It was @media Europe 2007 last week and for me it was the best yet. Patrick and his team of merry oompa-loompas put on a great show.

The present­a­tions were fantastic this year. Particular highlights for me were those from Richard Ishida, Jon Hicks and Dan Webb. I took a lot of good stuff away from each of them.

It was also a privilege to see Molly E. Holzschlag (who recently announced her retire­ment from the confer­ence circuit), Joe Clarke (who announced his retire­ment from Web Accessibility) and Håkon Wium Lie, who showed off the $100 Laptop.

Outside the present­a­tion halls, it was great to catch up with old friends again and lovely to meet new people. Hopefully I’ll see you all again soon. It was only slightly weird when the bouncer at Metra told me he’d voted for the Threadless tee I was wearing.

I was begin­ning to feel a bit down about the whole web thing, so it’s really good to leave @media feeling enthused, inspired and full of fresh knowledge. Big thanks to every­one who made it what it was and here’s to the next one!

I’m sure you spend a lot of time making sure your website’s user exper­i­ence is up to scratch. But are you think­ing about all of your users? What about the poor sap who has to use the content manage­ment system (CMS) that drives it all? Are you making life easier for them?

I’ve come to the conclu­sion that a lot of default CMS install­a­tions are just plain horrible to use. They’re over-complicated, diffi­cult and ugly. After the initial Oooh, I’ve got a shiny new toy to play with! feeling has worn off, you (and your users) just don’t want to use them. If the user doesn’t want to update the website, the website simply won’t get updated.

So what’s the answer? You can either find yourself a new CMS and rebuild the website around that, or you can make the best of what you’ve got.

Now, it’s likely that your CMS users won’t know HTML and nor will they want to. To help them out, the CMS often comes with a WYSIWYG HTML editor that tries to look, feel and work like Microsoft Word.

That’s all well and good, but they often come with absolutely everything enabled. Imagine Word with all of it’s toolbars switched on — it’s got buttons that’ll do the washing up, summon a small army and invade New Zealand or even change the colour of your text. It all adds up to make an editor that’s hard to use and intim­id­at­ing to the new user. Besides, do you actually want the user to be able to change the text colour? Won’t that contra­vene your brand guidelines or ruin your lovely design?

Keep it simple, stupid

Now for a tangent: A lot of people love Apple products. Why? One reson is their simplicity:

The most funda­mental thing about Apple … is that they’re just as smart about what they don’t do. Great products can be made more beauti­ful by omitting things.

(from technologyreview.com).

It’s that good old maxim again: Keep it simple, stupid. So what happens if we apply that to our HTML editor?

I started by remov­ing absolutely all of the buttons and drop-downs. Every last one. I was left with a blank canvas on which to type. Obviously this is a bit limit­ing, so I slowly added back the functions I needed to do the job (and nothing more). The end result is vastly simpli­fied; an envir­on­ment that lets you focus on the content, not the features of the editor. What’s more, by strip­ping out some of the more advanced features, I reduced the likeli­hood of the editor going bananas and crank­ing out the sort of HTML that Word itself would be proud of *.

Now, this is obviously just one small aspect of the CMS. But apply that principle across the whole system and the end result will be simpler, easier to use and less intimidating.

Don’t stop there either. If you’re able to custom­ise the look and feel of the inter­face, make it look good, too. Here’s that article again:

Attractive things work better… When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.

(also from technologyreview.com).

If you get the inter­face right, it makes life easier for your users and they’ll love you for that (or at the very least, harbour less of a desire to kill you).

* Not sure what I mean? Open a document in Word, then visit File > Save as Web Page. Open the result up in your text editor of choice and — as Mr. T would say — Let me intro­duce you to my friend pain!

Around about this time yester­day, Wolff Olins unveiled their brand for the London 2012 Olympics. Predictably, the design community (and the rest) did it’s thing and went blogged like mad, reveal­ing their almost univer­sal dislike for it. My initial reaction agreed with them: My answer to the question What the bloody hell is that? was It’s bobbins, that’s what it is.

I’ve mellowed a bit towards it in the last 24 hours. I still don’t think it works — yet. It’s certainly new, differ­ent, fresh, innov­at­ive, shock­ing and all of the other things their mumbo jumbo says it is. Despite all that, it just doesn’t hold together as a standalone logo.

As part of the overall brand though, it works a lot better (you can see it in context at london2012.com). Over the next few years the brand is going to be used every­where: On televi­sion, billboards, the inter­webs, printed media — just about anywhere they can display it. As it becomes more pervas­ive we’ll get used to it, and if they go about it properly, maybe we’ll even grow to like it.

Despite all that, I’ll forever struggle to get past the Lisa Simpson image. Thanks Reddit.

Our local bike shop must love us. We can whinge about how they’ve never got anything useful in stock until the cows come home. But then Brett goes in there and buys himself a shiny new Cannondale Prophet (all the best people have them) and Stubacca lays down his hard earned for a GT iDrive 5 (in a fetch­ing 80’s Honda Civic style metal­lic brown). They’ve got to be rubbing their hands together with glee.

What’s more, Owen (not that one) had gone out and got himself the mother of all hangovers (not from the bike shop though). What better excuse for us all to go out and play?

So we draged the bikes out, and after some exten­ded faffing, set off. We spent the best part of six hours out there, riding through everything from blazing sunshine to howling gales and snow flurries. We grovelled up big hills and burned down twist­ing single­track. We even stopped at the pub for a nice cup of tea.

We did about this many miles (I’m holding my hands about as far apart as they’ll go), so I’ve got that tired but satis­fied glow this evening.

Biking rocks. Nuff said.

Plenty to catch up on since last time. I’m feeling exhausted as I write, so apolo­gies if it goes a bit random.

The big news: I’ve moved house again. I’m sharing with Brett and Christian again, just like old times. This time though, we’ve bought the place. It’s a nice early-Victorian maison­ette in the park area of Cheltenham. If you want/need to know where it is for some reason, drop me a line. It’s just begging for some DIY and we’ve already started re-decorating. Watch this space for some of our more inter­est­ing adventures…

Yesterday Anton, Brett and myself drove up to Cwmcarn in south Wales with the downhill bikes, to have a play on a secret track up there. It’s a hell of a push up the mountain and I don’t think we got the top section right at all — we got confused where a load of moto-crosser ruts converged. It was good fun making our way down the random stuff though. The highlight for me was the monster “straight” (lumps, bumps, ruts, rocks, roots, ace!) that feeds into a ludicrously fast bermed corner before spitting you out into a much shorter rock-strewn straight. Chasing Brett and Anton into there was mental, Anton seemed to be climb­ing all over the front of his bike trying to keep up with Brett. He got a bit over-confident on the steep stuff further down the course and dived headfirst off the side of the course into an awful lot of brambles, slicing his shins up nicely. Mmm, blood. I was annoyed at myself for not riding the evil steep bit (again) but gener­ally had an ace time! I’ll have it next time…

I was absolutely knackered after that, which made it all the more diffi­cult to get up at ludicrous o’clock this morning.

Garry swooped in to drive myself and Charlie all the way up to Llandegla for a blast around the trails there. To be honest I was a bit disap­poin­ted with the place. The trails had their high points (there were some nice corkscrews and berms to play on), but they just didn’t really “flow” for me. The black runs were quite fun, but nowhere near the awesome roller-coasters I’d been led to believe they’d be. I thought maybe it was just me, but the other two agreed and the comments in the visit­ors book seemed to back it up. Still, the place has got loads of poten­tial — given some time to develop it further it could become great. We had fun regard­less — after all we were out in the countryside playing on bikes and they quite clearly rock.

Man, I’m proper tired now. G’night!

Does anybody else think that a 431 word disclaimer is perhaps a little bit excessive?

Updated: It would appear that it’s a legal require­ment now: Is your Company Website in breach of UK laws — specific­ally the 2007 Companies Act?

Some little scrotes tried to nick my bike from work today.

They sliced straight through the Kryptoflex cable, but thank­fully the (very expens­ive) New York Lock defeated them. Luckily, Tim left work just as they were coming back for a second go, which scared them off.

The greedy buggers clearly wanted the whole bike though: Nicking either wheel would have been pretty easy after they’d cut through the cable lock. Thankfully they were too thick to figure that out.

I think I’ll be borrow­ing Brett’s uber-cheap “Probike” for the next few days…

On Saturday 6^th January 2007, my grand­dad Dominic McDonnell passed away, after a merci­fully brief battle with cancer.

On hearing the news, I jumped on a train home so I could be with the family. My grand­mother and most of his children (includ­ing my mum) had congreg­ated at his house in Woking: we spent the evening celeb­rat­ing his life, remin­is­cing and sharing our favour­ite memor­ies of him. It was very much the right thing to do.

A week and a half later, I headed back down south for the funeral. I’m not sure why, but I felt almost emotion­ally detached during the service. The church was absolutely packed with friends and family, many of whom I hadn’t seen for years. It wasn’t until we left the church and I had my arms around my younger sisters that I broke down, as we watched the hearse carry Granddad away. The crema­tion service the follow­ing day was lovely, with his children, Justin, Claire and Stephen all reading pieces about him.

It almost feels wrong to say it, but the parties we had after each service were great. It was good to catch up with all of the people I only ever see at the really big family events.

You may still be wonder­ing why I’ve titled this piece “Boiled Eggs”. It’s because that’s my favour­ite memory. I don’t think I voiced it at the time.

When we were young, Alice & I would occasion­ally be dropped off at the grand­par­ents for a weekend. Our mum & dad were usually off doing something silly like The National Rally on their classic bikes. Anyway, break­fast was always a highlight: Dominic had perfec­ted the art of the soft-boiled egg. It came from the chick­ens they kept in the garden. It went in for four minutes. It never cracked prema­turely. The soldiers were toasted to perfec­tion. There’s probably an element of rose-tinted glasses, but that’s the way I remem­ber it. Good times.

Obviously he was a lot more to me than just the man who taught me how to boil the perfect egg. It was my mother that pointed it out to me: I was probably a lot closer to him than I might have been if my father hadn’t died in my teenage years. Granddad was always a man I looked up to. He was so bright, talen­ted and worldly wise, without ever being condescending.

I was looking through my collec­tion and could only find one photo of him. I’ll have to get some more from the family. My little sister’s got a nice photo of the whole family from the day of the funeral.