Carbon footprint of ads!

There is a drive to start measuring the carbon footprint of online media.

I find it hard to believe that the C02 output caused as a result of a fan cooling down a server which is getting hot because it is distributing some web pages is really worth worrying about compared to Hummers or cheap airline travel.

Apparently some digital agencies are interested in being carbon neutral in terms of the media they produce. Sounds weird - its dependent on site traffic surely, so how is that going to work?

Interface design

Jakob Nielsen said:

"The big lesson here is the need to stick with the design conventions that
users know."

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/dialog-box.html>

Apparently he found a badly designed dialog box - arrrgh, no!!! On the SIG-IA list, Ziya had a typically caustic reply (which I 100% agree with):

"Of course, the most glaring evidence against the brain-dead fatwa that can
only be made by a small-minded bureaucrat, 'if it's different, users won't
get it,' is the iPhone: not bad because it has "non-standard GUI behavior,"
but great because it manages to transcend Nielsen's conventional
straightjacket."

Poor old Nielsen, he does sound incredibly dull. If we all stuck to the idea of making everything the same just in case some people don't 'get it' when we try something new, the world would be pretty awful. Obviously the more new things you try, the bigger the risk that something will go wrong - but its worth the risk isn't it?

Flickr widget for blogger

This code, which I stole from David K works really nicely as a little flickr photo widget. You can customise the number of thumbnails, and how many rows to spread them over - it's shown in action at the top of the page, under the blog title...

Click here to get the widget code

Then you just need to add a widget to your blog of the 'html/javascript' kind, and paste in the code in the file above.

Make sure you edit the flickrUsername and flickrApiKey fields - you need to get your own flickr api key from here.

My 2 yr old Jonny Rotten

We had a great weekend with Leigh, Rich and Ella (Ikey's girlfriend, sort of).

On Saturday we went over to theirs for a BBQ. We had triple chocolate ice-cream for pudding - which Isaac and Ella also had. NOT a good idea. Too much sugar that close to bed time.

Although afterwards, Isaac and Ella got on little stools that kids use for going to the loo and starting basically free-styling an improvised medley of songs / nursery rhymes / general observations to a sort of spasmodic alternative crazy body popping dance. Isaac added some sort of general spitting, growling weirdness to it all just to top off the 'possessed by Satan' feel for the event. I was in stitches with Clare and Leigh, whilst Rich was looking a bit shocked when he commented 'I'm not sure if its cute'. I have some nutty photos to go with this - will upload later...

I think...

Isaac at breakfast: "I think Rosa is cute, and Daddy is big and Mummy is tiny."

A flickr plugin for lightroom

One day, when Adobe release their Lightroom plugin SDK, I am going to make a plugin which synchronises collections between Flickr and Lightroom.

It's probably impossible, but I want it! Fed up with having to create collections twice!!!

Or perhaps someone else will do it...

Flickr and Lightroom

This is great - if you use Lightroom for photo editing, you can add Flickr Uploader as an export action - saves a few clicks!

http://blog.mayyan.net/2007/03/27/lightroom-flickr-uploadr-set-up/