supersonic feet

Browsing my way through the products Amazon had deemed worthy to recommend me today (the gimmick of the new AJAX ratings made it more interesting and less hassle), I noticed a bit of a trend in the way I was rating products/marking them to be ignored/leaving them in the list that could be turned into a handy feature of the site.

There were of course those which I already owned, bought elsewhere, and which I simply marked as owned and gave a rating.

There were products I had absolutely no interest in and even felt a bit affronted that Amazon would think I might like (but fair enough, their learning systems aren’t quite that advanced yet so as to recognise sub-genres and trends within them).

There were products I might actually buy in the near future when I’ve got a bit of spare cash.

Finally, there were products I’d quite like, but have no intention of buying at the moment as they’re still at/close to full price and I just don’t want them that much. Stuff like a film I’ve already seen, wouldn’t mind owning, but won’t spend £15 on. It’s here that I feel the big shops like Amazon could provide a service that might at first seem against their interests, but might in fact make them that bit more cash in the long run… (more…)

I’ve just found (and started playing with) a PHP framework called PHPonTrax that’s basically a PHP port of Ruby on Rails.

I did mention quite a while ago I was going to look into doing some development in RoR, but a hectic work schedule has meant I haven’t actually got round to it properly yet. The main problem is that not only do I have to learn Rails’ workings, I need to learn Ruby too and the doubling of required effort means it’s gonna need a bit more dedicated time to sit and get to grips with it properly.

And so, in steps PHPonTrax. I spotted this only by coincidence when looking at the Sitepoint Ruby forum where someone was after a comparison of the two.

It’s very clear that PHPonTrax is still in its infancy and doesn’t implement everything Rails does just yet, but it’s most definitely in a workable state from my first 30 minutes checking it out and it certainly absolves me of the immediate need to learn Ruby in order to use a nice framework like Rails. As a result, I’m going to play about with Trax for a while to aid my existing PHP development and at some point I’ll hopefully get the time to properly sit down and learn Ruby as its ‘everything’s an object’ style looks very nifty indeed (plus it gets me the proper Rails).

At any rate, check out PHPonTrax and/or Ruby on Rails depending on your interests.

… or some other Hollywood-style tagline to suitably over-egg the release of a new website.

The company I work for (Net Effects), is moving servers and moving designs with it. The old website wasn’t great in terms of either visuals or accessibility and so it was finally decided that a re-design was in order to better represent the company and its skillset.

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The web design company I work for has a sister company, Ability Media, that handles a number of disability-related web projects including government-backed websites. The sites are all currently in the process of being re-developed and the first phase involved taking the former print magazine, Ability Magazine, online.

Having finished the design and development and with the magazine having been live for a couple of weeks, I’ve now added it to my portfolio.

The real thing is definitely worth checking out though, and will be updated often with a wide variety of articles (the last three have involved the NSPCC’s Full Stop campaign, Motability and clay pigeon shooting; so be sure to check out UK Ability Magazine

I found a great blog on my web travels last night, Niggle. It’s a blog about the niggling details of design that can make or break usability and/or the user experience.

Reading through the posts got me to thinking of the niggles I notice in websites all over the place and after checking out 37signals’ 37better project I thought I’d do a very quick re-work of my own (and I mean quick, dirty and not that ingenious). The first site I came across that had a niggle that cried out to me to be changed was the VG Cats online comic.

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I started using ‘AJAX’ methods a while ago, playing around with it to see what it could do and then actually using it for a client project where their customers needed to be able to submit any number of service requests at once. The traditional way of doing this would be to either leave the customer with the hard work and just let them submit one at a time until they’re done, or to provide an input where they can declare how many requests they wish to make this time and the page will reload with the given number of forms. (more…)