Mad Dogs and Enlgish Wine

Henry (who talks at the Geek Wine Thing) and Andy from The Butlers Wine Cellar are doing a 2000 KM cycling trip to raise:

• money for the the Chestnut Tree House children’s hospice and…
• awareness of quality English wine.

Being a bit of a Google Maps junkie, I decided to plot their journey:

View Larger Map
More info is available on the Mad Dogs And English Wine website.

Geek Wine Thing – Back for 2008

Having just spoken to Henry from The Butlers Wine Cellar, I'm pleased to announce that the Geek Wine Thing is back for 2008.

You can register on upcoming.

We haven't agreed a theme yet, so please feel free to suggest a theme in the comments.

Also, you can now follow what's going on with the Geek Wine Thing via Twitter.

Emotional Engagement

For several months now I've been irritated by a pair of annoying pop-ups (modal dialog boxes to be precise) that appear, one after the other, every time I start iTunes.

This is the SRS iWOW plug-in telling me that my trial period has expired and asking whether I want to buy a license. I do not.

Showing a modal dialog box is bad, showing 2 of them is really bad and presenting no way to remove the software makes the problem inescapable.

These two pop-ups are really annoying:

• they interrupt me
• they require my input
• they interrupt the importing of songs - so that I have to initiate the opening of files twice, and they're ugly.

I resolved never to buy anything from this company!

In desperation I emailed their customer support not expecting either to be ignored or, at best, a dismissive, reluctant response containing complicated instructions. I couldn't have been more wrong - what I got in response was a prompt, apologetic and helpful email written by a real person (someone called Michael Gonzales).

As it turns out, this would completely changed my opinion of their whole brand.

Some time after this email exchange, I came across the TunePro iPod Speaker Charger Alarm Clock (nice name) which bore the SRS logo and, to my surprise, I found myself wanting the thing. Because it had the SRS logo on it. Baring in mind that I'm the sort of person who couldn't care less about having an alarm clock, this is pretty amazing.

It just goes to show how wide and complex the area of user experience is. Who'd could have predicted that I'd reverse my decision to never buy their stuff based on one email?

Emotional Engagement - A Lesson from Darth Vader
Bad experiences engage you as deeply as good ones.

And then, If a bad brand redeems itself, it stays with you but now it's switched and quickly becomes your friend - like Darth Vader at the end of Jedi.

3 Ways to Improve Your Website Based on Statistics

Website stats contain so much data that it can be hard to know what to do with that information.

Here are 3 ways that you can use statistics to make your site better:

1. Look for the most frequent search term and work that term into a prominent link on your homepage.
2. Find the most popular broken link (AKA, 404 page) and replace it with a real page. Alternatively, configure your web server to issue a permanent redirect response, this way people are unaware of any issue.
3. Find out your site's most popular entry point and concentrate on the design of that page like you would your homepage.

Week of SkillSwaps

I'm helping organize a Week of SkillSwaps as part of the Brighton Digital Festival and I happy to announce that 5 sessions have now been confirmed.

Links for Booking

• Photography 101 with Jane Dallaway
• Master Screencasting with Ian Ozsvald
• Agile: Iterating the Reasons with Joh Hunt & Tom Hume
• The Art of Storytelling with Charlie Davies
• Software Testing with Rosie Sherry

Venue

The events will all be held at Madgex. Thanks Glenn for sorting this.

Other events in the Brighton Digital Festival

About SkillSwap

If you aren't aware of SkillSwap:

The idea is that on a semi-regular basis, people from the local digital community volunteer to give up some of their free time to train a small group of their peers in a subject that interests them

I hope to see some of you there it's going to be greeeeeaat.

Ugly Beautiful

I've recently noticed a trend towards ugly marketing:

• lingscars.com (Via Tom Nixon)
• Skills Matter's HTML emails
• Really ugly email from Borders

I don't know yet whether I love it or hate it.

Keeping Things Public

By default I always assume that things are public unless there's good reason to make it private. Of course I would always make sure that those involved are in the know before anything gets published.

A Flickr API Method for Getting Note Coordinates Please

I recently did a rough interface design for an image grouping tool that a client has requested. Having uploaded the file to Flickr, I added some notes explaining how it would work.

What I want now is a way of getting high-quality version of the file (including notes) which I can print or send to the client.

Theoretically I could write a little web application which fetches the image file along with it's notes and their locations from Flickr, and combines this stuff into a PDF for me to print.

Unfortunately this can't be done because the Flickr API only lest you add, edit and delete notes - not get information about existing notes.

So, Flickr people, please add a method for retrieving notes for a particular image.