Tricks of the Trade

Every trade has its own tricks that make life easier, and clean up your mistakes. Here is an article that outlines a few Tricks of the Trade for several professions. Good tips if you've ever wanted to know how to fake it as a street musician or what your butcher just yelled to his mate out the back.

Microsoft Press to Publish "Beyond Bullets" Book

Recently Cliff Atkinson announced that Microsoft Press will be publishing a "Beyond Bullets" book.

The content of the book will expand upon many of the ideas in this blog, but present them in a more methodical and accessible way. And it will introduce new ideas and innovations well beyond anything you've seen here, keeping them all grounded in practicality.

I've got his blog on my blogroll (at right) because of how powerful and effective his communication tips are, so this will definitely be an addition to the McDonald library.

HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future

Blog Maverick is a blog run by the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and one of the guys behind HDNet, who provide high-definition TV.

He has a post about HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future where he makes some interesting points:

1. DVD will always be limited in size (even if it moves up to 50GBs), but portable hard drives aren't - and keep on getting larger capacity.

2. Making movies/programs in high-definition and then distributing via hard drives will allow media companies to kill off internet piracy - because the files will be too large to share over public networks.

HDNet are already having to compress their programs down to fit the broadcast standards. Putting them uncompressed on hard drives would increase the quality that people could watch them at on their TV at home.

RedSheriff's View of Google

Speaking of Google, Red Sheriff's latest report on internet and technology trends has this to say about Google.com.au:

Google is used most regularly by 42% of Australian Internet users compared to Yahoo at 18%. Other search engines mentioned were Ninemsn (14%) and Altavista (4%). Google achieved the highest level of search satisfaction with 80% of their users very satisfied, compared to Yahoo users of whom 63% gave this response. Peoples' satisfaction with their search engine increased significantly as they became more Internet savvy, indicating it can still take time and practice to learn how to search effectively.

Just Answer the Question

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox, When Search Engines Become Answer Engines, shows how web users no longer value individual sites as much because they know they can find whatever they want on the web using search engines.

I find this myself - there is no one technical site that covers every problem I have - I get my answers by Googling for them, using Google's search engine to scour websites and newsgroups for answers.

Jakob goes on to point out the consequences of this for website owners, and strategies to increase loyal users versus unique visiters.

It is clear that websites cannot create loyal users just by reproducing content found elsewhere on the web, users will rely on search engines to find the pages that are most relevant to their needs and will only stick around if;
 a) Your content is superior to that elsewhere; or
 b) Your contextual links interest them, and/or help them answer their current question.

There is an interesting parrallel in current theories about how Web Services will affect distributed data. Most businesses that operate in multiple locations put up with the need to replicate their data (e.g. contacts lists, sales figures, etc.) around their various locations. Broadband web access and WANs/VPNs have gone some way to reduce this need, but it is still the industry convention.

We replicate because there has been no sensible alternative. Yet replication is an inherently weak and error prone model that causes inconsistency, complexity and huge costs. Web services based interoperability offers interesting solutions to this problem as the new SOAP based Internet standards enable pervasive accessibility.

Business users just want the answer, they don't care which data store it comes from. More to the point, they will have problems with data that is inaccurate or out of date. In the same way as websites need to concentrate on the information that is unique to them, so too might corporate data stores specialise in the data they own, and then use Web Services to make that data accessible to users that might previously have had to rely on a local replica of that data.

I think that Microsoft's commitment to architectures that support Web Services and distributed collaboration (such as .NET, SharePoint Technologies and SQL Reporting Services) will help drive this move to more accessible local data. With SharePoint Portal Server the power of web search engines is harnessed to make corporate data more accessible to all users. In fact it provides better functionality because it handles user authentication, different levels of access permissions and rich meta data.

Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

I'm building a website for my brother-in-law at the moment, and so I decided to eschew table structures completely in favour of CSS2 styles. Everything was sweet in Mozilla Firefox, but then when I check it out in IE 6 weirdness abounds (and why does this not surprise me?).

So I am out and about searching for good CSS help and I along the way I found that A List Apart has a great set of Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks, & Techniques. I especially like the one for HTML forms, which I am using with some minor mods (I got rid of the span for the labels and styled the LABEL tag instead).

Producing Quality CSS in a Team Environment

Digital Web Magazine has a great article titled A Matter of Styles: Producing Quality CSS in a Team Environment. The article points out that with the widespread adoption of CSS standards by large corporates, web designers are being forced to work together on stylesheets - something many web designers are not used to when it comes their CSS.

The best example of how much personal choice is available to designers is the specification of colour, a relatively simple aspect of web design (use hex numbers right?). Here is the problem for the designer updating CSS stylesheets maintained by others:

His find-and-replace dreams were quashed by more methods of color notation than he’d care to think about: some of the application’s developers prefer to write #003366 in its entirety; others are fans of the terse #036; a few sadistic souls apparently ditched hex notation altogether, and opted for rgb(0, 102, 153).