Last week was a long one, everyone waiting patiently for the bank holiday to arrive.

It seemed the world decided to enhance their 3 day holiday with an extra day, but luckily the team was still string within Creative Jar.

As the votes were gathered for Most Excellent Person, it was clear that two people had impressed the team this week.

But, there was only one winner and that was

Nathan Burn

Picnik, if you haven't googled it by now, lets you edit your photos. I, for one, love photography and I think maybe one of the best parts of the art, is being able to show your work off  but, that’s not all you can do with this site.

I was set a few hours to look through the site, so I could come up with something to write about and you know what...I was impressed. 

Think flickr and very a cut down version of Photoshop 7, mix them up and Picnik is what you get. It’s a really intuitive little site, enabling the user to edit photos (to a basic level) and then to post them online for the others to see. 

It doesn't stop there, thanks to its speedy server, you can upload photos, then edit and save them back on your desktop in minutes. Not happy with your photo's? Look for inspiration on the homepage by following the featured photographers. 

If you love your photo's, print them to canvas or that special office mug you been longing for, all with a few clicks of a button. 

There is only one draw back...unfortunately Picnik is powered by Flash and Flash being Flash it’s not supported on the iPhone, or iPad which is a bit of disappointment...but hey life goes on!

I am not gonna chat endlessly about Picnik and frankly I ran out of thing to say. But I will say this; if you are interested in photography or just wanna upload photos with your friends quick and easily, then Picnik is for you. 

Go on have a look (picnik.com) you know you want too!

Location-based social networking is experiencing a boom and now entering the lives of far more people than ever before… but what is it? The examples below are based on the current Foursquare model.

To put it simply the premise is that an individual 'checks-in' to a specific location, whether it be a business, restaurant, holiday destination etc. and collects points in doing so. Points are scored and badges unlocked dependant on the amount of times a location is visited. Users can post notes and advice based on each location. For example: 'Dave's Fish & Chips' would be your entry and your comment could be something along the lines of "Try the Steak and Potato pie, homemade and great tasting".

There are extra features including:

• • Location aware searches
• • Friend searches and connections

OK, so it's a game? Yes and No. It depends on what you wish to use it for. As a user I have absolutely no interest in the collecting of badges or playing a game. I want to use the application to give me real information that will assist me in a present situation. There are people who love the game aspect of the concept and spend a huge amount of time in becoming a 'mayor' of their local Tesco.

Examples of how a location-based social network can assist an individual rely on the quality of the data input. I have only ever posted twice within the Foursquare environment promoting a Chinese restaurant who serves Gluten-free food. To me this is an extremely useful piece of information that can be searched for within the application. There are currently too many people posting irrelevant entries for me to want to open up the application on a regular basis.

That said this form of social networking can be huge for businesses (but can be sabotaged). Starbuck's use Foursquare to generate custom by offering discounts based on check-ins to their outlets in the US. A number of other large companies have given away free products to the first 'X' amount of people to check-in  at specific locations. So for businesses it's a great marketing tool that generates leads for pretty much no outlay.

It will be interesting to see how the recently announced (and launched in the US) Facebook Places competes with Foursquare (currently you will be able to push check-ins from Foursquare to Facebook Places). One interesting addition is that by adding a business via Facebook Places a Facebook Page is automatically generated, allowing you to target people who like your business page.

I think for the time being, especially in the UK, location-based social networking is still a wait and see. It is extremely reliant on the quality of data and businesses jumping onboard. Possibly when Facebook Places hits the UK we will start to see a positive adoption of the technology, especially as businesses realise that amount of people they have at their Facebook doorstep.

I thought that hell would have frozen over long before I ever blog about a Microsoft product, let alone Internet Explorer, let alone looking forward to it, but here I am - blogging about Internet Explorer 9, the latest soon-to-be-released version of Internet Explorer.

Even though the much improved Internet Explorer 8 was only released over a year ago in March 2009, Microsoft are already hard at work (and not too far off releasing) version 9 of their controversial browser application. You can even download the latest preview of the browser from their test drive microsite.

It was also announced that the first official beta of Internet Explorer 9 will be launched on September 15th 2010, that's just 3 weeks away from today.

Having just switched to Google Chrome after years of being a Firefox fanboy, there is no worries of me jumping ship to Internet Explorer as my browser of choice anytime soon. However, the main reason for my excitement is the possibilities it opens up when developing websites.

Though we hate to admit it, Internet Explorer is probably one of the most influential browsers in terms of the technologies we decide to build our websites in. Due to the large market share, we have to make sure that what we build is compatible. This meant that using exciting new technologies such as CSS3, and HTML5 was not as possible as the more standards compliant and frequently updated browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera.

As of the fourth preview release, Internet Explorer has surprisingly good support for CSS3 selectors (43 out of 43) and properties, scores 93/100 on the Acid3 test – a much higher score than the 20/100 IE8 receives, a faster JavaScript engine and supports new HTML5 tags such as <video> and <header>.

With the end of Internet Explorer 6 coming more of a reality day by day, we are likely to see a big surge in people upgrading and therefore allow us to use these new technologies which the latest browsers are now supporting.

As an industry we are steaming forward into a more standardised playing field, meaning our web designers and developers are happier and the web will become a much more competitive and exciting venture.

Reading mashable last night and being a new iPhone 4 owner I found one of their latest posts most useful!

Using your iPhone keypad while typing tap and hold the '.?123' button, then slide your finger to the required key and let go! Instant update without having to tap to switch screens!

I found this incredibly useful with punctuation, tapping away for my message then sliding my finger for a comma, job done!

* So much so this has all been typed from my iphone :)

mashable.com

As designers who code and developers, we like to shout about writing semantic HTML as a standard in our work, but a lot of the time we then get asked "What does Semantic HTML actually mean?"

In short, it means the HTML tags we use imply meaning to the content, rather than presentation. This in affect means our HTML is cleaner, easier to understand, more accessible for screen readers, and should no custom CSS be applied to the document – the content is still readable in the manner it was intended.

Some examples of these would be using: <p> tags for our paragraphs of text; <address> for, you guessed it, an address; <h1>, <h2>, <h3> for headings and sub-headings – increasing the number as the heading decreases in the page's hierarchy.

When writing semantic HTML, we also tend to use <em> and <strong> tags rather than <i> and <b>. Earlier we stated we want to use HTML tags which imply content, not presentation. In this case <em> and <strong> imply that the content should be emphasised and have strong meaning, whereas if we were to use <i> and <b>, they are a presentational instruction for the content to be italicised and bolded – which can just as easily be done through CSS, further separating visual style from content.

The above are just a small handful of the tags we can use, and with the continuing development of HTML5 we are seeing even more tags created to make our templates even more semantic, removing the need of copious amounts of <div> tags (a <div> being just a container, implying no meaning to its content).

Headings and SEO

On the topic of semantic HTML, the conversation about the use of headings and its impact on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of a page is often raised – and one tag which causes confusion and a plethora of opinions, is the <h1> tag.

The <h1> tag is intended for the most important heading on the page. Most of the time designers and developers wrap the site title and/or logo in the <h1> tag as they deem this piece of information as the most important. However some SEO specialists disagree, and would rather the current page's or blog post's title should be within the <h1> as this holds the most weight about the information that is on the page. So who is right and who is wrong?The answer is there is no right or wrong way, and there is a lot of grey area, just personal preference and different SEO strategies – hence the reason for difference in opinions and implementations.

Personally, I agree that the page title should be in the <h1>, and the site title should then be within a link to the site's homepage.

But what about the home page, that doesn't necessarily have a title? After a recent discussion with other developers we came up with a simple solution. This solution can also be found in the recently released Twenty-Ten default theme for WordPress 3.0.

On the home page, the most important heading on the page is the site title, correct? Well on this page, we wrap the site title and/or logo within a <h1> tag, giving it the highest priority on the page in terms of structure, and search engines will recognise this.

When moving onto a subsequent page, the <h1> tag will then be used for the page title as discussed earlier, and the site title will then be wrapped with a link.

This might require a bit more code from the server side point of view, but the result is a lot more efficient for your semantic HTML, and it will definitely make SEO consultants and specialists happy.

Friday is once again home to the Most Excellent Person!

This week it was a double whammy for one person. Not only did they support numerous projects and help the teams, he also invented the mini scrum and he is getting married next week!

The Winner is.... Nat Coxall!

Better late than never!

As always the Most Excellent Person deserves the acclamation, this winner had theinitiative to call old clients and bring in two newpieces of work, while taking on responsibility for Frankie’s (recently left, and much missed account manager) projects as well as attending events and getting leads.

Phew, a lot of extra work!

The winner is: Charlotte Murray

The founder of Wikipedia, Mr Wales, is calling the Times paywall “a foolish experiment"

As the founder Mr Wales has multiple business interests. He's not a journalist who has to rely on his news organisation surviving - newspapers have been in decline for some time.

The free paper model, funded by advertising, has been steadily devaluing news for some time.  Online, the mindset is that news content is free.

The Times is trying to restore its premium positioning.  The catalyst for this is the launch of the iPad. The Times are putting tablets such as the iPad at the centre of their publishing strategy and they've set expectation, right from the start that content on this platform is paid for.

Under these circumstances, a free website would be an anomaly and would undermine the strategy.   

There is value in high quality, accurate journalism and tablets will allow publishers to regain control of their product and generate revenue from the journalism at their core. 

Publishers will need to adapt though, because consumers will expect to see richer, more dynamic content than is on offer currently.

The Times will also need to provide in-depth features and analysisto set them apart from basic news products and justify their premium positioning.

Yes, it's disappointing that the Times pay wall cuts off the social web.

However, the by-product of the pay wall for FT.com is thatit’s allowing the publisher to develop a deeper understanding of their users’behaviour, without contravening their privacy.  The benefit of this is improved targeting ofcontent, news gathering resources and better product development.

The risk is that The Times could lose its reach andtherefore much of its voice in the international, online news market.  However, if consumers see the value in premiumnews content, just as with valuable business information, then the pay wall will succeed.

Following on from my previous article on git source control, I’ll now take a look at a few solutions for the other side of development : Database structure

There are 2 sides to most development projects.  The code, be that business logic, UI or reports is easily  via a variety of solutions (SVN, CVS, git, VSS, etc)

The other side of the coin is that of the database.  Most applications will consume some form of data in their operation.  While some may rely on external services to provide this, most will have some form of local storage to store all the elements necessary for it to function.  Many site will have space for user logins, product information, shopping baskets, news, events, documentation, the list is endless

In the same vein as development, the data stores usually starts as a small collection of tables.  As functionality in the codebase grows, so does the number of tables needed to store all the different types of data that are being coded for.  So, as developers make changes to their sections of code and can commit their changes to a repository, what is there on the database side?  How does one track changes and additions to tables and stored procedures?

It’s definitely something that is becoming more of a necessity in these days of incremental release.  Traditionally, a new database would have to be created in it’s entirety. Not really a problem for development database that are used prior to release.  The development code can be expected to be quite fluid and changes are expected to occur frequently.  Once that database has been released to production, this becomes impossible.  Customers are very reluctant to lose historic data, user tracking relies upon it.  In this case, changes can be made piecemeal and scripts generated to map the single changes to other instances of the database

Fine if you’re using the DEV>UAT>Production strategy.  A single setup coordinator can orchestrate the script from a developer and apply that to the UAT database.  When the QA team are happy that the changes are working, this same script can then be applied to the production database, preserving existing data

However, when development becomes more distributed that a single developer and single production database, things start getting a little trickier to manage.  Sending scripts around becomes impossible.  People might not have the very latest build so scripts that rely on a series of changes will fail

This is where a central source control solution come in.  There are tools for applying these single change in order so that dependencies can be tracked.  Red gate have a fantastic tool which integrates natively with SVN so map changes, and there are some other really usable open-source tools available which can target more databases, but with more of an onus on developer collaboration to make the changes in sequence

Red gate's tool integrates only with SqlServer but is a valuable addition to their Sql toolbelt set of tools.  I’ve been using them for years and can’t fault them for mapping changes to production databases.  Their latest tool is no exception.  It works as an addition to the Sql Management Studio which ships with SqlServer.  Extra tool menus allow you to attach a database to an SVN repository.  Once linked, the tool will make an initial snapshot of it’s structure.  Then each change is managed within the tool, allowing the developer to commit them one by one as they are made.  When another developer needs to get a copy of the development database, they only have to make an empty database, link that to the central repository and the tool then maps the tables and stored procedures across, including any dependencies that are found.  The new developer can also make changes to their database, commit these one by one and the original developer will see these as updates and can apply them to their database.  The process can be scaled up in much the same way as regular development source control  solutions.  Distributed developers are given access to the repository and off they go

The open source solution I’ve looked at closely is deltaSql.  This employs a custom server for mapping changes which runs on Apache, making it cross platform compatible with Windows or Linux.  It uses a similar commit and update strategy but pulling the individual scripts from it’s central server instead of SVN.  This solution also allows for more databases to be catalogued, including mySQL and postgreSQL and Oracle.  Lit integrates into the Eclipse IDE via asset of open source windows so is totally free to use

Both solutions provide a lightweight method of mapping changes from a distributed set of users to a central location over multiple database solutions.  Source control is essential for most projects and databases should be no different.  They are, in some cases, more complex than the code that drives them, so being able to sync the change with your peers is an absolute necessity.  Throw in a few QA houses, production databases and data warehousing solutions and the "Drop and Reload" method is not going to work out.  Both offering provide a less painful way to make structure changes in a controlled manner and provide a means to roll these changes back and start again should testing prove unsuccessful.  Very powerful!