The web has come a long way from its beginnings and the check box has basically never changed since those days, and most designers leave it alone and let the browser or operating system look after the styling of it. Most of the time this will work perfectly, but sometimes an extra bit of styling can add hugely to the design of a form, and thus make it fit in better with the rest of the web design.

Do we need radio and check boxes to look different?

This section was prompted while visiting the very excellent http://www.51bits.com, as recommended by Elliot Jay Stocks. The contact page on this site, uses the same excellent designed check box for both radio and check box form elements. At first, I was a bit put out by this. I wondered about the decision and whether it was the right one. I expected the behavior to be different when I saw the check appear.

I wanted to ask Chris Sealey (designer,developer of 51bits) about this, but I’m a wuss – and someone else got there first. Eric Eggert (http://twitter.com/yatil) pointed out the same thing:

Chris (http://twitter.com/51bits) replied back,

And after thinking about it for a while, I have to say I agree. Does the user care what it appears like? I’d almost go as far as to say that if you need to differentiate with UI elements then your options aren’t clear enough for the user to interpret correctly. As long as the options are intuitive the user will know how many or how few options the user has to click on.

The check boxes in question…

from 51bits.com/Contact

You can clearly tell from the options whether you should be clicking more than one option at a time. Plus the design is perfect, I really like those check boxes.

Conclusion

There’s two issues here I feel. As a designer, you owe it to your client to make their design be… well… beautiful. Even better if you are your own client as in this case. So in this case, the options are pretty fixed, Chris knows what the options are going to be and is smart enough to put them together in such a way that there is no confusion.

But then, if you hand your design to someone else (i.e. the client) and they have the ability to change things like this, then they might not be as aware of the issues that could arise if they make the options more ambiguous. We’ve all seen terrible polls and option lists so this isn’t as unlikely as we might hope.

Are there any other great examples of modified check boxes? What are other peoples feelings on the matter?

This isn’t as straight forward as one might hope if you use VDM’s. Now, before I go on, I’m not going to go through the initial NDMP setup. Both EMC and Symantec have good documentation on this. However if you werent the person who initially configured all of this, you may still be tasked with backing up a new share.

First you need to figure out the root vdm that your share sits on, so putty to your celerra control station and run the following command:

nas_server –l –v

This will list all the VDM’s sitting on your Celerra. So the ID is the important part as it makes up the first part of the backup selection. So if the vdm you need to back up has an ID of 16 then the first part of your backup selection becomes:

/root_vdm_16/

Then, you will want to see what file systems are mounted on this VDM. To see this you need to run:

server_mount [name of VDM]

This will give you a list of the file systems and the mount points. Its this mount point that makes up the second part of your backup selection. So if you file system is called homes_fs on /homes_fs_1 then your full backup selection (including vdm from above) would be

/root_vdm_16/homes_fs_1

This is further expandable depending on how you’ve configured your CIFS Shares, but normally you should just be able to follow the path straight to the folder you need to backup, e.g:

/root_vdm_16/homes_fs_1/danoneill/mustbebackedup

As John points out in the comments below… It really is quite simple… One command:

server_df

This lists all the file systems and their VDM’s.

Jack of all trades…

Unfortunately in current times, people feel like they have to be able to do everything, to be able to offer every service to their customers. And to be honest I’m as guilty as the next person of this. I have a keen interest in the web, and I’m a half decent developer. I love design but I know that my design work isn’t great – so I don’t do any for clients. I outsource that for almost every job I do, as I owe it to my client to give them the best possible product.

… Master of none

Some companies however, take this to another level – I know of a number of computer repair shops, that offer “web-design” and pretty much every other computer “related” service that they could fit on a flyer. This leads to a distortion of the market, as you have these people offering their services at a very low price, so some actual designers, maybe starting out or whatever, feel like they have to be able to match this.

Along with this, some potential customers, looking to get a price reduction, will point out that these people can do it cheaper. You do not want these clients – if they can’t tell the difference between a real designer, and someone chancing their arm, then it does not bode well for the project.

Hopefully, people are able to tell what they are getting before they approach a designer.

Its for that reason that I believe there are two problems in the Irish equation – uneducated clients and bad web designers.

Uneducated Clients

The number of times that a small business owner has said to me that their 15 year old nephew/niece is a brilliant web designer is beyond counting at this stage. And perhaps I’m being unfair – maybe they are the next Chris Spooner, Meagan Fisher or Grace Smith. But I’ve heard it so many times that this is virtually impossible.

And unfortunately this boils down to the fact that although these business owners (apparently) know quite a lot about the subject matter they deal in, they know little or nothing about the web. This is of course a shame. But not the end of the world. I feel to really help these people you must be able to educate them as to why something is a good idea. Or a bad idea. And most of the time they will listen and understand and learn. And once we get to that stage the relationship can only get better. And your job then becomes much more rewarding. And hopefully you’ve earned yourself a repeat client.

Bad Web Designers

Full disclosure – I have made some really terrible websites in my time. But I never charged anyone for them – They were back when I started out and they were for friends. I never would have advertised the fact that I was a web designer. In fact – I still don’t. I love design but I love development more – And I’m much better at it too – In my opinion .

As I mentioned above more and more people are offering themselves as web designers, and they really shouldn’t be allowed. I’ll stop short of advocating that there should be some kind of test before people can call themselves a Web Designer… but only just.

Unfortunately, these “designers” cause a distortion or blur the market for young good web designers. When starting out and looking for a steady amount of work or in the current economic climate, you may take on work that you would never have taken on normally – and these clients can sometimes cause problems because they can’t tell the difference between these cowboy designers and you – the excellent designer.

Not Specific to Ireland?

The more research I did on this I realised that Ireland is not really the only country that suffers from this. You have the same issues all over the world. But Ireland is in a fairly unique situation, we’re a tiny country – with a population which is punching well above its weight in the creative world. You just have to look at all the world renowned poets, musicians, artists and authors. In the business world, you can look at all the Irish companies doing very well around the world, or all the Irish CEO’s of leading companies around the world.

We have an excellent and unique opportunity to educate our business owners on usability, on accessibility – to ensure that they get the website that they need to further their business. The website that their users deserve.

(Main image attribution: uggboy on Flickr)

Say you update your phone system or you merge with another company and have to update phone numbers in your AD address book without having to do it manually. PowerShell to the rescue.

First you need to create a .csv file with all the names and new phone numbers that you want the users to be updated to. It should look something like this:

user,phonenumber
Dan O'Neill,+353 1 234 5678
Brad Pitt,+353 1 123 4567
Frank Bruno,+353 1 235 6789

This will be read by the PowerShell script. Reading in files in PowerShell is simple to understand. All you really need to know is that it reads files line by line and sometimes there are even cmdlets that will look after the import for you. In this case we can use Import-CSV.

$userlist = "C:\temp\import.csv"
$UserDetails=Import-CSV $userlist

Nice and easy – then we need to iterate through this list and actually do what we’re looking to do – Update a large list of users in AD with PowerShell – in this example, update everyones phone number.

So, as we’ve imported the csv file we’re then able to iterate through it line by line. As we move through it, we assign the value to a variable. Like so:

foreach($UD in $UserDetails) {
	$user = $UD.user
	$phnumber = $UD.phonenumber

The next stage is the first time we connect with AD and it’s quite an important part of the script. We want to check that the user in the file is an actual user in AD. In this case, I’ve been given names – so I check this against the CN in AD. However, you could check against any unique field in AD like username(SAMaccountname) or something like that. The following line assigns TRUE or FALSE to our variable $UserN:

$UserN=[ADSI]::Exists("LDAP://ad.domain.com/cn=$user,ou=Users,dc=ad,dc=domain,dc=com")

Then comes the actual interesting bit. We check whether that has come back with false…

if($UserN -ne $FALSE){

…and if it hasn’t then we apply the changes that we need to.

$UserN=[ADSI]"LDAP://ad.domain.com/cn=$user,ou=Users,dc=ad,dc=domain,dc=com"
$UserN.Put("telephoneNumber",$phnumber)
$UserN.SetInfo()
write-host $user "has been modified"

Very simple and straight forward. And since we want to be able to tell afterwards which users worked and which didn’t, the other part of that if…else loop looks like this:

}
else{
        write-host $user "object does not exist" -foregroundcolor red -backgroundcolor yellow
}

This prints out to your console in nice red font and yellow background which users failed to update.

In full the script looks like this:

$userlist = "C:\temp\import.csv"
$UserDetails=Import-CSV $userlist
foreach($UD in $UserDetails) {
	$user = $UD.user
	$phnumber = $UD.phonenumber
        $UserN=[ADSI]::Exists("LDAP://ad.domain.com/cn=$user,ou=Users,dc=ad,dc=domain,dc=com")
        if($UserN -ne $FALSE){
		$UserN=[ADSI]"LDAP://ad.domain.com/cn=$user,ou=Users,dc=ad,dc=domain,dc=com"
		$UserN.Put("telephoneNumber",$phnumber)
	   	$UserN.SetInfo()
		write-host $user "has been modified"
	}
        else{
            	write-host $user "object does not exist" -foregroundcolor red -backgroundcolor yellow
        }
}

The website, while not the worst example of government sponsored web design in Ireland or the world at large, probably wont help you plan that visit very well and I think it definitely could be much better. There are a number of very bad design and usability mistakes that I feel could be rectified by both redesigning and realigning the site to better serve any visiting users.

A Critique…

Layout

The layout of the site is a sign of being designed with a specific screen size in mind. In fact, on the main page it looks like the news & events list has grown much longer than the original designer had intended. In the menu, the layout doesn’t seem to take into account any differences in browsers/Os’s as you can see above unfortunately it has started to wrap on the line below. Drilling further on, the layout of the site does not give itself well to announcements of various sizes. This may well be an issue that again has become prominent since the design was completed. Maybe not enough work was completed on what was actually going to be displayed on the pages. Its always a difficult step to reach out to the client to find out the various types on information that they are going to want to convey, and to then image your design with that content in it. Getting that info very early in the process is very important.

The layout suffers from a lack of highlighting or direction. The three/four column layout is a little confused, and doesn’t help highlight any particular column or even separate them very well. And this layout is used nowhere else on the site so there is no familiarity when you go deeper into the site. Now I don’t expect the homepage layout to be featured everywhere else in the site but having familiar index type pages is a very useful tool for guiding users around.

The main pages lack of direction and how to fix it is something that I talk about later on.

As one of the most beautiful places in Dublin you really want to be able to show that off. The homepage of the site has a couple of images that show a bit about the park. However, the images aren’t ideal – they are small, not optimised for the web, and don’t really add anything to the page. Example – The image on the right is of the Wellington monument. One of the parks main attractions. However – nowhere on this page is it even mentioned. There’s no way to find out anything else about what that images is. If they were only for decoration – I think you use better photos?

Digging a little deeper, to the following page for example – http://www.phoenixpark.ie/visitorinformation/attractions/ and you have the main attractions of the park listed. Again, the images used, while they could be excellent, are too small. Unfortunately, there seems to be no thought about where the images are going to be used throughout the entire website. All of the images on this particular page are even different sizes, and this leads to another point – there’s no template for image sizes. This is a common website management tool – you know where the images are going to go – so you know what size to make them.

The phoenix park is one of the most beautiful places in Dublin, and the imagery of this site does not do it justice.

Navigation

This is one of the main usability problems with this site – the navigation is not as clear as it could be. Imagine the scenario – A couple, in planning a Saturday day trip with their family wants to see a map of the park – which item would they choose? They choose “maps” of course. But say they want to plan to see some of the attractions?

One of the most important things about any brochure/informational website is being able to give people the information they want as quickly as possible. And for that to happen – the menu’s have to disambiguate as much as possible. You don’t want a user to have to click on 3 different menu items because they’re quite similar. So with this, you either reduce the options, or give them more precise options. The risk with giving fewer options is that you could then end up not helping the user at all as they might think the site does not cater for them. And on a site like this - which has no site search functionality that is definitely a possibility.

To not give a user an easy means to search your site is a usability error on the highest order. It might never get used if people get to your site through Google and are immediately gone but on a site like this – the homepage is where people start. And people are used to have site searches, and its so easy to implement that it is a very strange omission.

The Redesign

Making it better

There are a few ways to guide people when they get to your website. The two I tend to focus on, are to either to try guide the user where I want to, or to try and imagine what the user wants to get from my website. In this particular site there is no real reason to guide the users in one particular direction. No product to sell (apart from a visit to the park of course, but thats different) or no signup to gather. In this case we want the user to be able to get whatever information they want about the site as quickly as possible. Not just a redesign but a realignment. Both in fact.

Redesign vs Realign

I feel this website needs both – a redesign to look after the usability and other design flaws, and a re-alignment to better suit the users that are going to be coming to this website. If you want to read an excellent article on the both of the above – and when either is warranted check out the following article from WebDesignerDepot – I feel this website needs both – a redesign to look after the usability and other design flaws, and a re-alignment to better suit the users that are going to be coming to this website. If you want to read an excellent article on the both of the above – and when either is warranted check out the following article from WebDesignerDepot – http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/06/redesign-vs-realign/.

Redesigning the Layout

The current layout is unfortunately a bit dated, and unfortunately over time and without a content strategy, the front page design has suffered. This is because over the years, the image sizes have obviously changed, the number of new articles has also changed and I suspect the number of menu items has changed – and this has meant that the design has not grown with the content or no set content strategy was in place to ensure that the the users of the site were able to update it over time without affecting the layout.

The one important column on the page is overused, with both news and events listed there. And even with the link text it can be quite difficult to see which each of them are without clicking on the link. I propose changing that out – You want your most recent items on the homepage – and you want it under the right headings so people can gather information very quickly about whats on or whats new in the park. On a minor note the heading for that column isn’t great – It just looks like another item in the list – not great for usability or anything else for that matter.

So I redesigned the site using a three column layout – Each column for a different type of update – News, Announcements and Events. This covered the three most used types of post and also allowed the user to quickly see which was more important to them! Each of the headings should be clickable to bring them to posts of only that type. I highlighted the events column as this should stand out – You want to attract as much attention as possible to these as you want to attract as many people as possible to the park!

This brings on the second part of the front page changes – realigning the navigation.

Realigning the navigation

The old navigation was confusing – at least to me. Whats the difference between “visitor information” and “about”? And unfortunately you have to click on both to find out. Meaning if you got it wrong then its just extra clicks to get back. What my concept calls for is a drop down menu with lots of information. This means that you can click on both – See what comes under them and then click on the appropriate item that you might be looking for. I’ve added this for many of the menu items – this should ease the navigation for the user.

It also means that the website owners have to think better about where items go – and what overall heading to use. I personally can’t see the difference between about and visitor information – and I feel these should be amalgamated under one heading on the navigation. The added advantage of drop downs is that you can then separate out below that if you really feel its necessary.

Then I added a search options – one of the glaring omissions from the original site. This is also in the form of a drop down just to keep in line with the design but that isn’t entirely necessary either.

The new front page I feel better serves users and helps them find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

Other Additions

I’ve also included a revamped footer – which I feel also benefits the users. First off is the addition of a sign up box for news or event updates. This is a pretty big omission from the original site as it can offer an excellent opportunity to advertise new events to people who are interested in the park, and to send out announcements as well.

Next is immediate contact information – Address, phone numbers, etc. Although this information was already on the site, it wasn’t that simple to find immediately or in a hurry.

The footer now also includes a little map, with the location of the park, but that map is clickable to bring up a bigger Google Maps page of the map. This means you can get directions etc very easily from wherever you are.

Below that again you could add sponsorship logos and the OPW logo etc.

Conclusion

Normally I would but more work into the article pages of websites but this mini project was unfortunately cut short by paying work. Unfortunately I’m also very busy in work so I don’t think I’ll get back to this concept any time soon. However I did offer the design and code to the OPW but they didn’t reply to my follow up mails. That doesn’t really bother me so if anyone wants the code or to use the design – feel free. Obviously the logo and other images are property of the Office of Public Works.

Live site – Front page, article page(not finished, nor will it be unfortunately)

One thing that I’ve come across recently from a bit of a odd situation is the Bypass traverse checking group policy object.

Basically, what this allows users to do, is traverse folders that they should have no access to…

This is how it is explained in Microsoft’s technet article about it…

This user right determines which users can traverse directory trees even though the user may not have permissions on the traversed directory. This privilege does not allow the user to list the contents of a directory, only to traverse directories.

This normally would bother anyone, unless during a very sensitive data move that requires you leave the permissions of the underlying data alone. In this case, you have a top level folder with a certain set of permissions but because of an audit rule you have to leave the permissions on the lower level folders alone for a period of time.

You would expect the users not to be able to get to the data below the top level folder – why should they? You’ve set the permissions correctly on the top of the folder and then the Bypass traverse checking group policy object steps in. And ruins your day.

Slight exaggeration, and easily dealt with since we don’t knowingly use this GPO for anything else in the server. This is the default user set that can, by default, gain access via this group policy:

• Administrators
• Backup Operators
• Power Users
• Users
• Everyone

Out comes the “everyone” group, and now we’re nicely audit compliant.

Normally this would not be a problem as most of you will force replication after a folder move, thus inherit the permissions of the top level folder and block the user from traversing the folder as they will have no access to the folder below the top level.

Daily Star News App

On first looks this app seems to be very basic. And after using it for a bit, it doesn’t really get any better. The design is quite simple, and the interface is quite underwhelming. Though that said – its easy to get where you need to go and the application is also fast to load and to move between articles.  There also doesn’t seem to be any way to refresh the current stories manually – You have to go into a story and then come back out again. Not ideal but not a show stopper. The news is English focused like the paper but if you like the Irish print version(with the token Irish stories) you may like this application as well.

They’ve kept the headlines a bit short but there’s an image with every story which is always good. The article length is often very short though. There’s also isn’t a lot of choice… you get News, Gossip, Babes, and Sport. That’s it… There’s also an information button for more information about the company that made the app… not very professional but people need publicity I suppose. I’ve also noticed some weird bugs… If you click to go into an article the toolbar at the bottom changed to a loading icon(left) and a refresh button(right). Pressing that refresh button takes you straight to the Babes section… A pleasant surprise but a surprise indeed. Interface buttons should always do what you think they will… and the refresh button is one of the best well known symbols around. Changing what it does in your application will only confuse people. (Although in this case I can hardly say I was upset…)

NYTimes News App

This application from the New York Times is one of the first news applications that I ever used. I also have previously recommended because it is very good. The quality of the writing seems to be excellent and some of the editorial pieces have had me reading for whole commutes. The interfaces is very nice, and very detailed. You have a huge amount of choice if you need it, but the latest news is right there in front of you straight away. The popular stories are also just one click away. The rest of the categories are only 2. Its an excellent interface and one that lets you get where you need to. Its also one that iPhone, iPod users will be used to as its very similar to how you get to podcasts for example from the music app. It’s good to see they’ve done some research.

There are a few nice features within the articles too – the top and bottom toolbars visible in the second screenshot, disappear when you start scrolling through the article. It takes the interface out of the way while you’re reading. Nice. And its easy to get it back – one click on the article and they pop back. Also when you read all the way down to the bottom of the article it knows when you’ve reached the bottom and it pops back. The ability to resize the text is there too – which is important as I find that the default text size is much too big. Back on the homepage the refresh button does what you expect of it, and articles seem to be fairly regularly uploaded.

Although this app has very few problems(and many positives), it does have one or two… – its quite slow, and after a bit of use the app crashed a few times – not a huge deal but hopefully would be resolved in later releases.

On a side note, this is also the only application to use right aligned thumbnails for the articles… hmmm.

Sky News

One of my favourite of the newer news apps that I’ve downloaded, this app has a lot going for it. The interface is simple enough, but shows you a lot of information straight away. As soon as you load the application you get the 6 top stories straight away. A feat only matched by one other application in this list. However, there does seem to be a little ad bar that opens down at the bottom but I can’t work out when it opens – it seems to be entirely random. The application is fully featured, and a lot of the stories also have video included and its easy to see which ones. The app is reasonably fast to load, with a nice little headline by headline loading mechanism. 

If I could give out about one thing, however, is that the article functionality is very basic. There’s no resizing of text, and no landscape view. Also, oddly, there’s no ability to share that interesting news story that you’ve just come across. This is surprising as almost every other app here lets you email, or twitter a link to the story.

One interesting part of this application is the “Your Report” section. I can see this having many benefits for Sky News as it enables you to send them news of an event that you might be witnessing! I can see this being a big thing – especially with the proliferation of iPhones around these days.

Time Mobile

There are a few Time magazine subscribers in my family and I came across this app advertised at the back of the magazine so a good while ago I checked it out. The first time I loaded it I was nicely surprised by the design of the interface, nice big pictures with a coverflow-like ability to flick across from one story to the next. However, for those of you without perfect 3G coverage there is also the ability to press a button in the top right had corner and to change it to a list view that some people might be more comfortable with. Apart from the default coverflow-like picture interface the rest of the interface is very similar to a lot of the other major news site apps. As I talk about in the conclusion later – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The article pages have a few nice features too – you are able to zoom in on the article and you can also change the font size. However the stand out very nice feature is in the bottom left corner of the article pages – the ability to turn off the accelerometer so that it doesn’t accidently shift to landscape view in the middle of you reading something! I absolutely loved this, and found myself looking for this feature in every other IPhone application I use! Back to the app though the news and editorials tend to be of good quality and if you’re used to the magazine or the website then you should be well looked after by this application.

ITN News

The ITN iphone application is one of a couple of applications on this list that provides Videos as well as more traditional text based news. And it has to be said that it does it very well. It’s very easy to see which story have associated videos attached, with a small “v” in the thumbnail. Once in the article and the quality is pretty good. The ads at athe top maybe take up a bit too much room but with excellent images and video this more than makes up for it. 

Within the articles it’s actually a little confusing where the videos are – until you click around a bit. Up in the Nav bar, you’ve got a copuple of buttons – Headlines(essentially the back button), Share and Videos.

This Videos button display a list of the associated videos and gives you the ability to play them. The loading of the videos is pretty quick and the quality pretty good.

The Share button gives you the ability to email and twitter a link to the article, however that sharing window that pops up is a bit weird. The cancel button doesn’t seem to work, and the others seem to take a long time to open. That could just be my phone though

Msnbc.com

The interface on this iPhone application caught me by surprise. The first, and I must say only, genuinely unique design out of this entire list comes from a news site that is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC. They integrated their logo (or maybe took inspiration from it) and turned it into a slick circular interface that is very nice to look at. Its also easy to use. When you click on one of the topics you’re taken through to a page that on first using is a little off-putting. The news itself flows by from the top downwards. This caught me out until I realised what it was doing. There is a pause button down at the bottom of the screen and I hit that as soon as I could!

The application is nicely fully featured and has literally hundreds of articles and blogs to read. They’ve also congregated all of their various twitter feeds under the twitter button. Once in there you can choose from any of their twitter accounts to see their recent updates. A nice feature indeed, as you can check out the feeds all in one place first before you decide to follow them later! I like this application a lot, from the Zumobi Network which seem to do a number of other nice applications.

Unfortunately, its not all rosy in the garden. To read the full articles, takes too many clicks and also loads the Msnbc webpage within a frame. If you just want the first half of the article you don’t have to go further but if you want to read the whole thing you must load the website. This website can be slow to load and kind of negates the data saving from using the application. I don’t understand this unless the object of the app is to get more visitors to their website? And maybe this would be acceptable if it didn’t have ads in the application, but it does – so you get ads in both places. Not ideal, but if you just want to do some casual news reading with a very nice interface then this application will suit you.

The Munster

The only free Irish web app in the top 50 listed in the Irish App Store, the Munster Express’s News iPhone app was a pleasantly surprisingly good application. This, I have to say caught me by surprise. I didn’t expect a regional Irish news paper to be able to produce such an app. And even if that does say more about me then it really should have, I then thought about it for a little while and I realized that of course it was possible. Ireland has an excellent community of developers who are easily capable of producing such an application. However why don’t we see more of this? The regional paper in my area – the Leinster Leader – does not have any iPhone app. But on to the application!

The application itself is pretty good. The number of articles on the main page is nice, as it allows you to scan headlines very quickly and easily. Especially when a brief excerpt is included. The application is pretty basic looking, but I suppose its better to stick to the default Apple styling than do some messy job yourself.

The news stories tend to be provincial but that’s exactly what you need from this type of application. If you’re from the south of Ireland and live away from home this is perfect to keep up to date.

Couple of weird things going on with the ads currently used by the app but I cant see that affecting you’re overall use of this application. The app is on the basic side but I dont think anyone expects anything else from a news sourfce of this size.  

France 24

A very simple application but the only one of its kind on this list. The France 24 new app is primarily a video application. The application loads and then you click on one of the options below and you get video news of that topic. They seem to be updated regularly enough. That said the design of the application could be a little better and if you weren’t in a 3G covered area then this application is really of no use to you.

The videos themselves once you let them buffer for a while are of an acceptable level of quality. The app also has the nice distinction of being available in 3 languages – English, and as its primarily aimed at the French market, Arabic and French. Unfortunately when the app is changing to the video, it goes completely black and it looks like the application has crashed when in fact it hasn’t. Not the first time we’ve seen this on the list but this black loading screen seems to last a good bit longer. The application itself is a case of sticking to what they know but the design could use a little sprucing up.

As this is my personal website, I tend to try things out here first. Like this design… I am unsure about the colours, but I like this layout and it only took me a weekend to put together. I’m calling the theme Bubblegum temporarily, and its written specifically for wordpress. That said, lots of it doesn’t work yet, so I’ll be working away in the background trying to fix everything. If you read this, let me know in the comments if you come accross anything that doesnt work! Thanks!

In other related news, I recently started a new project – 26Squared. I’m going to use this as the umbrella for all of my other projects – They will all become part of the 26Squared network – along with some new things in the coming months. More details on this I’ll try to announce later.

As with all things in life – A major change requires a bit of reorganisation, so many of the current posts on this site are not optimised for the current theme. I will be working on this in the coming weeks… but expect a few hiccups! Oh and I dont have the logo/site image ready yet – hopefully in the coming days! Without it, the design looks like its leaning to the right a bit. This will be resolved soon!

So there it is – another new beginning on this site, but beginnings are the best part so hopefully many more to follow!

Update – The site logo(A poor as it is),  is now up!

We’ve all, at one time or another, needed to find a phone number of a local tradesman, or business. Now, the first thing I do is google it. However, before the advent of google, the first thing you picked up was the golden pages or some other local directory. Even now, alot of local businesses just dont have a web presence so the only way to find them is through the Golden Pages. And even the companies that do have a web presence, can’t totally cut their directory listsings as many people’s first port of call is still the local directory.

Recently however, that has started to change. More and more companies (especially companies that conduct their business mostly online) have been foregoing a listing in the local offline directories and even the national directories like the golden pages. This is because they believe it is impossible to tell whether they have achieved anything from their ad in the golden pages. They don’t have the same transparency that they get from their visitors coming from Google, Digg or Twitter.

I believe this trend is largely similar to what we are seeing in other industries like advertising. A large number of advertisers are focusing on the forms of advertising where they can easily track their results. This is why big online ad companies like google aren’t seeing the huge hits in revenue that printed advertisers are seeing.

However, just the other day, during a discussion someone asked me if it was possible to find out how much traffic was coming from these offline resources. And although it might take a little bit of work I think it might be possible to tell. All you really need is a little creativity and some way to track your websites statistics – like Google Analytics.

The easiest way, first off, if you haven’t already run the ad, is to use a slightly different URL for your offline ad. I’d even go as far as to suggest a different domain. You can then redirect from this URL to you normal address with little or no fuss. You can then easily work out numbers coming from offline resources. And even if for some reason your offline URL is being used somewhere online, you’ll nearly always have a referrer. Since all of your ‘offline’ customers, will show as a direct connections, you can work out whether your offline ads are worth it. I believe a number of companies already do this. However it seems to be more tailored to specific advertising campaigns then to particular ads but the premise is still valid. You’ll often see companies like Coca-Cola have a different URL on certain ads – A different URL for each campaign. Its a way of seeing how successful a particular campaign was. I’m sure huge advertising companies have completed studies that are able to work out the number of people who actually see an ad from the number of people that actively go out and type out the URL, however this is beyond my means as a one man development team. Plus in our case, only the people that use the URL are important as they are potential sales, or offers, or whatever it is that you do. Coca-Cola also have the luxury of being able to correlate sales to campaigns, and I’m sure have very intelligent statisticians working it out for them.

This is not always going to work though. And it’s not always good in every situation. One situation where I’d advise against providing users with a different domain, is when the brand is ultra important and you’re trying to create brand loyalty. While its ok for Susan who owns and graphic design company to have a couple of domains, as its her name and work that is important not exact brand recognition. And its definitely ok for a huge brand like Coca-Cola because they already have all the brand recognition that they’re going to get. If you have to keep the exact brand, you could offer your offline resourses a slightly different landing page. In the offline ad list http://example.com/golden as your domain name. Again this has a couple of problems in that it has a much better chance of being found in the wrong manner and if that happens it might take a lot of effort to work out the approx numbers coming from offline resources.

As I pointed out earlier, Coca-Cola have correlation between sales and ad campaigns as a perfect measurement of ad success. If you’re deciding whether to drop that offline ad and suspect its doing absolutely nothing for you then the easiest thing you can do is drop the ad and see if there is a correlation between the amount of work you lose. Risky, especially if you’re wrong. But in certain businesses you’re going to be able to do this with very little risk.

One last thing to take into consideration however is demographics. And what a huge thing to throw in at the end. I could have written a whole post about demographics and will do so in the future. The key is to think about what your normal customer is. Are they an old couple from a rural town? Don’t bother with the web (unless of course you’re looking to change your normal customers – again depends on the business). Are they young “bebo-ers”? Don’t bother with offline directories – They’ve never picked up the golden pages. You need to look at your customers and work out who who want or need to target and work out your advertising from there. Not the other way round.

Obviously, the first suggestion was to go to each PC and start a search. Ouch. That would have taken an age and would have to be done when no-one is at the desk. And with hundred’s of PC’s to look after this really wasn’t a good idea.

So, wanting to show off my meagre scripting skills (but mostly to avoid walking around the entire office) I said that I would be able to script a solution to search every PC remotely. Although, I’m pretty good at scripting  pretty simple tasks, I had no idea if I could do this.

First, I had to see if I could search my own PC with a command line tool. I considered a couple of options – either FIND or FINDSTR. I decided to go with FINDSTR as there are loads of options and useful switches. I also wanted to reduce the time it would take to search my PC. I took a look at the security settings and basically decided that it would be a waste of resources to search every file and folder on the PC as our PCs are locked down so that users only have write permission on certain folders. So I could narrow the search down to those folders. So part 1 of my script became:

findstr /s /M /D:c:\Temp\;c:\docume~1\; /C:”Phrase to Search For” *.xls

Let me explain the switches in use here:

• /s – Search all subfolders
• /M – Only print out the filename of files that contain the phrase. The default is to display where in the file it is too.
• /D: – The directories to search in a list separated by semi-colons.
• /C: – The literal search string
• and the last option is the files to search. In this case – all files that have the .xls suffix. i.e. Excel files.

This line worked excellently and produced the following output:

c:\Temp\:
c:\docume~1\:
username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK10\stupidfile.xls

This shows that it found a file in my documents and settings folder with the above phrase in it. Excellent, so now I could move onto the next task – running this script on every PC and with admin rights, so that every folder could be searched.

In steps the Systems Administrator‘s best friend – PSTOOLS. Literally the best selection of admin tools for the Windows Systems Administrator, from the legendary Mark Russinovich. One of them – psexec.exe – does exactly what I need it to do. It allowed me to send out the above bat file to a huge list of machines and run it remotely using whatever user account I need to.

psexec @list.txt -u domain\adminadccount -d -c search.bat

Let me explain the switches in use here:

• @list.txt – basically this list contains every machine that you want to run the command on.
• -u – this allows out to stipulate the account to run the command under. In this case the fictional domain\adminaccount account
• -d – dont wait for the command to finish before carrying on. I was able to do this by using the bat file to output to a cetral location.
• -c – this switch copies the following bat file locally to the machines in question before running it. This is important because I had local drives specified in the bat script.

This ran on the test machines fine. Next stage was to pipe the output to somewhere nice and central and in manner that would allow us to differentiate the output from each machine. You couldn’t output everything to one file or you would have different machines outputting to the file at different times so depending on when the search was started it would output at different times and the file would become unreadable and full of meaningless data.  To avoid this I did a little roundabout way of outputting to files. I did this by getting the bat file to create a txt file based on the PC name:

echo %COMPUTERNAME% >> \\centrallocation\%COMPUTERNAME%.txt
findstr /s /M /D:c:\Temp\;c:\docume~1\; /C:”Phrase to Search For” *.xls >> \\centrallocation\%COMPUTERNAME%.txt
If %ERRORLEVEL% EQU 0 ECHO %COMPUTERNAME% had a copy of the file >> \\centrallocation\overall.txt

Note – The above should only be three lines. This was the full search.bat file but let me explain it:

First line created a file called computer name and on the first line of that file wrote the computername. You may not need this but for peice of mind I did this to be able to show management that it actually ran on the machine.

Next line outputs the findstr command from above to that same file. Often this would just output two lines with the directories searched as nothing would be found on the machine. However if the file was found it would also output that information.

The next line is very important. It is what the entire bat file relies on to make it simple for you to find the machines with the file. Even though the line above has created files for every PC, and all the information is held within them, it would be a very timeconsuming task to go through each one. Basically if findstr doesn’t find a file that you’re looking for it will change %ERRORLEVEL% to greater than 0. If it does find it however find a file the %ERRORLEVEL% will be 0. So if that is so then we output the computername to a file called overall.txt. This then gives us a list of PC’s where the file was found and we can then go to the corresponding computername.txt and find the location where the file was found.

So that’s how I did it. I wouldn’t mind hearing any different ways to do it from anyone out there so get in touch in the comments.