go ahead, snoop around…

Social sites are brilliant. There are literally hundreds of billions of people on the internet, sharing useless, irrelevant information all day when they should be working and paying their taxes. You can really profit from this information by distracting yourself from the harsh, depressing inevitability of life, spending all of your cash on things you don’t really need, or convincing this electronic community that you’re actually cool, even though you’re actually not. Don’t get me wrong, I love the social web - I use delicious, twitter, youtube and facebook and I really benefit from them. I’m in the exact age group and hobby-set that most of this shared information applies to, yet I’m still not happy. I’m not happy because I’m not cool enough for a ffffound.com invite.

I’ve Googled for ffffound.com invites and I’m not alone. There are literally some other people who want these invites, but are in the same group of uncool people who won’t get an invite to this site, and are forced to passively view the stream of great images collated by the individuals in the know.

This all got me to thinking, is it a good thing that I’m not allowed in this community? What do I have to bring to the table? The popularity of my blog is proof positive that my images aren’t universally appealing enough to garner popularity on their own, so who wants to look at images that I like? Do I have time to positively contribute to this site? “Yes”, “Nothing”, “No-one” and “No”. My favourite thing about ffffound is the fact that idiots aren’t allowed (and if they do get in, they low enough in numbers to not gain power in moronic numbers (see: Youtube or any blog with open comments)). This is further confirmed by the fact that weheartit is nearly an unbearable stream of pretentious rubbish, arty muff-shots (a middle-waste-ground between art and porn that does nothing for no-one, and should be stopped) and images from ffffound that I already saw on the ffffound feed!

I’ve been getting the feed from ffffound for a few days now, and there are around 50-100 images a day that are top quality, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because they don’t let people like me in. I’ve nothing to share, except my view on shared images (which no-one cares about anyway) so it’s right I shouldn’t be allowed to join. If people like me were allowed to join, it’d just be another Youtube, and who wants that?! Not me, that’s who.

ffffound - do us all a favour - keep it exclusive, don’t let idiots in!

So, on August 12th, I started work on the new do1 site. The big pimpin’ gentleman in the yellow is the designer/owner of the new site and there’s a reason he’s looking smug. Aside from the fact that we managed to turn around this monolithic site in under a month (complete with my first proper Wordpress integration and my first real foray into mootools), it has turned out totally awesome (even if I do say so myself!). The powerhouse in grey with crazy eyes is Krzysztof, the legend who leapt in on release day to tie up loose ends with me.

Whilst this has not been the application-oriented site that I’m used to, it is an HTML and CSS beast, with transparency and javascript animation coming out the whazoo. Needless to say, I’m quite proud of myself aside from a couple of small things that I want to tidy up (namely full Opera and Firefox 2 support).

This all went down on Monday, after a 17.5 hour day, which metaphorically put me on my ass to the extent that I’ve had today off work. Quite convenient, really, when you consider that the Sky man’s coming to fit a dish today. Almost as if I’d planned it!

Enjoy the new do1 site, and let me know what you think/if you get any errors (unless you’re in Opera or Firefox 2)

Today, I want to talk about work. I like my job. I love to learn new things and be met with new challenges, and in my job that’s my daily bread. I like to challenge myself, too. Every project I undertake, I do better than the last one. That’s not to the discredit of the last one, because it was as good as I was capable of at the time. I challenge myself to get the job done with less code, smaller files, less-to-no repetition. I hate to compromise, even though the web frequently forces me to do so. I even hate to compromise when the compromise is better than what I was initially aiming for, because I had to forego something that was unachievable. I don’t like to admit that I had a bad idea (even though I can, and I consider it very important to be able to).

I think I’m good at what I do. I take a lot of pride in my work, and it shows in the enthusiasm with which I present myself and my work.

However, with each project I finish, I become more aware of and frustrated by the limitations that are inflicted upon web-workers on a day-to-day basis by certain aspects of the web. The problem is split about 70/30 in my eyes between users who use and insist on using antiquated software and the software itself. Looking at it from this angle, it would be easy to say that users are 100% of the problem, but I don’t think it’s right to let certain vendors get off scot-free, being substantially arrogant to release ridiculously sub-standard software.

The crux of this small point (I could go on but, as I said, all my midnight oil is gone) is that there are a lot of developers who have a real passion for user experience, right down to the stuff that you don’t even think about, and we do it as a hobby even when we’re not getting paid!

This is why I’m not obnoxiously telling you that you’re an idiot for using a Microsoft web browser - as a user, the majority of the reasons I want you to switch aren’t important to you, I’m simply asking that you try one of the amazing alternatives that are free, faster, easier to use (everything new involves a learning curve) and created by people who actually care about your experience and aren’t just putting a browser out because being seen as having a large market share is important for their image as a software giant. A couple of weeks ago, 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 in one day, and I’d really appreciate it if you did the same, it would definitely make my life a load easier to be able to drop support for barely-capable browsers.

If you try and don’t like Firefox, definitely take a look at Opera, another amazing browser.

You’ll thank me for this later.