Duke Street Alley

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a fascinating article by Walter Kirn in November’s Atlantic Monthly, called The Autumn of the Multitaskers. It basically argues that trying to do multiple things at once is a fad of the current era, possibly caused and definitely accentuated by conceptualising the brain as a computer. And further, it seems it’s not good for you. There’s a level at which this appeals to me, because I’m very bad at multitasking. Unless I carefully prepare myself for it, I have difficulty switching from one task to another without a few seconds of blank staring in between. And if I do the preparation, then neither task is really done to the best of my ability.

There’s an argument that this is a problem most men have; women seem to multitask better. I can barely walk and engage in a sensible conversation at the same time; many women seem to be able to do both as well as, for instance, send a text message. I don’t know many men who can multitask well.

This is somewhat belied by the fact that as I write this, I have earphones on and am listening to my current favourite genre of epic metal music, and am holding two IM conversations at the same time. The music, however, isn’t really a distraction; it’s partly in use to block out surrounding conversation and noise from the workplace, and partly to make me comfortable - I’m not actively listening to it. The two IM conversations are about prosaic, day-to-day items in the workplace. Neither of them is requiring much from me other than quick bursts of information I have no trouble recalling.

Part of the Getting Things Done method that I’ve been trying, with some success, to stick with, is a principle that having other stuff in your head, background tasks, prevents you from getting on with the ones in hand. The solution there is to dump everything you can think of out to a set of lists, where you can come back to them later. In other words, you can concentrate better if you’re not multitasking.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator is a bit horrified by a motorbike repair shop where it’s clear that the employees are doing more listening to the radio than concentrating on their work, with poor work being the result - and moreover, it’s poor work that they’re not aware of; they think they know what they’re doing, and doing a good job.

I don’t know if I believe that multitasking is bad for you, but it’s an interesting line of thinking.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve just finished a redesign of The Wizard of Duke Street. There might be some tweaks to go, but the core of it’s done. Your comments and criticisms will be welcomed.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I borrowed a book from the library a few weeks ago, called Getting Things Done. I’ve been poking at a few of these marketing / business / management / organisation books lately, because I’m pretty certain my use of time hasn’t been what it could be.

This book has blown me away. It’s got some very simple principles, no corporate gibberish, no affirmations, and completely dodges the “prioritising” bullet in favour of context.

The basic idea is that people have difficulty getting things done because they have too much in their heads. You sit down to answer an email, and find you need to research something, which means you have to ask someone, which means you have to send them an email, and then you see another email reminding you of a meeting, and all the while you’re aware of another project that you’ve done nothing on, and the need to buy milk on the way home.

The simple solution is to get everything out of your head and onto a very simple system of tracking things that need attention. This centres around making a great whacking list of projects, working out what the next action is on any given project, doing it if it’s short and easy, or putting it on a contextual list otherwise. The contextual lists could include things like “Near phone”, “Near computer”, “Things to buy”, and so on.

The idea is that once you have everything you need to attend to in some sort of trusted system, where you’ll be reminded of it at the right time, you can get down to what you’re doing in the moment without wasting RAM, as it were, on irrelevant things. If something does come to mind, you put it in the appropriate place in the system and go back to your current task.

The effect is rather stunning. I don’t have a huge amount of stuff to manage with this in work; we have an excellent project manager who makes sure we don’t have to bother with anything other than the task in hand, but I have a good-sized pile of projects at home. 78, actually, at the moment. The difference it has made to have these out of my head is absolutely huge, and I’m getting things done at a rate of about three times as many per day as I was before, with more time to kick back at the end of it.
So yeah. Huge recommendation for Getting Things Done.

(Wikipedia,  Author’s Site)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve had a few conversations lately about my various websites, and how much traffic they get, and so on. So I figured I’d do up a post discussing that.

The two sites that get the majority of traffic are dukestreet.org, and inranelagh.com. Most of the traffic for both comes from search engines.

Dukestreet first, then. In the month of August, there were 15,052 visitors, who looked at 18,873 pages. 96.3% of that was from search engines, the remaining being between site referrals and direct URL entry. I suspect that links from within email, IM, or the like may look to Google Analytics like direct entry.

The top ten search terms were “torchwood season 2″ (2,287 visits), “torchwood series 2″ (937), “doctor who series 4″ (919), “world of starcraft” (435), “lotro music” (335), “freema agyeman” (312), “doctor who season 4″ (291), “time and chips” (275), “dr who series 4″ (256) and “japanese monsters” (161). As you can see, there’s a definite slant in the interests there.

The referring sites are less than 2% of overall traffic, and most of them consist of search engines that analytics wasn’t able to identify properly, or links from discussion boards. Essentially, referral traffic could go away tomorrow, and I wouldn’t miss it at all.

Inranelagh.com doesn’t have the same weight of traffic, by any manner of means. 1,226 visitors in August, viewing 2,273 pages. Just under 78% of that was from search engines, 9.79% from referrals, and 12.23% from direct traffic.

The search terms are an odd assortment, divided between the main part of the site and this blog. “ranelagh” comes in first (91 visits), followed by: “ranelagh dublin” (64), “dvi vs vga” (30), “superquinn ranelagh” (21), “ranelagh ireland” (15), “better than myspace” (14), “steampunk parts” (14), “ranelagh, dublin” (13), “kelli ranelagh” (11), and “facebook better than myspace” (9).

The referring sites are obviously much more important here than for dukestreet. Again, some of these are search engines, but wikipedia tops the list, sending me 31 visitors from the entry on Ranelagh.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been threatening to build this new site for a while: How To Survive Winter.

With thanks to bluedevi for the initial idea, and kamaitachi for provoking me to finish it!

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a truly magnificent map of the internet made and posted by Information Architects in Japan. The people who like the modified Tube maps should go look at this.

It fascinates me, though, that they’re actually using the thing:

In house, we use it as a consulting tool. It has helped us exploring, defining and explaining the Internet strategy and positioning of all of our clients since we first introduced it in January. Each website on the map stands as a (more or less) successful paradigm for an interactive brand, design or business model. In order to position yourself, you need to know your place on this map.

That’s a very cool way to approach the idea of positioning.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Advisor newsletter carries some breaking news about an “unavailable_after” tag, for use by Google to determine when information is past a nominal “sell-by date” - the special offer is over, the event is past, or that article is gone into the subscription-only archives.

It’s not clear yet, however, if that’s going to be a meta tag, for use on a per-page basis, a tag in the proper HTML sense that you could use for a section of a page, or something else entirely like a class or a command in a robots.txt file. If anyone knows, let me know - in the businesses I’m working in, that functionality would be gold.

UPDATE: It’s been confirmed by Google as a meta tag.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m pleased to point you all at Nina’s site, Rocking Grass, now returned to action with a new design. I may be posting a bit there as well in the future, when food-related topics strike me.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m having an extremely grouchy day. The cats were PvP-enabled from about five this morning, I have a persistent headache, the Irish news is going to be full of the mechanics of voting for the next few days, and a million small details are annoying me.

However, I’ve found a few interesting bits of web development stuff knocking around that I’m finding interesting, so it’s not all bad.

Roger Johansson has developed a way to make shrink-to-fit graphic buttons in CSS, which look like they actually work properly. His code ends up using four nested spans, which is far from semantically ideal, but I’ll be keeping it in mind for getting out of tight design corners.

And Eric Meyer has developed an ultimate CSS reset,  which I suspect I’ll be putting to use sooner rather than later.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The Pig, head writer at Wandering Goblin, has published an open letter to Uwe Boll on foot of Boll’s offensive 9/11-related opening to Postal, recently leaked on Youtube. His proposal is to fight Boll, in a boxing match, face to face, and if he wins, Boll is to agree to cut the opening sequence from his film. It’s an interesting proposal, and seeing as Boll’s methods of promotion appear to consist of being ever more offensive, I do hope it’s taken up - and that the Pig wins.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Since I was beating my head off this problem all weekend, I figured I’d post the solution for the benefit of anyone else who’s looking for it.

The Problem: Moveable Type (which I’m using for The Wizard of Duke Street) changes links so that they have the attribute ‘rel=”nofollow”‘. This is annoying, as when I post a link, or allow through a comment which has a link to the commenter’s site, I intend that link to be seen by search engines as a mark in favour of that site. Nofollow prevents that from happening - while the search engine spider sees the link, it won’t credit it in terms of the algorithm that calculates how popular a page is.

Solution Part 1: Disable the “nofollow” plugin in Moveable Type’s plugin page. This will allow links in the body of your post to function properly, and depending on how MT is configured on your server, may also work for links to commenters’ sites. If it doesn’t do the latter, though, leaving in a redirect function rather than a direct link, you’ll have to move on to part 2.

Solution Part 2: There’s an almost undocumented attribute which you can apply to the MTCommentAuthorLink tag, which you can do under Templates -> Archives -> Individual Entry Archive. Your tag should look something like:

<MTCommentAuthorLink no_redirect=”1″>

Rebuild your individual entry archives, and you’re done! Links should now have no nofollow “functionality” attached, and should go straight to the target sites, with no clumsy redirect.
Credits: I eventually found mention of the no_redirect attribute on Eat Drink Sleep Movable Type

Links: You can find more about how to disable nofollow on various blogging platforms on Andy Beard - Niche Marketing.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m looking for an archive - PDF, transcribed text, whatever, I don’t mind - of early newspapers, preferably British, but anything in English will do. I’m thinking pre-1800, but anything up to 1850 will be useful. I found archives of the Penny Illustrated Paper, but it started publication in 1861, which is a little later than I’d like. Anyone able to point me at anything older?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It fascinates me when people that I’ve known, respected - and in this case, worked for - start doing such a prosaic thing as blogging. Nevertheless, Chris Horn, the CEO of Iona Technologies, where my working life got off to a running start, now has a blog. Anyone who has encountered him knows he’s pretty articulate, and that comes across very well in his writing. He’s dealing mostly with issues in the software industry, and also with aspects of travel, books, and Iona’s business dealings. Well worth reading.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’d like to take a moment to point out that the Sordid City Blues comic, now back on the air after some time off, is really rather excellent. Go read it.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Licensing has been agreed for a Firefly MMO. If this works at all, it’s going to be good.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

For those gamers not reading the Duke Street feed (and why not, eh?), it may not have reached you yet that CCP have bought White Wolf. CCP are the people who make EVE Online, and White Wolf are responsible for the Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf RPGs, among others.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

You all know I’m a weather buff by now. And one of the things I’m most fascinated by in the weather is the stuff that happens within a few days of the same date every year, regardless of what the rest of the weather is doing. One of these is the upturn in temperatures on Christmas Day (proving, at least in my mind, that the date was set by early medieval weather geeks). The other is the equinoctal storm, which happens twice a year, within the week of March and September 21. St. Patrick’s Day 1987 saw one of the worst storms I can remember, and now, coming up to September 21, we have… Hurricane Gordon.

From Metcheck:

Here are the probabilistic forecasts for the next 48 hours :- 1. Gordon has no interaction with the British Isles (5%) 2. Gordon splits in two late on Wednesday evening taking gales and heavy rain North into Southern Ireland which later spreads East into Western areas (60%) 3. Gordon retains central circulation affecting Western Ireland as a Tropical Storm (20%) 4. Gordon retains central circulation affecting Western England and the Irish Sea as a Tropical Storm (15%)

Better forecasts will be available tomorrow, but in any case, incoming storm.

(Yes, I know this is nothing for people in real hurricane areas. This is a big one from our point of view.)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

And it’s launched. Several months of hard work, a few weeks of late nights, far too much coffee, and one very early morning have resulted in 2006’s new version of Sports Interaction. Key features here are that the frames are gone, and it does clever Ajax things while you’re not looking. The layout is also predominantly CSS. There are still a few bits and pieces to be fixed, but by and large, it lives.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

We’re rolling out new material left, right and centre in sports betting at the moment. I know that sports fans aren’t huge numbers among my readers, but some of ye might be interested in the new baseball betting and NASCAR betting pages. As usual, if you’ve any feedback, drop me a line.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a fascinating article on the BBC site which suggests that cities, becoming more and more independent from the countries that host them, could give rise to new city-states. London mayor Ken Livingstone is quoted as saying:

“Having been to Singapore and seen how successful it was I think anything short of a fully independent city state is a lost opportunity, with its own foreign and defence policies thrown in.”

I’ve always been a fan of the notion of city-states, and the concept that they might make a return is very interesting.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I posted an article on dukestreet.org this morning, and stuck it on digg.com for purposes of experimentantion. The very first response is from some guy who buried it, with the comment “Buried because I don’t want competition.” How peculiar. I assume he’s talking about competition on the auction house, rather than on his website.
If any of you use digg, feel free to push this one up. If it looks useful, I’m considering putting “digg this” links on the site.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m working on a site for my father’s stairmaking business. In looking around for other sites in the industry, I’ve discovered that not only are there very few, there are no portal sites for Irish Woodworking either. So, being as it’s something I know a little bit about, and since it’s very little effort to put up a site, I’ve constructed Woodwork Ireland, and I’m hoping it’ll be useful.

For anyone who’s interested, it’s syndicated, and also available on livejournal syndication.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

After a couple of weeks of fairly intensive work, we soft-launched Sports Interaction’s Spanish version yesterday. There’s now a link saying “Español” in the top right corner, and if you feel like betting on the World Cup (or indeed, any other event) in Spanish, go for it. I’m pleased to see this one live.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

dukestreet.org has its first guest column today.