The Website

A screenshot of the Hire Dudgeon demo site

The system uses PHP and MySQL to do all the heavy lifting. The front end uses a bit of jQuery and JavaScript as well as HTML and CSS to keep it all together. The site uses some CSS3 features which visitors with modern browsers will benefit from.

Hire Dudgeon contains several features which work together to provide just the desired functionality; nothing more, nothing less:

• A content management system for the database of equipment;
• A user registration and membership system, including additional support for administrators;
• A booking system for ordering equipment;
• Automatic invoicing;
• Tracking information for system administrators;
• Clean, quick code and simple UI;
• A full documentation booklet.

The full site will go live after the busy University examination period is over, but a working demo site can be found on this website in the meantime. Watch this space for more information on the official site, coming soon.

Browse the demo »

Little Greyie is my favourite teddy - can you guess how I chose his name?

Love is supposed to wear out your fur a little

The more you cuddle your teddy, the thinner its fur will become. The label will begin to fade and the stitching might come loose. It is like a well-thumbed book: it shows how often it has been used and enjoyed. If you blog for a long time, you will find your it gets a bit tired from time to time. That’s a natural consequence of regular use, just like your teddy’s worn-out fur. It is always good to revitalise your blog from time to time, but don’t ever lose its character. It is worn where you have used it the most, and that is not always a bad thing.

It’s okay to let your inside stuffing show now and then

Whichever style of blog you keep, it’s important to remember that it is a social medium. That means that it is not just OK to be yourself, but that it actually works best if you bring your character to the web page. The more you squeeze and cuddle your teddy, the more stuffing begins to pop out from the seams – from time to time you might find yourself exposed by your blogging. Never over-indulge, and never do anything online which you do not feel comfortable about. But do feel free to let your stuffing show every now and then.

Listening is as important as talking

Teddies are so popular for children because they are incredibly reliable friends. They always seem to know what we are thinking (mainly because we have anthropomorphised them and transmitted our emotions onto them). Teddies are fantastic listeners: a shoulder to cry on when we are upset; a friend to hold on to when we feel unwell; a mate to play with. Listening is as important to blogging as talking is. Assuming you have more than one reader, more people are listening to your blog than talking through it. They are like teddies, largely silent but indispensably useful to us. If they leave a comment, you have the opportunity to reverse the roles for a while and listen to them. Truly great social networks flourish when people learn from their teddies and listen well.

1. You will see that designing less is best

Grab a notepad and a pen, write down the list of features you have planned for an upcoming application, and see what you can cut in 60 seconds. Draw a line through each feature you can cut without completely destroying the application.

The goal is to leave youreself with only what is most essential for the application to serve its purpose.

Bells? Gone.

Whistles? Gone.

Show me only the pieces you absolutely have to keep for the tool to do its job.

2. You will see why mental models matter more than reality

For users to feel good about an application, they need to feel as if they understand it. Making it as simple as possible for them to understand – even if that simple understanding is completely inaccurate – is designing the obvious. Of course, the inaccurate understanding has to be useful as a way of thinking and simplifying, but as long as that’s true, the design has a better chance of succeeding.

In other words, it’s OK if the user is completely wrong in her perception of what is happening as long as her sense of understanding makes her feel good and competent, and she can accomplish her goals with her understanding, regardless of how faulty it is.

3. You will see how to prevent errors from ever happening

Poka-yoke (pronounced POH-kah YOH-kay) is the Japanese term for “mistake-proofing”. A poke-yoke device is whatever is used to prevent an error. It’s what makes something foolproof…

The remote for my car locks all the doors at once so I don’t have to wonder if I left any unlocked. My car has a little plastic strip that tethers the gas cap to the car, so I won’t accidentally leave it on my trunk and drive off without it properly attached. The keys can’t be removed from the ignition unless the engine has been turned off. And I can’t put the transmission in reverse unless I’m at a complete stop…

Poke-yoke devices are everywhere.

Sadly, they don’t show up on the Web nearly as often as they should. When the do, though, it’s fantastic. Users can get things done without incident. Things go smoothly. You know, the way things should go.

“Save the file as index.html and open it in the web browser. And there it is, your first website!” A website? Just like that? I had to have a go.

One minute and 7 tiny lines of code later, I had made my first web page.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
</body>
</html>

By the end of that lunch break I had created a couple of pages and linked them together. By the end of the term, I had made something resembling the academic-style portals from the late 1980s. Within the year, I was using Blogger to run a website for the school’s debating society.

I am so grateful for Benedict’s computer club. I began to learn HTML out of pure curiosity and I have kept that inquisitive mindset of youth ever since. The joy of scripting is that you will keep discovering new things and inventing new ways of doing things. That might seem frightening, but it is actually endlessly encouraging. It means I can keep exploring, always asking the next “what about…?” question.

I may have learned how to make a basic web page that afternoon, but the bigger lesson was that my assumptions about programming were totally wrong. I expected it to be impossibly difficult and dull. In reality, it has trained me in several important disciplines and remains extremely rewarding (especially when problem-solving). Not everybody will become an expert in HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, JQuery, or whatever poison suits you, but most people would have a good time if they had a crack at a bit of basic scripting. I’m glad I made the most of the opportunity I had to do just that.

You don’t need to know everything. As with any field, there’s a lot you could learn about usability. But unless you’re a usability professional, there’s a limit to how much is useful to learn.

I’ve always liked the passage in A Study in Scarlet where Dr. Watson is shocked to learn that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know that the earth travels around the sun. Given the finite capacity of the human brain, Holmes explains, he cannot afford to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones:

What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Steve Krug, Don’t Make me Think, 2nd ed. page 6.

Read my review »

The Windows startup jingle of triumph

I don’t know who first thought of playing a jingle when a computer boots up, but he or she deserves a medal. On the face of it, the Windows start-up jingle serves no useful purpose. It does not make the PC load quicker – if anything, it might even slow it down by a fraction of a second. But a closer look reveals that it appeals to your emotions without you realising it. Have a listen:

It is an uplifting, affirming melody of triumph which subtly suggests that you have achieved something magnificent by successfully turning your computer on. In five short seconds, Microsoft subtly preaches a message of personal victory – and it’s only just gone 9am.

The Mario game over music of death and mourning

On the other end of the spectrum, you do not have to be an 80s child to know what the Super Mario game over music means.

It fills that awkward moment in a game between your character dying and everything being OK again almost immediately. If Mario lived in the real world, of course, we would be wearing black and singing Abide With Me right about now. But in Nintendo-world, Mario has as many lives as their are green mushrooms floating about the place. The game over music has enough of a melancholic, mournful feel to make it seem significant that Mario has lost a life, but after 15 seconds the absence of any genuine consequences becomes unavoidable and the cheery soundtrack bounces back to life.

Using riffs to say more than words

Why not experiment with riffs and jingles? If you produce social media videos, try adding a melody which creates a mood and taps into emotions in just a few seconds. More importantly, keep a close ear out for every jingle you hear. How does it make you feel? What does it bring to mind? You will find that you can rarely communicate more as effectively with words in such a short space of time.

Making a Magic 8 Ball

To make out JavaScript Magic 8 Ball, we will be using the Math.random() and Math.floor() functions to generate a random number and to round it down to the nearest integer.

<script type="text/javascript">
//Define the variable results as one of the 20 answers
var results = [
"It is certain",
"It is decidedly so",
"Without a doubt",
"Yes – definitely",
"You may rely on it",
"As I see it, yes",
"Outlook good",
"Signs point to yes",
"Yes",
"Reply hazy, try again",
"Ask again later",
"Better not tell you now",
"Cannot predict now",
"Concentrate and ask again",
"Don't count on it",
"My reply is no",
"My sources say no",
"Outlook not so good",
"Very doubtful"];
//Define the variable randresults as a randomly generated number
//... between 0 and 19 (where *19 defines the maximum number)
var randresults = Math.floor(
 Math.random()
 *19)
document.write(results[randresults]);
</script>

See this script in action »

Taking it further

In my tutorial of random things in PHP, I covered several examples of how the random number function could be used. Each of them is also possible using the JavaScript method above. Using that example as a starting point, why not have a go and see what you can come up with!

Use a different medium

If you usually write blog posts, have a go at making a video. You do not need an expensive video camera: most modern phones can record high-enough quality to stream in a compact size. Your video might not look like it was made by Steven Spielberg but nobody will complain. (You probably don’t write like Oscar Wilde either, but I doubt anyone has mentioned it before.) Of course, you can always use videos from YouTube or Vimeo on your blog.

If you have a photo blog, have a go at stop-motion animation. Animating your pictures is a surprisingly effective visual way of telling a story.

If you are particularly artistic, try drawing a cartoon. A clever cartoon can easily say more than a whole article would. Plus, nobody will blame you if it does not turn out so well if it’s your first time.

Let a quote speak for itself

If you want to say something but you know somebody else has said it better before you, why not let their quote speak for itself? Everyone is a winner:

1. The post is better than if you had written it;
2. It is very quick to write;
3. (Depending on who you quote) You come across as learned.

Tell a story

Blogs are fantastic places to tell stories. A well-crafted story is more memorable and poignant than a well-argued discourse. You could share an anecdote, tell a parable or write some straightforward fiction. Or perhaps you could tell the story of the time you tried something different with your blog!