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At the risk of a second post mentioning Tim Ferriss, and sounding like a productivity cult member, I’ve been reading some stuff about selective ignorance In short, it’s the simple idea that one recognises things that you can safely ignore and ignores them. The tendency with RSS,Email,Twitter,Facebook et al is to feel that one can stay on top of everything, but personally I’m finding that is exhausting and with unclear tangible benefits.

It hit home to me whilst perusing my many illustration based feeds. I was enjoying looking at some of the marvelous work produced and discovered and I had what I believe is called a moment of clarity. All the time spent looking, is time spent not doing.

Discovered that the Fontcase and Dropbox solution that i thought was working so well has hit a bump. Apparently there is a known problem with the resource fork in the files and the way that they are saved in Dropbox. There’s a really nice place provided by Dropbox where one can go and vote for features to be added/supported. If you’re a Dropbox user and you’d like this you can swing on by and vote.

Writing Tests.

I wrote in the last roundup about how I created an app with some tests ready to be picked up and made real. Well, I was reminded by our testing guru that the tests I had written were not clear enough and I needed to go back and clarify. Far from being chastened by this I was encouraged. I found it a good thing to be able to refer to what I’d written previously and see where I needed to clarify. I’ve found that many times as a group, we’ve discussed the way a feature or system should work and not captured that discusssion. When we then revisit it we have to start at square one again. I’m sure I’ve still got a way to go to get the stories to comprehensive and concise, but I’d much rather begin the job with clarity rather than sort out any confusion later.

Went to ‘Making IT happen’ – DISAG Showcase. Overall, it was a good event to begin to emerge blinking from behind our desks and get a wider view of what’s happening in IT across the University. The process of meeting people and straight out asking what someone did I found useful. There was an element of preaching to the choir, but I guess that the lesson there is that education and that dreaded nebulous word, ‘engagement’ are activities that need to take place over time. Rome wasn’t built in a day – certainly not using PRINCE2.

Hoping Fontcase will fix me

Finally bit the bullet and decided to buy a font management app. Billed as ‘iTunes for fonts’ Fontcase is working for me. I like to have a small set of fonts for daily use, but the option of lots os dingbat fonts and the ability to sort them out well. The real killer feature for me is the simplicity. The app stores all your fonts in one place unlike a mysterious process of ‘activating’ them , it just copies them to the appropriate folder when they are needed. This approach makes it really easy to keep them all in a remote folder and organise things across multiple machines. So even though it was more than a tightwad like me would normally pay, I’m glad I did.

Realised that i remembered more than I thought about creating a rails app, so created one and started writing cucumber features for the developers to build. Along the way we had an entertaining but pointless discussion about what to name our repository. Animals, Elements, Authors,Fish and Birds were among the sets of things we thought about. I stopped caring halfway through and we settled on capital cities.

Discovered that our microformats need some overhauling, since the technorati feed has stopped working for us. Microformats still feel like a geeky hobby, but it seems daft not to use them for the minimal effort that will be involved.

Swimming and Learning

Enjoyed Tim Ferris’ talk about learning things. Although he’s a pretty self regarding figure, he still manages to be interesting, and I will certainly try out his swimming tips. I think he massively underestimates how analytical he is and assumes that everyone else has those same skill. Maybe that’s his point.

Been wrangling styles that have been placed in content areas of ours sites are hence pretty unmanageable because of it.

A false dichotomy

Does make me think of the wider issue of the the grey area between content and code. I don’t think the proposition that is often made, that ‘content’ people can just get on with content, whilst the code people just provide the platform. From the content people’s perspective, understanding the technical requirements, limitations and strengths of the medium is central to creating engaging and useful websites. I guess it can be daunting for people who consider themselves non-technical to be faced with learning about things like document markup and semantics. Perhaps as a dev team we need to provide the carrot of help learning some of these things before we begin to use the stick of constraining a system to disallow poor practice.

In the same vein, as developers we work with and use an large number of sites, so over time we can’t help but form opinions on content ideas and approaches that work. Quite how we get those ideas into our sites is a challenge, because up to now we’ve been very clear that the authority for content rests with the content people. However, it seems a shame for (what we think are) good ideas not to be included into overall strategies. Quite what needs to change for this to happen I’m not sure. I just hope it does.

As ever, I enjoyed the insight onto his working method that Andy Clarke demonstrated with his talk about a new project and how he’s doing it . It’s the simple and pragmatic hands-on post that I really appreciate. He explains how to go about using advanced styles in a way that encourages one to go off and try them out. For me, the thing that is making me slightly tardy in beginning the process at work is the palaver of supporting Internet Explorer (ain’t it always the way).

Mark made his extensive notes from the FOWA in London available, and I thought they were very good. He seemed enthused and bored in equal measure, but he’s already got work on some of the things in there. You can read them in full. From the same conference I watched the video of Gary Vaynechuk, who made an impassioned plea for people running sites to really, actually care about the people visiting the site. He was a very robust and entertaining speaker delivering some unvarnished truths.

Glow is the BBC’s Javascript Library which seems like it will be the next Javascript library to amaze and baffle me. I was looking at this one since we have started to play with it, and thought I should have at least a little knowledge of it.

I learnt a nice little photoshop selection trick using ‘color range’ from this tutorial

Whilst looking at a collection of free fonts I showed some restraint in not getting anymore; it would just add to my already ridiculous and ongoing indecision about managing my fonts. I want a nice short font list , but seem unable to bring myself to get rid of any.

Finished a really great book this week. The Language of things by Deyan Sudjic

A fascinating book. The author whilst obviously deeply thoughtful and educated about the cultural significance of the objects that surround us he wears his knowledge lightly and makes it very easy to follow.

Joe Clark wrote a great review, which is what made me pick it up. I agree with his assertion that it’s full of great points that then get pushed out of one’s head to make way for the next one. Really enjoyed the chapter on Fashion, which educated me about what a huge and voracious industry the fashion business is, and how it consumes so many other cultural activities. The chapter on Luxury was equally thought provoking.