got me my most favourite of Xmas pressies – a book. Each reflects my abiding love for all things historical, particularly British history, so I look forward to cosying up for the next couple of weeks and getting immersed in Tudor England, Norse legends and the British military.

My beautiful and wise wife got me 2 gifts, first was the new David Gray CD which is hauntingly good. The man has a voice that is as ‘right’ as the clear note one gets from tapping the side of a crystal glass.

The second pressie was a rather spiffy camcorder which means we’ll finally be able to make movies of the kids, something we couldn’t afford until we saw how cheap this camera was.

Life over Xmas is an interesting time when you have an autistic family member. Its a hell of a lot of change to have to deal with when you are someone who doesn’t cope well with change and the change in routine (parents home from work who usually aren’t, the bewildering concept of ‘presents’, a bloody great tree in the front room, lots of people dropping off or picking up pressies, cards all over the place) can be very confusing.

We try to maintain a balance. Our non-autistic kids need and deserve a Xmas with all the trimmings but our autistic kids can’t deal with too much Xmas so we scale back the decorations to a tree and a wreath on the front door, autistic kids presents aren’t (or are only partially) wrapped and we tackle the Xmas dinner in stages so that everyone who can cope with Xmas has enough materialism and face-stuffing to suffice and those who struggle don’t get too overanxious. For those people, doors to bedrooms are left open and favourite items are prominently displayed so that retreat is always available if needed.

Sometimes it gets too much no matter what you do and when you also have a young baby who picks up on emotional excess that can result in a run of bad nights. At these times, parents fall back into the ‘shift sleeping’ pattern of one staying up through the night and one taking on the day. For the one taking on the night this can have unexpected benefits as this parent has the chance to watch an entire footy match from start to end without any other adults complaining! Indeed, on particularly bad nights, this parent can watch _all_ the scheduled matches over the Xmas period thanks to Sky’s excellent ‘Football First’ program and the magic of interactive TV. This parent is happy to report that the lads have done well in the last few games and seem to rising clear of the relegation spots that looked so inevitable a couple of months ago.

One of the main areas to monitor is the social aspects of Xmas. Understandably, friends and family want to pop over to see the family, drop off and/or pick up pressies but these visits aren’t as simple as ‘popping over’ to an autistic person. The ground rules for each visit must be established with the visitor before they come over so that the purpose and length of each visit can be understood and tolerated and those rues must be adhered to. Depending on your social circle this can sometimes result in a few people who grumble but screw them – just don’t invite them next year. They take us as we are, not how they want us to be. Our friends are all magnificent in this respect and 95% of our families are as well. One or two can’t commit to putting others needs first but thats their loss. People popping over ad hoc is forbidden in our family. Its just not fair to our autistic kids and our kids come first.

All this organisation puts paid to the traditional British pastime of ‘getting bladdered’ for tired parents but luckily this means one learns to appreciate the glass or two one manages to get of the nice Soave or Chiraz. It also means that your Xmas’s become much more family-centric. Indeed, our whole lives have become much more family-centric since autism entered our collective life. Thats a present that is beyond value.

A Statistical Year in Blogging

20 Dec

Its that time of year when we all look back at the year from the perspective of your own blogs/ideas/thoughts etc. I’ll have some more to say about that in a bit but firstly some incredibly dull fascinating visitor statistics for this site this year (excludes Bots,spiders and feed-readers):

This site has received *112,412 unique visitors* this year.
It has received *272,008 total visits* this year.
It has served up *2,609,187 pages* this year.
It has received *5,292,786 hits* this year.
This sites most popular day is a Thursday.
More *Americans* visit this site than any other nation.
This site has been visited by people from *152 countries*.
This site has *approximately 220 subscribers via Feed Readers* (most from Bloglines but an increasing amount from Rojo).
The most popular browser is *IE 6.0* with Firefox 1.0.? coming a very close second.
The site has been indexed by *45 Search Engines and Directories*.
The site’s most popular referrer is *http://cssvault.com* with nearly 20,000 unique referrers this year.
The site’s been found by searchers utilising *15,111 unique keyphrases*.
The most popular phrase to find me is ‘autism blog’ which brought 429 people to the site.
*52 people* have added this site to del.icio.us
I currently rank: 13,387 (285 links from 110 sites) on Technorati.
The site has a PR that fluctuates between 6 and 8 on Google.

Thats all very interesting and confirms my theory that my amount of readers vastly outnumbers my active commenters. As an aside, I’m very curious as to who all these lurkers are – if you fancy dropping a ‘hi’ to the comments of this post that’d be great – you can do it anonymously if you so desire :o)

This year saw me start blogging more about autism as a social/medical issue and less about it as it relates to my daughter. This is something of a shame as I know many people enjoyed reading posts about her. There are a few reasons why I stopped which I’ve discussed in other places.

Also this year saw the launch of Project: New which was an attempt to provide a starting point for new web designers and web designers new to web standards to get a good start in the field. It didn’t end up quite how I expected but I was very pleased with both the response it received and the end product itself. I plan on starting Project: New Part II at some point next Spring. Part II will concentrate on client and serverside scripting.

More recently, I came to the conclusion that whilst the blog was good for provoking discussion that that discussion frequently become bogged down in side issues (I’m as bad as everyone else in that respect) so I started up a forum to deal with autism from a scientific point of view to create a calmer and more rational place – the blog is more heat than light. I’m hoping the reverse will be true for the forum.

As for next year, I have plans. As I say, Project: New Part II is crying out to be written and I’m planning a ‘from the ground up’ revamp of the blog and forum. I want to present a more accessible environment and besides, I’m getting bored with this design ;o)

Autism/Science Forum

9 Dec

I’ve set up a new resource.

Its a forum which I intend to use solely for the discussion of the science that supports/refutes various things under discussion that are alledged about autism.

Everyone is encouraged to participate, regardless of where one stands on the issue and all science is allowed to be discussed – whether its peer reviewed or not, I would imagine though that science that is not peer reviewed should be questioned by those who disagree with its conclusions.

Forum rules:

The forum rules are very simple. These forums will only be used to discuss the science that is used to support/refute certain allegations about autism. No discussion on any other topic will be entered into. As this will be a science based environment, the atmosphere should remain polite, with no profanity, abuse, short-temperedness, sarcasm etc. Polite disagreement is encouraged but you must be prepared to back up any quotes you provide with a scientific source. Journalists don’t fall under this category.

I’m doing this for a number of reasons.

Firstly, blogging software isn’t really up to the the task of ongoing discussions. Forum software is perfectly suited to that task. Secondly, it seemed to me that whatever subject I start to talk about lately always falls back to a discussion on the state of the science underpinning autism – providing this forum will hopefully mean a lessening of the inevitable dilution of the subject.

The forum is easy to use – create a username and password and then go and post or read.

Now, the thorny issue of my own beliefs come up and how impartial I can hope to be in allowing some things to be discussed. I hope I’ve shown that I don’t edit or delete anything unless its plain old abuse, illegal or if I’ve asked people not to. However, if the forum takes off then I _may_ need a few moderators to help with crowd control etc. In the interests of impartiality I’ll try and get mods from both the neurodiversity *and* biomedical belief systems. Thats for the future though.

Curious Search Terms

7 Nov

Every so often I amuse myself by trawling through the search terms people use on Google, yahoo etc to find their way here. Some of them are fairly obvious – I rank pretty well on autism and web related terms.

However I occasionally find some downright bizarre or otherwise funny terms. Some of them are so odd I simply can’t figure how any engine returned my site as a match. I thought what I’d so was to share some of the more odd phrase that turn up in my web logs on occasion.

can ingesting mice urine make humans sick?

Pure genius. This is one of those great questions that answers themselves. Simply remove the ‘Can’ and the ‘?’.

quack jeff bradstreet quack

OK, I agree but the funniest thing about this is the mental image of someone shouting “Quack Jeff Bradstreet, quack!” in some sort of demented orgy of duck-related flagellation.

ipods cause autism

I must admit that a mouthful of tea very nearly hit my monitor when I first read this. I feel sure that in the coming months we will see a rise of parent-lef groups campaigning to rid the world of evil MP3 playing devices. ITS THE MUSIC PLAYERS, STUPD!!

stop the pigeon

I loved that cartoon. Second only to Pinky and the Brain. I have no idea how it ended up in my web logs though.

play extremist deth

??? Are ‘extremist deth’ a group? Some kind of sick board game? It sounds like some sort of Metallica/Napalm Deth offshoot to me.

theres a voice keeps on calling me! down the road thats where i ll always be!!!

I frigging hated the Littlest Hobo. Sorry America. But this was such a surreal phrase to turn up in my web logs that it kept me giggling for hours.

naughty policewoman

Er…OK. There’s only one guy I know of who hangs about with Strippers and lap dancers (its his job the lucky git). I promise I don’t keep any ‘naughty policewomen’ related imagery.

Not on my web server anyway.

nicest ass in the internet

Heeyyyy…..thanks unknown searcher. Seriously though? I really doubt it. I’m large, shambling, hairy with wild eyes etc. And _in_ the internet?

how to say subjcts in french

I love irony as much as the next man.

powerpoint noise induced hearing loss

One of my personal favourites. Is there a support group for people who’ve lost their hearing due to Powerpoint related noise? If not, there really should be. The suits I know love to put swishy noises on there terminally dull presentations. Possibly someone got carried away in an apocolyptic cacophony of MS-plinky action noises.

how do i speak to my dead husband

OK now, I try not to be cruel but I defy anyone not to think wicked thoughts. Its not so much that this person wants to speak to their dead husband so much as she _searched the internet_ looking for sites to tell her how to do it.

And thats it for my web logs – got anything amusing, odd or downright peculiar lurking in your search terms?

Lets Cut Microsoft Some Slack Eh?

19 Sep

I don’t know about anyone else but I’m getting really really bored with the recent upsurge in MS bashing. Its really prevalent in the web design industry as a lot of designers are Mac users.

It comes in many flavours. First their is the odd blog post with a reasonable proposition that turns into an MS (oops, sorry ‘M$’) bashing fest. Or there’s the full on blog attack.

MS (damn, did it again, I need to write ‘M$’ for full ‘kewl’ points right?) have just released their Developer toolbar for IE and yup, you can bet that announcement got its fair share of idiocy too.

Most of the complaints centre around how uninovatory Microsoft are. Well duh. Thats not their strength. You know thats not their strength, they’ve never traded seriously on that being their strength. Stop moaning about it. However, what they _are_ good at is responding to demand. They watched how Konfabulator panned out then launched Gadgets. They watched how Tiger panned out and they’ll soon launch Vista. They watched how Firefox panned out and saw how good some of the extensions were/are and did their own…..um, whats wrong with that?

Here’s one of the things that rankles me: if they _didn’t_ do these things then these same people would be moaning about how Microsoft are sticking with the same old crap that nobody likes. There truly are times when Microsoft cannot win. They appreciate how good something is and implement a similar system/product and get accused of being uninnovative. Stick with what they’ve got and they get accused of not being able to move forward.

Here’s another thing that rankles me: without the Windows PC, the vast majority of those doing the moaning would not be in the line of work they are currently in. Corporate websites require visitors. Next time you wonder who pays your wages (or who funds your clients ability to finance design work) take a look at the OS stats for your clients site visitors.

Windows made the PC easy for the mass market to use and to get on the web with. Whilst Mac dither about for months designing a _mouse_ , the average price of an internet ready Windows PC is still falling. Whilst precocious designers complain about how Gadgets are really Widgets or what ever, Windows users continue to ramp up web sales.

This recent spate of Windows bashing is totally misplaced. So what if Vista uses a ‘plastic’ style interface? So what if Desktop X wasn’t the first to support widgets? So what if the new IE toolbar resembles the Firefox extension? Are any of these things holding back innovation on the web?

Why don’t you redirect some of that moaning into areas that Microsoft really _do_ need a good kicking about? Like full CSS2.1 support. Or why it took nearly half a decade to get an upgrade to their flagship web product?

Oh, and if you really want to know why PC’s (both Win and *nix) sell better than Macs, try changing the memory on a Mac Mini.

Having A Mint? Nope.

6 Sep

So Mint got launched. The product site is gorgeous and you can almost taste the minty tang on your tongue as you surf around. Watch for it appearing in CSS Galleries over the next few days.

Regarding Mint itself: First things first. It also looks fantastic. But then its designed and built by Shaun Inman so thats hardly news. It also works like a dream but, again, its designed and built by Shaun Inman so, again, thats not a surprise.

What _is_ a surprise is how limited it is functionally. It picks up on browser share, visitors, searches. Its a Stats programme. Call me cynical but I was distinctly underwhelmed. Whats new here that justifies $30 per site?

Most disappointingly of all, you can’t configure it to hook straight into your server generated log files. Instead its dependant on Javascript to source all stats. Thats not good. Or as reliable as getting data straight from the source.

Now I know some people will say that its very simplicity (which seems to be becoming synonymous with ‘lack of standard functionality’ on the web these days) is its attraction – thats its easy to just get the most ‘vital’ data and go. Hm. What web stat application can you _not_ do that with? Personally, I’d rather have all the options I can and then invest some time in (gasp!) learning why they’re important and how to use them.

I don’t mean to knock Shaun Inman here. He’s a web designer/developer that the vast majority of us can only aspire to be as skillful as. Maybe thats why I’m so disappointed by this. The ‘Inman’ brand usually comes with an assurance of innovation and ‘must have’-ability (sorry for the word mangling).

I use Awstats on all my sites and the sheer power is hard to beat. Its also very well organised, dead easy to use and a doddle to find what you need. Its also free.

Mint on the other hand seems like its aimed at a ‘vanity’ audience who just want the quick warm glow of seeing which of their mates linked to them. Thats all very well but whats the point in that other than a quick ego-trip? A tool like Awstats by comparison allows you to develop a brand new skill – learning to read log files in order to better your SEO skills. If you’re in business then the better your SEO skills are, the more money you make. If you’re an agency or in-house developer then the better your SEO skills are, the more money you make for your company and the better your chances of career advancement are. How can you lose?

One area of interest might be Pepper which is basically an API to allow 3rd party developers to develop plugins for Mint. But to be honest, if I’ve already paid $30 per site when I can get 100 times the power for free then I expect much more functionality to be in the core product from the word go.

Is there some aspect I’ve missed here? Something that would blow me away?

Web 2.0? No Thanks.

5 Sep

Web 2.0 – I’ve seen the phrase now and again but I’m not big on hype and I wouldn’t consider myself a really early adopter so I just marked it away for future consideration and moved on. Over the last few months though I read an upsurge in articles about Web 2.0 and have a clearer idea about what it actually is.

What it is is hype with very little substance. Steady on now as I’m going to have a bit of a rant.

First is the idea of attaching a version number to an uncontrollable system. This is the most bullshit marketing aspect of the whole deal. The whole point of versioning software is to retain an aspect of control over its staged development.

It also seems to be an attempt to add ‘coolness’ to something which doesn’t need it, in much the same way as the year 2000 become known as Y2K. I really hated that too. A year (or the web) isn’t cool, it just _is_. If it needs to have coolness thrust upon it then its almost certainly a concept that isn’t a good idea.

Secondly is my fear that this is simply a way to wrap up a series of perfectly understandable and easy to access concepts in a containing idea that simply adds mystique where none is needed and might actually be counter productive. We have enough to learn as web designers/developers without having a totally unnecessary concept put upon us.

Lets have a look at the technical components that encompass Web 2.0:

CSS, semantically valid XHTML markup, and Microformats
Unobtrusive Rich Application techniques (such as Ajax)
Syndication of data in RSS/ATOM
Aggregation of RSS/ATOM data
Clean and meaningful URLs
Support posting to a weblog
REST or XML Webservice APIs
Some social networking aspects

Wikipedia

So basically, Web 2.0 is any halfway decent out-of-the-box blogging tool.

This leads me to strongly suspect that Web 2.0 is essentially a big old-boys club for web designers/developers. Once we were able to take the piss out of those lesser than us because we could code valid XHTML and they couldn’t. Now they’ve caught up we need to up the stakes to something else in order to maintain the old boys network.

What the hell was wrong with the ‘Semantic Web’? as a concept? At least it didn’t appear to be a way to exclude rather than include people, it didn’t place a stupid amount of emphasis on blogging and it had a totally valid purpose – to make the web more semantic and thus easier to understand. Most of all it didn’t have a bloody infantile ‘version number’.

WikiPedia sums it up:

An earlier usage of the phrase Web 2.0 was a synonym for Semantic Web. The two concepts are similar and complementary. The combination of social networking systems such as FOAF and XFN with the development of tag-based folksonomies and delivered through blogs and wikis *creates a natural basis for a semantic environment*.

Thats right, it does. And a naturally developed environment has no need to suffer through the bullshit of a hyperbolic naming and packaging process. Let the semantic web evolve and stop trying to coerce it.

Lion Taming For Beginners

1 Sep

What results in a successful piece of software? Is it the power of the software itself? Is it the range of features it has? Or is is the interface design that allows a user to access those powerful features?

Its a bit of everything really but that would make for a very short and dull post and you’d feel like you wasted your time if I finished with that so let me explain.

I’ve just started a new role working for a software development company. Their flagship product is an immensely powerful data management tool – and ‘tool’ is an understatement, it doesn’t _begin_ to do justice to the level of complexity this bad boy has. If you’re an ordinary user you can view and generate reports and charts based on data from either an OLAP or relational (SQLServer in this case) DB. If you’re a Developer then you can design custom forms, reports, get down and dirty with your own SQL and a wide variety of other frighteningly techy things I’m too right brained to get right now. Take it from me, this is one powerful piece of kit.

And its driven through the thinnest of clients – a web browser. When I first saw it working, it blew my ‘cool’ rating up to 11. Its the first time I’ve ever seen anything this powerful working in a standard install web browser.

But as Spidey’s dead Uncle once said: “with great power comes great responsibility.” and thats where this colossus falters just a _little_ bit. Its too easy to get lost in it and its a very steep learning curve to learn how to use it. We know that and this is one of the reasons they took me on – to put an interface on it that is easy to navigate and make it work like the very best web based applications such as “Rojo.com”:http://www.rojo.com – a big powerful beast with an interface that tames it wonderfully.

I suspect I may have a bit of understandable resistance to overcome. There’s a lot of people who invested a lot of time in this product and it’ll take some time to convince them that I also want whats best for it. I’m hoping I can find a way to let them see the potential of this without treading on anyones toes.

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