I’m sorry but Audi put iMacs in their showrooms and then run Windows on them. Some things are unforgivable.

I totally missed this one, more about it later I’m sure but for now a bit more here

OK so there is something that has been troubling me for a while…
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I am not aware of any evidence that Stoneage people sat around waiting for the Online Delivery Van from the supermarket of their choice. In the past if we wanted something we had to physically go and get it. Nowadays thing are different. We can, if we choose, veg in front of the screen and make the goods come to us.

The same goes for news. Yes there is still a town crier in Topsham, where I live, he has a nice little label on the back of his nice little Rover. On Saturday we go to the paper shop because it makes us feel that the weekend is with us. True we could turn the telly on for news, but, now with computers and RSS feeds news can come to us, on demand, in the flavour that we desire.

We also get notification of our friends’ lives to compare, contrast and fret over with Facebook. We get those necessary minute by minute updates via Twitter and interesting oh so essential insights through blogs. We can feed our (British) obsession for the weather and convey our day to day endeavours to the wider world through a fully synched Google-iCal-Nokia-Suite-calendar-widget-thingy.

Then we can sit worrying because we know we have forgotten some aspect of this helpful technology but don’t know which. In the past we worried about the gas or the tap being left on now I suppose it is ‘is my firewall operating?’ We can also add a certain piquancy to our annoyance when the various online alarms start going off just after the meeting that we have just set off for has been cancelled, via text of course.

But all this technology can be useful and fun, it just needs a bit of management and this is where Start pages come in.
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Just in case this seems like a load of tosh, as predicted from my last post ‘youtube cigar smoking football players’ now occupies position two in the Google rankings (using the cleared cache and history, not logged on Firefox not Safari search…). This is an overnight increase of four positions.

Good News!

“Man-willing-to-look-after-aston-martin” Is now (overnight) occupying top Google ranking. No replies yet but fingers crossed. Top news though pop-pickers.

Andrew Butler, Design, Photographer, Topsham, Exeter, Devon …

4 Feb 2010 … Andrew Butler a Designer & photographer based in Topsham Exeter Devon. Design Credo, design, photography and SEO for websites, …
designcredo.co.uk/…/man willing to look after aston martin/ – 12 hours ago -

I suspect further lame postings referencing the need for Beyoncé to help in light household duties will not go down well at homé.

Further to my last post about collecting the data, I have just noticed that a particular search string that has led people to this site is ‘youtube cigar smoking football players’. Imagine my surprise?

Sure enough if I throw this string back into Google I find my own site listed at number six.

Andrew Butler, Design, Photography, Topsham, Devon | Design Credo …

Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’ … men and children (v. young) stood in the street trading football cards, cigar smoking men trading post cards. … WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better. …

So there you go, sometimes you don’t get what you expect but clearly I will now have improved the ranking of this search string by referencing it again.

With that in mind then,

Man willing to look after Aston Martin

Man would treasure a Leica M9

Man needs a Colnago Mexico

As a psychology student, the importance of being seen to be ’scientific’ in our endeavours was regularly stressed and to a point this has affected me ever since. I often get a bit uppity when I hear non-scientific conclusions being reported on Radio Trash News.

I think it is fair to assume that if one searches for something in Google this search will be replicated if one switches browser and searches again using the exact same search string. I think it is also fair to assume that if one has a Google account the search results will be the same whether or not one is logged into that account at the time.

I will state one final assumption, that is that most people would be surprised to find that those first two assumptions are incorrect.

The way to keep yourself from making assumptions is to ask questions. ~ Don Miguel Ruiz

Collect data and ask questions

As part of my own scientific endeavour I collect data and ask questions. I use Google Analytics, WordPress Stats, I have a stats package built into my website hosting and I regularly examine the raw data. I find interesting trends, sometimes I can’t explain the results, sometimes my data sources fail to correlate. By and large though I get an idea of how transparent my websites are and I get an idea about whether or not my Organic Optimisation Techniques are working. I can see fairly easily if people are using my sites but I also need to check to see if people can find them, so I Google myself, regularly. (I would like to point out that I am not alone here, lots of people do this.)

I have previously mentioned that the implications of Googling one’s own name are different for individuals and global brands. People know Starbucks but probably don’t all know Andrew Butler (yet). Further to this Andrew Butler is quite a common name.
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It started as a farewell lecture by a terminally ill professor. Now Randy Pausch’s last goodbye is making millions rethink life By Tim Walker

We ate last night in China-Town in London in The New World, a restaurant that I first went to over 20 years ago. To be honest it hadn’t really changed at all. In fact I ‘m not certain it had even been decorated but that was what I wanted, the food was enjoyable and the service friendly.

When I was first there I was a student. At college we used very early Apple Macs in the labs and the adventurous were word processing their work. There were no mobile phones, no internet, and no email. The Photographer’s Gallery (where I am now) was near Leicester Square, whereas it is now just off Oxford Street.

Walking round London some things change a lot but others seem not to at all. Earlier I had a double expresso in The Bar Italia in Soho. The Gaggia machine was ‘old school’, hand pulled, refreshingly quiet whilst still making exceptional coffee. On the large screen TV, Murray was getting through to the semi-finals in the Australian Open much to the enjoyment of the Italian and Eastern European staff. Take the screen out and the setting would have been difficult to date, maybe the clothes would give the game away.

Some things change, some things stay the same, some things should change, but stay the same.

We Are The People Who Try

I am just coming out of a intense week or so of website building. The customer wanted something a bit different, saw the way the Apple presents previews of images and said I want that. I now know how to make that happen on a website. As Fahti the swimmer says, “we are the people who try”. I can’t think of a period of my life when I have done so much learning, independent learning, the ultimate aim of the education system. The information is out there, accessible (subject to cautious analysing and filtration of course). There is a huge generosity of spirit too, with people wanting to share ideas and knowledge. This is a good thing (I think) but very different to twenty years ago.

The other day I spoke to someone who only recently learnt how to cut and paste on her computer. This may seem strange but she has always used Macs where there is a long history of drag and drop. She has always just pulled what she wanted from one document and dragged it straight on to another. Macs have always had a very visual appeal, there is a strong visual metaphor and I suspect that for this reason they appeal to very different people. I am always surprised when I hear people complain about how difficult macs are to get to grips with, for me at least they seem very intuitive. However when I attended a night class that used the Windows platform I felt like a complete and utter numpty. Whatever though the Mac Vs PC seems to get to peoples’ core.

In my house now I regularly have a number of computers, currently a Mac G3(BW) desktop, a G3 Pismo PowerBook, a G4(DA), a G4 MacMini (my FTP server) and a Unibody MacBook Pro. This tally sometimes swells when two other current MacBooks come to visit as well as my son’s Toshiba PC. Apart from the G3 they all work, the only reason the G3 doesn’t is because I sold the processor. Oh there is one more, maybe the most important, I have an old Dell laptop, with a German keyboard.

So they all work, the ten year old Pismo is used by the children, it’s rather slow now but hey? But what of the Dell, what’s that all about?

Well, I use it to test websites (to destruction). You see, it is old and slow, but uses the much loathed IE6 browser. IE6 is still used by around 10% of users but unfortunately it is no longer compliant with current web standards. This means that in order to get a website to work on this browser designers will have to design in a number of hacks and workarounds. This invariably means that a compromise has to be made either to the visual appeal or the functionality and yes I realise that these two should be inherently linked. So, when it is testing time, yes it is lovely to see how good the site looks on the Mac but unfortunately much as I love them the truth is that Safari accounts for 3.4% of the (browser) market, and as such the hopeless old IE6 with all of its failings will be the window that three times more people will use.

The good news is that 46% of people will use Firefox which is a pretty good browser. Increasingly design companies are dropping support for non-complient browsers. You can get a WordPress plugin to display a large gaudy banner if the viewer is using IE6. Somewhat devilishly this plugin can be set to crash IE6 although I haven’t felt the need to be so annoying on this site.

Some grow old gracefully and get a bit slower with age whereas others get really a little too grumpy for words.

A couple of days after this post the BBC reported that “Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a cyber attack on the search engine.” (more)

As found at the BBC