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I really like blog posts that give a behind the scenes for design changes. I’ve just written an internal post for my work on the reasoning I’ve made changes to a key part of our user experience.

This is an interesting look at the effect of a new icon design for Foodnoms has increased downloads. I wish more developers and designers would be this transparent about their work. It’s great evidence that shows how important the users are in our design considerations. No matter how well you know your users you don’t know what’s the most effective design until you speak to them.

This is a rather concerning piece of research. I hadn’t considered this angle of decentralised social media services. One thing that the large corps have is resources and urgency to tackle things like this.

When I started this site, I was just a 19-year-old looking to have fun on the internet. After all the twists and turns, I’ve come back around to a very similar place. Now, I’m a 31-year-old who’s still looking to have fun on the internet, share my thoughts and experiences, and make friends. That’s what this blog is for, and I’m really happy with where it’s landed.

Devon Dundee posting about his journey with his blog tells a similar tale to the story of my blog. Mine started when I was 20 and has been through many different iterations since. I recently switched back to WordPress in an effort to return to an easy way to post, have fun, and have a place to share that’s mine and no one else’s.

This is a fascinating read that presents the idea that calendars should be multi layered.

We tend to think of calendars as 2D grids with mutually exclusive blocks of time, but as this example shows, not all events automatically cancel each other out. Depending on their characteristics, they can be layered on top of each other. This means we manage time in three, not two, dimensions.

Think of a meeting you need to travel to. In your calendar will be an event for the actual meeting, but you need to block off time before and after so that no one else schedules something in that time. So really the unavailable time covers when you start travelling, the meeting itself, and the time travelling back. The total time makes one layer, the meeting is a second layer, and perhaps some tasks you need to accomplish in the meeting are a third layer. It’s a great concept and one I would love to see someone build an app based on it.

Back on WordPress. It’s been a few years and many attempts to revitalise my blog, but I’ve decided to move back to WordPress. The ease of posting from any device using apps has trumped everything else. Things will be a bit rough over the next few days and weeks as I get old posts back but stay tuned for more.

Editing memories

I’ve been looking at some of the things Google announced this week. Whilst some of the things are quite interesting – like the Pixel Tablet and stand – others are just plain puzzling….

Adding tags

This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to WordPress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog. It’s taken me a…

Hobbies, blogs, writing, iPads, and Macs

For the last few years 99% of my personal computing has been handled on the iPad Pro. For the most part it was ok. Sometimes I would need to jump through some hoops…

Blank page paralysis

I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour…

The internet needs a follow button…

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to…