Development

Control Your Content by having your own platform

Development, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Just saw this from twitter : Matthias Ott – Into The Personal Website-verse

Such a thought-provoking article that reminds me that I need to publish more of the work that I on here rather than on Instagram or Twitter or Flickr. I think of businesses that run their pages from Facebook or Instagram and wonder how they are giving control over their audience to another platform. Break their rules and years of content could disappear. Remember “musicblogocide 2010”?

One day, Twitter and other publishing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Medium will indeed die, like so many sites before them. And every time this happens, we lose most of the content we created and with it a fair amount of our collective cultural history.

Data loss isn’t our only problem, though. If you decide to publish your work on a platform like Medium, you’re giving away control over it. What if Medium suddenly decided to extend the already existing paywall to all articles? There’s not much you could do about it. Simply because you don’t own your content anymore.

Go there and read the whole article as he articulates it much better than I can.

If you’re a beginnner and prepared to rollup your sleeves a little, get a domain on NameCheap for less than €10 and hosting with WordPress on SiteGround for €4 per month. It’s not that hard to do and allows an easy way to get your content on your own platform.

Follow the legend – Graphic ideals for displaying data

2010s, Development, Tech, Thought Provoking

I really enjoyed this post about how to convey information in graphs. Taking a simple Excel and changing it so that it conveys information more clearly. 

To accelerate that understanding, upgrade your line graphs to be efficient and truthful. Some broadly applicable principles should guide you to the right neighborhood.

http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/11/13/remove-the-legend

Read the whole article for more. Perhaps Microsoft can upgrade this graphic capability for charts in the future in Excel.

Reducing product and enhancing result in design

Design, Development, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Fanstastic post by Goran Peuc in Smashing Magazine about design in information products.

Some highlights are mentioned below but read the whole article.

One of the main problems in product design:

I still find a lot of products today, be they digital or physical, to be too complex and feature-driven. Shouldn’t we as designers instead be looking to remove complexity for users as much as possible or as much as allowed for by current technology, by making our products fit more seamlessly into their daily lives and routines? I feel that we simply don’t and, more worryingly, that we still haven’t learned lessons from the past.

The desired process:

Figure out a way to remove such complexities. Figure out how to remove entire pieces of your product or interface, while keeping the user on the path to the desired result.

Finally:

Theoretically, the ultimate goal for any product is to be completely removed from the user’s perspective. Work towards that goal because nobody wants to use your product.
People just want the benefit of using it.

Google changes search engine to prioritise mobile friendly sites

Development, Mobile, Software, Tech, Web

I got an email from the Google Webmaster Tools Team in relation to one of my old sites.

Google systems have tested 204 pages from your site and found that 99% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 202 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.

Now I have to update this old site. I feel it is a good time to implement some current technologies like angular.js and jquery with it and maybe some others. But this is really a tipping point in the supremacy of sites being ready for mobile devices above normal computers and laptops.

CMS Wire has more detail here about the change.

It’s possible to test a site for mobile friendliness using this link.