The Stupidest thing: The beginning of the 200th show
Posted in Boagworld Bites on: Saturday, February 27, 2010 by Paul Boag
This is the first extract from the 200th show with complete transcript. Unfortunately, this is the introduction section which mainly consists of pointless waffle!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:01 — 13.8MB)
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Paul: Hello and welcome to the stupidest thing I’ve ever come up with. The 200th episode live 12-hour broadcast at boagworld.com, the podcast for all those involved in designing, developing and running web sites on a daily basis. We have so many people here today I just do not know where to start, but I would obviously start with the lovely Marcus Lillington.
Marcus: Hello Paul. I don’t know what all the fuss is about because this is actually my 196th Boagworld.
Paul: Which is, by far, more important than the 200 mark! So it’s really good to be here. Hopefully everybody can hear on the live stream. If they can’t, Ryan can you please shout. We have a room full of people here, it’s all gone very over the top in our organisation of things. Hopefully everybody’s here, hopefully everybody’s enjoying it and it should be a good day.
Marcus: Talk slower Paul.
Paul: What? Just leave me alone. You’re not allowed to talk because you haven’t got a mic. People without a mic don’t get to talk, it’s the way of things, let’s be clear about that – set the rules to begin with. You’ve gotta start enthusiastically because I know by 10 o’clock…
Marcus: Enthusiastic and big gaps between the words.
Paul: I’ve got about 144 questions I wrote last night, so it’s gonna be a full-on show.
Marcus: Ask me one.
Paul: ‘Why?’
Marcus: That’s it, just ‘Why?’
Paul: There we go. Also we have a few people in the room, we have Drew. Hello Drew.
Drew: Hello.
Paul: And Rachel. Hello Rachel.
Rachel: Hello.
Paul: It’s good to have you two on the show starting off bright and early.
Drew: It’s great to be here! I’m not sure about ‘bright and early’.
Paul: What time did you leave?
Drew: We left about 8 o’clock, so it wasn’t too bad.
Paul: Oh that’s not too bad, that could’ve been worse. We’ve also got Paul Stanton in the room. He has to shout very loudly as he doesn’t have a mic. It looks like he’s sorting out Twitter and everybody on Twitter. He seems to be spending time on Twitter
Marcus: He wasn’t, he was just playing around.
Paul: He was not! A minute ago he was talking to people on Twitter and answering their questions. So what are you, @stanton aren’t you. So people can send messages to him. We are gonna swap around a lot in this show because we’re not gonna be able to keep up 12 hours, me and Marcus sitting at the mic. So I expect Stanton and Ryan Taylor as well who’s here will be taking a turn, as will Dave and Craig who are sitting right down at the far end of the table.
Marcus: Have they got cameras pointing at them all the way down there?
Paul: No they haven’t, let’s turn it round – hang on. I can probably change camera to get them in it if I can work this out; It’s all very hi-tech.
Marcus: Wave to the camera!
Paul: There we go, see their now on the camera. Suffice it to say you are now on camera. Ryan isn’t however coz my laptop is breaking his head.
Ryan: It’s alright, no one wants to see me.
Paul: No I think we can all survive without that view. So there we go.
Marcus: I just wanted to do an apology before anything goes wrong. We can’t believe we’ve actually managed to make all this work. We’ve got a big telly that people who are gonna do Skype interviews with us are gonna appear upon. We can record them etc etc. So at the moment it’s all working, but who knows whether it will carry on?
Paul: It won’t! What particularly amuses me about this is that I’m so confident that something will go wrong that I’ve produced this screen: “We have technical difficulties. Be right back” is what it says. That’s how confident I am that something will go wrong at some stage today, but hopefully not too much. So we’ve got loads of guests.
Marcus: Give us a run-down Paul.
Paul: We’ve got Drew and Rachel from edgeofmyseat.com here to start off with. We’ve got Elliott on later around 11.30. We’ve got our own Rob Borley on talking about productivity and project management at about midday. Then, Drew and Rachel, apparently you’re back later to talk about something called the Joel Test, which I’ve never heard of, so that’ll be interesting.
Drew: Excellent.
Paul: We’ve also got Simon Collison on talking about user requirements and pushing the boundaries. We’re gonna discuss alternative devices. I think we probably need to tackle the whole subject of the iPad at some stage – it would seem wrong not to. Christian Hellman’s on at 2 o’clock talking about developer evangelism. Relly Annett-Baker, who was due to be here today but she’s poorly, so won’t make it, but we’re gonna talk to her via Skype.
Marcus: That’s the worst news. She was bringing cakes.
Paul: She was bringing cakes. We do however have one cake already – let’s see if I can get a shot of the cake so that we know that there is a cake here. This is very hard, I’m trying to do so many different things at the same time.
Marcus: I’m gutted. Sorry. No I’m gonna have to go out the room for a minute.
Paul: There’s the cake, look! That’s nice cake. There’ll be more cake, it’ll be fine. So there we go, we’ll put Marcus back on camera looking miserable. So Relly is gonna be here in spirit.
Marcus: She did tweet in the middle of the night, which was basically was translated as “I’m up,” which means: “The baby’s up.”
Paul: Yeah, I think she had quite a rough night. So we’ve got Sarah Parmenter at 3 o’clock, talking about being a freelancer. We’ve got Andy Clarke at 3.30 talking about designing in the browser. Yaili’s coming along at 4 o’clock, she’s actually coming here isn’t she? So she’s gonna be here from 3, but will be joining us at 4 to talk about CSS3. We’ve got Chris Mills at 4.30 talking about education. And then we’re gonna talk a little bit about getting yourself noticed and we’re gonna have loads of time as well for listener questions and site reviews. At 6 o’clock we’ve got Patrick O’Keith talking about community – or this is long isn’t it, there’s a lot of this. Flip me this is a bad idea.
Marcus: Well we’ve done 5 minutes, Paul. So we’re ok.
Paul: Is that all we’ve done? Oh my goodness. This is such a bad idea, what the hell was I thinking? So that’s exciting. We’ve got Alex Hunter from Virgin.
Marcus: Let’s start again. Welcome to the 200th Boagworld and the 8-hour podcast.
Paul: And then I’ve got bored. There’s other stuff after that. There will be loads going on. Somebody’s asking in the chat room what time Ryan Carson is on. He’s not actually on this show. They don’t work Friday’s as Ryan has just told us, so unfortunately we’re gonna miss out on their wonderful contributions. They wouldn’t consider this work! This isn’t work, this is just playing.
Marcus: No it isn’t.
Paul: Ok. So the whole thing I guess is gonna be very relaxed. What are you doing, Marcus?
Marcus: People are saying “I just saw me on Boagworld.”
Paul: What, one of this lot down the room?
Marcus: No. On the telly.
Paul: Oh on the big telly? Oh I see, they can watch themselves. That’s exciting. So it’s gonna be fairly laid back to be honest, there’s no way we can keep up a normal podcast pace on a show like this, but hopefully you can spend the day hanging out with us having some good time. If you wanna tweet about the show, please use the hashtag #bw200 and also obviously share this show around so we get as many people as possible watching it. Marcus is gonna record the whole thing, aren’t you Marcus?
Marcus: Yep. I might have lied then. It’s currently recording. How long that lasts for I don’t know – I’ve only got about 20 gigs left on my hard drive.
Paul: 20 gigs is gonna be ample!
Marcus: 12 hours of audio? Ummm, not sure.
Paul: Yeah! Can’t be that much. You can get a high definition film for about a gig, and that’s like an hour, and that’s hi-def. Video!
Marcus: Yeah, alright, whatever.
Paul: “Whatever”? It’s gonna be like that is it? Everybody wants it to be recorded in its entirety, Marcus. Everybody wants it.
Marcus: I’m recording it. I’m recording it!
Paul: That’s good. As long as we understand at the outset.
Marcus: I don’t know how long I’m gonna record it for, but I am recording it.
Paul: We’re also recording it to Ustream. I wanna know at what point Ustream gives up.
Marcus: You did hit record didn’t you? I was supposed to remind you of that.
Paul: Yeah, thanks.
Ryan: Apparently we are having quite a few people having trouble with the stream at the moment.
Paul: Well that’s their problem. Then hard-chesse, sucker. I don’t know what we can do about that. Is there anything we can do about that?
Ryan: Apparently it’s better on the Boagworld site than the Ustream site.
Paul: Ah, there’s a useful tip. So check out the Boagworld site. You can either go to boagworld.com/live or just go to the homepage and you’ll find a blog post which includes the video in and you’ll also get there a rough agenda of what we’re doing for the day – and I do mean rough.
Marcus: Even my wife is gonna look at this, which is just unheard of.
Paul: Really!? Well I’m thinking about getting my son on it later, via Skype. I thought that might be quite fun.
Marcus: She did say “I’m not prepared to do any talking.” And I said: “Well you’re not allowed to.”
Paul: Ooh, that’s a bit harsh.
Marcus: But I’d forgot about Skype.
Paul: Yeah, she could’ve Skype’d in.
Marcus: She hasn’t got a mic on her work computer so she couldn’t have done it anyway.
Paul: And Cath is coming in later to do us sandwiches and stuff.
Marcus: Well she can definitely come and say hi then.
Paul: Yeah, we’ll let her in shall we? I hope she doesn’t do anything embarrassing.
Marcus: What time’s Cath coming in? I’m hungry.
Paul: I think she’s gonna be around from about 11. I think that’s the plan.
Marcus: That’s great, that’s really soon.
Paul: I know, it’s soon enough. But we’re not eating at 11, that’s too early to eat. You don’t get food that early, I’m sorry Marcus. Ok, so what shall we do first?
Marcus: I’ve got a couple of cream eggs in the car. Walnut Whips!
Paul: You’re still on food. You have got an unhealthy obsession with Walnut Whips.
Marcus: It’s just that the garage that I fill up with petrol is a Marks and Spencer and obviously they decided to make a gazillion Walnut Whips and now they’re giving them away for nearly free and I used to love them when I was a kid.
Paul: They taste really plastic-y inside, I don’t like the middles.
Marcus: Yeah it’s great.
Paul: It’s like there’s nothing natural in them at all, is there, except the walnut. And even that I’m not sure about.
Marcus: The chocolate’s brown and earthy and good for.
Paul: There we go. We’ve got 12 hours of this people. You’ve brought your guitar haven’t you? And apparently the rumour is that Jeremy Keith, when he comes in – do you know, we haven’t put Jeremy down for a slot.
Ryan: We’ve got two-and-a-half hours of free slots.
Paul: No, I’ve filled them up!
Ryan: You’ve filled them up?
Paul: I’m gonna talk – for two-and-a-half hours.
Marcus: Yeah, I’ll look forward to that.
Paul: We ought to let Jeremy on the show. Let’s get him all the way down then not let him on the show, not let him say anything. He’s bringing his bazooka thing – malandarin? Something like that.
Marcus: Is he? Mandarin. Mandolin.
Paul: No it’s not a mandolin, it’s a bazooka.
Marcus: Bozouki. For God’s sake. Dealing with monkeys. That’s a big mandolin. I just thought he’d probably bring the mandolin because it’s little.
Paul: Well I don’t know what he;s bringing. Something playable.
Marcus: Whatever. How many times I’m gonna say that today?
Paul: I think there is definitely an option for some kind of buzzword bingo today. Somebody has suggested that every time somebody says ‘awesome’ they should have a drink. We ought to have drinking games.
Marcus: I’ve got to drive home!
Paul: Oh yeah that’s true. The audience can have drinking games.
Marcus: Yeah. I’d love to do that. Brought some beer, but I can only really have one or two.
Paul: Aww that’s a bit poor. You are gonna be here over 12 hours, so if you start now you’ll have sobered up by the end.
Marcus: That’s a good point actually. Wedding drinking – drink yourself sober.
Paul: Exactly. So there you go, it’ll all be fine.
Marcus: So there’s me wobbling at about 6 or 7, but come midnight I’m absolutely fine.
Drew: “I’ve drunk myself sober, officer”
Paul: Kids, we are not encouraging drink-driving. Also, kids – those in the chat room – we’re not encouraging bunking off school to listen to the 200th Boagworld either!
Marcus: Why not?
Paul: What? Social responsibility here!
Drew: It’s Friday. Nobody does any work on a Friday at school.
Marcus: School’s rubbish these days anyway. It’s just grooming for exams. I know, I’ve got kids there.
Paul: One of your kids has left school – and that worked out well.
Marcus: It might do. She’s actually going for a university interview today.
Paul: Today? And you’re not with her? You miserable arse!
Marcus: Well I would’ve liked to have been. Some idiot organised a 12-hour podcast.
Paul: I want to see the sick note from your mum that says you’ve got to go home at 7 or whatever time it was.
Marcus: That’s later than I’m normally allowed to stay out. I normally have to be in before it’s dark, which is about half 5 at the moment. But she said, if I’m good – and because it’s Friday – I can stay out till 7. So I’ll be here till about 6 or 7 and then I’ve got to go. Sorry.
Paul: Just the way it is. Ok.
Marcus: So obviously I won’t be able to record the last 3 hours.
Paul: Have we got anybody interested in coming on to try out the Skype with us, any listeners on the show?
Ryan: I’ve just messaged them, nobody’s replied yet.
Paul: Are people still having problems with the stream? Oh they’re moaning. There’s no way we can do anything other than we’re doing really can we. We’re streaming, it’s going up. I’m just having a look at the settings, see if there’s anything I can do. I can’t without stopping broadcasting.
Ryan: Someone’s complaining they can only message every minute.
Paul: I’ve turned the chat room onto slow because it just becomes so overwhelming.
Marcus: “This is like Loose Women.” Lovely. ‘Loose Geeks.’ Ustreamer33005.
Paul: Ryan, if you click on ‘Chat Options’ then you should be able to have an option to turn off Slow Mode. You just turn it on, it’s a toggle – it’s either on or off.
Marcus: “When do we learn something?” Excellent, keep those comments coming.
Paul: So we will actually start getting to the nuts and bolts of things about half 10. We can start a bit earlier if we wanted to. But I thought it might be quite fun to get some of you guys on the show before we get any further. Do you wanna actually ask any questions? We’ve got Drew and Rachel here, we’re here. If people wanna kick off with a question, we can do that as well. Oh apparently the stream is suddenly miraculously better. We’ve got someone calling in, that’s exciting because we can try out our big Skype camera. Hang on, if I now pretend to be professional by going back to me – although now I’m leaning across the camera.
Marcus: Well you did say “pretend to be professional”.
Paul: Oooh we’ve got someone coming through. It’s gonna be exciting guys. Any minute now, we’ll wait until he appears. We’re dialling him. Now should I know who Ben is?
Ben: You should know who I am!
Paul: Oh God he can hear me. Have you got video?
Ben: Yes I can hear everything.
Paul: Oh no. You got video?
Ben: No. Let me hit this button here which says ‘Video’ and maybe something will happen. That’s turning on my video.
Paul: Ooh! Great.
Marcus: It’s very sunny where you are Ben.
Paul: Where are you then, Ben?
Ben: I’m in my study in London.
Paul: It’s very nice there, it’s obviously good weather in London.
Ryan: Is that your new study?
Ben: No it’s not a new study, it’s just you didn’t see it in daylight, Ryan.
Paul: We’re not used to daylight; it scares and intimidates us. So Ben, apparently I should know you. I’ve had dinner with you? When was that? Oh now I’m sounding like a complete jerk.
Marcus: He’s just so bloody embarrassing. He did this yesterday.
Paul: Oh yeah I got a clients’ name wrong on a call.
Marcus: “Yes, hi Frank” – it’s Spencer.
Paul: I’m really sorry, I’m very sorry. I’m a selfish bad man. So what is it you do Ben?
Ben: I am one half of a company called Neutron Creations. We’re a web development studio.
Paul: Cool. So what’s your role there, what sort of stuff do you do?
Ben: I’m the front-end developer, so all the front-end stuff.
Paul: Right, and I presume your partner then is the back-end guy – that always sounds dodgy to me.
Ben: Correct. We’re like a big pantomime donkey.
Paul: So what are you working on, anything exciting?
Ben: We’re doing some work at the moment on authenticjobs.com. We’re just adding some new bits and pieces to that. I’m not gonna talk too much about them, but there’s exciting stuff coming there. Top secret.
Paul: Oooooh. Tantalising us with potential new things. So what kind of stuff are you really into at the moment? What do you think we should all be paying attention to?
Ben: I think we should all be paying attention to HTML5 and CSS3 because they’re a lot of fun. And we should stop worrying about them and stop worrying about the old browsers that don’t really deal with them too well and just move on.
Paul: So we’re just abandoning IE6 now are we?
Ben: I think so. Well thats unfair really, there are some projects where you have to pay attention to it, but for most things then I’m generally leaving it behind a little bit.
Paul: So when you say that you’re leaving it behind, do you mean that you’re just not designing for it at all, or you’re letting it degrade gracefully, what are talking about here?
Ben: It varies. It depends on the design because obviously some designs are more intricate and there are certain things that just aren’t gonna work. For most things though I typically code with IE in the back of mind, aware that certain things aren’t going to work . I make a note to come back to those later and just make sure that they don’t look completely disastrous. But generally I’m quite happy to deal with IE as it comes, at the end.
Paul: What about you guys, how do you deal with IE these days?
Drew: It’s increasingly getting to a situation where clients are happy to consider the fact that they might not have to have the site looking exactly the same in IE6. And there’s few enough people using it that as long as we’re covering IE6 and making sure that the site looks acceptable and looks professional and there aren’t things overlapping, all the content’s accessible, but perhaps it doesn’t have to look exactly the same in IE6. I think that’s a sensible approach.
Rachel: I think you can point out the cost as well, the actual financial cost of fully supporting IE6 in terms of some of the things we have to do and time we have to take to get the same visual effects working, particularly on a very advanced layout. So you can sell it as a benefit and say: “We can get it looking decent and maybe a little bit plainer in IE6 or we can spend the time, effort, and the money to try to get IE6 to look the same as IE8 or Firefox or whatever” and let them choose what they want to do.
Marcus: That’s exactly what we do. We have our IE6 development testing as a separate, normally quite expensive line in our proposals and it focuses clients’ minds on it. Works well.
Paul: So Ben, is that the same approach that you’re basically using – you’re providing a plainer version? – or are you going a step further and using Mr. Clarke’s “here’s the real dummy stylesheet for IE6 users”?
Ben: We’ve used a combination. On our own website we’re using Mr. Clarke’s IE6 universal stylesheet, but that’s our project, we are the client so we have a bit more leeway there. With client work, we have in the past said we can support these older browsers, we can go as far as to say that they’ll look identical, but you are gonna pay the cost for that because it’s gonna take another week or so to go back through the whole site and fix all the little bugs.
Marcus: Exactly.
Paul: Of course, when you talk about HTML5 and CSS3, you are talking about other browsers that don’t support all of the features of HTML5 and CSS3. So what are you doing with that, just accepting that different browsers have different looks and feels?
Ben: Another technique that we use is that we don’t really rely on certain features of CSS3 for essential stuff, it’s generally window dressing. Most of the time it’s fine to accept that these browsers are gonna have those additional feature – it’ll be things like transparency and rounded corners, all the usual stuff, gradient backgrounds, which you can always fall back onto other things for. It’s generally fine to accept that some people will be getting a better experience, but because they’ve downloaded this more advanced browser those people will be expecting a better experience and they’ll understand more about what’s going on. So it’s also about the level of the user who has come into your site. If it’s someone on IE6 in a corporate environment, they’re not going to appreciate all the finer details, it’s more likely that they’ll be closer to the lowest common denominator of user.
Paul: Yeah which is fair enough. Drew and Rachel, what are you guys doing in terms of some of the more advanced CSS properties like gradients and multi-columns? Are you actually using any of that stuff yourself?
Drew: It depends a lot on the audience. We’ve been working on a web app that’s aimed at students. From that we can assume a certain level of savviness in that they’re educated, they’re younger and perhaps they might be open to running browsers other than IE even on Windows. For the really advanced stuff – the columns, the gradients – we’re keeping clear of those because they are still so niche in terms of browser support and open to change. The last thing we want to do is implement something for a client and then find 6 months down the line, they’ve changed how they render it and all of a sudden the site’s looking a bit of a mess or not quite what the client was expecting. So you want to leave them with something that is reasonably stable. So for things like
border-radiusthat’s stable enough, that’s been predictable for a long time. We can use that and know it’ll be ok. But gradients, maybe, maybe not. Certainly the column layouts, we’re talking pretty cutting-edge in terms of browser support.
Paul: I think the other aspect to it is that it has such a big impact if it’s not working. Even with a gradient, if it disappears it’s not the end of the world. If, however, multi-column isn’t supported then it’s gonna break the whole design in quite a fundamental way. But you’re saying, Ben, that occasionally you do use gradients and stuff like that?
Ben: Yeah, for example on the AuthenticJobs project, one of the things we’re doing is modifying the way that people change or select their job type when they are posting a new job listing. So we’ve got this fancy way of doing that and it’s very visual – you’ve got different cards for different job types, you can click on one and it will fade out the other ones, and there all very pretty and lovely. This is me taking designs from Cameron Moll and implementing those at the front end. He’s very realistic about graded browser support. So one of the things was a bevelled edge on the inside so it was like they had a two-step border, so a darker border round the outside and a lighter border on the inside for a shadowy/light effect. So I started out trying to do that with
box-shadowbecausebox-shadowhas, in some browsers, a property calledinset, which allows you to am the box shadow appear on the inside rather than the outside. Unfortunately that was only working in Firefox 3.6. It wasn’t working in any WebKit browsers and alsobox-shadowhad recently been dropped from the CSS3 spec. You can mess around with these things a lot and experiment but at the end of the day you need something that’s going to work in at least most browsers. So what we ended up doing there was that we switched toborder-imageand we allowed it to degrade nicely, so if people didn’t haveborder-imageall the padding, all the layout and spacing was fine, it was just they’d only get a 1px plain border than a glossy edge.
Paul: Which is fine. AuthenticJobs is aimed at a geek audience, so they have decent browsers, which I think helps massively.
Ben: Another thing we were using is this Javascript library called Modernizr, I think you’ve covered that before on the show, so that was very helpful. You can very easily target people who have support for these features and just deal with the ons who don’t very easily.
Paul: Which is brilliant. I quite like the idea of using some of these Javascript libraries that will, in effect, reduce the number of people that can’t view the effect you’ve got because they have to have (a) an old browser and (b) not have Javascript loaded. Rachel, what do you think in terms of these Javascript libraries where they supplement CSS?
Rachel: Personally, I prefer to take the approach of using specific Javascript to plug the holes. We tend to use jQuery anyway in our projects. Where I want to use a CSS3 selector that’s not supported in IE6/7, I tend to write a specific thing using jQuery rather than develop from the outset with a library that is patching things up. It’s personal preference, but I think where it’s just a few selectors I only need a few lines of Javascript, I don’t need a whole library to deal with that. And I’d also rather see where the problems are, see what happens if someone doesn’t have Javascript, add the Javascript but know that at the base level, someone who has got IE6 and no Javascript is still getting a good view of the site and can read everything and I’m not accidentally writing something that means that someone needs Javascript to see what I’m doing.
Paul: I get where you’re coming from on that, that makes a lot of sense. Ok. Sorry I’m just trying out new effects on my computer. I’ve discovered I can do camera-in-camera. It’s very exciting.
Rachel: It’s very distracting because I can see it up there.
Paul: We’ll move onto the wide shot where everybody’s in it.
Marcus: I just picked up on my Twitter feed – this is really important. One of our clients, the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, is on Twitter and I couldn’t help but notice their latest post: “Zombie worms found on whale bones.” What’s a zombie worm? Actual real zombie worms?
Paul: So what’s this got to do with web design?
Marcus: Nothing. Well their one of our clients.
Paul: I’ve had nothing to do with that project. Dave said “I don’t want Paul in it in any way.”
Marcus: Words to that effect: “We’d love to work with you as long as Paul has nothing to do with the project.”
Paul: Ok. That’s entirely understandable. That happens occasionally. So zombie worms, there we go. Ben, thank you very much for coming on the show. It was really good to talk to you. I apologise I didn’t know who you are. I won’t forget you now because I’ve been publicly humiliated in front of hundreds of people, which is always good.
Ben: It’s always the way. It was good to talk you too. Thanks. Bye.
Paul: It was a really good discussion.
Thanks goes to Simon Hamp for transcribing this segment.
