It is a truth universally acknowledged that writers will do anything rather than write, and, if absolutely compelled to write, will write anything but the thing they should be writing.

This morning I received the following e-mail from Michael Jecks, whose murder mysteries bring fourteenth century Devon to life – and to violent death.

Dear Jean

Well, I was planning on making five gallons of beer tonight. My daughter wanted to help, but since Jane was away, I had to wait until I’d got Billy Basher to sleep before I could make a start. So that was all evening until 7.30 before I could chuck him in his bed and tell the little monster that two stories was his allocation and he’d had three already and wasn’t getting another “Winnie the Witch” tonight. So downstairs.

And I had a brainwave. You see, I have three pressure barrels. So I reckoned, hey, why not brew up twice the quantity in my kettle, and then water them down? That way instead of brewing only five gallons, I’d be making ten. Double the beer for the same effort, eh? Good idea? Yup. That’s what I thought. So I chucked in fourteen pounds of grain to the water. And then . . .

You see, you go ahead with the best of intentions, and then there is the law of unintended consequences.

I had now brewed enough to fill two five gallon containers with beer. Good. Fine. Except I only had one that was ready to be used. I have several others – most are so old they won’t do. Three are fine. One had five gallons of ale I made last week. OK. One was empty. Good. Um. The other was also full, though, waiting with five gallons of lager, until I could be bothered to clean, disinfect and wash intensively forty bottles. Bugger. So I had to clean forty Grolsch bottles ready to be used, disinfect them, rinse them, and then fill them. Then I had to disinfect and rinse the main barrel. Brilliant. That cost me another three hours. By now my little helper had been sent to her pit. And I carried on. The lagers are now out in the shed. Great. And I had to carry on cleaning out the beer barrels. And I succeeded. Yippee! The things were ready and done, and no problem. So I sparged (oh, bloody well look it up) the malt and got all ready, then put everything back in the brew kettle. Except suddenly the bleeding kettle sprang a leak, and Berry, the Ridgeback, was all over the floor licking like a puppy in heaven. I had to empty the kettle, hoping like hell I’d not compromised the cleanliness etc, then check the seal on teh tap, change it, bugger about for an age, and then watch for another hour and a half while the hops boiled. And I didn’t have the right hops. This is not, I thought, a good evening. Still, all done at last. My second boil’s hopefully done now. It’s one fifteen. I have to be up in six hours for the puppy.

I haven’t finished the newsletter.

Whoops.

Mike

David Almond’s short story, Slog’s Dad, has been shortlisted for this year’s National Short Story Prize. His story appears in the anthology So, What Kept You?, published by our client Flambard Press in September 2006. The National Short Story Prize is the largest award for a single short story in the world, with a prize of £15,000 for the winning story, £3,000 for the runner-up and £500 for the three other shortlisted stories. The winner will be announced on Monday 23rd April; meanwhile the shortlisted stories are being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and you can hear Slog’s Dad at 3:30pm on Thursday 19th April.

Update (23rd April): Slog’s Dad was runner-up in the competition. Our congratulations to David Almond and to Flambard Press.

That’s the headline of an article in last Thursday’s Guardian: it is still available online, but you have to register to read it. It’s an interview with Mark Anders, the senior principal scientist at Adobe Systems, and the man whose job it is to develop Flash for the internet of the future. Flash is the technology behind many web sites, and the more the site design relies on animation, moving images and eye-catching graphics, the more likely it is to have been built with Flash.

This hasn’t made it popular with everyone. The article quotes useability expert Jakob Nielsen, who once condemned Flash as “99% bad”; he saw it as a temptation to bad design, and a distraction from the real purpose of the site. If you have ever clicked a site proposed by Google, and then sat tapping your fingers while the front page downloads and the company logo does its dance, waiting for the magic words “skip intro” to appear – well, you’ll know what he meant.

Anders’ response at first seems less the case for the defence, more a confirmation of this criticism: he says “Developers loved it, though. It was always very effective for advertising, and over time people used it for new and unique experiences.” Good web design is not about what the designer loves, it’s about making sites that the user loves; new and unique experiences are only new and unique the first time round, but what if you visit a site repeatedly (as we hope you will)?

There is still plenty of self-indulgent design around. Here’s just one random example: I had reason to Google the name “Daniel Fox” the other day, and the results showed that it’s a name shared by a variety of people: a Walsall footballer, a polymer chemist (the inventor of a plastic called Lexan), an estate agent in Birmingham. But the link at the top of the list (www.danielfox.com) wasn’t giving any clues about who it belonged to, took forever to download, offered me a pretty picture and left me to guess what I had to do to see some text (clue: some of the flowers are clickable) … And I have a fast broadband link: if you’re on dial-up, this Daniel Fox just doesn’t want to know you.

Yet Flash doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Two years after his original assessment, Jakob Nielsen conceded that Flash was much improved, and drew up guidelines to make it more usable. Certainly, Flash can be used without making sites inaccessible to visually disabled surfers. It’s not about the technology, it’s about what you do with it.

As The Guardian points out, many people use Flash sites without being aware of it – like the Flickr photo hosting site. Roger used Flash to display one of Valerie Laws’ embedded haiku (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Flash on these sites is a tool, a means to an end: it doesn’t draw attention to itself, and that’s why it works.

Another birthday present which helped to make Roger’s birthday very special (see previous post) was this poem:

For Roger, ending his fifties.

A Durham Rambler sweet as any rose,
He clothes in protecting arms the city’s stones,
Shielding the ancient walls, but turning to those
Who’d bring them down, his fiercest ranks of thorns.
True to his name, despite his love of home,
This hardy plant will wander far and wide,
His roots are deep, but still he loves to roam
Thriving in streets or leafy countryside.

Yet in another world he flourishes,
The virtual paths of web and internet.
He keeps their rights of way, and nourishes
Their frail connections like a cherished pet.
To writers, artists, business folk alike,
He gives a home, a carrying voice, a face
Which invites a hit, but never goes on strike;
An aery castle, with a sense of place.

His busy brain with elegant equations,
His days with work and walking fully crammed,
He still makes a fine show at celebrations,
A glass of red wine blooming in his hand.
So now he’s grown to reach his sixth decade,
Let’s hope this is one rose that will not fade;
A hard drive never needing a defrag,
A ‘jolly Roger’ who will never flag.

Valerie Laws

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, Roger celebrated his 60th birthday: or rather, since the actual birthday fell on a Monday, and he planned to mark the day by going out and collecting his bus pass, he celebrated the last day of his 50s.

Roger asked people not to give him presents, but Francis Blake made him this very appropriate birthday card.

[This post dates from March 2007. The rates mentioned in it have been revised subsequently. Please see the page on the website about hosting for our current rates.]

When we set up in business designing web sites, broadband was still in the labs. Home internet access was via dial-up telphone lines. I think our first PC, back in 1995, had a 28k modem though 56k became standard fairly soon after that. These figures are in bits-per-second, and as there are eight bits in a byte, the most someone with a dial-up connection can hope for is a download speed of 7,168 bytes per second. These facts of life governed the way we designed websites: the text on the pages wasn’t much of a problem but we had to compromise the quality of the photographs to ensure that download times were kept to a minimum, and we also had to limit the number of photos on each page. I remember when we could copy all of a website happily on to a 1.4 meg diskette and take it with us when we visited clients. And the 20 megabyte allocation we gave each client was many times what they might possibly need.

That was then and this is now, as Bob Dylan once memorably said. Broadband started to become available about five years ago. When BT halved the price in 2003 we took the plunge and it revolutionised the way we use the internet. At that time less than a quarter of the internet connections were broadband. The number has shot up. According to a recent report, in December 2006, there were over 13 million broadband lines in the UK, compared to just under 10 million a year ago. That’s almost 80% of UK connections, according to the Office for National Statistics.

How have we responded to this? And how have our clients? We’ve taken to compressing our pictures less, and thereby improving the quality. We’re also happier to put more pictures on each web page. But the big difference has been that our clients have come to us and asked us if we can run audio and video on their sites. Once we would have cautioned against this, now we’ll do it happily. Recent additions to various websites have included a 40 second DVD trailer for Anne Fine (1.8Mb), a 3 minute promo for the New Rope String Band (5.5Mb), a 5 minute showreel for the actor John Elnaugh (13Mb) and a 17 minute animation for Véronique Tanaka (23Mb — £1.99 payment required). Coupled with streaming technology (where the video starts to play while it is still downloading) this means the video can be seen in real time over a broadband link. On a dial-up link these files take much longer: the New Ropes promo would take at least a quarter of an hour to download, for example. So we make sure that these files are an adjunct to the site, adding extra value, but not essential to the experience.

This trend means that we now have some very large websites, and some with high bandwidth usage. It also means that the spread between our largest and our smallest client sites has grown. We found that we were running out of server space, and so we have upgraded our account with our hosting service. We also reviewed the charges we make to our clients and we have decided that we have to move away from our one-size-fits-all approach. We think that the fairest approach is to introduce a tiered structure so that only those clients who need the extra resources will be asked to pay for them.

The good news for two thirds of our clients is that we have been able to increase their allocations of both disk space (up from 20Mb to 30Mb) and monthly bandwidth (up from 300Mb to 500Mb) without increasing the annual fee, which remains at £50. Clients who need up to 60Mb of disk space and a gigabyte of bandwidth will pay £75 and for 100Mb and 2 gigabytes the fee will be £100. We will be writing to all clients in the next week or so to tell them where they fit into the new pricing structure.

Once we’ve set the level of fees we will of course monitor usage but, unlike some companies, if you bust a limit we won’t automatically pull the plug. We’ll investigate the cause and if it looks like a temporary incident we’ll see you through it. If it’s a permanent increase we will probably adjust the fee when renewal time comes around.

We’ve also been looking at our hourly rate, which was last increased in April 2005, and we are increasing this from £45 to £48 an hour. This 6.7% increase compares with a 7.1% increase in RPI over the same period. Any work that was requested before this increase was announced will be done at the old price.

Other changes we have made are to change insurers to get better cover, which now includes professional indemnity and product liability insurance. We are also changing our telephone and broadband provision from a domestic to a business service, which should mean if anything goes wrong with the phones or broadband service it gets fixed sooner. We are upgrading the broadband speed to 5.5 megabits and unlimited usage, and cancelling the second phone line to replace it with a VoIP (broadband) line. Our main phone number remains as 0191 386 8756.

On Monday 26th March, The Guardian carried an eight page supplement, paid for by the RNIB, to accompany their regular Media pages. Its purpose was to encourage the production of information that is accessible to people with a visual impairment: not just those who have no sight at all but the far greater number whose eyesight is not up to reading the print sizes and colours often produced by designers who aren’t aware of these issues. I’d like to point you at the web version of the article, but I cannot find it. There is a page on the RNIB site but it’s not even a summary of the contents.

What the article does add to what’s been published before, including on the accessibility page on our own website, is the growing body of legislation including the new equality duty for the public sector which came into force on 4 December last year. This affects 45,000 public bodies across Great Britain. And it’s clear, as we have been saying for some time, that a web site provides a service. There is no point, for example, in upgrading your theatre to provide disabled access if blind people cannot access your online booking service to get tickets.

It’s a common misconception that blind people cannot use the internet because they cannot see the screen. There are two answers to this: the first is that many people have impared vision rather than being completely blind. People who can read large print books can also use properly designed websites, which are ones that allow the user to adjust the size of the text and which have clear contrast. If this has been done, just hold the Ctrl key and press the + key to make the text larger. It’s that easy with both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.

Blind people can use assistive technology, which can read the contents of a web page aloud. It sounds a bit like having Stephen Hawking come along and read the web page to you. (Though to be fair, many modern voice synthesisers sound rather more natural than Hawking, who I understand has decided not to upgrade because his accent is now so familiar.) But care is needed, particularly with images, which need a succinct alternative text description for the voice browser to read out.

The Guardian‘s article pointed up some unexpected benefits: Legal and General found that their new accessible website had 50% more pages in the search engines and they doubled the number of visitors receiving quotes. So it seems everybody likes accessible websites.

We try to write accessible websites and have had some success: in 2005 we won a Visionary Design Award for Anne Fine’s website., and these days we try to make all new sites accessible. It’s not that difficult particularly if you are aware of the issues. These days we use style sheets to define the overall look of a site. Although they take a little more work to set up at the outset, it soon pays off because coding the rest of the site becomes a lot easier.

I could go on. And on. But dinner is on the table so I will leave that for another day.

The Cornwell Internet web site is the home of this blog, and always will be: you read it here first. But to make life easier for those of us who also use LiveJournal, Great and Glorious Samarcand, whom some clients already know as the person who sorts out any crises while Roger and Jean are on holiday, has used the RSS feed to syndicate the blog to LJ. No, I don’t know what the technical bit means either.

What it means in practice, though, is that you can now read this blog via LiveJournal, and have it delivered direct to your ‘friends page’ there.

Thank you, Samarcand, for making this possible.

I am constantly impressed by the way our clients bring us into contact with distant and exotic places – and not just the superpowers, but the small and idiosyncratic corners of the world!

First we had Chaz Brenchley with a story translated into Estonian (a language related to Finnish and Magyar – Hungarian). Next we learned from Nicholas Rhea that the Heartbeat TV series has a devoted following on the Pacific island of Vanuatu. Now Ann Cleeves tells us that she has sold the rights of her novel The Sleeping and the Dead for translation into Georgian, a member of the South Caucasian language group with its own alphabet!

I like to keep an eye on the bandwidth usage of our clients’ websites, to try to head off potential problems should they look like running out of bandwidth. So when this morning I noticed that the Diamond Twig website was over twice as busy as it usually is, I decided to investigate. By using the stats package I noticed that one file, iwd.php, was getting all the hits. Then I realised: iwd = International Womens’ Day = 8 March = today.

Eleven years ago Diamond Twig published a set of six postcards, each with a poem for International Womens’ Day. When we set up the website in July 2000, I created a page which displayed a random postcard from the set. And now, if you Google international womens’ day poems and ask for only pages from the UK, this page is top. How come?

Well, probably a combination of things: the text mentions International Womens’ Day very prominently, and the page has been around for a long time. Still, to be number 1 out of 115,000 is an achievement which we’re proud of. And it explains why every year, when International Womens’ Day comes around, women head for the Diamond Twig Website to read a poem or six.