13thoughts.com

Long time no see guys, thought I’d best fill you in on things and explain my massive absense.

I’ll be the first to admit the last year has been a tough one. While the CMS/Ecommerce System got some very good feedback, we struggled to make it a viable way of making money, so we ventured into the Web Agency game. Again, while the feedback we got for the work we did was excellent, we were struggling to support two people from it. Therefore, when I was contacted by an old friend from my Cite DMS days, who proceeded to offer me a very good job, it was the only choice I could make.

After dicsussing it through with Stef, we realised that it was the best thing for both of us. The amount of work Clear could do wouldn’t drop by that much, and the running costs would be more than halved by myself leaving, and Clear moving out of the office. A tough decision, but one we had to make.

So I’m now at the new job, I’ll be heading the development of a huge site, more will be revealed soon. I’ll also hopefully getting back into my twitter/blogging regime, as I failed last time.

So, I’m back, basically!

Very excited to be writing this post, after a few months of testing and frantic fixing and development, we’ve finally launched Clear Content! This is a very important time for our company, as we can now actually go ahead and sell something physical (in software terms ) rather than just trying to push the idea behind our CMS.

Check it out at http://www.allisclear.com

This also means we can spend some more time on other project, like Clear Ecommerce, and start to develop the really cool stuff for Clear Content, like the visual editor!

As an industry, when does it become our responsibility to make people move on, in terms of technology?

With the numerous conversations I have with people about supporting this browser and that browser, surely there comes a time when the industry, as a whole,  has to decide “thats it, *insert browser here* is out of the window”.

Everybody is worried about losing users because they may be using an outdated browser. But, if these users don’t stop being able to use certain functionalities of certain websites, when will they learn? When will they move on?

Internet Explorer 6 is a perfect example. It will have caused infinite amount of headaches for every web designer and developer at somepoint. There are a lot of better alternatives out there, even IE7 would be a marked improvement, so why are we still testing for it? Its time to stop supporting such browsers, and force these last few remaining people into the present.

Well, is it? Personally, I’m not even sure that the two should be compared.

Facebook is an amazing social network, but does anyone actually use it as a networking tool? It consists of hundreds if not thousands of friend circles, where you can view photo’s, video’s and chat. But if you’re not in a friend circle, you don’t have much chance of really engaging with anyone in it.

Twitter, however, pulls down these social cliques, and lets you engage with complete strangers. Sharing links, stories and advice like old pals, and, if you wish, letting people know about every intricy of your life, from what you had for lunch to your latest bowel movement.

They are two completely different beasts. One, Facebook, is a completely self contained little universe, where just like life, you know who and what you like, and they’re the only things that you need to worry about. Twitter is a much more open, free universe, where ideas and links can spread like wildfire.

This is why, surely, Twitter is much more of a powerful marketing tool than Facebook can ever be. Seeing how quick some links are ‘ReTweeted’ around is pretty insane sometimes. In comparison, have you tried really reaching a target market on Facebook without a massive marketing budget? If you’re not a known brand-name, you’ll never get a look in.

Get it right, and Twitter could be much more efficient as a marketing tool, just don’t get it wrong like Skittles did.

A conversation with Stef got me thinking. Why is PHP so…..boring?

There is obviously a lot of people that are really into developing in PHP, myself included, but it just doesn’t have the same wow factor that Javascript has, for instance. Nearly every PHP tutorial I can find includes javascript in an effort to make it more exciting.

I’ll agree that javascript has helped PHP development massively with the use of AJAX, but surely something that makes the world go round shouldn’t have to rely on something ’shiny’ to get people interested in it?

Well, I better do the whole ‘First post’ thing. After working on and with blogs for the last few years, and spending the vast majority of my life infront of some kind of screen, I decided it was time I started my own proper blog, if only to provide a place to vent random frustrations throughout the day.

Hopefully something useful will be written at somepoint though. Thanks to evaneckard.com for the theme.