useability

Drupal in five minutes

jp.stacey 7 July 2007

Will wonders never cease? I’m helping a friend build a website for his driving school, and decided to give Drupal a try so he could have all the whistles and bells he might want. It seemed a bit like overkill, but it would also be instructive for me and would mean that he could always turn to someone else in future to do the development. The number of sites that must founder because they’re maintained by a friend that becomes an ex-friend….

DO NOT BEEP!

jp.stacey 29 August 2007

On both my work and home Dell laptops, the computer beeps at full volume when you change the sound settings. This has come close to shattering my eardrums on several occasions these past few days.

Unsubscibe me form this maling list... for a bit

jp.stacey 17 December 2007

‘Tis the season to remove yourself from mailing lists if you’re subscribed from your work address. And there’s only so much good will to go round, until it’s completely soaked up by people asking lists with automated (un)subscription procedures to “unsubscibe” them, please, right now. It’s even harder to deal with those who ask thousands of people if they can be unsubscribed, but then re-subscribed

FixMySpine

jp.stacey 18 January 2008

FixMyStreet is getting some great press, this time a Guardian article comparing it favourably to Facebook.

Drupal 6.0 out

jp.stacey 13 February 2008

Drupal 6.0 released. The smoothness of D6’s interaction with both user and developer is really breathtaking these days: as close to one-click installation as you’re likely to get on shared hosting; modules to help you port your own modules over from D5; and even automatically downloaded updates to (unhacked!) core. I had a look at the release candidates but owing to other responsibilities I haven’t had a chance to sit down and play with the actual release.

Cheaper rail journeys with Matthew and Spliticket

jp.stacey 13 March 2008
The rail industry's biggest fares secret: exposed, and now given an interface.

I’ve built something, just in time for me to crowbar it awkwardly into conversations at OKCon.

RSS feeds: keep them well hidden

jp.stacey 22 June 2008
All the minimalists in the house say "Yo!" All the maximalists say "Well, it really depends on a number of complex and mutually antagonistic factors...."

Mark Pilgrim on extreme minimalism:

Successful musicians write songs that other people like

jp.stacey 12 August 2008
By all means be careful what you invest in: whether you're paying with your time or with your money. But thinking about the needs of your fellow man can reap rewards too: not just for your moral integrity.

I love Stevey's Blog Rants: I don't always agree with him, but he puts forward a hell of a lot of interesting ideas. Also, he writes long blog posts, which is respectful to his readership, who he considers to be something other than attention-deficit idiots.

Belated and potentially unreliable discussion of Google Chrome

jp.stacey 14 September 2008
I feel it's important to tell it like it is, even in the restricted space of a post title; but maybe I need a lesson from Google in self-presentation.

I'm typing this from Google Chrome. Since it was released almost two weeks ago I've wanted to blog about it, but have been mostly hampered by no easy access to Vista or XP.

Wordpress violence / breaks the silence

jp.stacey 14 September 2008
Come cracking in / into my little shared-hosting environment. I'm working on it.

I finally began to get on top of Wordpress upgrades a few months ago, with an upgrade to 2.5.1. It worked well, but left me open to what looks like a failed attempt to exploit a cryptographic splicing vulnerability in Wordpress 2.5.x.