The Blog of Jack T Franklin

Interviewed

I got published on other’s blogs the other day so I thought I’d post them here in case you missed them:

Show me your Dock Series! Part 32 

Grace was looking for some people to take part and I did! Gain an insight into my work flow with a detailed look at my dock. Thanks Grace!

An Interview with Jack Franklin

Dan Davies was looking for people to interview so I volunteered (anything for 5 minutes of fame!). This one was pretty light hearted, I’ll admit! Thanks Dan :)

Just Be Yourself

This was all inspired about 2-3 weeks ago when someone I follow on twitter posted something along the lines of

“Wow…I’m now being followed by [famous_person_here]…must tweet good stuff”

I’ve nothing against the person who said this (and if you know who you are, I haven’t stopped following you or anything) but it wound me up slightly. I’ve blogged about this before. One of my biggest peeves:

Guides on how to Tweet

I HATE these things! I read one once that said “Don’t tweet about what you’re doing. No one cares”. It also contained lots of tips…keep tweets short so people can retweet them, don’t swear because it might put people off. Who actually cares?

I’m going to be myself on Twitter. I make no apologies for this and neither should you. Be yourself. If people like you or can relate to your interests (EG: web “stuff”)  then they will follow you. If they don’t like your habits, they wont follow you. But you probably don’t want them following you anyway. If they find the occasional expletive inside a tweet and don’t like it, then it’s their loss. They wont follow you. But you shouldn’t care.

I’m not about to be someone I’m not in an attempt to gain 100000 extra followers.

And I’d like to think you’re not going to either.

The jQuery Flicker

So, I’ve been doing a lot of jQuery work recently and one thing that got me recently was random flickering. I would make an element fade in and out on hover, but when that element was faded in and I hovered over it, it would fade in and out really quickly. This had me baffled for a while. On a very basic level, the code looked something like this (link to JSBin)

If you hover over the red box, you will see a paragraph appear. Now, if you put your mouse on that paragraph, you’ll see the flickering problem.

Why is this?

It’s because you are showing/hiding an element when its sibling is hovered over. Make it appear when the parent is hovered, and no problems.

Hope this helps!

Goals for 2010: Mid Year Review

So I know it’s not anywhere near the end of this current year, in-fact we’re pretty much exactly half way through, but I kind of felt inspired this morning to write such a post. On my old blog I just found this post - titled “Goals for 2010”. As I’m at the mid point, I guess I should review them:

• Post at least once a week on this blog. Mega Fail
• Get my own design going on here – which will mean learning how to integrate Wordpress. Since moved from Wordpress to Tumblr and redesigning as I speak. So 50/50 Fail.
• Launch a new project I’ve been working on with a friend and make some money from it. Fail. College work and other stuff got the better of us. I still believe the idea is a winner though.
• Pass my Driving Test (should have this done pretty soon). MAJOR SUCCESS! WOOHOO!
• Post at least once per fortnight on TheWebSqueeze.com. Mega Fail. I had a break from writing for others, but I had an article on there about 2 weeks ago and more to come.
• Have a post posted on Nettuts.com. Fail
• Get featured on an online web publication. I was interviewed by @bkmacdaddy. MAJOR SUCCESS!
• Get the grades needed to go to Bath Uni to study Computer Science. Don’t know yet, but I’m not hopeful.
• Attend at least 4 Bar Camps. I’m on 1 so far and know of two more I should be going to at least. So still in progress. Gutted I’ve only made 1 so far though.
• Attend at least 3 conferences. 0 so far. But should make it to dConstruct and a couple more possibly. A work in progress.
• Redesign my personal site. 50/50 Win/Fail. I redesigned then decided I didn’t like it so I reverted back.
• Learn Expression Engine. I’m going to have to use it for my job in the next fortnight +, so I’ll be learning it very shortly.
• Learn CodeIgniter extensively and release one plugin for it. Working on it.
• Do enough freelancing to bring in £100 pw. Major fail. However I do now have a web development job which gives me money.
• Extend my Twitter following to 1500. I’ve plateaued out at 730ish it seems.
• Read at least 10 web books. Logo Design Love, CodeIgniter 1.7, The Website Owner’s Manual. I’ve got a couple on pre-order and some more I plan to buy. I’m working on it :)
• Get up to Level 70 on Call of Duty MW2. Sod this. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is much better so I play that.
• Launch one personal side project. For a short while stuffweoverhear.com was alive, but the domain expired and I didn’t see the value in renewing it. If anyone wants to, go ahead! The site does exist at stuffweoverhear.tumblr.com

So…a couple of minor victories there. I did take a bit of an exodus from the web for a couple of months around exam time due to…yeah you guessed it, exams. So…here’s my renewed goals which need to be achieved by January 1st, 2011. 

• Get a full time job as a web developer. I’m currently on a 6 week spell working for @Squizzled, and there is a chance this may turn into full time come September. If it does, then I may well stay, but if not, I need to find another job. I’m not very hopeful of getting the grades for Uni, in all honesty.
• Release a web app that uses CodeIgniter.
• Get an iPad! :D
• Attend 3 more Barcamps.
• Attend 2 Conferences. Toned this down from 3 - I already know the two I’ll be going to.
• Post weekly on a blog. I want to have one post a week somewhere - a guest tutorial on another blog or here.
• Improve my design skills.
• Release a Mac application that is useful (learning Cocoa/Obj C at the moment).
• Read/Buy 7 more web books.
• Be interviewed/featured on another online blog.

Here’s to a successful 6 months!

Barcamp Blackpool 2 Review

So this weekend I travelled up to Blackpool to attend my 2nd Barcamp, Barcamp Blackpool and thought I owe it to the organisers to do a short review about the day (and the night!). Seeing as I’m starting a new job in Scotland with @richquick on Monday, we decided to meet up Thursday evening in Blackpool, take a day out doing the tourist stuff, then head to the pre-party on the Friday evening and attend the event on Saturday. We spent most of Friday at the Pleasure Beach, which was terrific fun and something I’d do again for sure. The pre-party started slowly, we met up with @houghster and @pauldunn_ first and headed to The Counting House, a bar which was the agreed meeting point, where we discovered @mheap on his own. We stayed there for a while and were joined by @lallyd, @BinaryKitten, @SonniesEdge and @Annamaflea. We stayed there until it closed at 1am, by which point we’d all had a bit too much, and me and Mike (@mheap) were singing along to Lady Gaga. We went to another bar, had a couple before myself, Rich and Paul decided we were hungry, so at about 2.30am we headed to the 24 hour McDonalds. Big Mac meals rule. At this point we decided to head back and grabbed a taxi, eventually crashing to sleep at around 4.

We headed to the venue at around 10.40am, in a place right by the Pleasure Beach. The event was well attended, with 125 people showing, a huge increase from the 30-40 that showed last year. I think this caught the organisers by surprise (understandably) and as such the proposed three rooms to do talks in just was not enough, so two more areas were quickly established, albeit without projectors. This was only a minor point and turned out to be a non-issue to be honest. 

The slots were 45 minutes, which was kind of surprising, at BCL7 they were 20 and it had been fine, so I was a bit concerned, but in the end I think 45 minutes worked out fine, perhaps a tiny bit long, I think 35 would have been enough. The introduction “icebreaker” was done by “The Hodge” (@thehodge). It was essentially speed dating, it worked really well and I met a few people, but then it was stopped rather shortly. Another 10 minutes would have been a good idea I think.

After that it was onto the talks. I started with “Debugging with PHP using XDebug” by @bwaine. This was all about efficient debugging with PHP, and avoiding using var_dump. This was an excellent talk, Ben clearly knew his stuff and was very good at presenting, and I’ll be attempting to set XDebug up on my computer this week sometime. 

Then I attended a talk by @timhastings about Twitter Reputation. It essentially showcased his site TagWalk.com, which is absolutely superb. Via various mathematical formulas and logic it can give you an entire load of information about a lot of stuff. For example, you can search for any hashtag and it will tell you about the people who use that tag, you can search for people and find out an entire host of information, and I’m only scratching the surface.

After that it was lunch. PIES! We all had a token and headed out to the Pie van. They were some of the best pies I’d tasted in a long time, absolutely stunning. I then had to quickly head back to the hotel because I’d forgotten my display adapter for my Macbook, but made it back in time for the sessions to start.

I attended @lallyd’s talk on British Sign Language and she taught us some introductory stuff, first the alphabet, then how to introduce yourself, what your job is, compliments and finally swear words. I think it says something about me that I only remember the swear words! I can spell my own name as well, but it was a super talk and really interesting.

Next up it was the Girl Geek Tea Party by a girl called Sam I think, I apologise now because I’m not entirely sure on your name and I’ve forgotten your twitter ID! So please correct me. This may have been a girl geek party but lots of guys went along to watch an introduction to HTML. I admit, if I had known it was that I would have gone elsewhere, as I’m pretty up to speed with HTML, but it was still good fun. It made my laugh to see the reaction to the line “The alt tag is not required” and I think the speaker felt slightly uncomfortable at that point but recovered well. At the end a few people who had never done HTML had made a page and were interested, so that’s fantastic. 

After a short break I was off to Rich Quick’s discussion on why IT education is crap. As a student I can vouch for this, having attended a course a few months back that used tables for layout *vomit*. There was so much to discuss and some really key points, it was interesting. As a student I naturally lay the blame on the teachers but obviously it’s unfounded and to hear things from the other side was good.

I then went to a talk by a gentleman named Walter (again, sorry, but I can’t remember your twitter ID!) on Sociometry. To be honest, I spent most of it refining my talk which I was to do just after, so kind of zoomed in and out of listening, it was interesting though, it involved studying a group of people, in this example students, and asking them who they would take on holiday if they won 4 free tickets. From this teachers could see who was popular, who had a couple of friends and who had none/very little. This obviously helped the teachers identify who they needed to keep an eye on, etc.

Finally it was my turn. I went for “Pimp my jQuery” - a collection of quick tips and tricks which I’ve picked up in  my 18 months or so of using jQuery. If you’re interested you can view it here: http://slidesha.re/doGLVk. I felt the talk was received well, lots of people seemed interested in it and a couple of people there had not used jQuery before, and said they would check it out, which is fantastic. I received some playful abuse by @mheap which I laughed off, especially at one point when he was about to point out something which I was about to say. Small victory to me! @BinaryKitten also commented some useful stuff, however if I’m honest I felt some things she said were a little disappointing, not really in the spirit of Barcamp.

PS - a couple of people watching me took pictures, if you could link me to these I’d be really grateful, and if you do have any questions about jQuery, then I’m @Jack_Franklin on Twitter and jack_franklin on Skype, so feel free to get in touch.

Finally we had a bar with £500 on (which went quickly!) and a magician. He was superb, very very funny and did some good stuff, I was laughing all the way through. We were kicked out at 1am, at which time I was pretty tipsy to say the least, Rich had downed an entire bottle of wine in one go and been up to his usual tricks. I’d had hilarious discussions with Tim Hastings et al as well. We wondered along the front for a bit but I wasn’t feeling great and called it a night at about 2am.

Overall it was superb and if it’s on next year I will be there for sure.

Designing for the iPad - iPointless?

This post all stemmed from the monthly arrival of .Net magazine (aka Practical Web Design outside the UK) in which the key feature was “Designing for the iPad”. I initially tweeted:

Latest issue of .Net just arrived. Main feature? Designing for the iPad. *sigh*.

And then I tweeted this:

Is designing for the iPad that important at this stage? I would have to say absolutely not. Think an entire feature on it is pointless.

Which got a reaction (a good one) from Rob Hawkes with a few tweets, all with valid points:

I’d have to disagree with you there @Jack_Franklin. Designing for touch screen devices is incredibly important right now.

In fact, it’s the most important skill Web developers need to learn. Touch is the future and current sites are shit. /cc @Jack_Franklin

@Jack_Franklin The thing is it’s a different experience to that of your iPhones and Androids so I believe it deserves separate attention.

So I promised to attempt to pull together some form of words to form this blog post. But I’m not sure where to go with it - the title was more of a stupid pun then my actual thoughts. This is how I see it. I’m sure you may well disagree or meet me half way or hate me, whatever.

The iPhone revolutionised the way mobile users browse devices. I’m pretty sure we will all agree on that. For the first time we had a mobile web browser that just displayed most pages in the very same way as on this laptop, and any laptop. It gave a unique experience, a mostly good experience. Of course, some websites were not fully optimised for this new way of browsing - and since then we’ve seen the iPhone become more popular, 2G, 3G, 3GS and soon the iPhone 4. Which has had 10x as many pre-orders as the iPhone 3GS. And now of course, we have the iPad. 

The iPad. Undoubted this offers a completely different browsing experience to the iPhone, and I’ve played with one a few times myself. But do we need to actually think more and more about the iPad - not just the iPad, I imagine other competitors will now evolve into something that can offer something on a similar level - but again, presuming they follow the Apple way and use Webkit to display sites similarly. 

Rob argued, validly, that we need to think about the iPad (note - I say iPad but from now on I really mean iPad + similar devices), but I’m inclined to disagree. I think that most websites that I ever visit on my iPod Touch work absolutely fine - and whilst the few sites I’ve quickly tried on an iPad have also displayed perfectly, I admit I can’t provide any hard evidence. However, my only point with this is that not a lot is different enough to warrant a large amount of effort into making it work flawlessly on an iPad. The main issue for me is the lack of a however, you can’t hover on a touch screen. Things like dropdowns that show on hover, or any functions such as “Hover here to find out more” do need to be looked at. However I don’t think it’s essential - you would need to look at the target audience in my opinion (although, if you’re showing lots of things on hover, you’re doing it wrong) and perhaps I would change it to “click here to show XYZ” rather than “hover here”.

But I honestly don’t see anything else particular. I’m probably being arrogant and single minded, so feel free to prove me wrong :)

What’s in my Bag?

A while ago The Web Squeeze’s magazine had a feature called “What’s in the Bag” where they asked web “celebrities”, or well known Web Designers & Developers, to tell the world everything that was in a bag - one they might typically take out to a meeting with friends, or to the local Coffee shop to do some work. Or perhaps, the bag that would grace them at a Bar Camp. Most of the items inside were pretty obvious - laptop of some form, mostly Macbooks it has to be said, some notepads, some pens/pencils, maybe a mouse of some sort. So today I decided to post what’s in my bag, having just spent a week away and having to pack such a bag for the first time in a while!

So, into my bag of geeky goodness goes:

1) Macbook + Charger. Couldn’t live without this - vital piece of kit and follows me everywhere. I take the power charger for pretty obvious reasons I think. Most places I visit have Wi-Fi so I’ll usually allow myself some time to catch up on the latest posts in my RSS, browse Twitter or check emails.

2) iPod Touch + Headphones. I could not live without music and although my iTunes library is of course on my laptop it’s a little tricky to just quickly listen to, so everything goes on the iPod. I’m addicted to the BoagWorld podcasts, they make my journeys a little more easy. I went for the iPod Touch for the games and I’m hooked currently on Angry Birds and Football Manager Handheld. I also use the Taskpaper app to sync my to-do list between laptop and iPod, and my schedules are synced via iCal. The headphones are a pair of Skull Candy in-ear ones, not the best but very reasonable considering how skimpy I was when it came to paying for them.

3) A4 Notepad, Pens + Pencils. Pretty obvious - right now I’m revising for exams, all the revision stuff is loaded on the laptop and then when I’m revising I usually write down whatever I need to in the notepad. Also doubles as an ideas book as well. I use pencils for initial ideas and then bold lines with pen when I’m decided on them.

4) Phone (LG Cookie) and Charger. It’s a crap phone but I got it dirt cheap and I like texting people. Not much more to say!

5) Magazines and/or books. I tend to carry any unread copies of .Net around, I’m subscribed but tend to save them up for long journeys as reading material. I buy other magazines occasionally so any I do and don’t read straight away will end up in my bag for consumption when I’m horribly bored or looking for something to do.

6) 8GB Santech USB. Really boring, but you never know when you might need to transfer some files or anything, so I always take this with me just on the off chance.

And that’s it. The bag itself is a rucksack, a Swiss Army bag from the same guys who make those knives people keep raving about, with a built in laptop pouch. I’ve also got a sleeve for the laptop to sit in, I guess I’m overly protective of it!

Switching to Ubuntu

So a couple of days ago I decided to check out Ubuntu 10.04, the new release. I’d messed with Ubuntu 8.10 a while back, and had liked it but never really settled on it. Along with my companion in geekyness @SamBlease we both tried it. Sam downloaded the .iso, burned it and then we decided to give it ago. Me being the guy scared of partitions, I went for the Wubi installer - which installs Ubuntu as an application into Windows. It still acts normally, although it is slightly slower (supposedly) and also the Hibernate does not work. No problems for me. Installing with Wubi could not be easier:

1. Load Up Windows
2. Insert the Disc with the Ubuntu .iso on
3. It will ask you to run Wubi.
4. Fill out the very simple form that Wubi presents.
5. And go! Wubi will do some stuff in Windows, and then reboot your computer before presenting the Ubuntu installation, where it will ask you to select your keyboard layout, timezone, etc.

It’s very clever - it adds Ubuntu to the boot menu, and it all runs normally. Yet if you want to get rid, just go along to the Control Panel in Windows, and uninstall it. No partition messing, no risk of deleting stuff, easy. Alternatively, if you want to install it properly, you’ll need to create a partition, and boot from disc. Probably just as easy if you know what you’re doing but be careful, if you give Ubuntu the wrong partition when you install, it will wipe it, which could mean bye bye to Windows if you’re not careful.

Once installed, it’s really nice. I immediately set about customising the panels, my screen is only 15.4 inch so I didn’t want to have a panel at the top and bottom. I removed the bottom one and then customised the top one so it looks something like this:

I then set about finding a dock. Being a bit of a Mac guy at heart, I wanted one! And I found the perfect one - GNOME-Do. But I’m going to save that for another blog post !

Disillusioned with Twitter

I’m going to start off with saying that I‘m probably being an arrogant jerk who expects too much. Yet I’m beginning to feel that being on Twitter is not worth the time I spend on it.

I’ve been experimenting recently, sending messages with a question in to various people. And whilst I didn’t sit down and analyse the figures, I reckon at least 90% of those tweets get unanswered. And why?

Too Little Time

This I can sympathise with, if you only can spare a few minutes on Twitter per day, you wont want to spend it answering my question. Fair play.

Too many Followers

If you have loads of followers, then of course the frequency at which you get asked questions is more, so for you not to respond is acceptable.

Keeping the Timeline Clear

This one annoys me. The egotistical people who want to only tweet quality. I’ve blogged before about my hatred of ‘How to get followers on Twitter’. My mantra has always been to be yourself. If people don’t like it, then tough shit. So don’t not reply to people because it might put a mark on your otherwise brilliant timeline of no doubt high quality tweets.

They Don’t Know Me

Twitter is for networking and meeting others. Not replying because you don’t know me is like going to a Barcamp and talking to no one else.

And lastly….

It really winds me up when I ask a question along the lines of ‘What program do you recommend for xyz?’. I have 700+ followers yet the last time I asked such a question, I got 1 response. Only 1 person out of 700 (although some will be spam accounts no doubt) could be bothered.