There’s been an interesting discussion going down on the SitePoint forums, about the recent design trend towards so called “Fat Footers”. As per usual in there, you’ve got zealots on either side of the argument and then those who take a measured approach and get lost in the noise.

Anyway, Derek Powazek first popularised the idea last year with his Embrace your bottom! piece. The idea is that the footer on your site can be more than the plain old boilerplate legalese.

The theory goes thus: A reader arrives at a page on your site and gets drawn in by whatever fantastic piece of content you have top and centre. They read down the page and assuming you’ve done your job right, they reach the bottom wanting more. So you use your footer to give it to them, with links to related articles and other interesting content on your site.

Sounds great, so why the argument?

Now, I’m a great fan of these things. I really couldn’t see people’s problem with them at all.

Then, whilst exploring the resources on Webcredible’s site, I found a very interesting article: Usability for older web users. One of the things I took away from it is that older users are much less likely to scroll down a page to find what they need, probably because it’s a concept novel to computer technology.

This doesn’t really change my opinion of the fat footer. It’s still a novel way of presenting related / secondary / meta-data without distracting the user from the primary content — another useful tool in the box. It simply means you need to take your target audience into account. If you’re designing for the “silver surfer” generation (and with an ageing population in the UK, you really ought to be considering them), you need to be aware that they’re less likely to use any navigation that sits “below the fold”.

Sorry Anton, I couldn’t resist ‘shopping it. Here’s the original and here’s the Flickr group with a whole lot more…

I’ve been using Google’s Analytics package for a little while now and the statistics make interesting¹ reading. I’ve been quite impressed with it really. The interface is a little ugly (hey, it’s Google), but it gets the job done nicely.

So what do they tell me?

Firstly, you lot need to buck your ideas up. Over half of you are still using Internet Explorer, you crazy fools! There’s plenty of better alternatives out there — and they’re free! Firefox and Opera are the obvious ones.

One of you is still using Internet Explorer 5. Whoever you are, you really need to upgrade.

You lot don’t like Sony, do you?

It’s no surprise to find that a lot of you have trouble with the Sony SonicStage and Connect software that came with your Walkman. The most popular search phrases are about those two, and my rants about them get by far the most traffic. Those of you still looking for an answer, might like to try the ml_sony plugin for Winamp.

Of course I won’t be writing much about them anymore, because they simply don’t work on this shiny new Mac. That’s good in some ways, but it also means that I’m left with a Walkman full of music that I can’t update. If anybody fancies writing a Mac OS-X driver…

Ahem…

Second most popular search term? “Cumfest”. Nicely done folks. I bet you’re not looking for pictures of mountain bikers in the snow either, are you?

Speaking of which, the rest of you are into your bikes. Unfortunately those of you looking for Hope Technology and 24Seven bikes aren’t going find much more than my rants about their awful web-sites.

Hmm, ranting is becoming something of a recurring theme here isn’t it? I’m quite happy-go-lucky in real life…

1. But only if you’re me.

I don’t know about you, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s successfully messed up my body clock but I don’t think I can blame anyone but myself for that…

So, I arrived in Brighton on Thursday night after a surprisingly trouble-free train journey. After checking into the hotel, I wandered up the road to Heist for the pre-conference social gathering. I met some new people, caught up with the usual suspects and generally had a good time. We finished up at a random pub on the sea-front at about 3 a.m.

Just under five hours later, my alarm went off. I staggered downstairs where I self-served myself the biggest breakfast of all time, before wandering up to the Corn Exchange, venue for the conference. A bit of fresh air did me the world of good, so I was feeling surprisingly wide awake by the time I got there. I grabbed the freebies, downed some coffee and got chatting to some more of the peeps before we were called into the auditorium.

The conference itself was ace. We had talks from Jeff Barr, Simon Willison & Paul Hammond, Jeremy Keith (twice!), Aral Balkan, Derek Featherstone, Thomas Vander Wal and Jeff Veen. Various other attendees around the internet have dissected each of the sessions so I won’t go into detail.

Obviously it wasn’t all perfect. Biggest problem for me was the lack of leg-room in the auditorium. Maybe it’s just my bad knees?

The good stuff made up for that though. Aral’s “Mash my Flex up” presented Flash to me in a whole new light. Derek Featherstone came up with a series of gotchas and examples of deeply inaccessible coding on some very high profile sites (hello Google Calendar). Finally, Jeff Veen stole the show (as per usual). It was one of his inspirational tour-de-force talks, leaving most of the audience thinking “Yeah, this stuff is ace! Let’s go and build it, right now!”

Which of course we didn’t. After running off to drop off various laptops, bags and miscellaneous freebies off at numerous hotels around Brighton, we all congregated at The Terraces for the Snipperoo sponsored after-party. Alas, I missed out on the free-bar (which ran out in about ten minutes flat). That place closed somewhat earlier than billed, so a bunch of us went-a-wandering, eventually ending up in Sidewinder. Again, I finally crawled into bed shortly after 3 a.m.

Just under five hours later, my alarm went off. I staggered downstairs where I self-served myself the second-biggest breakfast of all time, before checking out and wandering up to the station. After a surprisingly trouble-free train journey, I got home to find that I’d lost my house-keys and ended up climbing in a window. Utter genius. Where did they turn up? Bottom of my wash-bag. Go figure…

Of course one of the best things about the whole conference was the backnetwork. I didn’t have to collect business cards from everybody I met. Instead I logged on, added them to my network (all done with XFN) et voila! I have their contact details. What’s more, it picks up people’s blog posts that mention dConstruct, along with any Flickr photos tagged with dconstruct06. Madgex, that was an inspired idea!

This weekend saw the final round of the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup, at Schladming, Austria.

Both Steve Peat and Tracy Moseley went into it at the top of the tables, but it was damn close, so they’d need to be on the gas in order to win the overall.

As it happened, Peaty came in 12th, which was just enough to hold off race-winner Sam Hill. Biggups to Gee Atherton and Marc Beaumont, who finished the championships in 5th and 7th places.

Tracy managed 3rd in her race, again just enough to stay ahead of the race-winner, Sabrina Jonnier. Rachel Atherton and Helen Gaskell finished a fantastic 3rd and 5th in the championships.

As Dirt Magazine put it, has there ever been a better day in the history of UK downhill mountain biking? I think not.

…if we could get away with just some of the silly ideas we come up with at work?

Alas I wasn’t allowed to put the Evil Edna button onto the live web-site.

It’s that time of year again: Cheltenham Film Society are about to enter their 61st season. Every couple of weeks throughout the winter, they show non-mainstream films from all over the world. It’s great if you’re into that sort of thing — you should join in!

I have a tendency to forget when the films are on, so I’ve put together a Google Calendar to tell me just that, along with what they’re about and so on. What’s more, I’ve made it public. It’s available in a couple of formats:

• iCal: For users of Apple iCal, Google Calendar and any other software that supports the iCal format.
• Atom: For use in your News/Feed-reader of choice.

I hope it’s useful to someone out there.

I looked up at her with what must have been a look of blind panic across my face. I had absolutely no idea where I was, what the hell was going on, or indeed who she was. Why is everything blurry?

Mr Hodgson? Are you OK?
Erm… wha?

I can see now. Oh, hang on. I know this place. You’re a nurse aren’t you?

Um, I think I must have passed out.

You see, about five minutes earlier, they’d taken that fetching blue plaster off of my hand (mmm, yellow and smelly) and handed me a leaflet explaining what might happen. The first thing in there?

You may find you feel faint or nauseous — don’t be alarmed — this is because your limb has been in a cast for some time.

I wandered out into the waiting room, then almost immediately got called into another room to wait for the doctor to get around to me. So I sat down to wait for a while. Next thing I know, I’m looking up at the nurse, wondering what the hell was happening. They moved me onto the adjacent bed and put an oxygen mask on my face.

I was feeling relatively normal after about ten minutes, so the doctor came back. He said it’d continue to hurt for a while (he’s right, it does) because I haven’t used it for weeks. No bat or raquet sports, pneumatic drills or power-tools for the time being. Jogging or swimming is fine though (boring!). Come back in a couple of weeks for a check-up.

I asked about mountain biking and he said I ought not to for a little while — but my commute on the road ought to be OK. That amused me, given the state of Cheltenham’s roads. I may also have neglected to mention I have a tendency to hoon off speed bumps and and down flights of stairs en-route to work. I might have a spin on the Cove tomorrow and see how it feels.

Oh, I still appear to be operating left-handed. What gives?