It took me some time to get into Delicious, I never really saw the pull of it. I could never be bothered to copy a URL, goto the site, login, and post it.

That was until I found something that smooths the whole process out. I am an Opera user, and unless it works well in Opera, I’m unlikely to use it.
So when I found some Del.icio.us Opera Buttons a few months ago, I was quite chuffed.

Tap in your username, click create, and then you drag the generated buttons to a toolbar.

Now when Ifind a link I want to bookmark, I just hit the ‘Post’ button, enter a couple tags, hit enter, and I’m taken back to the page I was bookmarking, with an entry made in Delicious.

Nice.

When asking “can you..?” also ask “should you…?”
When reading a list of requirements, ask yourself why they are requirements, what is their purpose, rather than just creating something that technically meets those requirements, but doesn’t meet the spirit of the requirements.

Over at Opera Watch, there’s a lovely graph showing page views per month shown on Opera Mini.  It’s one of those sharply rising graphs we’re used to seeing from popular web start ups.  About 100,000 page views in March 2006, to almost a billion page views in July 2007.

I think that’s pretty awesome, the market shares might look ridiculously low, but if you start telling people around (and soon over) a billion pages a month are being shown on one app on mobile phones, I think it will start making people sit up and listen a bit

One of my pet discussion points recently has been about the mobile web, and how it looks like it might finally actually take off, but not with the requirement for loads of mobile specific web sites that people think it will need.

With alternatives to Opera Mini starting to show their faces, I get the impression generaly mobile web usage will finally rise to more measurable levels.

In these times of web standards advocates speaking the message of cross browser compatibility and not tying site to specific browsers or devices, why, why, WHY, are people suddenly busying themselves with making iPhone optimised versions of their services?

37signals have been doing it (in fact, I find that fairly hypocritical of them, and have stopped bothering with their blog feed), Blogline have just done, and a quick search on Google for [iPhone optimised] brings up a slew of pages about this very thing.

Why are we making the same mistakes with mobile phones that we made with desktop browsers?
There are other, usable, functional, more prolific mobile browsers out there.  Yet suddenly the iPhone, which is meant to just use Safari, requires special attention, extra effort to make web sites look nice on it.

I really don’t understand this.  If you’re going to make a mobile optimised version, ok.  If you’re going to tweak your site so it works better on mobile phones as well as desktops, fine.  But making sites specifically designed for the iPhone?

Come on people, lets have sites and web apps designed so they can function on my desktop, my Opera Mini phone, my housemates Wii, the Apple fanboys iPhone’s all at the same time.  I’m not about to start making a new web site for individual devices now, after spending so much time trying to get people to build them without those restrictions.

Just picked up on an excellent blog post via Reddit (some non-political stuff does still appear on there).
Deadlines, Overtime and Undertime talks about what happens to productivity when people work longer hours in an attempt to get a project finished for a tight, unreasonable deadline.

More code bugs, more sick days, lower morale, unimpressed client, reduced long term productivity.  Not the kinds of outcomes that suggest working ‘harder’ helps anything at all.

No matter how much effort you put into thinking about a site design, how you lay things out, how you highlight certain things, there are pretty much always comments about how you could improve it, how certain things are annoying etc…

I find that when you launch a new web site, or a redesign of an old one, the way people ACTUALLY use it differs greatly from the way you designed it, or expected them to.
That may be because they are unaware of some of the aspects of the design, and therefore don’t use them, or it could be that they have found some shortcuts somewhere to what interests them.  It could even be (and actually I think this is the msot common) that their goals when using the site are different than you expected.  Indeed some of these different goals only come up once the site is launched and they discover the ability to do it.

I’ve seen cases where websites have bits added to a page with reasoning like “oh so from here they might want to be able to get over there, so, uh, lets put another area in there with related links to that section”, trying to 2nd guess the end user all the time.  Adding related links can be good, but I fear some(a lot of?) people go a bit too far, and end up confusing, rather than helpful.

Add on top of that, the people ‘designing’ (I mean the client, not the actual designer) getting too close to it, knowing what everything can do, where everything is, the intent behind everything on the page, and you can have a big gap between the intended use of a web site, and the way eventual visitors actually use it.

One clear example, forums.  They are generally laid out with a list of forums, maybe showig a snip from the most recent post in each area.  The idea being you click into a forum, and then see the list of recent threads in that forums, and then choosing a thread, you go to a page listing the posts in that thread.
However, a lot of regular forum goers struggle to keep up with certain individual forums that way, or end up clicking into each of the forums to see what new/updated threads there are.
So they actually end up wanting tools like the “Last 72 Hours” link we have at Cre8asite, which is an edited version of the standard functionality, listing the most recent posts from threads that have been added to in the last 3 days.

Many of our regulars use that tool as their main means of seeing what’s going on, quite different to the usual intended forum usage.

It’s always difficult to know how someone might use the things you’ve just designed, but it’s worth bearing in mind when you launch something.  You might get slatted for some design decisions because they are simply using it differently and you didn’t take account of that.  Either some proper pre-launch testing (yeah right!) or post launch flexibility is needed.

Re-inventing nature for cheaper solar power suggests a group fo Australian scientists have developed something akin to photosythesis, on a small scale.

If they really have managed that, and they can harness that energy in electrical form, and scale it up, that is awesome news.  Much more efficient than our current solar panel technology.

There’s a few “if’s” there, not to menton price, but it’s a promising idea.

Ignore whether your new site is Web 2.0 or not.  Concentrate on doing cool stuff with it.

Digg has just been removed from my Bloglines feeds.

The reason?  The bunch of (probably) teenage muppets continually spamming the site with ‘articles’ about the accidently leaked hex code key, and everyone digging all of them.

Digg has finally disappeared completely up it’s own arse.  It completely highlights the generally level of maturity there, which only gets worse in comment threads.

I’ll be sticking to Reddit now.  I’ve generally found there are more stories there that I feel like clicking on, and stuff that apears on both seems to often appear on Reddit first.
I just hope I can survive all the US Election crap that does get listed on Reddit.  Nice as it is to see younger people taking some kind of interest in Politics and therefore hopefully helping them decide how to vote, but it gets a bit OTT on Digg and Reddit alike.

In a distinctly non-work related post, I went away camping for the first time in a long time over Easter. A bit of walking round the north coast of Exmoor.

Here’s some pictures, awesome weather generally