John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Graffiti and arrogance: 31 October 2003: SPAIN: Some graffiti I can handle. I can see how graffiti can be an art form, and how in a concrete and depressing landscape where there are few opportunities for contributing to society it's a beautiful cry from human hearts. But inside Gaudi's boggling Sagrada Familia I simply couldn't understand the thousands of scratched "Geoff & Gina were here" messages. So I'm going to rant, OK?; I felt the same, actually, as a kid when I visited Stonehenge in the days when you could actually wander around between the stones, and saw similar graffiti there.; I think I dislike arrogance more than anything, and I think that stems from my genes. I'm very tall, so I tend to get noticed and I've never had to be loud to make my point. That's lucky. I accept that others have more forceful personalities and that's fine. Also I'm often 'in the way', particularly at events where I'll easily block the view of the person behind me. Since I can see from the back of any crowd, I gravitate there, giving everyone a view. So I tend to operate at the periphery of things, and with respect for others. I'm a great listener, and I see everything. I can absorb from a whole room and reach a conclusion.; Anyway, in the Sagrada Familia you are in the presence of greatness. Not only is it the most ambitious of Gaudi's work, but it's also a church. Now, I'm not religious, but I do have respect. So what I can't wrap my head around is what makes a person think they are big enough or important enough to graffiti inside the Sagrada Familia. And why would someone with such little respect want to pay to visit it?; It ties in with something I heard Germain Greer say, that the wheels of society used to be oiled by politeness. She said she didn't understand or didn't agree with the common "I'll speak as I find", "I'll tell it like it is", "at least I'm honest" attitude that's becoming prevalent. What's wrong with keeping some hurtful or damaging thoughts to yourself? I agree with that, we should be spreading good feeling, not bad.; I'm about people power, I believe in enabling people, it's what I try to do all the time in my work. So arrogance gives me a huge problem because that single arrogant person or organisation behaves with no regard for anyone or anything else. I take it personally, 'anyone or anything else' includes me, so I see no reason to give that person or organisation anything at all.; Yep, that definitely winds me up, can you tell?
Proper chuffed: 30 October 2003: The Tin Shop have used my design for their website as the basis for their latest stationery . I think that's wonderful, I'm glad they like it so much.
What does telly make us?: 28 October 2003: SPAIN: Another ponder, this time without a conclusion. So, Spanish life on the street must mean the Spanish are more skilled interpersonally, perhaps more friendly, than us Brits who tend to sit in our homes of an evening (because of the weather) and historically watch telly but more recently play computer games or surf the net.; But is that true? Brits have pubs where we can interact. I was thinking that the Brits have a good television, film, multimedia industry because, basically, of our weather. But then if the Spanish are more interpersonal because they spend all their time outside with their mates, then storytelling and entertaining and knowing how to engage others is just as useful a skill when devising multimedia entertainment. I wonder if the Spanish do good stand-up comedy, or theatre?
Internet purchase in the time it takes to make a mug of instant coffee: 27 October 2003: My partner's not particularly interested in the Internet, quite rightly being more interested in human things like conversation. Anyway, on Sunday we set off to the local B&Q to buy a simple pair of chrome poles and fittings to turn a very small room in our house into a wardrobe, no problem surely. The poles I needed were just short of 1.5m long. B&Qs price for those and fittings, admittedly 25mm diameter, was about £25 plus the cost of driving out there in the first place which I reckon was about £3 and the time we spent doing it. Now, I hardly ever shop on price, and particularly I have a problem with low prices if I think that I'm saving money at the cost of a third world worker or two getting a square meal, healthcare, education and basic health and safety. But metal tubing doesn't make me think of third world manufacturing, and this seemed steep. All the while also, my partner was, with considerable humour, ranting about how she hated B&Q. She even threatened to write out her 100 reasons why she hated it. Starting with the car park.; Previously, I'd taken a surprise forward step in persuading her that the Internet is good when we had a racing pigeon come and rest in our garden for a few days. I was able to look up what to do with it, how to support it, and even, once I'd read its tag number, I managed to find out who owned it (although that required a human operator coming back to me, for some reason the database wasn't online anywhere). Cue my partner saying "ah, now I can see a use for the Internet .. I mean how else would you have found out how to care for the pigeon". I really, really must be doing something wrong if after all this time that's the most persuasive I've been :-).; Anyway, when we got back from B&Q, I set a challenge. I'd find the poles cheaper online in the time it took her to make us both a cup of instant coffee. She volunteered that I should signal once I'd powered up the computer, and only then would she click the kettle on. We were agreed.; Before I say what happened, I've an admission. I wasn't sure I'd succeed in this challenge. Shopping on the Internet can be pretty difficult, so I don't do a lot of it. Amazon I use, obviously but when I want something I do tend to physically go shopping for it as I spend all day at home on the Internet and it's nice to get out once in a while.; Well, it worked. In the time it took Ali to make me a cup of instant coffee, I'd found Fox DIY. We managed to find what we wanted and order it, and the total cost was about £15. It was painless, even joyful, barring one or two programming errors (I got a 'beautiful' error by populating a basket, doing some further browsing, and then clicking the checkout menu option). So now she knows, the Internet's good for escaping B&Q and rescuing racing pigeons. Pity we can't seem to escape the impending gloom of a trip to IKEA (they don't seem to sell online, but the online help centre's pretty well done). We did say we'd never go again. Maybe I need to get on the net .... (I did, I failed to find what we want online :-( ); As an afterthought, I do try to send a praise email when I meet good Internet service, so I thought I'd do that to Fox DIY. So I clicked on the link to the in-house service/company that designed the site. It was a bad link. So I tried the contact-us link on the site, it gave "CGI Wrapper Error: Could not stat script file! Last Error: No such file or directory [2]". Wow. Now just picture that in the real world. Imagine you're in the shop, you're walking up to the service desk and just as you reach it, you fall down a big hole. You wouldn't go back a second time would you? It just needs sorting.
Funding content: 27 October 2003: Another Roger Black comment, this time about content. Magazines spend about 60% of their budget on content. So, he says, web sites should do the same otherwise, after the fascination of the navigation system has died away, there'll be nothing left to keep the readers' interest.; Thinking about The Tin Shop I guess they've spent many happy hours data entering information about their tins, I estimate about 176 hours, whereas I've spent about 800 hours building the site overall, including learning PHP and so on, and over a couple of years. But over time, obviously, this proportion will change. Development will slow but data entry will continue. So I suppose that 60% figure is for a mature publication.; Now I can live with this, I like evolutionary development. I could happily start a new website with someone, they'd spend 60% of the budget on content, I'd spend 40% of it on site development and we'd start with something very basic and build from there with a whole lot of small iterative changes. In my experience, however, most clients (and particularly most finance managers) don't think that way, preferring to spend the money developing a site, have a launch date, and then pretty much forget about development (it doesn't work that way of course, there's almost always ongoing maintenance and improvement to do). In that scenario, the 60% figure is useless, because at an extreme it's 100% software development to start with, then almost 100% content development thereafter, and whether you hit 60% for content management or not depends solely on when you measure it.; It's an interesting point, however, that the cost of website development is not just the total of the invoices from someone like me, but also the larger cost of creating the stuff that will go on the page.; However, I can't just leave it there because I can write content (I used to write press releases and press articles for a living), take photographs (I've an active interest in photography), write music (I have an amateur studio at home) and have various multimedia skills so I'm quite capable of contributing to the content creation too. Much of the The Tin Shop static page wording and some of the photographs on the 'about us' page are mine, the articles in the kitchen site (that's not public yet) are mine and he said "the good thing about you is we get professionally done Internet and marketing in one package".
Interesting in a geeky way: 25 October 2003: The most interesting stuff sometimes comes out of the blue, and these products look pretty cool http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,46398,00.html, and http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,46397,00.html (thanks to Mike for pointing these out). What interests me most is that this is a thought thing rather than anything else. What's made Nokia come up with these products rather than, say, Pentax in the camera world. I think it's because the camera people are all trying to take themselves seriously, to produce quality photography. Nokia is less bothered about that, and more bothered about the fact that their phones are held dear to their users, that they are hugely personalisable so they become part of the user's identity, and now they can take pictures let's see how far we can take this. It's a thought thing, a mindset thing. Pentax could have done it ages ago, but they didn't. I love creative thinking, I usually use some De Bono techniques (I love him :-) ) to help and it works an absolute treat. Try me.
Firefly: 25 October 2003: When I was an adolescent punk and music was on vinyl and bought in record shops I had this idea that a shop could have a computer terminal in which you'd create your own profile, and it would match up with others' profiles and recommend some music to you.; I was a little slow in picking up on the Internet lifestyle thing and so missed out on the pleasure of FireFly, which apparently did this and much much more, online. So I researched that a little and found this profoundly depressing piece. Is it any wonder Microsoft has created such a pool of bad feeling against it?; Then I discovered this interactive Internet radio station. I'm having a little local difficulty getting it to work with my players, but otherwise it looks wonderful.
eBooks: 25 October 2003: There's a piece in PC Pro about eBooks about how eBooks can offer so much more than ordinary books. Things like animation, software tools, and multimedia. And now books don't have to be linear, you can just explore. Really? Wow. But, isn't that what the Internet does? Could it possibly be that having failed to gain absolute control over the the Internet companies (Microsoft features heavily in the article) are seeking to gain control over the publishing market with books that have tight digital rights management (so you can't resell them or share them with friends). I can see how more research is needed to make reading from screen as easy as reading from paper and I look forward to those handheld display devices and digital paper achieving that goal. But when they do, won't they be connected to the Internet which offers all those advantages and more?; Also, the idea of an eBook is that it's as cheap as a paperback. With all the costs of creating the multimedia content suddenly a book becomes a full feature production (and, err, not a book anymore). And the reader has to buy the display and the remote Internet connection. Sounds expensive to me.; Remote Internet, now that's exciting. Being able affordably to browse the net from wherever you are. So you have information, news, training, trading, and yes, reading materials, the whole gamut of services.
Non-GM soya in the Amazon: 23 October 2003: A television news report last night (I can't find a link to it though, sorry) focussed on how the Amazonian rainforest was being cut and burned at an ever increasing rate because of European demand for non-GM (genetically modified) soya which can be grown on the cleared land.; The feeling given was that we Europeans are responsible for destroying this beautiful natural resource by continuing to want non-GM soya.; I found this biased. How about this slant on the same story? The advent of GM crops and the lack of consumer demand for it has made non-GM crops increasingly valuable, turning the economic argument for growing GM crops on its head. Yet once a country grows a GM crop its natural, similar crops become tainted. Brazil has found a lucrative market in non-GM soya and aims to overtake the US in its production. It's a risky business however as, once contaminated, the crop will forever more be GM.; Being an island nation, Britain is perfectly suited to banning GM forever and concentrating its efforts in what is a real growth industry, organic food production. This would have huge consequences for Britains health, attractiveness and productivity.
Not forgetting: 22 October 2003: Apparently most people quickly forget what they learned at uni. Being a mature student I didn't want to go to uni only to forget what I was being taught, and I could see how I could use almost everything we covered in 'real life'. So I wanted to retain as much as possible (I didn't want to have to relearn it another time, and it seemed a good way of getting my money's worth), and I wanted to really test what I'd read ages ago in Tony Buzan's book "Use your head". This proved exceptionally useful and I owe my first class degree to him.; Anyway, I'm now four months out of university (it feels like years) and I'm still using the Buzan systems to keep uni stuff alive. In all honesty, there's just not enough time to implement his systems in full either during the course or after, but I am doing as much as possible to keep the mind maps and my knowledge alive in the areas which my clients are using. For instance, I've just been revising network design for a legal client (more on him later).; The upshot is that I think I have the systems to keep alive and to update my university knowledge, so not only did I get a good score, but I'll forget less of what I once learned, and I have an efficient system for adding more knowledge all the time. This is crucial because IT is always changing.; For you, my lovely potential new client, this means I mostly know what I'm doing, and if I don't, it won't take me long to find out.; As an example of the systems in practice, I wrote some revision software in Java which works like revision prompt cards .. ie. it asks you questions about your chosen subjects. I've more than a thousand questions in the system at the moment. It's more likely to ask you a question that you got wrong last time, so gradually it focuses on the stuff you don't know until you do know it, and doesn't waste time on stuff you do know. I used it to learn some Spanish before going away. The great thing about it is that it practices recall which is a quite different memory system than recognition and is the most important for passing exams.
Retailing individually crafted items: 22 October 2003: SPAIN: I may well be being naive but I got to wondering why there aren't more shops selling individually crafted items. I'm a little bored now wandering into shops that clearly source their trinkets from the same wholesalers. There used to be a jewellers in Nottingham who sold entirely jewellery from individual artists and he had clients from all over the UK and the world (but he died, unfortunately and I think the shop's no longer there). Also I heard a very persuasive woman from one of the crafts guild type organisations talking up a London exhibition. I agree with her that as technology progresses, what makes people human becomes clearer and more important. To own something that another person has made using great skill, knowledge and experience is special and will become more so. The value of contemporary art has risen over recent years on the back of this idea and art galleries obviously do sell individually 'crafted' works. Jewellery is fairly obvious too. But what about toys (I know of a manufacturer of wooden toys in Beeston, Nottingham who presumably would be glad of an additional outlet or two), kitchen stuff, furniture, foods (home grown food), clothes. What if I were to set up a website to sell such things? The Internet is a one-to-one relationship tool. One of the great things about the Internet for me is how it empowers individuals. Putting buyers in touch with craftspeople would be a great way of using the Internet, and it could work completely internationally. Ooh, exciting :-)
Caterpillar and snail: 21 October 2003: SPAIN: At one point in a greengrocers we noticed a snail on the cabbage, and at another the (English) people next to us in the El Corte Inglés canteen complained about a caterpillar in their salad. Obviously both are fairly unsavoury. But the last time I saw animals in my greenery was when a caterpillar floated to the top of a pan of boiling home grown cauliflower, and that must be thirty years ago now. So exactly how much insecticide do we Brits use to keep our greens bug-free? And how come the Spanish don't appear to be so bothered? I felt good about seeing those bugs because to be it meant the food was good, not so sprayed, real, and life sustaining.
Life on the street: 20 October 2003: SPAIN: On a lighter note, one of the highlights of the Spanish trip was arriving in Barcelona and going shopping, and at about 8pm near the top of Rambla Catalunya on Friday 3 October the doors of a church were open to the street and inside, a wedding (I give the details in case anyone reading knows the church, or who it was getting married). That just summed up the 'life on the street' feeling of Spain for me. Suddenly I wasn't shopping, I was out living. Beautiful.
Women and feminism: 20 October 2003: Here's another from the Observer "Women lose white-collar pay struggle". In my youth (which is a good twenty years ago now) I regularly read Spare Rib (a feminist magazine now defunct). I recently read Germaine Greers "The Whole Woman" in which she says she's "ready to get angry again". Too right. Where is the female revolution I looked forward to? I read this recently too "Crime puts Iraqi women under house arrest" which is quite sickening and reminds me of how male the whole Iraq, terrorism, Afghanistan thing is. After all the work that RAWA did and is doing, the initial coalition set up to rule Afghanistan after the Taliban were removed contained (I understand) not a single woman nor any representative of RAWA. As a male, I clearly can't further feminism. I just wish I could see something happening to further the female perspective on all this.
A weird foxhunting piece: 20 October 2003: A piece in the Observer yesterday got me thinking "The wrong fox". 75,000 foxes killed each year by hunting with dogs it says. Surely not. I've only ever heard a foxhunt at a distance. This implies hunts kill 200 foxes each and every day. A quick Internet search reveals other figures .. 7,500, 10,000, 16,000, and 25,000. Apparently there are 311 hunting packs. I guess if each went out every weekend and caught four foxes 75,000 is possible. Whatever, my point is, if we're going to stop foxhunting let's do it with facts. Let's be the reputable side.
Threatened: 17 October 2003: SPAIN: Interestingly, the only time I felt threatened in the whole time in Spain was when walking through a small Tossa de Mar street past a shop where some British holidaymakers were standing outside. Everyone else was warm and welcoming and friendly. No wonder the British have a reputation abroad. It reminds me of something I caught of one of Michael Palin's 'around the world' programs where he encountered the worst attitudes back in London at the end of his travels. Well, I can't change the British but I can aspire to be as friendly, warm and welcoming as the very best. Sometimes the only thing you can do is improve yourself.
Social navigation: 17 October 2003: SPAIN: Twice while we were walking around Barcelona English-speaking tourists came up to us to ask for directions. We could help a little. This is real social navigation, as is the evening chat in the hotel bar where you swap stories with fellow holidaymakers about what's good and not-so-good to do locally. There's a website equivalent. For example, a list of the top ten items viewed, or ranking articles by their readers scores both use input from visitors to improve the next visitor's experience. Amazon's "those who bought this also bought these" feature is social navigation too. This can be taken much further and I'm working on it but I'm having to keep quiet. More later if I can.
Don't click this: 17 October 2003: Working through Roger Black's "Web sites that work" which is ages old now but I thought I'd work through it as part of a clearout of my books, I rather like his idea that the "Don't click here" button is the one people will click because "people want to do what they're not supposed to do". That's a bit of a dilemma for us system developers. So we spend all our lives developing systems, and because users are human, they instinctively don't want to use them. They want to feel like they've found their own route through. Put another way, this is about the user being in control. It's about facilitation not rigidity. You can lead a user to your page but you can't make him click.
Just a simple step would make it alright: 17 October 2003: SPAIN: We stayed at the Hostal Abrevadero for a couple of nights while we were in Barcelona and yes it's clean, safe, spacious, well appointed, the bathroom's great, the bed's comfortable, there's someone on the door 24/7, and you can book over the Internet. But we were left with a poor impression because, believe it or not, of the state of the emulsioned walls. They were scuffed and dirty, with greasy marks where people's heads had rested while sat in bed. The point is this. It takes almost no money and very little time to emulsion a wall. This hotel has a great location, all the systems work, the facilities are fine. To fall over on such a simple thing that anyone could fix is virtually criminal. It's like when I complained to Morrisons (a supermarket) that I couldn't find any organic cheese any more yet the label was still on the shelf, what did I find the next time I shopped? Organic cheese? Not on your life, no, the shelf label had been removed. So I stopped shopping there. All the facilities and systems that Morrisons has, and I make a shopping decision on that one thing. The management must despair, but that's how consumers make their decisions. Do you have an emulsioned wall issue in your own business? I wonder if I have?; OK, more on the Barcelona hotel. The website makes much of the hotel's quiet, yet central location, and my partner spotted (but I didn't) very strict rules in for occupancy .. no drink, absolute silence after 9pm, and occupy your own room after 9pm not anyone elses. This led us to believe we'd found a quiet sanctuary. But of course, people arrived in the night talking loudly in the corridor sometimes for ages, one guy whistled all the way to his room, and so on. We expected this in what is a reasonably cheap hotel in a city that never sleeps, but the 'rules' set new expectations which were later dashed. This is a lesson about managing expectations. If you want to create a quiet hotel (and what a good idea) you have to be prepared to enforce the rules you set. More basically, I never saw the rules, so probably most others didn't either. They were most likely completely unaware of them. They should have been more prominent, and when you collect your keys each time you arrive back, the hotelier should re-inforce the rules "remember it's after 9pm so please be extra quiet as others are sleeping".; Finally, the breakfast. A completely sorry affair, coffee and things in bags (eg. lifeless plastic wrapped pan de chocolate). No problem, except with just a little more effort it could have been a pleasant experience to make us want to return. As it is, we resolved to earn more so we could stay in future at a proper hotel :-)
Antonio Gaudi: 16 October 2003: SPAIN: The first time we went to Barcelona about seven years ago was purely to see the Gaudi architecture. We took two days and we were blown away. This time we could be more relaxed, but there's no surpassing the man. Here are a few links for anyone interested: Antonio Gaudi.
Toytown: 16 October 2003: SPAIN: It was a little like going back to an old BBC version of village life, Trumpton perhaps. Tossa de Mar has neatly clipped hedges, tidy trees, and a policeman ensures that people don't come to any harm on the zebra crossing. The town certainly feels safe and pleasant to walk around, including at night. It feels good, it feels really good. While us Brits cut costs at every turn during Thatcher's era, and continue to persue efficiency, the Spanish police banter with children as they cross the road. I know I'm being flippant, I know the Spanish have fine and efficient manufacturing and the builders seemed miraculous (more later). My serious point is this. I liked that feeling of everything being in order. It made me feel confident that all was well. If we can give the same impression on a website, that all is well, everything's been thought through, and there are more resources than are required for the task, maybe it will instill confidence in the website. Confidence is enormously important in e-commerce. So this is not whimsy, it could double your sales.
Beauty in all things: 16 October 2003: SPAIN: I'll write a single disclaimer now for all my Spanish observations. Clearly I only went around Catalunya so I can't speak about the rest of Spain nor other Spaniards (but I may sound like I am). OK, that over with, here goes.; One of the things that really struck us was the Spanish ability and desire to add beauty whereever they could. Ali spotted a firehose in Barcelona that was designed to be beautiful and was wound with real care and art. Antonio Gaudi created some of the most exciting buildings, furniture and artworks we know of. On a previous holiday in Nerja I got the impression that Spanish fashion and style was conservative. Now I see how conservatism can flower into quality. Rather than trying outrageous new ideas, it feels like Spanish style is about doing the right things very well, and that leads to some really fabulous clothes, art and architecture.; At university we were taught to be software engineers, where an engineer is someone who applies scientific principles to design, construction and maintenance of whatever it is they are building. It's the same thing .. using knowledge to do the right things, developing your skills in doing the right things, and eventually creating things of beauty that also work incredibly well, even creating things that are beautiful because they work incredibly well. That's why my focus in website or software development is always to get the system to work well first, and since most of my systems involve a user, I design systems that are easy for a wide range of humans to use. Beauty comes from great functional design.
I've been a Tossa: 16 October 2003: We've been on our holidays, to Tossa De Mar on the Costa Brava of Spain. I've lots of thoughts to offload so I'll do that over the next month or so and prefix them with SPAIN:. First of all though, just for the record, Tossa De Mar is just perfect if you like mooching around some shops and going to bed early. If you want nightlife or you have kids, go somewhere else, I don't even think the beach is safe for kids (but what would I know, I don't have any).; I did just want to namecheck the Hotel Hermes which you can also book (at least in the UK) through Thomson Small and Friendly. It's a small, privately run hotel. The three women who seem to make it all happen, Isabel, Francisca and Guillermina have been there for fourteen years, so something must be working well. My partner and I stayed here seven years ago and a lot's happened in our lives over that time. Hermes has improved its facilities, but it was a shock and a joy to see the same people working there. Francisca has kept her awesome sense of humour (you only have to look at her and you both start grinning), and Guillermina who cleans the rooms has worked there even longer. So, if you want a friendly hotel in a quiet resort with enough shops to keep you interested, I can definitely recommend it.; One very good point about Tossa De Mar is that it's an excellent location for some local touring. Barcelona, for a start, is less than ten Euros and 90 minutes away by Sarfa bus, and the bus station in Tossa is just a hundred yards from the Hermes Hotel. Barcelona is the home of Gaudi (more above) and the Picasso museum. You can get to all three of the Salvador Dali museums, and all three are worth visiting, although you'll need a car to get to them. If you do go to Port Lligat, we also enjoyed visiting Port de la Selva. The Sarfa bus company also runs to Girona which is an additional inspiration.