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So, I said that I didn’t know if I ever wanted to write a book again. Apparently I lied.

As the image at the top of this post suggests (assuming that you are looking at the blog version and not a feed), I’ve been working on something new for SitePoint – what they are calling ‘The Ultimate HTML Reference’. I couldn’t possibly use the word ‘ultimate’ without getting all terribly uncomfortable and just so darned British and bashful about it. But hey ho, that’s what it’s called, and it has taken enough evenings for it to be getting close to ultimate – and it’s definitely been an ultimate pain the arse to put together! Please, if anyone ever asks me to write a reference book again – that’s to say one where you have a formula to follow and templates to complete rather than writing free-form as you would with a normal book – be sure to stop me signing on the dotted line ;-)

Writing a reference is not an easy task – this has taken about 5 months on and off, mostly late in the evening when my wife is asleep, the dog has (mostly) calmed down and I can concentrate on the task in hand, but only for as long as I can physically stay awake. And you can forget about such frivolities as playing Nintendo Wii! But now that the job is pretty much done, excepting a few minor amendments that may be passed my way to address, it feels pretty good to see the end result on SitePoint.com, all searchable and just waiting for the likes of Google and co to start indexing it. Once the initial rough edges are all smoothed out and all the in-house editing has taken place, it’ll then be printed in (their words) a ‘sexy hardcover’. Yay! A hard-cover author, no more of that second-class ‘trade paperback’ malarkey for me, I tells yer! For the next one I want to gilt edge, embossed and with some kind of fancy lazer-cut emblem on it, no less. Which is fine, because there will be no ‘next one’, or at least not a book of this format (ie, the reference kind).

In recent days, as I’ve been telling people at SXSW Interactive about the work I did on this, I used the analogy of having a child. When a mother has her first child, sure it’s hard work – and for a long time, too – but in most cases once the child arrives, the stresses and hardships get quickly forgotten because the baby is here, so never mind all that. And later, the parents think “Let’s have another child”, conveniently forgetting the hardships they faced before. But before long, the memories come flooding back. And so it was with this book. I’d mentally blanked any of the difficult moments from writing the first book, forgot that it can take over your free time when deadlines come around and technically this was a much more challenging book than the first one. But, like I said, the baby has arrived and I feel a bit like a doting father.

So, please do have a poke around the HTML reference and feel free to add comments (need to be a SitePoint member to add comments to any topic file). But if you feel like leaving a comment here, then that’s all good too.

Now, as I’ve no longer got to write about stuff, I’m going to settle back down and watch a nice film. And it’s bliss!

Earlier this evening I decided to post something to the local Freecycle list - a mattress that we’ve had kicking around, never used, but is just a bit on the lightweight and (for me at least) not very comfortable side. I used the ‘message maker‘ - a web page that has a form you complete which generates an email with all the necessary bits required, including something called the fair use policy. I didn’t read what it involved, but clicked the checkbox anyway, as it seemed like the right thing to do. After sending the mail, I realised that it had added this to my outgoing message:

Fair Offer Policy: I agree to wait 24 hours to see what responses I
get before deciding who to give my item/s to. This gives members on
Daily Digest, or those who don’t have continual access to the
Internet a fair chance to reply.

Wow, that little phrase there really changes the responses you get. No longer is it first-come, first-served. Instead, the responses are all about who’s most deserving of the freebie. Here are just a handful of the responses I got (all typos are theirs, and I can’t be arsed to tidy up for them):

hi if this is still available i would be very greatful for it as our
matrress (passed down from family) has got the springs sticking out and half of the buttons missing,its very uncomfortable to try and
sleep on but cash is tight so cant afford to buy one new for quite a
while.we can collect anytime over the weekend sunday would be better
for us but if saturday would be better then im sure we can do that.if
you want it gone before that i could pop round after school
hours.many thanks lisa

A good one for starters. A mattress that has "passed down from family", like some kind of heirloom? "Here you go, son, this was my father’s and my grandfather’s before him, and now I’m letting you have it". My heart bleeds. Probably because of the those vicious sticky-out springs. It’s uncomfortable but there’s no cash to buy a new one "for quite a while" - evidently they’ve calculated how long they need to save up for a new one (but the broadband and computer obviously gets funded - much more important than sleep, after all). Fail! So, I thought this response was atypical. How wrong I was:

I would be so very grateful of this for my sister, who is having to use a blow up matteress at the moment. Due to a serious incident her mattress was taken away by police and she has not been able to afford to replace it yet. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

Now it’s the sister who’s suffering, and on a "blow-up mattress" too. But what’s this? "Due to a serious incident her mattress was taken away by police". ? And again ? WTF? Let’s hope it wasn’t anything serious, like a stabbing incident which caused the police to remove it for DNA testing or something. And if it was, let’s hope it doesn’t hapen again - it’s a blow-up mattress, after all, and wouldn’t take a puncture very well. Anyway, if I am to give away a mattress, the last person I want to invite over to my house to collect is someone who admits in their begging note that their last mattress was in some way involved with a "serious incident" that required the police to take it away from the scene of the crime. Who are these people? Fail! Who’s next?

Hello I hope I am not to late to ask about this. I would like to ask you if I could have it please I am disabled and on a very low income my Husband is a large framed man and he has killed the mattress that is on the bed. It does not have any spring in it and I cant even lay on it these days with out being in pain. even to sit on it the mattress is uncomfortable. This would be so welcomed in my home please.

I think this one might be genuine. But the husband "a large framed man" has, apparantly, "killed the mattress". Perhaps it was the same man who was responsible for the previous lady’s mattress which appears to have met an unfortunate end? Anyway, they didn’t get the mattress on the basis that I know that if I find the mattress squidgy and not up to supporting my 13-stone carcass without giving me backache in the morning, it won’t be any good for said disabled lady and her large-framed husband. So, who’s next in the queue?

Oh, YES PLEASE!!! We desperately need a new mattress as ours has
outlived its lifespan and I’m waking with backache. I prefer a
softer mattress. My husband and I keep meaning to go look for a new
mattress but with a very hyperactive little boy we foster, we just
never seem to find the time to go looking and buying one!! You would
be saving us an ENORMOUS effort if you would allow us to have it! We
just never seem to have any leisure time at all!

Suffering from back pains? Check. No time to get a new one? Check? Tugging at heart strings by letting me know that they are good people who take on foster children? Check. Again, might be genuine, but who knows for sure. Finally:

hello, i would really love this as mine has just about had it with
the springs sticking through, and i dont seem to be able to get one on
here always gone before i can ask , or as i dont drive and have to
arrange it with family, i think they give it to first to collect. but
never mind if its gone i will keep trying, but i would be very grateful
of it.

Another person suffering from deadly sticky-out springs. Seriously, does this happen anywhere other than Tom & Jerry cartoons? Apparently it does. Swindon seems to be plagued with inferior-springed mattresses, by the look of it.

Oh. Wow. This is just perfect. I had said ‘finally’ a moment ago, but just as I finished the last paragraph, another response came in. Perfect timing! And this one has it all:

do you still have this available please? as a single mum i cannot afford to replace the one i have (which has springs poking out all over lol)..we have just moved to your area,we are in newhall street….my eldest and i could walk it round the corner at your convienience …
please please please…. i am so desperate to get a good nights sleep but what with christmas and my 3 children needed new ones when we moved alas mummy gets overlooked lol

In the end, I decided to offer the mattress to none of the above. The winner simply wrote:

yes pls can i collect it patricia

To which I replied:

As you replied with the most straightforward and non-creepy ‘woe is me’ tale, I’m giving you first dibs on this.

So, FreeCyclers, the lesson if you want something from lloydi is to cut the crap and keep it simple. Oh, and a bit of punctuation, spell-checking wouldn’t go amiss, either. Tsk tsk.

Now I don’t claim to be – and nor will I ever claim to be – a good logo designer. In fact, you could omit the word ‘good’ from that last sentence and it would still be truthful. But I recently ended up doing some logo work as a favour for family.

Some of Manda’s relatives have gone into a business venture together (a Chinese Buffet in Swindon, Wiltshire), and I offered to help by building a web site for them. I knew that they had enough financial outlays, and didn’t want them to get someone else to do it and either be charged too much or get a shoddy product, or both! I knew, also, that it didn’t need to be too involved – just a web site to give people an idea of prices, what’s on the menu, a booking form (Christmas bookings much welcomed!), all fairly simple stuff.

But the original logo designs I saw were not great. The ideas were created in PowerPoint by one of her family and I couldn’t help but think "That really shouldn’t go up out the front of the building", plus there were other considerations like letter headings, menus, flyers etc. Admittedly, these are things that I’d not thought of before, as I’d never had to.

Knowing that that Photoshop is not the best tool for logo design, and acknowledging that it would take me an age to get something half decent together in Illustrator, I ended up using the simple drawing tools in Skitch, a program that’s really only designed as a screen grab tool, with some basic tools for annotation/highlighting etc. But I have found them to be a real joy to use. And so I ended up creating the main logo and other related images entirely in Skitch. The image can output as SVG - it’s all vector-based.

Last week the restaurant opened for business, and I couldn’t believe how good the logo looked in place on the front of the building. The simple black background contrasting with the backlit red and orange was so effective – from a distance, it was clear to see that there was something new at the site, and I really hope that it draws attention to random passers-by, just as it did to me. Naturally, I hope that they are able to make a success of the business and if they do, I can feel happy that I may have contributed in some way towards that goal.

‘cos I paid a man to iconize me … and I’ve either aged a few years (e.g. 10) or I really have a false self-perception!

I had all these great ideas about how I was going to approach this. I thought of looking into patents, to see if I could document my idea, protect it and then get someone to build it. But I realised fairly soon that this was a whole can of worms that I did not want to open and I’d never quite get my head around it anyway.

So I then considered the possibility of offering some money to a savvy Mac developer to go ahead and built what I was after, for a fixed price, and I take the gamble on making enough sales and not getting screwed in the process. But I realised soon after that bright idea that software that you sell requires ongoing support, support that I would never realistically be able to provide myself and would be over a barrel for a retainer to the developer. So I’ve decided to just put my big idea down in writing and hope that someone sees value in this and makes it happen. So, here it is:

The Problem

I was presenting the other day and was using Keynote with presenter display on my laptop and the big screen showing the proper slides. I was using my Sony Ericsson phone with a Bluetooth connection to advance the slides. This all seems, on the face of it, to be a good approach. But there were problems:

• When I enable the Bluetooth remote on the Sony Ericsson, it disables/hijacks the mouse trackpad on my MacBook Pro, so I was having to turn it off and back on again when I needed to take control of the laptop
• The setup of the room was such that I could not see the presenter display showing on my laptop screen unless I stayed anchored behind the lectern (something I hate to do), and hence I didn’t have the prompts I wanted/was hoping for
• At certain points during the presentation I needed to take control of multimedia elements on slides (the scrub bar - progress of a movie), but in presenter display mode, these elements are not accessible, so I was having to crane my neck to see what was happening on the main screen to locate the mouse cursor (once I had switched off the Bluetooth, of course) - basically, I could not see the mouse movements in front of me because of the ‘helpful’ presenter display. Bah!

I worked out that there could be a way to solve all these problems with a really slick application for the iPhone. I am going to label it the Keynote Buddy. Here’s how I see it working.

The Solution

• The iPhone has Keynote Buddy installed on it and becomes an extension of Keynote on the Mac.
• The iPhone is used to control the slide advance (and back of course) using touch screen controls.
• The display on the main (projected) screen would be the full screen affair, while the iPhone would give the presenter’s display, similar to the existing Keynote presenter display but because it’s an iPhone it probably should be sexed up with a Coverflow-esque appearance ;-)
• Controls on the Keynote Buddy would allow for changes between presenter display and the audience’s view on the fly so at any time the presenter can see exactly what the audience sees without having to turn around and turn his/her back on the audience
• When embedded multimedia, e.g. a movie, appears on a slide, the presenter should get a nice fat thumb-friendly overlay on the iPhone screen so that he/she can pause and restart the movie, while the audience sees just that the movie has paused, with no distracting overlay
• The Keynote Buddy software will, by default, automatically disable the phone from ringing/vibrating during presentation mode - no embarrassing moments
• Finally, and this is a nice to have, for moments when the presenter needs to exit the slides for a live demo, the iPhone should allow the presenter access to the host Mac’s desktop so that with a few double-clicks, he/she can navigate around to a demo file.

Something like this, in fact:

So that’s what I want. What about you? Are you a seasoned presenter with Keynote? Got an iPhone? Long for something that ties the two together in the way I’ve described? Please, tell someone who can make it happen. And if they do make it hapen, and if they want to thank me for suggesting the idea, I’d be happy to take a shiny new iPhone as a form of payment. As long as it’s got a copy of Keynote Buddy installed. Because I’ve got this need, you see, and it’s for a modern-day presentation prompt card thing …

Having been on sale for just under a year and a half, I recently got the second sales report for my book and it’s done better than I hoped. Sure it’s not a seller in the region of JK Rowling or anything, but the sales figures are pretty respectable for a book of this nature, and people are still buying which is a good sign. However, I did wonder just how big the sales were in a physical sense.

• Would it fill up a bus?
• A double decker?
• Would it fill up the space in my office?
• What about my whole house?

I tried working out the volumes but couldn’t believe the figure that was staring back at me, so I gave up on calculating volumes and assumed I’d made a mistake; instead I went for the old ‘how big would it stretch if … " routine. What I discovered was:

• If I were to stack each and every copy of the book that was sold up until June of this year, one on top of each other, it would reach a height of 393 metres.

So, naturally I then went searching for something that was about that height and discovered that my tower of books would be just 20 metres taller than the Empire State Building (actually the Empire State’s top floor tower – there’s another 230 feet from the top floor to the top of the lightning rod).

Now I just need to go to New York to see for myself what that really means. And as for that JK Rowling, I think hers would basically equal the volume of all of downtown Manhattan!

This may seem like a bizarre question, but someone out there might have a suggestion on this one.

I can’t add pages to del.icio.us at my place work because the login page is blocked - actually anything beginning https is, unless you can make a business case for it to be unlocked (and del.icio.us doesn’t really classify as a ‘business critical’ tool). So I’ve gotten into the habit of routinely emailing interesting URLs to my personal email address and then adding the pages to del.icio.us at home in the evening in a batch. Frankly, it’s a pain.

I was thinking of using del.icio.us on accessify for adding quick links to useful stuff to avoid having to do a full post about it (which always seems like overkill) and thought that with all the WordPress plugins that there might be one that would allow me to add directly from within WordPress - it’s my server, and hence the wp-admin side of things, is not blocked for me at work. Alas, despite the range of plugins, there does not seem to be one that allows this kind of functionality.

So can anyone suggest another way around this annoying little problem?

Following a very successful event in Birmingham a little while back (despite Bruce’s vivid imagination), the people behind Public Sector Forums have recalled the same team to put on another show in London . That team includes Bruce Lawson, Ann McMeekin, Patrick Lauke, Grant Broome, Dan Champion and myself. We’ll be speaking at the Barbican on the 8th of August and would love to see you there.

Don’t be mistaken by the ‘Public Sector’ part of Public Sector Forums – this time around the organisers are opening the event up to anyone – you don’t need to be working in some dingy council office to apply for this one, anyone’s welcome!

I will be doing a general show and tell, finishing up the day’s events with plenty of real world examples of people getting things wrong-diddly-wrong, including many web sites you know and possibly love.

Interested? Find out more on the PSF site and you can book your place here (and please mention ‘Accessify’ in the booking form when asked how you heard about it, even if you did read about it here - thanks!).

There’s an exellent post over on Joe Clark’s site today entitled Advice for presentations: It happens! In this lengthy piece (well, this is Joe!), Joe imparts some of his knowledge on what makes for a good presentation and how to deal with things when they go a little (or quite badly) wrong.

I’m pleased to report that I can tick most of the boxes where preparation is concerned, but I wanted to elaborate on one point that Joe makes regarding setting up browsers in advance for anything that you want to demonstrate. My advice - don’t.

In my experience, most of the conferences that offer wireless connectivity suffer almost from the word go, such that good connections - or any connection at all - cannot be guaranteed. Thankfully, it’s never happened while I’ve been presenting, but I cannot say how many times I’ve seen people presenting visibly flapping because their idea of showing off a feature of site A or site B has to be cancelled becaue they can’t connect. And even when there is a connection, the mere fact that you may have 800 eyeballs staring at you means that when you are trying to do something like fill out a form, you will make stupid mistakes, you will fumble, you will find it uncomfortable as there is silence while you wait for the browser to do something.

So, I’d like to add to Joe’s already excellent list of tips with one of my own: pre-record anything that you want to demonstrate.

In many presentations that I’ve given of late, I’ve used screencasts embedded in my slides. I can do however many takes I have the time and patience for at home, keep that video file for the presentation and re-use later. In that screencast, I make sure to allow for live explanation of what’s happening - usually accompanied with a circular motion of the mouse around the section I might want to refer to - and when presenting it, the cursor is in itself a prompt for me to describe that feature. Another advantage of this approach is that you *know* how long the demo portions will take, which makes timing as a wholemuch easier.

There’s no problem with lack of internet connection, although you have to be aware that if you rely heavily on the visuals, a hard drive failure or other similar disaster means that you will not be able to wing it using notes alone (but, again, you can prepare by having backups of slides on a key drive, and even a backup ‘pooter).

So, that’s my way of doing things, and it really makes presenting so much more stress-free :-)

And before I get flamed for that, I’m making a direct reference to one of Apple’s memorable announcements in days past, namely the time that iTunes was announced for Windows users. Mac fans around the world grumbled that their nice little music library application was being shared amongst the great unwashed but soon got over it. "They can have our iTunes, but they’ll never have our wonderful iLife apps or super-fast Safari".

Well, looks like we need to have another re-think.

So, one of the announcements at yesterdays WWDC conference in San Francisco was that Safari was going to be available for Windows users after all. The press release boasted that is is the "fastest browser running on Windows, based on the industry standard iBench tests, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2". How reliable those claims are may be tested over the coming days.

But what does this mean to the world of web standards? The browser wars were played out a long time ago - does this mean that the ceasefire has been broken? Is it a new front being opened up or is it simply a minor skirmish that the rest of the world can turn a blind eye to?

I don’t have the answers - I was surprised as many people, blindly assuming that Safari would always and ever be a Mac-only piece of software - and I can’t claim to be massively excited about the prospect of using Safari on Windows. Or at least not until such a time as Firefox extensions, such as the indespensible Web Developer Toolbar, can be made to work in Safari but that’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But that said, I think it’s a good thing:

• No more will testing for Safari be left until the last moment (or at all) - finally developers can check their work early on
• If it really is faster to render pages, that can only be good for the user
• Mac users will benefit too, as it will become more difficult to reject support problems on Safari with a simple "Ah but that’s just a certain percentage (Safari users) of an already small percantage of users (Mac users)"

So, what’s your take on this announcement? Exciting? Will it change the browsing landscape massively? Or are you just thinking "meh, whatever".