I’ve just got back from a fun and extremely girly weekend in Manchester. My friend, Claire, is getting married in a couple of weeks so 17 of us converged on Manchester city centre for the weekend. The theme of the hen party was ‘cowgirls’ because Claire’s a big Dolly Parton fan (I’ve been friends with her since we were about 4 years old but it was only about two months ago that I found this out!) so we were all provided with white cowboy hats (adorned with tiaras) and told to bring appropriate outfits for the Saturday evening.
On Saturday morning, at breakfast, Maggie (one of the bridesmaids-to-be) announced that we had to meet back at the hotel at half-two so that we go to our pole-dancing lesson. This was news to at least some of the party but we were reassured that we didn’t have to wear skimpy bikinis or heels if we didn’t have them or didn’t want to. During the morning, Claire discovered some stunning black t-shirts in Primark with ‘Dancing Queen’ emblazoned across the chest in sparkly pink and got a job-lot of them. So, at quarter-to-three, clothed in our matching t-shirts (and Kerry in her fantastic neon pink leg-warmers), we trooped across to The Ruby Lounge.
Having to knock, mid-Saturday afternoon, on the big, red, locked double-doors to be let into a nightclub in a basement felt a just a tad bit seedy, and I think we looked generally apprehensive when our teacher met us. We were a bit fazed when she said we could get changed but she wasn’t at all fazed when we (dressed mostly in jeans or combats) said we were changed - she just suggested that we roll up long trousers. She was wearing her company uniform of matching cami and very short shorts - the more skin, the better, we were told. 
After a short warm-up in flat shoes, anyone who had heels could put them on and the lesson began. After two hours of swinging round poles and hauling ourselves up just to slide back down again, we were absolutely knackered and also rather sore. When we went out that evening, I was sporting a lovely friction burn/bruise on my right wrist. When I went to bed that night, I discovered, too, that I have a matching pair of bright red bruises on my knees from sliding down the pole and landing on them too fast. And today, my arms, sides, thighs, and stomach ache.
So I think you get the idea that it was pretty hard work. Our teacher (from Polestars) was great - she made it look so easy but was very patient and clear about how to do the moves she demonstrated. In the last five minutes, she offered to teach us some lap-dancing moves. By this time, we’d lost much of our earlier nerves and, although it was slightly weird having to dance in front of each other (despite being called ‘lap-dancing’, there’s little contact), we giggled our way through it - it was basically similar moves to what we’d learnt on the pole, just without the pole.
That evening, we went to The Birdcage cabaret nightclub, which appeared to be mostly populated by hen parties wearing a wacky range of themed costumes (we were quite sedate by comparison). Just before we left, a woman came on to the podium to dance incredibly energetically in a bikini and did a bit of pole-dancing. We were, of course, all very impressed and full of a whole load of new-found respect for exotic dancers. And we got very excited when we spotted her doing moves that we recognised from our class.
First, this is my new penguin who lets me know if my phone is ringing (taken with my phone in poor light - sorry about the quality):
Whenever my phone rings or I receive a message, the penguin starts to spin round and flash lights to let me know. In fact, he even starts to spin and flash before my phone even starts to ring! How clever is he?
Second, this is my funky gorillapod - a kind of tripod for my camera but, unlike traditional tripods, it doesn’t have to be set on a flat surface. In fact, it thrives on uneven surfaces…like the back of this chair.
Cool huh?
Ho-hum, blooming users!
As you may notice, if you hover your mouse over the little icon at the end of the following link, the Snap Shots previews (formerly known as Snap Preview Anywhere) now works fine and dandy.
The nice Erik Wingren, head of UX Research at Snap.com, posted a comment in response to Saturday’s blog-post about how I couldn’t get Snap Shots working on my website. His comment prompted me to check that I had the latest and greatest version of the WordPress plugin (I didn’t) and to try it again. This time it kind of worked but not always.
So Erik posted another comment to say that my unique key was too short. He was right. I registered for a new key and now it works! I can only be impressed that it worked as much as it did with the abbreviated key!
Slightly sheepishly, I did check the old version of the plugin in case I’d always had the key wrong but I hadn’t - so I’ve no explanation why the old plugin didn’t work. But the new one does, which is the main thing. The WordPress plugin makes it incredibly easy to install (if you’re used to installing WordPress plugins) so I’m not sure what Snap.com could’ve done to make it more idiot-proof.
Good UX research from Snap.com, I think. What a great way to meet your users. I wish it were that straightforward to get feedback from users of business middleware….
p.s. Here’s some blurb that Snap.com provide to explain just what Snap Shots is about and how you can disable the previews if they drive you up the wall when you’re reading my blog (though I suspect that most people who read this use an RSS reader and probably have absolutely no idea what this entire post was about):
Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com
I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, , MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.
Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.
Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.
I’ve finally just got round to carbon off-setting our flights for this year. I did do it a year or so ago but after that I read in New Internationalist magazine about the down-sides of carbon off-setting, I was less eager to just go throwing money at some company to asuage my carbon guilt and felt I should do a bit more research.
While doing some filing just now, I found the latest issue of The Co-operative Membership magazine, which has an article about The Co-operative Bank and its ethical policy. The Co-operative Bank apparently uses the Climate Care scheme to off-set its carbon footprint of things like business flights. I figure that The Co-operative Bank is probably a reasonably reliable role-model in such things so I decided to just get on with it and calculate how much carbon I contributed to the world by flying this year.
I’m sticking to personal flights here and not counting my return flights to the US at Easter for business. I need to look into what IBM’s eco policy is for such things.
So, sticking to personal flights, I think I’ve done pretty badly this year in terms of the number of flights I’ve made. Tony and I went on holiday to Paxos, a Greek island, in May, which involved return flights to Corfu. Also, I flew from Southampton to Glasgow for a wedding in June, although I virtuously caught the train back (I couldn’t take the day off work to get the train both ways). And Tony and I have another three flights between us between Southampton and Edinburgh for another wedding. On the plus side, we went to Brussels for a weekend in February using the Eurostar both ways - which was not only greener but actually quicker and more pleasant in my opinion.
According to the Climate Care calculator, all that comes to the grand total of £8.96. Which doesn’t seem very much but I guess that’s because they’re all fairly short-haul flights. I can’t remember how much CO2 that was but I’ll get my PDF certificate within 5 days to remind me.
So do I feel less guilty about my flights? I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I still feel it was an excessive number of flights to take - especially when it is actually possible to catch trains to Scotland (although the 7.5+ hours it takes each way from Southampton does cause problems if you’re going just for the weekend). I try to imagine what I’d have done if low-cost internal flights weren’t available. I guess I’d have either taken more holiday from work or just not gone to the weddings. I don’t think the availability of carbon off-setting would have featured very heavily in my decision. My reason for catching the train home when I went to the wedding in Glasgow was that I wanted to try to be at least a bit greener. I’m quite happy to sit on a train for an afternoon with a book, and it was actually cheaper to catch the train than to fly. I actually wouldn’t mind paying a little more to catch the train than fly so I felt a bit smug that I’d proved wrong all the people who claim that flying is cheaper than other forms of transport to travel long-distance in the UK. I’ve recently discovered, in travelling more frequently between Southampton and Lancashire, that you can actually get pretty good train deals if you book far enough in advance.
So, my position on carbon off-setting isn’t cut and dried. I think I see carbon off-setting as the last resort, after trying to find greener methods of travelling. I like to think that I’m making a bit of an effort in that (catching the train and Eurostar when it’s possible) but I know it’s not really as big an effort as it could be yet.
Snap Preview Anywhere
Last night, I finally disabled the Snap Preview Anywhere feature (now know as Snap Shots) on my blog (I actually used the Snap Preview Anywhere WordPress plugin). It seemed like a good idea when I first installed it. Every external link on my blog had a little icon alongside it that you could hover over to get a thumbnail preview of the site you’d go to if you clicked the link. At first, however, it didn’t work - I just got a message saying that there was no preview available, for any link. That could have been the plugin not working properly because, after a WordPress update, some of the link previews started working, but only those that pointed to high-profile sites like Wikipedia and Flickr. Which is a bit crap because the majority of my links were still just saying that the preview wasn’t available.
Looking at the Snap website now, the description only really says that such high profile sites will be previewed. The original descriptions that I read when I first installed it on my blog suggested that the previews would work on any site as long as Snap Preview Anywhere knew about the link - and that they’d go preview new links within a short time. Maybe that was too much of a commitment for them to honour. It’s a free service so I’m not too bothered but it seemed like a good idea that’s not really happened.
Tag cloud
I’ve been thinking that although my blog/website is pretty and red, it is actually a slightly old-fashioned design now. So I was trying to work out what would be better without being dull. One of the things I wanted to do was make it a bit more Web2.0 - not that I particularly want loads of flashy drag-and-drop - more that I’d like to have fewer static-looking lists of links. Having a tag cloud is one of the things that I wanted. Partly because the categories that I had for my blog posts were pretty bad, and they have a fairly static, hierarchical feel about them. Although it’s a difficult mind-switch to make, I’d like to get away from thinking in hierarchies.
I once attended a task analysis tutorial given by Dan Diaper and one thing he said that stuck in my mind (bearing in mind my job as a technical writer) is that although we impose hierarchies on many many things (in order to categorise them), the real world isn’t hierarchical - that is, as soon as something belongs to more than one category, the hierarchy breaks down, and this happens frequently.
One thing that new, tagging-based sites like Flickr have shown is that we need to be more free with how we classify things for retrieval. On Facebook, for instance, although you post your photos in albums, you and your friends can tag the people in the photos so that it’s possible to retrieve all the photos containing a given person from across multiple albums. You aren’t restricted to a strict hierarchy of albums and sub-albums to locate an individual photo.
A similar example is some Adobe software that my Mum uses to organise her photos. She tags each photo with things like the names of the people in the photo, the location of the photo, the event taking place, and so on. The software can order the photos along a timeline so that you can pick a particular date in time and see what photos were taken on or around that day. You can also sort by tag; for example, show all the photos of pets, which is great because the software dynamically creates an album starting with the family dog when she was young, the pony she had from when she was about 15 years old until I was 15 years old, the dog she and Dad had for 17 years from before I was born, the various cats through the ages, up to their present dog and our two-year-old cats. Tony’s recently found a similar piece of Open Source software, F-spot, which aims to do something similar and which I’d like to try using to organise our photos.
So, anyway, information is all about retrieval. It’s no good me using logical but useless categories (like ‘Personal’ and ‘Opinion’) to organise my blog posts (they’re more useful for me than for other people). The trouble is that I find that when I’m thinking hierarchically, it’s difficult to decide which category or categories a post fits in to. Also, the site design that I use just lists the categories down the side of the page so the more categories I have, the longer and more boring the list. Tagging is a bit more natural an exercise, I think.
The SimpleTagging WordPress plugin provides what I want. I imported my existing categories (then decided they were terrible and deleted them all anyway), and then went through my existing blog posts and created and renamed tags to describe them. The tag cloud is a visualisation of the frequency with which each tag is used. The more popular tags (ie the topics on which I have written most) are shown in a larger, brighter font in the cloud.
What does the tag cloud show the reader? Well, apart from looking pretty, I think it gives the reader an idea of what the blog is about and, by extension, what I’m interested in writing about. I was a little bit disconcerted (though not terribly surprised) to discover that my interests seem to mostly revolve around cool or geeky stuff, though it’s nice to see that HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is top at the moment.
On a bigger scale (though not here), the tag cloud can show what’s popular across a group of bloggers. For instance, a lot of IBMers have internal blogs at work. On there, a tag cloud can show what topics are of most interest to the IBMers who blog across the world.
What my tag cloud doesn’t show is the popularity of the posts with readers. In some ways, it might be interesting to show the relative number of comments on each post, or something like that. Though on a low-traffic blog like mine, that probably wouldn’t show enough to be that interesting.
Another interesting use of clouds is on the Nabaztag support website where the popularity of search terms is shown in a cloud so that you can just click a term in the cloud to retrieve the information instead of entering a search term. The more people who have searched on that term, the more prominently the term is displayed in the cloud. I guess the idea is that whatever problem you have, someone else has already had it and searched for a solution so you may as well benefit from their experience.
Anyway, take a look at my tag cloud, to the top-right of this post.
Archive calender
Before: an increasingly long list of months of blog archive.
After: a neat little calender in which you can click a date to view that day’s post (if there was one).
No plugin required for this one; just paste this bit of php in the right place in the WordPress theme and WordPress does the rest: <?php get_calendar(); ?>
Good eh?
Facebook badge
Finally, the last addition to my blog website today was my own personal Facebook badge - the photo of me and my Facebook status to the top-left of this post. Tony had made one of these and he showed me how. Just go to your Facebook profile page and scroll right to the bottom where there’s a link to create your Facebook badge. You get to customise the badge a bit, according to what information you want it to show. Facebook then generates the bit of HTML code that you need to paste into your blog page. And that’s it.
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