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The best moment for this website ...are actually two. Smashing Magazine selects porcupine colors among hundreds for its 404 error page and for its favicon. Great news and a lot of traffic here.
A blog which made me read it again and again: The personal website of Andy Rutledge. Great posts about what is to be a professional Web designer and fight for it. Hey, Mr. Rutledge, you did exceptional work and thank you for it. It is the absolute bookmark.
The best: (with no further explanation) Jeffrey Zeldman. I hate him and I envy him, that’s all.
The best book I read:The God delusion by Richard Dawkins. It’s a light romance written for people who try desperately to find the love of their life. No?
The strongest thought:“Ambition! You must want a big success and then beat it into submission; you must be as ravenous to reach it as the wolf who licks his teeth behind a fleeing rabbit; you must be as mad to win as the man who, with one hand growing cold on the revolver in his pocket, with the other hand pushes his last gold piece on the ‘Double-O’ at Monte Carlo.”
From the book of Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, via blog.pmarca.com
Some random thoughts
2007 was a year of constant changing. A new home, a new car and a new Mac are enough but not the only changes in my everyday routine. Time passed so fast that I let many things uncontrolled and this is the not good part of the story.
I owe some trips, preferably outside Greece in order to change my view and create new life feedback. (Do I write nonsense here? I think so.) I also want to visit Athens again and again, it is my hometown anyway and I never get bored of it.
This website did change my life in ways I could never think of when I begun. It doesn’t have to do with how many visited it only, but who they did. I can’t provide details right now but I think you know what I mean. porcupine colors grows and becomes the center of my activities and work. Stay tuned.
The only thing I wish for myself is to remain healthy and I wish you the same dear readers. Last year I said that the best is yet to come. Now I say that the best is here but is not over. In fact this is only the beginning.
A CMS is an easy to be used tool for non computer savvy users to manage a website. There are so many CMSs out there which do what they are supposed to do very efficiently because there are great teams of developers to support them. Furthermore, many of these systems are free. What interests me though is not which CMS is the best one but why companies keep developing their owns.
Reason #1: doing certain things with your own CMS
The “lifestyle” of small companies is limited. Customer X wants a website for the company he owns, customer Y wants to develop a personal project and customer Z to support an investment. What do companies do in such cases? They build their own CMS in order to come up to the expectations. The question is why a Web development company decides to take this path instead of using an already developed CMS? I think there are two main reasons:
A company cannot control an external CMS. What I mean is that it is not easy to trust other people to cover your own needs.
There isn’t any CMS which can do everything. As the needs grow a single CMS can’t cope with them.
Both reasons seem quite fair to me. However there’s an objection I need to make. Any platform, any tool needs to be supported in a regular basis by people who know it well. This is why I believe that well known CMSs will always be better than the ones developed by a team of people under a small company. It’s utopia to believe your own CMS would serve you better forever than one which is supported by hundreds of users and developers.
I do believe in open communities of developers and I do think that in the near future we are going to use far more powerful systems than the ones we have now. To add some more salt into the wound I ‘d be much happier with a team of people who can use a lot of different CMSs the way a chameleon changes its colors. This is what I call adaptability, knowledge and power.
Reason #2: marketing
Marketing, the laws of industry, hooking clients etc. are all empty words to me as long as we use them without knowing what they really mean. However, all this emptiness can be a reason for developing your own CMS.
So there’s this clever dick who thinks: “If I convince my clients to use my own CMS they will stay forever with me. It will be very difficult for them to use this system without me.”
Instead of trying to develop a good product, to help a client achieve what he needs to, to provide a solid solution and to support efficiently, this guy messes things up. In this scenario it is most probable to end up with an unhappy customer who won’t trust easily a similar company in the future. Is this business wise?
In other words we reach to a situation where one develops a product in order to trap a client. I know this thought hides a lot of in between steps, but the meaning remains the same. I am not a specialist but I am pretty sure this is all wrong.
To conclude, often a new CMS isn’t always a new tool which can make the life of people easy. It works the same way as when someone who owns some money becomes a CEO. It takes more than just a roll of the dice to do that.
Let’s see what is what: W3C is the association of people and companies who are responsible for the evolution of the Web. W3C’s CSS Working Group is another team of people who take care of CSS and determine the new editions of the platform. This group consists of W3C developers and huge companies such as Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Google. There ‘s no question about the importance of the group.
What really happens in there? Since yesterday there were no designers participating in the group. It sounds ridiculously dump. We are talking about people who implement what the group determines. An equivalent would be a car company which doesn’t give cars to drivers in order to test the new models.
The second thing is such companies can’t get organized easily and work together towards a common target. We are currently using CSS 2.0 and the question is when are going to move to level 2.1? Apparently, not soon.
The result of all these frictions is designers who remain still and keep developing websites the typical way whereas evolution is one step away.
The Opera & Microsoft battle
Opera now publishes an antitrust letter against Microsoft. The letter affords the whole Web community and in there Opera accuses Microsoft for harming Web standards and the whole industry by not focusing on what the group tries to implement and by keeping Internet Explorer a part of Windows. You don’t have to be an expert to see that this letter is a bomb which is going to spoil the whole effort.
Obviously, Opera is theoretically correct. All versions of Internet Explorer, except for the latest one, are far from good. This won’t make Opera create better products and the already slow moving CSS Working Group will stop for good. Furthermore, it is unfair in my eyes. How will Microsoft take it? Will Microsoft guys hug the Opera ones for their tenderness? I don’t think so. I only wish Microsoft ignores Opera.
For all the people who use CSS in their everyday routine this battle is one more car crash which leaves us behind. We do only need the CSS 2.1 specification but also the CSS 3.0, the way Jina Bolton described it in an extraordinary presentation (.pdf file - 7.9MB).
Now what?
Andy Clarke an invited expert in CSS Working Group went further and requested the disbandment of the whole group. He also talked about a new group consisted not by browser vendors but by people who care about the evolution of CSS because this is central to the success of their profession. It is difficult to say if this is going to work really.
How easy is to say “OK, I am going to disband this group and create a new one” when the current participants are the Web? How easy is to leave e.g. Google people out now and ask them later to support the new standards you made without them? It is important to understand that we don’t only need such companies but we also want them in because they are good.
As designers and developers we do need a helping hand in both the areas of creativity (call me CSS, XHTML etc.) and browser’s support. The current form of CSS Working Group needs an overhaul. It sounds rational enough to me to think of a new, smaller and much more flexible team consisting of designers, developers and browser vendors. I am afraid that what is rational is at the same time the most complicated thing in the world.
The website analytics package, Mint, is created by a guru of Web design, S. Inman. It takes almost €20 from your pocket though. I hear people say: “Why should I pay for it when Google Analytics is free and can be easily installed?”
I admit neither I could see why until the moment I used it. The GUI and the way this software works made me happy about this purchase. Now I seldom use Google Analytics. The main advantage of Mint is that it gives you all you need to know in one page. What do you actually need to know? Who came to your page, where from he landed onto it, which pages he visited and how he found you. OK there ‘s something missing: how long he stayed there.
Mint and Analytics give quite the same results, so there ‘s no question about accuracy. To add some salt, I must say that for Mac users there are a few sweets for their dashboard as well. Thus, I use Mint every day and I only go to my Google Analytics page when I need to see some general statistics such as browsers and OS of my visitors.
All in all Mint a tiny luxury for my online life that I love to use and I think I won’t get bored of it easily.
Flickr started out as a place where each member of the website could upload photos and share them with a friend or with the other members. Photos can be organized in sets and have tags according to the photographer’s mood or preferences. There’s nothing extraordinary so far.
Commenting photos is another option provided. Comments can bring members closer to each other but again this feature is just OK. The real fun begins with other features such as notes (special spaces onto photos where comments can be added), connecting photos with places via maps and the feature of groups where a lot of members can share the same virtual space and upload images around a specific subject.
Did I say images? Yes. Flickr is not about photos only. Acting like a huge repository of any type of images is the best thing about it. Flickr now is a place concerning anything which can be shown in a computer screen: wallpapers, screenshots from applications or games, illustration, tutorials, thematic areas, you name it.
Actually, Flickr has become something much larger and important than a photo album. It’s all because of its users. It doesn’t matter if you call this Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 or Web 100.0. What is important is the power of users. At the same time people who run Flickr (you can call me Yahoo!) stayed focused on what we call “visual communication”. They could add tones of irrelevant features but they didn’t. This is the second best thing about it.
On the other hand Flickr created dozens of services concerning its users. Now anyone can show his Flickr images at his own website. He can have any image printed in a book or in a postcard or practically anywhere. It only takes a registration and a few bucks.
Latest news: Flickr introduces Places a virtual space which shows photos from one place e.g. the Eiffel Tower. There’s more: just yesterday Flickr announced online image editing. Try it, it’s free and intuitive.
What’s next? I have no idea but it must be fantastic!
Sigur Ros create music which can’t be described or categorized. Even worse, they sing in their own language. They come from Island but they don’t sing either in icelandic or in english. Instead they use their very own language “hopelandic”.
The first song I listend to was Staralfur. It was a very hot and difficult summer and this song made it bearable. Sigur Ros offer much of their content at their website so it worths the visit.
Recenlty, Sigur Ros announced their film, Heima. Heima means both “at home” and “homeland”. As they say, going back to their home is something they urge to do. They may be famous enough to play anywhere in the world, but playing at home is their real need.
Heima is a patchwork of shows they gave in Iceland. Instead of concert halls they chose to play in deserted fish factories, sylvan fields, darkened caves etc. Being among their friends and inhabitants, following the landscapes, fire and ice, they created a great film in a breathtaking atmosphere. I ‘d love to be there for once.
I admit neither I could see why until the moment I used it. The GUI and the way this software works made me happy about this purchase. Now I seldom use Google Analytics. The main advantage of Mint is that it gives you all you need to know in one page. What do you actually need to know? Who came to your page, where from he landed onto it, which pages he visited and how he found you. OK there ‘s something missing: how long he stayed there.
