Category: technology

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Introducing shopify

At work I’m currently working on delivering a project to offer online shopping to the public. So 2005 I know but better late than never. In the web world Shopify rings bells so I figured it was a safe bet to experiment for us. One of my favourite companies abookapart uses shopify and having been on the customer stand I feel happy with the platform.

I’ve just attended a half day workshop led by Keir Whitaker from Shopify which was an introduction to the platform with time to have a little dig under the hood. The session gave me the confidence that shopify should meet our immediate needs and longer term needs. The point of sale (POS) rollout in 6-12months is also pretty exciting. I made a few notes:

  • Shopify is a theme based e-commerce hosted platform
  • you can try out the partnership platform for testing out the entire process and flow for internal stakeholders
  • uses an open source template language called liquid
  • at present over 110,000 stores
  • Shopify uses stripe to handle payments but accepts many other gateways
  • examples of great shops included – United pixel workers, Greats brand, Herb Lester
  • essential cheatsheet for code snippets
  • you can use www.fetchapp.com for handling digital products
  • there are new EU rules coming into force in 2015 that need exploring around item returns and digital downloads from 2015
  • if you’re a mac user like me you can use their free desktop app to edit themes on your computer
  • get used to making shudder for, else, if statements
  • one product can have multiple variates e.g. a product is a t-shirt but the sizes are variates
  • building a theme consists of HTML, CSS,  javascript and the liquid template language
  • uses five folders (assets, config, layout, snippets, templates) and 11 core files.
  • #shopifyu

I’ll let you know how we get on in July!

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Week 51 at work

This week i’ve been up to:

  • Shorter week due to being at the Le Mans 24 race in France
  • Shut down over 200 web pages which were scattered across the retired mshed.org website and Bristol City Council pages
  • Set up 301 redirects which are critical to help Google know we’ve moved the content. Where possible I have mapped old URLs to their new home
  • Met with Bristol Record Office to review their web section
  • Went on a fact finding mission to see how we can improve our performance data gathering
  • Enjoyed being part of the IT Desktop user group giving feedback about what needs to improve: start up and shut down speed, unrestricted web access and skype!
  • Carried out my final team members six month review
  • Improved the staff ebook I released last month
  • Sent the director my draft plans for the next few months: interpretation, website phase two and more!
  • Spent a lot of my time with my head in the GDS measurement guidance and coming up with key performance indicators based on our Council and Arts Council measurements
  • Agreed to start a ‘behind the scenes’ breakfast instagram and blogger tour of the sites
  • Chopped it up with Sarah Saunders about images, metadata and engagement
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A few thoughts on in-car technology

View of the cockpit from the drivers seat

This is a post about how in-car technology has clearly moved on since our 2001 car was built.

Last week I rented a Nissan Note for our week in the South of France. I grabbed the keys and found my silver car in a long line of shiny new cars. I pressed the unlock button on the key fob and jumped into the driver seat. Everything lit up like a runway and my immediate thought was what the heck do I do now AND don’t touch anything. I moved to put the key into the ignition and realised it didn’t have a keyhole but those ‘push to start’ buttons. The car knows i’m the driver as it senses the key fob close enough. The last time I saw this feature was on Top Gear with a Ferrari. At this point I think must people will try and press the button to start the car but they’d be wrong. You need to press the clutch at the same time or the car won’t start – i found this out a few years back when I wasted 15 minutes failing to work it out on a previous rental. Once the engine started I decided to check my surroundings properly. My dashboard displayed a range of completely comprehensible details, which I later learned stood for ‘range of fuel left’, how green I was currently driving, current fuel level, gear etc. My steering wheel also had a number of buttons which I steered clear of initially. These controls allowed me to change the radio settings, activate cruise control (which I played with at 130kph to learn…!) and mess around with bluetooth devices.

In short, things have moved on in 10-15 years but not massively and I was a little bit disappointed. In addition to the above, I had a front and rear camera to assist parking (a bumper is a much simpler feature ha PLUS I built a parking sensor in college in 2000 for under a fiver), LCD display control unit with GPS and some odd flashing lights for whenever I was very close to a car or wall when driving – something that is required to drive those amazingly twisty narrow roads like the D44 between Plan De La Tour and Le Muy.

We are looking at buying a larger car yet I can’t help wonder who would pay for all these ‘features’ which basically poorly replace good road craft. Also I can’t imagine the LCD screen or many of these features still working perfectly in 10-15 years.

The best features? a cup holder next to the driver seat and a cubby hole under the boot, which probably is possible with a small spare instead of a full blown wheel I lug around.

At least now I can rest easy just looking for a second hand car with a decent cup holder and the will to carry me around.

A few details:

  • Approx £190 for seven days rental from the airport
  • We covered 650KM for £40 fuel

 

 

 

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Week 44 at work

This week I got up to the following:

  • Coordinating the content for the 8th May soft launch of our website which is still in beta and can be seen at dev.bristolmuseums.org.uk
  • Reviewing the digital outputs for Moved by Conflict post live prototyping with the public. Our vision and budget need to have a chat!
  • Outlined our interview approach with Ian from aardman  for next weeks NESTA funding interview
  • Great discussion with Patricia S and Professor John Cook from UWE about working together
  • Waved farewell to my boss, Trevor Gough, who took voluntary severance.
  • Agreed our internal deadline to move the M Shed kiosks to our primary collections system
  • Met with UWE staff and students from the Information management course to see how they can ensure they are employable for folks like me
  • Showed our director our website progress and l=outlined our next one week sprint
  • Attended the launch of our Turner Watercolours from the West private view
  • Took a tour with Jenny Gaschke, our Fine Art curator, of our public collection. I was BLOWN away by Jenny’s way of describing the collection, the links and themes and also what digital might have to assist!
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Come to Museums Get Mobile

On Friday 16th May I’ll be hosting the Museums Computer Group one day conference ‘Museums Get Mobile’ at our M Shed museum.

Museums Get Mobile! is one of this year’s most important museum events for technology development, exhibition innovation, mobile expertise, multiple platform projects and audience engagement. Curated by the UK Museum Computer Group (MCG), this one day conference is a must for museum curators, managers, consultants, directors, bloggers, novices and experts. Find out what the Natural History Museum knows about how its visitors use their smartphones and tablets before, during and after their museum visit, and what the V&A has learnt about designing sites for different devices.

Speakers include:

  • Andy Budd, Clearleft (I have his CSS Mastery book and it is very well worn!)
  • Andrew Lewis, V & A
  • Léonie Watson
  • fffunction

Book your ticket today for only £45 (membership is free for individuals)

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My computer Setup

Professionally I’m normally referred to as the “IT guy” and people often think i have every new gadget. Yet the truth is that I own relatively few toys, preferring tools that I will use loads and are value for money. I REALLY fear buying a device or tool that proves to be useless and effectively a waste of cash.  I started to list my items and figured I may as well share them here. Interestingly in recent months i’ve been spying on friends and family gadget collection and i’m really average and far behind true nerds!

Devices

  • 2.4 GHz macbook with 8GB RAM (secondhand but from 2011? used to replace the below)
  • 2.4 GHz macbook with 4GB RAM (2009) that I now keep at work to get things done when I hit the IT services wall on occasion!
  • Raspberry Pi – affordable computer that I tinker with
  • Kindle Paperwhite – for reading ebooks and looong reports
  • Kobo touch
  • HTC One X mobile phone
  • Nike running watch and heart rate monitor
  • Nexus 7 tablet
  • Apple iPad 1 (secondhand) for testing

Software and tools

  • VLC Media Player – used to watch all videos
  • Mozilla Firefox Browser (my browser of choice for the addons – screengrab, Web developer toolbar, firebug, )
  • Google Chrome Browser – used for testing
  • Filezilla FTP – transfer web content
  • Coda 2 – code editor
  • 1password – for managing all my passwords and serial numbers and ESSENTIAL
  • Spotify – useful for streaming music
  • DoubleTwist – music sync for Android
  • evernote – for writing and storing personal and work notes
  • Trello – used for all my to-do lists
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Bathcamp 44

I attended Bathcamp 44 after a fairly lengthy absence. Both sessions were from former Government Digital Service (GDS) product managers and were highly enjoyable, unlike the one hour drive to Bath. Here are my notes from both talks combined:

Sarah Prag up first

  • Fix publishing, Fix Transactions, Go Wholesale – make everything widely available and let others build services from you
  • Simpler, Clearer, Faster
  • Saved £42,000,000 in 2013/3 and they started late into the year
  • Highest priority is understanding user needs – it’s all down to understanding user needs NOT your needs as an organisation
  • Data is your friend – what to your users Google? what are the most frequent phone calls? With this data you can set your priorities
  • Following user needs enables you to choose which battles to fight
  • Data tells you the language to use, for example should a section be headed annual leave or holiday entitlement (winner from the data)
  • Tell stories – As I… I want to… So that I can…
  • Content designer encompasses more than being a writer
  • Create a style guide – plain English first, then the official term
  • If you can’t figure out the answer from the data ask real users
  • We aren’t just fixing websites we’re transforming government said Mike Bracken at Sprint 14

Ross Ferguson notes

  • His work was to change the culture and lead on organisational change – “but we can’t, I can’t, we don’t normally…”
  • Bringing the civil service with us
  • Always be shipping
  • don’t tell, don’t show, ENGAGE
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Week 29 at work

This week focused on the here and now with the green light on the website project and then also trying to think strategically out to 2020. Although 2020 seems far away, in reality this immediate website project will be the foundation for work that will happen in 2020!

  • All the procurement reading (70 odd pages) and hoop jumping has finally resulted in the green light to build the first phase of a new website for the service. We begin on Monday 20th January with the first wave of work called project ‘discovery’. Our champion striker in Government digital, GDS, describes the discovery phase as “Find out what your users need, what to measure and what your constraints are”   Both us and the chosen agency, fffunction,  will be talking about the project regularly so stayed tuned.
  • Monthly budget forecasting which is the motorcycle equivalent of riding behind a truck in the rain
  • Had an introduction with a new curator who will be joining us for a few months. Its fun times like these where I really enjoy preaching about the emerging digital curator roles I imagine the sector needs from now for the future.
  • Demonstrated why it’s essential to listen carefully to an archivist about file naming conventions if you want to find the source material in 100 years. Talking of 100 years, I and the Records Office met with a central IT project manager about how our modern records might survive for the next 100 years. I really don’t think even Microsoft will be able to open a 2010 edition word file in 2114!
  • Discussed my ideas for 2014 to 2020 with my boss. We looked at infrastructure, revenue, digitisation, skills needed, constraints and the chaotic beast that is the world of digital and IT. I drafted a trello board with these activities if your curious called the BMGA roadmap.
  • I reviewed the user interface progress on a student project around volunteering
  • Took a valuable trip to Exeter to visit Rick Lawrence at the RAMM. After a tour of their setup we talked about opportunities to work together in the near future. In order to do the best possible work many of us all need to work together which is also principle number 6 of our digital principles.
  • Finished reading Content Strategy for the Web which will be an invaluable reference from here on out
  • I took a leaf out of Tim Lloyd’s blog post and gave my personal copy of ‘Organisations don’t tweet people do’ to my boss who is already half way through. Out of my own pocket I
  • Finally, I agreed to speak at the Office of National Statistics in February about digital media IPR and hopefully a little about digital books. Again, I think there is lots that can be shared across Government digital services.
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Week 28 at work

Everybody came flooding back this week and with them a tidal wave of email.

  • Transferred BRERC to our own server to further reduce our third party annual hosting costs. By the end of all of these moves we’ll have saved several thousand pounds.
  • The new interim Director started and I look forward to talking about my plans. IT services managed to drop the ball and I found myself saying “Welcome to the Council”
  • Got a detailed tour of our City Lives exhibition from the curator Julia Carver which was brilliant and I wish everybody could have a curator in their pocket!
  • Ironed out how we move a key collection back into the fold
  • Put the wheels in motion for a web project with regional partners where I think we’ll give the website service squarespace a run through its paces
  • Wrote about why online is still the real world
  • Hit the brakes on a pending project due to begin next week
  • Managed to squeeze in a lunch-time run (6km)
  • Finished reading Organisations don’t tweet, people do during my breakfast reads