It’s time to blow the dust off this blog and announce some rather exciting news for Creative Jar. Previously this year, Creative Jar launched Phase 1 of Cranfield School of Management's new website and was received with huge success. Recently, as part of the second phase, we were required to build a powerful search tool for the website much like Google – a scary comparison, but a challenge Creative Jar set out to achieve.

Your average search tool consists of a keyword search which displays a generic list of results relating to your search term. Leaving users to flick through link by link for what they were searching. However, the SOM Search uses your search term and returns results in an array of categories; images, videos, documents, website sections.

Directly from this results landing page, the user can watch videos, play audio files and read snippets of content. Alternatively, the user can select to view your standard results page if they wish to do so.

All of this is powered using Cranfield's custom CMS, giving the client full control over their content and their search... a powerful tool for any website – and very exciting for use techies to build!

Check it out and find out for yourself by visiting the Cranfield website!

We have been working with a client who has a Google Search Box installed in their website. http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/index.html

The guys lucky enough to have been working with this technology are loving it. Digging deep into XSLT - we think we have provided one of the strongest search solutions available on the internet (for an internal search engine).

Stay posted - this isn't live yet.

In the meantime, anyone contemplating adding a search tool to their website should be looking at this. It's enterprise level, so not cheap, but you get what you pay for. And this is awesome! 

I am currently in the process of packing up my belongings to move house - and let's face it, you inevitably will find stuff which you had misplaced about 6 years ago behind a book or in a box deep within your cupboard. One thing I did find was a box of untouched floppy discs and it got me thinking: when was the last time I used a floppy disc? With CD's, DVD's, Memory Sticks and External Hard Drives polluting every computer users repository for file storage, floppy disc's don't even get a look in.

So with the 'fate of floppy discs becoming apparent' what will happen to the Floppy Disc Save icon that we see on every computer application that has saving functionality? Will it be modernized to suit the advancing technologies that we now use to store our files? Or will it be standardized as one of those all-time-favourites that just don't need changing? Well I did a bit of googling on the matter, as you do, and found this interesting discussion: Modernizing the Save Icon?

You will find a few comic jokes thrown in here and there but some very valid points are raised about why should we both touching something which has become such a standard?

"Quick, off the top of your head, what does a red octagon with a white outline represent? How about a button on a GUI that looks like a pair of scissors? What about a red circle with a red line across it from the lower left to the upper right? A button on the corner of a screen window that has an X in it? Do *any* of these things actually look like the object or process that they
represent? Does it matter?

A good icon is simple, visually distinctive, easy to recognize instantly, consistent across many interfaces. The floppy disk icon for save is all of these things, and it's also familiar to almost every experienced computer user. It could be simplified a little (removing some superfluous details, like the label and the little readonly-lock thingydo), but the basic visual is already
quite simple and distinctive. Nobody's going to mistake it for (say) the paste button. Sure, it's an anachronism, but the standard icons for cutting and pasting are scissors and paste, respectively, and nobody's used *that* method of cutting and pasting since word processing came into vogue. So what? The icons are visually distinctive enough (well, the scissors are; they should
probably have used a roll of transparent tape for paste, but it's too late to change that now) and their meaning is well established."

I think the above nailed the point really: an icon is something which is easy to recognize instantly, consistent and requires no thought. Just because the technologies that we use nowadays look different and are structured differently physically doesn't mean functionally they do not have the same purpose - to save your current file

We have recently been working on a multi-lingual website - one supported language being Korean. Thankfully, on Windows Vista, we have a pre-installed language pack which displays all of the Eastern language characters. However we were running into a problem on some Windows XP machines, that even after installing the language pack, some elements (primarily select drop-down menus) were rendering with square text rather than the Korean language.

After researching into whether or not it was the DOCTYPE of the page, if the font being used supported Korean characters, or it was infact a browser issue as the problem only occured in Internet Explorer. I was able to fix  the problem by setting the language charset for the page to Korean by using a meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=euc-kr" />

So simply place this in the <head> tag of your web page and the problem is fixed. Hurrah!

Theres nothing new about a robots.txt file, but I have started using robots.txt validators that will not validate unless an XML sitemap is specified.

This is very good practice as the XML sitemap will get picked up by all crawlers that support the tag 'Sitemap' within your robots.txt file (Google and MSNBot do for starters).

So using http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php#submit_robots as a reference my example robots.txt file will look like this:

The blank link between the Sitemap tag and the User-agent tag is essential as this can cause problems for some crawlers.

Happy SEO!

I was very privileged in being able to attend this year’s Future of Web Design Conference in London hosted by Carsonified. Whilst primarily aimed at web designers, there were quite a few talks which interested me as a front end developer and that the topics would provoke ideas which I could bring back and discuss for Creative Jar.

Some highly renowned names were amongst the speakers, including Meagan Fisher from Simplebits, who discussed the level of support for Mobile Interfaces. Do we make our websites viewable to suit the ever increasing number of mobile web users by just making sure it works, or do we offer them something special – a layout and application specifically built for their mobile?

Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet gave a demonstration on how unusable popular websites such as Youtube, Google and New Scientist are from the perspective of a blind user. Also giving us some tips as to what can help us make our websites a bit more accessible.

Sabrina Dent demonstrated what happens when you throw client collaboration out of the window. A very nice method of thinking, but not too sure how much clients would appreciate just being told “No!”

Molly Holzschlag informed us on the future of web standards and whether there is one. CSS3 is looming just around the corner, even though there is a lot of scepticism of whether we should start implementing it. The support of IE6 was also mentioned; be careful with it. Rather than just throwing it in the bin as we would with any other trash, we should still cater for it. Offer a milder user experience, whilst at least there is a new push of upgrading browsers coming shortly. Overall, the talk proved to be very informative talk on how best handle our code and move forward with our standards.

And these were just a selection of the many great speakers that I was able to watch! To make it even better, I was able to attend 2 workshops the following day on Accessibility and Javascript! Both being such an eye opener of what can be achieved; one with the problems which disabled users face on day to day websites and how we can use ‘Personas’ to create the best user experience for our audience even if they are disabled through vision or movement; and the other demonstrating what can now be achieved through the many Javascript libraries which are at our finger tips and help solve some of our common problems such as dynamic graphs.

At the end of the 2 days I felt that I had never laughed so much, debated so much amongst like-minded designers/developers and met so many interesting people. Definitely worth the visit and looking forward to the next!

I have recently gone through a series of critical hardware failures affecting nearly all my personal hardware devices.

Now in my career I have been a Network Administrator so maintaining regular backups of all relevant data has been at the forefront of my choice of hardware, but sometimes this has slipped. So let me take you through the failures and their effect:

Failure 1: Mac Book G4. 

Problem: Fan increases in speed and makes a grinding noise, software locks up, computer is inoperable. This computer held all personal digital photos, from 2005 to 2008.

Outcome: I managed to backup up these photos to an external hard disk with the help of a friend who attached my Mac to his and booted my Mac as an external hard disk. Not happy that the most expensive computer I have ever bought failed and the fix would cost me £400. This computer has been recycled and I won't be making this mistake again. This Mac has been replaced by a second hand IBM Laptop and I have also got an Iomega external hard disk. I have uploaded 10GB of photos and videos to an online account http://home.live.com, which allows for 25GB of data storage for free, including photos as part of the Skydrive app.

Failure 2: Xbox 360.

Problem: I had the RRoD which seems to happen to almost every Xbox.

Outcome: One call to Xbox support and I am issued with a freepost packing slip, a delivery man comes to my house and picks up my Xbox. 5 days later it is returned. No loss of data as everything is stored on my Xbox hard disk, I also get an additional 3 years guarantee on the machine. In a word - happy!

Failure 3: PC Hard Disk.

Problem: My Western Digital hard disk fails within 1 month of the 3 year guarantee. This is a first!

Outcome: Complete loss of data - everything, potential for recovery - zero! After getting a new Western Digital hard disk and rebuilding the OS I change the way I store files - now everything will be duplicated online. By using a combination opf Windows Live, Live Sync and Live Mesh, anything I do on this computer is replicated either on another computer or online. Sure I am limited to 25GB, but bear in mind thats free and by carefully choosing which LiveID you store your relevant data against, you can easily maintain 75GB of data online! If you've read this far - then take my word for it and get to know these three apps, any future loss of hard disk will only cause me the minor issue of rebuilding the OS.

Failure 4: Mobile phone.

Problem: My Sony Ericsson K850i fails to start after locking up.

Outcome: Sending the phone to a repair centre results in my phone being returned in full working order within 5 days. However, I was not backing up my contacts to my sim card, resulting in the loss of all recently added contacts. Inconvenient, BUT I should of selected the option to automatically save contacts to the sim card. Additionally all existing sim card contacts got messed up when using a temporary Sony Ericsson phone.

The positives to come out of these issues is that all data is now backed up online and when buying hardware in future I will establish the manufaturers guarantee. Though completely happy with the Sony Ericsson and Xbox outcomes, if I had of backed up everything prior to the failures then undoubtedly I would only have suffered minor issues instead of the anxieties that I experienced.

Backup NOW!

Like most useful software, I discovered Windows Live Labs Listas due to a problem I was having whilst browsing the internet. My problem was a fairly simple one - I had a few snippets of various web pages I wanted to keep and share with friends/family. I didn't want to use notepad as storing several instances of notepad text files takes some organising plus this wouldn't be kept online. Sure I could of emailed them, but that would of meant an extensive email with several lengthy explanations. Simply - I wanted to keep the snippets, the source of the snippets and a simple way of retrieving those snippets.

Well in fact this isn't so simple, I could find no way of doing this in the browser. Adding to favourites or storing the links in social bookmarking like Delicious or Microsoft Community Bookmarks didn't do it for me as I only wanted a snippet and not the whole page. I was using IE8 on the computer at the time, so I looked at the IE8 addons website and there wasn't anything there, Firefox has a similar addon website but I wasn't going to install a new browser and then search for an addon that may or may not exist.

I read about a new accelerator for IE8 called webslices, but this is push technology so didn't tick the box (the website owner has to enable webslices - I can't request one).

I was about to give up and open Notepad when I came accross Listas which is exactly what I was looking for. Signing in using my LiveID, my account is created automatically. I can then add the snippet to any list that I create on my Listas account, which also helpfully saves the URL and provides a link back. Admittedly Listas works better if you have installed the toolbar (which does not require a restart of the browser). The outstanding feature here is that you can then export the list or lists as an RSS feed. Also the lists are very manageable. All in all an very useful site, it's in Beta so care must be taken about how much you depend on it, because it could just get dropped. But I am using this extensively right now!

Of course Mac users will be laughing, as they have stickies, which probably would of done the trick. But my Mac is broken and I am not happy about it!

I went to a Virtual Earth developer day at TVP the other day and one of the big releases that they demonstrated is the new Virtual Earth Silverlight control

Currently in a Community Technology Preview status, the control builds on the fluidity of DeepZoom to provide mapping over a really slick looking canvas.  Being that it's silverlight based, the canvas is really responsive compared to the AJAX implementation that is the current fashionable flavour

The controls can be downloaded from the Microsrof Connect website.  This MSDN blog really isn't lying when it says you only need to type 2 lines of code to get a basic looking map out of it :  http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2009/03/18/introducing-the-virtual-earth-silverlight-map-control.aspx

Just add the references and make a simple Map Tag and you're away.  Making overlays is really simple and this guy has plotted the course and speec of the top 4 marathon runners in the New York Marathon, however i can only see 3 points : http://conceptdevelopment.net/Silverlight/VEMap01/default.html

He's actually plotted a few of the recent marathons in a few cities around the world.  The map pans to follow the runners

I have a demo that i created to highlight how easy it is to implement.  The app took around 10 minutes to create, including downloading the control from Microsoft Connect!!  http://silverlight.creative-jar.com/maps/default.html

On April fools dat, Google unveiled the hardware behind it's website and data. Not only are their servers homemade, but also that there are hundreds of thousands of them. They pack them into ship containers - 1,160 per container, and the Google Chief electronic Engineer took two and half years of working 14 hour days to build some of them! Now thats a job.

Whether or not this is an April fools joke, the point will still remain - if you want to run a website, not only does it have to be coded efficiently, but there is only so much you can do with a small hosting solution. If you want to engage with as many users as possible, you'll either need lots of cheap simple servers or you'll need a beast of a machine!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html