Interesource Blogs : James Higgs

I went over to Telegraph towers for a meeting with Shane Richmond and others this morning to agree the concept design for a new homepage for My Telegraph. The meeting went really well and Isaac 'still no blog Pinnock's design met with almost complete approval. Now, Shane has revealed the design sketch on his blog for the community to pull apart discuss.

I think this is further evidence of how much the Telegraph 'get' the new web. My Telegraph has been the most open project I've ever worked on, and I think it's much the better for it. I hope the community like the new design - we'll be starting on fleshing out the sketch into proper Photoshop loveliness and then we'll get on and build it.

Hopefully, Shane will be keeping the community appraised of our progress.

Well, My Telegraph is now officially live and was puffed in the paper itself in a full-page spread on page 2. There was also a gigantic banner under the masthead. People have been signing up like crazy and blogging like they were digital natives. Here's a PDF of the page in question featuring mini interviews with two of the beta testers. There were 12 testers in all, and their contribution was absolutely vital in us stabilising it for launch.

Our problem now is quite a nice one: it's so popular that we need new ways of browsing it so that things don't drop off the homepage in minutes. We're working on an interim release right now and that should be released later today. We've so far fixed 8 bugs that we didn't know about before or decided not to fix for launch. We have three more we need to fix before we launch the interim release.

In an internal mail yesterday, I said that this was the best project I'd worked on in my 19 years as a programmer. Every member of the team has been awesome, and it's been a pleasure working with them. 

I'll leave you with a couple of quotes:

I don't think it's an overstatement to say the Telegraph's new 'My Telegraph' blogging platform is revolutionary. Others - specificially, The Sun and Express - have opened 'personal' areas within their sites, but both are underwhelming. 'My Telegraph' has clearly been put together by people who 'get it' - Simon Dickson

Nice move by the Telegraph to offer this service. Isn't it the first such service in the UK from a national newspaper? - neville

We have a lot more work planned, so I better go and get on with it.

I've been off for a while taking a rest from all the My Telegraph madness. The team haven't been idle, mind you. We released a few new features and fixed some bugs last week, and we have an improved Most Popular page to launch very soon, as Shane previews here.

Sophie has been doing heroic work in my absence, managing the release and implementing a load of new stuff while juggling with other client work too.

Anyway, the shiny new Most Popular page will be in front of real users very soon.

Occasionally, I see a piece of design on the web that really impresses me for its simplicity and impact. Two that have struck me recently are Facebook and del.icio.us.

The design of Facebook is wonderful of course, but their page telling you about their mobile version is especially good. They show you an exact preview of what you will see on your mobile with live data from your profile. It's a simple but powerful method of telling you exactly what to expect. You can even see what some of the pages you're already familar will look like. Finally, they give you the URL in a nice big font so you don't have scan around looking for it.

Facebook's mobile preview page

I'm more surprised by the second bit of design that impressed me. I've never been keep on the design of del.icio.us - it looks like it was designed by a techie for techies. Being a Mac boy, I've been using nightly builds of WebKit, the open source postion of Apple's Safari browser (now available for Windows). The one thing I miss on Safari is Firefox style plugins, and I can't really live without del.icio.us bookmarking being built into the browser. So I headed over to del.icio.us to see what boomarklets they offered for Safari. There's been that little extra attention paid to that screen because they show you a screenshot specific to your browser and give you a really simple explanation of what they do and how to install them.

The del.icio.us bookmark page

It's little touches like this that make a real difference to user experience.

Facebook, social networking site du jour, was rude to me this morning. It comes to something when your own profile page randomly insults you!

I confess it now: I've sold my soul to Apple. They can do very little wrong. But what on earth are they doing releasing a version of Safari for Windows? It was particularly strange to be Steve's much vaunted 'One last thing...' - he announced a piece of software that almost nobody in his audience would use (how many WWDC attendees use Windows as their primary OS?). Did he expect them to cheer?

I think Safari is a terrific browser - and, yes, I've used Firefox on both Windows and Mac, but Safari is just that little bit more polished. I don't really care about plugins, which is most people's reason for using Firefox, it's blazingly fast at rendering and it doesn't hoover up memory like a turbo-charged Dyson on acid. So won't Apple be doing the Windows world a favour? I don't think so.

In his keynote, Steve Jobs used iTunes as an example of something that Apple does well on Windows. Huh? Almost everyone I've ever talked to about it thinks that iTunes sucks on Windows. I'm a long-time iPod+iTunes user, initially on Windows and more recently on OS X. I *hated* it before the switch - it was only because the iPod is so brilliant that I persevered. iTunes on Wiindows reinforced the received opinion in much of the Windows world that Mac software is pretty but flaky.

It was in spite of that experience that I bought an iMac about 18 months ago. I'll be honest: I bought it because it only needs one wire and looks nice in my house. It was only once I started using it that I realised just how good Mac software can be.

Initial impressions of Safari on Windows are not good. There were some well-publicised security flaws (which make a mockery of Jobs' claim that it was 'engineered to be secure from the start'). It crashes a lot. And, worst of all, the rendering behaviour is different between the two platforms. All that does is to increase the already onerous cross-browser tax that web developers have to pay. Worst of all, it looks nasty and out of place with that soon-to-be-retired Brushed Metal browser chrome and just downright awful with the Windows-style menu placement below the title bar. I have no idea what it looks like on Vista but it can't be pretty.

On the positive side, it is indeed very fast at rendering - and that's in Parallels. It must be truly awesome at native speed.

Joel Spolsky has a great post on how Windows users will perceive the Mac-style font smoothing (which is awesome by the way), but he's right to say that habitual Windows users will just think the text is blurry.

The current theory is that Apple will make a lot of money from search engines. But I worry that they will damage the reputation they've built up since the switch to Intel and retard the gains they're making in other areas. Perhaps they did it so that Windows-based developers will have a way of testing their iPhoneapps websites. Whatever. It's bad news for Apple fans, I predict.

Via Surfin' Safari, we learn that there's a new and shiny version of the Web Insepctor for Safari. It's pretty and useful - everything an Apple product should be. It does many of the jobs of HTTP Debugging Proxies like Fiddler on Windows or Charles on OS X but right in the browser and without any config hassles. And, in this brave new world of Safari on Windows, it works on the other platform too. Highly recommended.

Web Inspector in action

Well, I've been using Safari on Windows for a while now. I am not impressed. Here's the latest cause for concern:

Safari is not happy on Windows. Who would be? (Click for full-sized version)

I updated it to use the latest WebKit build and that left it in a state where it wouldn't launch. Then, I upgraded to the latest beta release - still no luck. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. No dice.

As I predicted, contrary to Steve Jobs's claim that Apple are good at Windows development, this is the sort of thing that makes Windows users think that Apple software is a bit rubbish. This is a great pity because on OS X, Safari is now easily the best browser in my view.

Yesterday we launched a new website for the Conservatives, called Stand up Speak up. Described by ITN as the party's 'latest campaign weapon', it's a website for collecting feedback on their policy review documents and helping to shape their manifesto. David Cameron says that we've seen the end of 'big top-down politics' and that 'the internet allows us to engage with people in a completely new way'. The site was the lead story on last night's ITV news.

Last night's ITN news item about Stand up Speak up.

The site was taken from conception to launch in less than two weeks, and is built on our social content management system, IrPublish. You can sign up, upload an avatars, comment, rate and vote, and we're planning much more as the number of reports grows.

The team that put this together was: Tim Malbon (concept), Simon I'Anson (design), Sophia Vader (development), Dallas Taylor (development), me (development), Sarah Craze (HTML/CSS), James Dose (HTML/CSS), Nairn Robertson (project management), Ian Howlett (account management) and Matthew Jeffreys (testing). Everyone worked really hard to deliver this in a very tight timescale. It's another example of our agile approach in action - I'd argue that agile is even more important in a project with an absolute deadline like this. Using conventional methodologies, you'd easily eat up two weeks in document writing, never mind completing the entire thing in that time.

As a result of the deadline, we were forced to prioritise things absolutely ruthlessly. At one stage we just didn't have anything to take out when a new feature raised it's beautiful head, so we just had to do a little out of hours work to make it happen. I developed a formula: 'you have two features and one get out of jail free card. Which one is going free?'. It's difficult for people in a service industry like ours to say 'no' to clients unless you know you're doing it in their best interests. Clients need help to stay on track and keep the ultimate goal in sight. They often need a little push to get them out of the 'but both features are equally important' delusion.

The project also represents an amazing confluence of our clients: the site is featured on page 3 of today's Daily Telegraph and as I said was featured on ITN last night. We recently won ITN as a client, working on ITN Source as reported in New Media Age (registration required).

There's even been a piss take already.

It was depressing this morning to be confronted by a 'Silicon Valley expert', whatever that might mean, on the Today programme. I didn't catch the name unfortunately. The interview was on the seemingly specious court case against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The interviewer questioned the 'expert' on what he meant by saying that the work Zuckerberg had done for ConnectU was 'open source'. The answer was that there were 'no patents or copyright or anything like that'. Even the most basic understanding of OSS is enough to tell you that copyright still has a key role to play. Only yesterday, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, was popping up in my RSS reader for restricting the right to use the Rails logo without his permission because he held the copyright on it. Open any open source code file and you'll see a copyright label at the top of the it. Depressing that this misconception continues to be widespread. Sure, the copyright situation is complicated, but to say that OSS implies 'no copyright' is just plain wrong.

Sam Gentile has a great post in which he reacts to Agile 'zealots' who believe that you can only claim to be agile if you use OSS tools. Why is it that in our industry, technologies and methodologies seem to degenerate into such idiotic religiosity? As Sam says:

An Agile team should feel completely empowered to define their OWN agile process and do what they need to encourage teamwork and collaboration including picking their toolsets.

I couldn't agree more. He goes on to say "I have zero desire to get in a war about TFS vs. OSS or whatever" - might be a bit late for that, Sam ;)

You may be one of the very few people not to have noticed Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight 1.1 (previously known as WPF/E) - a Flash competitor built on top of a streamlined Common Languuage Runtime (CLR). It's a cross-platform Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform that is going to be revolutionary, I predict.

The CLR was explicitly architected to be cross-platform, and for years Microsoft have made a 'shared source' Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), called Rotor, available. That's right, you've always been able to run .NET code on a Mac. But the Rotor platform never had the engineering dollars spent on it to make it really take off. It always felt like a toy for geeks and people who wanted a really deep understanding of how the CLR works. Now, Silverlight will be available as a 4MB download for Safari and Firefox on the Mac and Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows. And when I say Windows, I mean plain old pre-SP2 Windows XP.

Microsoft seem to have finally got something right. Scott Hanselman says that this is the best thing they've done since .NET 1.0, and I think he's spot on. Whisper it, but when Microsoft sees itself threatened by genuine competition, like Firefox, Flex, Apollo, Mac OS X and the rest it can respond like an actual company: by doing something better than the competition. This is what you get when you put smart people like Scott Guthrie in charge. We'll all be better off for it. 

In the continuing series of updates on what we're doing with MyTelegraph, here's another update from the coalface. Shane's also put a little more flesh on the bones. The last couple of days have been spent ironing out some less obvious bugs, and implementing the new image upload process, the people and most popular pages and doing cross-browser testing. Here's what the upload process used to look like:

Click the image for a full-sized view

A bit clunky and generally rubbish. Whereas now, it looks like this:

Click the image for a full-sized view

Which is beautiful - and it's significantly more usable that it was before too. It opens over the content below it so that you can still see the context of what you're doing. Visually, your eye is drawn to the upload form because the rest of the page is shaded out.

Isaac has worked his magic once more, but it took me all day on Monday to implement this, which meant a late night to sort out some other stuff that I had expected to get to earlier. The frustration is that it looks like the stuff I worked late on will not be required after all. That's one of the downsides of an agile project, I suppose. It wasn't wasted work though because I found and fixed a few bugs as a result of it.

It's clear to me that we'll need to spend some time optimising the number of database calls we're making - I came across one method that was going to the database every time it was called. It was being called repeatedly on several controls, sometimes as many as 25 times per request. It was easily optimised out so that we're now only touching the database once per request for that piece of data, but we need to make sure there aren't other howlers like that lurking around in other bits of the code.

I've learned through painful experience that you should always watch the SQL traffic you're generating from a content managed web site because you will often find several unnecessary round-trips to the database. If you use SQL Server, as we do, SQL Profiler is your friend. It's amazing how much extra performance you can squeeze out of an app if you minimise the number of DB round-trips.

We'll be making a new test build for the beta community tonight. Hopefully they'll like the new features. One encouraging sign is that they have now stopped writing about the software we'vve written and are actually blogging on topics that interest them. There should be some good content available when we launch.

Last night was karaoke night. If you have a strong stomach, you can watch and listen below. A sterling job by video maven Nairn.

We're nearing the launch date for My Telegraph. That means that we're now in 'stabilisation mode' meaning that we only change things that absolutely have to be changed and fix bugs that are show-stoppers. We're also working on optimising things so that they are as streamlined as they can be for a three-week version 1 product.

The tag cloud from the My Telegraph beta site

As I write this blog post, I've just committed another change to our source control system and that triggered build 457 - which makes an average of around 35 builds per working day. At any given moment, our internal testers, or anyone from the Telegraph can see exactly what the state of the application is - we have nowhere to hide.

The beta community have been creating some great content and feeling their way around the idea of blogging - many of them are blogging for the first time. They are currently using build 398, so there's quite a few things they haven't seen yet. We'll be doing what we hope is the final beta build some time today.

We're very, very nearly there now. I'm really pleased with the way this whole project has gone - it's been fun to work on, although totally exhausting - the whole team has been putting in early starts and late nights. And, best of all, I think there are still a few things that will surprise people when it goes live, and that's before we've even started on release 2...