the goose

What could be more embarrassing than appearing on national TV, begging for investment?  I’m not sure.  Maybe having your website fall over at exactly when you have a chance to make some much needed sales would be the cherry on the cake.

I wondered whether I should do some performance testing on the site before the air date.  Piehole is written in rails, which has a name for poor performance.  That coupled with my slightly ropey programming expertise, could be a recipe for disaster.  On recommendation, I signed up for loadimpact.com and starting using their free account.

The page I tested was on this page.  This is what I got.

Holy crap. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to have a job shaping the future of telecommunications in Europe and yet I can’t even transfer an incoming call without cutting someone off.

The dirty little secret of telecoms is – that bugger all people actually do know how to transfer someone without cutting them off, or configure an IVR or pretty much do anything else useful.  The reason for this is that real telecoms expertise is far more nerdier that your run of the mill computer science grad.  We’re not just talking pocket-protectors, we’re talking Ronny Drew beards and open tow sandals. Read the rest of this entry »

Pretty much any man and his dog can slap together a webapp these days.  Putting together a user interface that doesn’t look like a dogs dinner however is another thing.  No matter how many gradients or rounded corners I throw at an app it still looks awful.  Maybe I’m not using enough of them.  Anyway – there are a few resources that make putting an interface together a little easier.  Here is my list of tools that I use to that end.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

Yahoo’s user interface API is probably the easiest way I’ve found of putting together a well formatted standards compliant layout.  They can’t help you with the graphics but the YUI Builder makes it a snap to get your general page layout in order.

http://www.blueprintcss.org/

Blueprint CSS is slightly more hardcore and harder to get your head around.  There are WYSIWYG editors that eases the experience somewhat.  They set default fonts which also look good and the forms look pretty good too.

http://bencosweb.com/franz/formulare/pure_css_form/pure_css_form/index.html

This is a simple form layout that looks well and spaces nicely.  Getting the forms to look right is always the bit I struggle with and I’ve used this as a template a couple of times.

http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-skins

Jamie Lawrence put me on to this resource.  The templates are designed for use as a back-end for content management systems but look pretty slick and might work well as a webapp template.  The templates are about $10 each.

http://builder.yaml.de/

Someone who’s design sense I’d never trust put me on to this.  I haven’t used this builder but it looks like it has sensible defaults for a webapp layout.  You configure what looks like a pretty standard webapp template via a javascript layout.  Think YUI builder on steroids.  Of course it makes a lot of design decisions for you – but if you are anything like me – tha

Maybe some of the excellent design sensibility down here in Buenes Aires will rub off on my soon and I’ll be able to mock up my own creations but in the mean time I’ll battle away with these guys.