Archive for February, 2010

In the quest of being cool, I’ve always wanted to make a web app. Perhaps it’s because I’ve got the mental age of an eight year old but the term web app sounds quite intriguing.

Three weeks ago, I took myself out of my client work and set aside the Monday and Tuesday evenings to get everything up and running and on that Wednesday Tweet in the Park went live to a pretty good reception.

If the folks over at T in the Park don’t have a problem with it, then neither do I.

A few people had asked why I had decided to launch this app a full five months before the festival started but my reason was pretty simple. The final batch of T in the Park tickets went on sale on Friday the 26th of February and I wanted to be able to see if the app could handle the amount of tweets that would be coming through and also to see if there was a need for such an app.

The answer to both was a resounding yes with the app handling over 200 tweets a minute at it’s busiest point and with over half of the people tagging their tweet with the hashtag "#titp".

So, what is Tweet in the park?

Well if you haven’t been able to guess it’s an app combining two of my favourite things; the UKs best music festival, T in the Park and the social networking site Twitter.

If you’re a Twitter user then you will have no doubt used it’s excellent real time search feature. Infact the search functionality is so impressive that the likes of Google and other search engines have moved to incorporate it into their search result pages. Creating apps that utilises the Twitter API have started popping up all over the place since Twitter published it’s own documentation on their libraries page.

Tweet in the park utilises the API to pull out all instances of "#titp" or "T in the Park" that are mentioned on Twitter displaying them on a timeline within Tweet in the Park for end users to view.

Why did I create Tweet in the park?

I’m quite a regular to T in the park however three years ago I was unable to attend and no matter how many text messages and phone calls I received from friends just didn’t make up for that fact that I wasn’t there. However, this probably had something to do with the fact that the majority of these calls were fueled by alcohol and totally indecipherable not to mention the fact that they were few and far between.

Unfortunately it is looking likely that I won’t be able to attend this years festival, even though I have already purchased my early bird tickets. So instead of having to go through the same torment of three years ago I decided to build an app that would let me see what everyone was tweeting about and chances are that quite a fair few people out of the 85,000 people that attend T in the Park will be Twitter users, so I’m thinking that updates should be fairly regular.

Give it a go and see what T in the park related things people are tweeting about.

Text Shadow Hover States

Time for a quick Friday post before we all knock off for the weekend, this afternoon I was working with text shadow and it occured to me that I’d never seen it implemented on any links, so with this in mind I set about implementing a quick piece of code to see it in action.


a, a:active {
	color:#4FCDFF;
	left:0;
	position:relative;
	top:0;
	text-decoration: none;
	text-shadow:1px 1px #004F6F, 2px 2px #004F6F, 3px 3px #004F6F;

}
a:hover, a:focus {
	color:#4FCDFF;
	left:-3px;
	text-shadow:1px 1px #004F6F, 2px 2px #004F6F, 3px 3px #004F6F, 4px 4px #004F6F, 5px 5px #004F6F, 6px 6px #004F6F;
	top:-3px;
}

After playing about with this it seems to work better when you’re putting this code on a large bold element ie, a heading. It also looks pretty good when you’ve also set the text to text-transform:uppercase;

Give it a go and watch your hrefs *pop* | Example

Update: As pointed out by Mitchell in the comments, I forgot to add an :active state, so this has now been rectified.

Working for free

There will be people who agree with this post and an equal amount who will disagree. However, so long as it helps out one person then it will have been a worthwhile exercise.

A couple of months ago, I went out seeking advice on how I should go about rewriting my CV and boosting my portfolio. Unfortunately this proved to be quite tricky because I’m sure like many of you, when you’re starting out in the web game, there just aren’t that many people who you can seek advice from. Thankfully, it didn’t really matter that I only had a select few people to turn to because the first person that I did speak to gave me a cracking piece of advice. The person in question was Mr. Bruce Lawson.

I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting Bruce twice but feels like I’ve known him a lot longer due to many emails about the HTML 5 Doctor. The fact that he was willing to give me advice even though we don’t really know eachother speaks volumes about the man. Anyway, enough praise, time to get on with the rest of this post…

One of the options we spoke about was working for free and why more people don’t do it. You might be reading that line again thinking I’m crazy, I know I did. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Let me explain

You now have a platform to showcase your skills
There’s a fair chance that you will be allowed to have more say, if not all, in the design than you would for a paying client
It shows just how willing you are to show your worth
It expands your portfolio

We all have to be realistic, it’s highly unlikely especially after just starting out that you are going to get the same amount of clients as leading industry experts such as Mark Boulton or Simon Collison. But by adopting this approach you will at least have these all important “real world” examples that future clients or employers are supposedly looking for.

To help give you some ideas here’s what I decided to do. I identified a few Scottish businesses with poor websites; I decided to choose one Scottish charity, one major Scottish business, one Scottish event and one mystery project. Upon each projects completion I’d would then contact the buisness in question and ask them if they would like to implement my new design. You could of course decide to go down a different route at this stage and charge the client if they decided to take you up on this offer, depending upon how much work you had done etc.

Of the four mentioned above so for I have launched one, Tweet in the Park. I’ll write more about this in my next blog post, if you are interested in finding out about more on this project then add me to your RSS.

As I outlined in the first paragraph, this won’t be for everyone and some people will just not be able to be in a position to do so but if you get a chance, even if it is just one site, I’d throughly recommend it. So far it’s proved to be a great experience. Let me know in the comment section below if you have ever contemplated doing something like this or indeed if you already have some published free work out there and what other people have thought about you for taking this line of action?

Glasgow UX Book Club

The other day I was browsing through random twitter profiles, for people located in and around the Glasgow area, when I happened to land on a person tweeting about a Glasgow UX book club.

UX is an area that I’ve been keen to get into for a while now, sure I know bits and pieces and have read a few books on the subject but I don’t think I could ever call myself an expert in the subject. Therefore, when I found out this information I jumped at the chance to register for the next event through their wiki.

UX Book Club Glasgow, March 2010

If you think this is something that you would be interested in and you are located in or around the Glasgow area, then please feel free to use the Amazon affiliate link, from the UX book club and purchase yourself a copy of this months book, The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and take part in the discussion.