Fuse Magazine: A Brief Look

Fuse: An Online Magazine, a new collaborative web project created and compiled by Sarai (chiklita.net), went live today.

First up, I’ll admit that most online magazines annoy the crap out me. It seems that all a person has to do to gain a little link-popularity these days is create a few lists derived from other people’s content, slap it together on a WordPress blog and tada… watch the talentless monkeys come rolling in expecting to gleam some sort of inspiration and skill.

That said, Fuze Magazine has started off reasonably well. Instead of doing the regurgitated list-format BS à la Smashing Magazine, we seem to have a format that more easily identifies with the likes of A List Apart. 4 out of the 5 core intro articles are reasonable in overall size, are non-list based, and the layout is easy enough to navigate/text easy enough to read.

Pleasantries and compliments aside, I do think there are some minor things that I personally would address (if I were hypothetically running an online magazine).

The intro at the top states “We rely on contributors like you.” It therefore strikes me as a little odd that the only place to contribute as a visitor is via a tiny comment link at the bottom of the home page. Although accepting comments brings a whole new level to the tedium that is managing a website, I find that most of my best content (thoughts, feedback and intelligent reasoning) comes from the very people I write to.

There are a few inconsistencies in overall style. The author “by …” text on the homepage is coloured the same as the links but are unclickable, but the names are linked on individual article pages. There’s a note about the author on the articles provided by Becky and Jenny but none on TWD’s or the Creative Spotlight by Sarai.

The first articles are a great taster for what comes ahead, although I didn’t find any of them particularly “on the edge of my seat” exciting. I’m sure this is more likely because I’ve heard it all before rather than because of any lack of talent from the contributors.

Spelling, grammar and basic sentence structure is above average for the most part, despite sentences like “You need to find a balance between the new and experienced user and quite frankly I don’t think that FanUpdate does a very good job of this“. I find it simply reads as redundant word-bloat… no emphasis is needed on the fact that this is lacking after pointing out a balance is needed in the first place. Likewise “The next, and biggest change, in my opinion, was the Awesome Bar” reminds me of “new and improved”, something I ranted about last month. Enzo lets the side down a little with “they’re design” (should be their) and “.. could mix in with your design without it stealing the show of the design” (ugly repetition of the word design); while his first language is not English these mistakes should have been caught by a proof-reader before the page was published.

Technical accuracy is not really an issue as none of the articles provide any code, although Becky’s suggestion to keep Cutenews over FanUpdate makes the security fanatic in me scream (especially as the entire review is based upon the assumption that FanUpdate is anything more than a basic blogging script designed for fanlisting owners — definitely not worthy of being compared to major CMS/blog engines — although that’s another topic altogether!)

All in all, I think Fuse has started off positively. It’s certainly not every day I compare a website to the mega-brilliance that is A List Apart. I think with each edition, providing that quality is maintained to a suitably high standard, Fuse has the potential to be one of those websites that appears in everyone’s link list. Like jemjabella.

July 1st, 2008 · Categories: Internet, Personal, Reviews · 13 Comments

I Loathe JavaScript

Given that my current course module thingy is on JavaScript, I expected to unearth a love for JavaScript that I didn’t know I had. I wanted to use the time to explore the quirks of the language, and its uses beyond the basics which I’ve picked up working in web dev.

Quite by coincidence, a client wants a JavaScript fisheye effect menu for a website due to go live next month, but given a limited amount of space it also needs to “carousel” left and right. I’ve found fisheye menus, and I’ve found carousels. I’ve positively spammed my del.icio.us account with JavaScript reference material and examples. However, I have not found a fisheye carousel menu.

After several hours of mashing my keyboard trying to combine two public scripts, and several hours of overtime pulling my hair out, I enlisted the help of JavaScript guru whizzmaster Mat. You may remember him as the guy who Ajaxified BellaBiblio v2. He has been fan-fucking-tastic and I think we’re actually starting to get somewhere… but if this is what JavaScript is about, it can kiss my ass!

June 30th, 2008 · Categories: Coding, Ranting, Work · 19 Comments

Cheesy Scones

After the piss-pouring rain put a damper on my pottering about in the garden, I decided to do a spot of baking. I don’t have much in the way of ingredients so I made scones, which are about the simplest thing you can bake. I found the original recipe in the Vegetarian Student Cookbook — which is brilliant even for non-vegetarians, but that’s a topic for another post — and adapted it to suit my needs.

Ingredients

• 250g plain flour (plus some for the surface)
• 50g butter
• 2-3 handfuls grated cheese
• 4 (slightly heaped) teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 200ml milk

Instructions

• Turn oven on at 230°C (446 fahrenheit) / gas mark 8
• Mix the flour, salt and baking powder in a bowl
• Add the butter bit by bit, working it into the flour-mixture with your fingers
• Add the cheese to the mix
• Create a well in the middle of the cheese/flour mix, pour in the milk
• Stir it all up to create a dough, dust a work surface well with flour
• Knead lightly then roll out the dough evenly until approx. 1-1.5cm thick
• Cut into round portions, or do what I did and use the rim of a glass to create evenly sized shapes
• Cook on a baking tray in the middle of the oven for 7-10 minutes

That’s it! You can serve with a variety of dipping sauces or my personal favourite: chopped in half and spread thick with butter. If I hadn’t run out of flour, I think I’d have tried another batch with a touch of garlic in the mixture just to make them really savoury.

June 29th, 2008 · Categories: Hobbies · 25 Comments

Veg Box Scheme and Growing My Own

I have quite a lot to say about my experiments with food and gardening of late but I’m a little concerned about scaring off the majority of you who’re here to read the geeky bits. As I don’t have the time to start and maintain a separate blog it’s a case of “tough titty”: you guys will have to pick the bits you want to read and ignore the rest.

With the rising cost of food everything in the UK I’m trying to do as much as possible to cut down costs; cutting out 20 mile round trips to Tesco on a Saturday seemed like the best place to start. I ‘enrolled’ into a local vegetable box delivery scheme a few weeks ago. Surprisingly, even though the produce is all organic, it actually works out cheaper than equivalent produce from Tesco. When supplemented with meat from the local butchers, bread from the bakers and so on, we’re saving about £20 a week. I have even been bulk buying cat food from the Internet to save a few quid there.

Anyway, cost-cutting aside, the veggies are benefits I didn’t think of. Firstly, I’m eating 4-5 portions a day. I’ve started experimenting more with my food — until a few weeks ago I’d never even heard of kohlrabi — and my meals have become more than just meat and two veg day in day out. I have bought a vegetarian cookbook (purely for the huge variety of recipes, not because I’m planning on going vegetarian) and I no longer struggle for lunch ideas. The biggest shocker is that Karl — the man that lived off microchips for years before we got together — ate butternut squash. Anyone who’s ever heard me rant about his fish cakes will understand what a big deal that is.

Moving on from commercial veg… my own garden is flourishing. I have a courgette that has totally taken over a growbag, so much so that a squash sharing the bag had to be moved elsewhere. My tomatoes are doing much better outside (this is the part where Sarah says “I told you so”) although I don’t want to spoil another post I’ve got drafted up so I’ll shut up about them. A couple of my strawberries are turning red now; I’ve got runner beans growing up a trellis (lack of canes, although this was fixed this weekend courtesy of Karl’s mum); and my rhubarb (the one I thought I’d killed) has recovered and is getting bigger too.

My biggest problem is finding advice online aimed at those growing purely in pots. Nearly all the sites I read seem to think it’s common for people to have acres of land or something! As a rental tenant, and the owner of a back garden that’s mostly paving slab, I cannot plant in the ground. The likes of Pots of Fruit are few and far between.

Heyho, I plod along. I don’t know what surprises me more… the fact that I’ve managed to grow things, or that I’m actually enjoying something that doesn’t revolve around my computer.

June 24th, 2008 · Categories: Gardening, Personal · 15 Comments

Site5 Sold Out

I’ve been using Site5 as my web host for several years now, both personally and professionally, and have had nothing but great experiences. The support team even helped me with my mysql errors despite it being a script issue (before I moved back to WordPress), and the affiliate payout system is financing my hosting 2008-09, as well as hosting for the q*bee and several geek t-shirts. Up until a few months ago the uptime statistic for my server was some 300+ days.

However, I’ve just looked at their homepage, only to see that they’re now advertising “unlimited” plans to celebrate July 4th. You know what? I think they sold out. They’ve sold out to hype and to marketing bullshit. All because of the word “unlimited”.

Site5 are advertising “unlimited” space, “unlimited” bandwidth, “unlimited” websites. There is no such thing as unlimited. It’s a term I feel most strongly about, and think it’s bloody ludicrous that a company as well known as Site5 are pulling this trick. Servers — hard disk drives — are limited in the capacity they provide. You can stick a few terabytes in a server but it is still limited because there’s no such thing as an “unlimited” disk drive.

Overselling a few GB is one thing, but advertising unlimited and then cramming people onto already packed servers for the sake of raking in a bit of extra dosh is only going to cause problems in the long run. When the servers are going down because the load is stupidly high — which, for some servers, it already is¹ — they’ll only have themselves to blame.

¹ Excellent article on server load

June 23rd, 2008 · Categories: Ranting, Reviews, Technology · 30 Comments