If..Else Log

James Bennett writes about his unusual (but perfectly valid) HTML markup. Quite interesting in a geeky, pedantic sort of way.

Seth Godin writes on the different kinds of traffic and what it means for a business.

Should Jeff Bezos be in mourning? After all, MySpace is killing Amazon in traffic…
The problem here is that Amazon users visit to buy stuff, and MySpace users visit to flirt. Last time I checked, flirting was a fairly unprofitable activity.

That's the problem with metrics; in the course of obeying the number, you lose track of what that number is supposed to be for.

If you're looking to run a business, it's important is to be able to convert attention to profit. It doesn't matter how much traffic you receive, if you don't find a way to monetise it (whether that's directly or indirectly), then all you have on your hands is a financial drain.

Community campaign

Swansea North Resident's Association have set up a site to complain about the mess left behind by Tango's Sony Bravia parody.

They've even gathered together a group of links to local press coverage on the whole event…

Advertising campaign

..or maybe not. The site content might have tipped you off; if not, the news stories that were linked to should have set off alarm bells¹. Not convinced? Take a look at the whois entry for swansea-res.org.uk.

Registrant: CHI advertising

Registrant's address:
7 Rathbone St
London
W1T 1LY
GB

Relevant dates: Registered on: 28-Feb-2006

It's none other than CHI Advertising. And who's listed as one of their clients? Tango.

All in all, it's actually a pretty good campaign. The design and language for the sites give an air of believability² and the advert is brilliant. Nicely executed and I can't help but be impressed; just a shame that us brits are a suspicious bunch:) [via]

1. Try to browse off the stories. [back]
2. Where else would you expect to see animated "Under Construction" gifs? [back]

If Blog Design Solutions was a football team, then it'll probably be Real Madrid; in the same way Real Madrid have managed to sign some of the Galacticos of the footballing world, BDS has managed to bring together some of the big names in the web design blogger circuit.

The likes of Michael Heilemann, John Oxton, and Simon Collison each take us on a guided tour of the major blogging platforms currently in favour. The old favourite of MT and current star WP are covered alongside other blogging choices such as EE and TXP. Rutter even gives us a glimpse of what it's like to roll your own custom CMS solution. So with such names on the front cover, what would the book be like?

After a short introduction, the book walks us through setting up your machine as a local test environment. Blogging is all about communication and sharing, and thus, rightly belongs out in the open but having a local sandbox for testing is an invaluable aid to development and experimentation. That said, the advent of easy to use web server distributions like Xampp are probably a better fit for most people but the chapter is a welcome one nonetheless.

The Blogs, Designs and Solutions

The subsequent chapters are each handled by a single author¹ talking about their platform of choice. Whilst each author brings their own flavour and writing style to the mix, each chapter broadly follows the same format. After a short discussion on setting up the software, a brief introduction to the templating engine followed by the development of a blog design. Following that, these ingredients are brought together to integrate the design with the templating tags to produce a custom blog theme. By the end of each chapter, the reader would have picked up enough to be able to, if not create their own theme, then at least understand how one is made up.

But for a but…

As I mentioned before, if Blog Design Solutions was a football team, then it'd probably be Real Madrid. And like Real Madrid, the combined efforts of the group of talented individuals, sadly, don't add up to the cohesive success that you may expect.

Upon reading the book, there's the unshakable feeling that each chapter had been written independently without knowledge or reading of the companion chapters. There's a strong sense of deja vu as you read about how to mark up and style a page. I suspect that the reader would have been better served if a single design was used by all the authors. As well as preventing the curse of unwelcome familiarity from distracting the reader's attention, it would have provided a better standing point from which to gauge and compare the workings of the different systems.

In fact, for a multi-format book, the lack of any significant comparison between the packages are a surprising omission. It would have been helpful to have seen a chapter dedicated to a more in-depth discussion on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of the contending solutions, especially since this was aimed at the blogging novice.

Perhaps, it's the format and constraints of the book which lets it down. By going for breadth in writing about 5 different approaches instead of focusing on one, the authors are unable to dig deep and illustrate the intricacies of each platform. A single chapter isn't really enough for the authors to get into stride and do each blog engine justice.

As a general overview and gentle introduction, the book has merits and if you're totally new to blogging, you'd probably find it informative. However, I can't help feeling disappointed, especially when you consider the depth and breadth of information that can be found on each of the author's blogs.

A quick 5 minute read in a book shop will probably be enough to tell you if this book is for you. However, if you already have your own blog up and running, I fancy that you probably won't find enough in here to satisfy you.

1. Apart from the WP chapter in which Michael and Chris both lend their expertise [back]

David Hellsing has decided to sell the venerable Stylegala.

Sunamiya, a paint firm based in Imabari, announced the development of the a teddy bear gun. Yes, a Teddy Bear Gun. The device, which blasts a teddy bear equipped with a parachute into the air was developed after they noticed people were throwing teddy bears into the air instead of bouquets at wedding receptions.

Japanese ingenuity never fails to impress.

What a day of heartache and glory for football fans in London! After leading their rivals for so long, Spurs fans had their heart broken as Arsenal grab the last Champions League spot in style. Henry manages to give Highbury a fitting send-off by rounding off a hat-trick which sealed their place in Europe next season irrespective of what happens in Paris.

As a neutral, it's good to see the last days of this season's Premiership action being fought with earnest with 9 goals being scored between the 2 games but I have to say, poor Tottenham. Whilst they can view the progress that they've made this season with optimism, I'd wager that it'll be hard to find a Spurs fan who would be feeling but disappointment right now. Arsenal, on the other hand, must be estactic; a timely morale boost before their adventures in Paris.

The reports of the death of excitement in the Premiership have been greatly exaggerated.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, take a look at the Birth-Month Soccer anomaly or why half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months.

John Shannon has a tutorial which shows you how to paint grass using Photoshop. Beautiful.

Love and hate, amour and haine; Rachel Plefger's T-Shirt design cleverly uses an ambigram to reflect the two sides of our emotions.