January 2011
8 posts
2 tags
Technical Drawbacks in the CABE Archive
The National Archives’ archive of the CABE website reproduces all our pages, images, CSS and Javascript. But it fails in two areas that are critical to the user experience – internal search doesn’t work and links to external sites break.
This post details the workarounds for these (and other) issues.
This is a follow-up to my earlier post about archiving the CABE website.
Internal Search
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Content Challenges in the CABE Archive
The biggest challenge in archiving the CABE website was reviewing 5,000 pages in 6 weeks. This included removing out of date information, deleting calls to action and making it read like an archive rather than a going concern.
The biggest decision turned out to be the simplest. Grammar. We decided not to rewrite the whole site in the past tense as the whole thing is framed by a banner...
2 tags
Archiving the CABE Website
On 20 October 2010, the government announced that funding for CABE had been withdrawn as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review. Put simply, CABE would cease to exist from from 1 April 2011.
So the CABE website faced an interesting challenge. What happens to the digital assets of a quango when it shuts? There were very few precedents.
The CABE site is a large, popular site that is cherished...
2 tags
Design Tenets (And Their Opposites)
One way to keep everyone focused throughout a design process is to create a set of design tenets upfront. Great examples include “every millisecond counts” (Google) or “the more it’s used, the better it gets” (Adaptive Path).
But design tenets are often elusive and difficult to write. So I’m loving Stephen P Anderson’s presentation on Principles To Build By which contains 9 specific guidelines on...
3 tags
Triple Clicking
Triple clicking is a workflow improvement that will save you hours, days or maybe even weeks in the long run. But what does it do?
Triple clicking on any text block selects that whole block.
It doesn’t sound impressive. But it will turn you into a speed freak when copying and pasting because it gives you an enormous clickable area. You just don’t have to be precise with your text selection any...
3 tags
My Huffduffer UX Tag Bundle
Update 18/01/11: Would you believe it? Within a week of this post Jeremy Keith explained how this functionality is built into Huffduffer. So you don’t have to use my over-complicated Yahoo Pipes nonsense - instead you can just use a single Huffduffer URL. This is next-level URL design in action…
I love Huffduffer for one reason. It lets me find podcast episodes that suit my precise...
Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible
These ideas may all sound familiar - devices are location aware, apps can access social contexts, users are happy to pay small amounts - but it’s great to see them wrapped up into such a useful article with references and examples to follow up on.
Stop building what was possible yesterday, and start building what wasn’t possible yesterday. Jason L Baptiste
Interesting idea. Definitely...
1 tag
None of us knows anything
Peter Adamson from Kings College London has a great podcast - The History of Philosophy With No Gaps - which throws up some amazing quotes:
None of us knows anything, and instead we make do with belief. Democritus
I like the humbleness of it. Learn - but don’t get complacent about what you think you know.
And apparently Democritus was known as the laughing philosopher because he...