On my journey to Pendeford I had the good fortune to meet someone who knew how to get there and found that he was involved in the class. In Val’s class it was nothing short of inspiring to see people of a range of ages learning new skills; learning how to use a computer without things that many people take for granted.

Where would most of us be without a mouse? More importantly, could you operate a computer if you turned the monitor off? Val can type at a much quicker rate than myself, his hands skating over the keyboard using shortcuts I wasn’t aware of, using the assistive technology - screen reading software JAWS to its maximum.

JAWS is very powerful, but it does have a steep learning curve with so many options and keyboard shortcuts, but when you can see someone able to use a computer better than many users without disabilities it is incredibly frustrating to know that many websites which have not been designed to assist such users, even things like putting in a link to a search facility instead of a search field can cause confusion.

I was disappointed to read Councillor Liz Walker’s comments (page 11, 12/3/2008) that she does not believe that a University campus could aid the long term regeneration of Dudley.She is right to ask: “What could we provide in a small campus in Dudley that we could not provide in Birmingham or Wolverhampton?” However the manner in which she asks this question has the air of defeat and negativity, an attitude that will leave this town in the same state that it has been since the early 1990’s.Dudley needs to invest in skills if it is to provide employment and services in the modern world. Part of that investment is a University campus that can focus on skills. 20 campuses have been proposed, to built around the country, so why do we have an elected representative uninterested in taking this opportunity for the town?

A University campus could bring benefits such as research programmes. Why can’t we work in partnership with Universities based in Birmingham, Staffordshire or Wolverhampton on specialist IT-related research projects? I would encourage Councillor Walker to talk to Lecturers and find the niche areas of research that we could offer; for example one area of interest to me is web accessibility so I would be interested in a Dudley campus that worked with the Beacon Centre for the Blind to study how people with visual impairments use the web and what we can do to improve this experience for them.From an economic point of view, users with severe disabilities represents a market in the USA worth around $46 billion a year, so it would be research which would almost certainly attract investment from both public bodies and private companies.

The potential research projects are out there but it requires the Council to spend the time to identify them.

Councillor Walker’s comments appear to be encouraging young people to leave the area, instead of building the facilities to encourage other young people from other areas to come to Dudley.

I went to a University campus based in Stafford which has a modern technology park based next to it. The rapid growth of the business park since 2000 is very encouraging. There are now many established businesses based there, and 38 graduate start-up businesses have been started since 2006 using a scheme provided by the University which offers the following:

• An £8000 grant
• Free business premises, computers, and software.
• A mentor guiding these young entrepreneurs.

Every successful start-up encourages more businesses to locate there, all eager to be based in a town with a constant supply of graduates equipped with the skills they need.

As a Staffordshire University graduate, I am eligible for this scheme, so if I wanted to start a company; why would I want to base it in Dudley and therefore (as Counciller Walker puts it) - ‘come back and share the wealth’?

This scheme or something similar could be used in Dudley; a University campus and space allocated within the forthcoming Innovation Centre at Castle Gate to encourage technology related start-ups.

I urge Councillor Walker to ask her question again, but this time to think creatively, to be positive, and to find out just which areas we can exploit that are not being covered by other campuses. I want our representatives to have a positive long term vision of what Dudley can be, to attract investment and to exploit its potential - not to surrender to its current situation.

My friend Pete told me recently about a friend of his who bought lots of books regularly and had worked out that at the rate that he bought them he wouldn’t read them all in his lifetime. He then decided that it would be perfectly fine as he was planning on living forever. Good plan!

Picked up the Tarantino and Indiana Jones boxsets as well - classic films.

This should be a good way of obtaining a wider view of e-commerce usability and web 2.0, as on a coding level - whilst you obtain invaluable technical knowledge and proficiency, you can lose focus on the overall picture of what makes a website work.

In day-to-day development work, individual tasks are completed, each design element is implemented but just like a football club filled with star players does not always result in a title winning team; sometimes a website can equal much less than the sum of its parts.

Sites often get the basics wrong! But because they are unattractive, unexciting jobs, which will probably go unnoticed and will not result in whoops of excitement from a Sales and Marketing team or a Director, too often not enough time is spent on things such as:

• Defining a clear navigational hierarchy and site structure
• Improving the site search algorithm to return more accurate results,
• Ensuring that the site is accessible to disabled users.

You might have a customer discussion forum, you might have customer reviews of your products, you may add flashy Web 2.0 widgets that you hope add a ‘coolness’ factor to the site. But I am suddenly reminded of a question that drummer Andy Edwards asks on a fairly regular basis… ‘Is it good?’

It is a simple question and the answer is largely a subjective one. You can produce something very simple, but it can be ‘good.’ An example I can think of off-hand is the song ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin, great song, but the drum pattern is on the whole very very simple, but when listening to the overall song, it sounds good!

Each individual developer can get so wrapped up in finishing their individual task that nobody is taking that step back and looking at the site and asking: ‘But is it good?’

Unlike music or film, judging whether a site is ‘good’ is much less subjective and you could define your own criteria based upon what you are hoping to achieve with your site. Task-based usability testing with participants representative of your users go a long way towards measuring whether your site is ‘good.’

Nielsen prefers that they use ‘Shopping Cart’ instead as apparently most users look for the term ‘Cart’, not ‘Basket’.

Numerically, he may be correct, as I am certain that American users look for the term ‘Cart’ as they are used to that term.  In the UK however we are used to doing our weekly trip to Tesco and putting the products into a ’shopping basket’, not a ‘cart’. The term ‘cart’ is very un-English and as (I strongly suspect) the target audience of watches.co.uk is English - surely the visitors on that site are looking for the term ‘Basket’, not ‘Cart’.

Of course an argument could be made that the site in question might wish to export goods to America, even if that is the case I would still say that their primary market is the UK, otherwise surely they would be using a .com (global) web address and offering the option to display prices in US Dollars.

I’ve just had a look at their updated site and spotted that they haven’t taken any notice of Nielsen’s advice (I suspect they aren’t even aware of it), and have actually made certain things even worse by removing the textual link entirely and replacing it with just a very small basket icon.

Not often I disagree with Nielsen’s advice, but in this case - I feel he is very wrong!

I’d been meaning to try out Ubuntu on my HP laptop for a while as XP Professional and the crap that HP bundled with it, had slowed it down to a crawl and all I needed it for was web browsing and IM (more on that in another blog). Point being while I hadn’t actually done much with Linux I was interested in seeing some demonstrations etc.

I sat through one presentation called the $100 embedded media device given by Joe Born of Neuros Technologies promoting an Open Source Multimedia Device - the Neuros OSD. The first half of the presentation was very much focused on the technical side of things whereas I was more interested in the - ‘but what does it do…?’ aspect.

The basic idea of the OSD is that you can ‘free your media’. It has a lot of different inputs on it, including a USB port, and two digital camera card slots which will support MMC, SD, MS, CF Card and Microdrive.

There are a lot of possibilities, but here is what I have done with it - right now I have all of videos, all of my music away from the PC, and stored onto a LaCie 500 gigabyte Ethernet Hard Drive. The Neuros OSD is connected to my router and can access the drive and play most of the media on it (more and more file types are being supported with each new firmware update).

So right now I can use the OSD as a kind of… multimedia jukebox. I now no longer have to bog down my PC with a massive winamp playlist while I surf the web (and incidentally stutter every time Yahoo Mail loads up - I suspect thats a combination of Ad-Block in Firefox with Yahoo Mail). Plus I can rip a DVD which I own but would like to access quickly without having to wait and sit through an endless amount of trailers of films that I don’t want to see when all I want is to see one episode of the Adam and Joe Show or Family Guy or Clerks Animated etc as I’m getting ready to go out.

The OSD can record from virtually any source and one of the things I have done is gather up my last remaining VHS tapes that I wanted to digitise, connected a VHS player to the Neuros OSD with a Scart to composite lead (Neuros OSD uses composite leads for input and output) and recorded the tape to an external hard drive as an MP4 file.

Tapes have included:

• The Wonder Stuff - Finally Live - Phoenix Festival 1994
• Mark Kermode - Scream and Scream Again (History of the slasher film)
• Mark Kermode - Interview with John Carpenter
• Wolves vs Newcastle Utd - FA Cup 2003

So yes, not stuff you are likely to find released on DVD any time soon

Recording was incredibly easy, theres a record option on the main menu, select the quality, the device you intend to play it back on, choose a filename, press record. Playback showed that it gives very good quality recording.

As the Neuros is open source, anybody is allowed to look at how the device works and alter it, program for it etc. So there are quite a few programmers out there, looking at porting a few Linux programs to it, and adding extra functionality. For example when I bought the OSD, the music player was pretty poor, but now some clever peeps have ported XMMS2 (a winamp style player for Linux) and added a Youtube browser - yes thats right - you too can view all the pointless shit you watch when you think your boss isn’t looking on your TV set at home. At the time of writing Windows Media Audio is not quite supported yet, although I have a development version of the firmware where it seems the support is almost ready.

But other ideas that I personally would like to see implemented in the OSD:

• Support for subscribing to podcasts - I love listening to Mark Kermode’s Five Live film reviews and it would be super excellent if the OSD would allow you to subscribe to different podcasts and download them when they are ready (in fact at the moment this particular podcast just won’t play at all and I have no idea why, I am sure they’ll fix that though).
• Streaming Internet Radio - I’m a big fan of BBC 6Music, and it would be excellent if I could stream that on the OSD.
• Emulation - This one is pure wishful thinking, but it would be bloody cool if you could play MAME on the Neuros OSD as there is a USB port allowing a joypad to be plugged into it.

Its certainly come very far in a short space of time so its a very encouraging device which doesn’t cost much at all. I bought mine for £130 (that included postage and customs charges) and the LaCie ethernet Mini Disk cost £133.

I took these very poor photos with my mobile phone but it gives you a quick overview of what the OSD looks like, the interface design and the size of it.

As a quick introduction, if you haven’t been on this site before, I’m a web developer in Birmingham working for Attraction World and I’ve worked on the development of several sites, most recently - FloridaTix, AttractionTix.

I’ve been working there since January 2005 and I’ve learnt a hell of a lot in a relatively short space of time and I’ve been fortunate to watch the company grow very quickly and help them produce better and better sites (always room for more improvement though!).