Gavin Wray // Carefully crafting content since 2001

Yesterday I spent a wonderful hour meeting Attiye Faraji at the sixth social media surgery in Birmingham.

Attiye is a health and wellbeing lead for young people at Health Exchange, which aims to “make health services available and accessible to all members of our community”. It’s a partnership development between the Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust and Birmingham City Libraries.

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I’m a big fan of revisiting posts within a blog and linking to related posts. Whether adding cross-references in the body of the text or at the end of a post by using one of the many related posts plugins, I think they can give real benefits to readers.

Linking between posts is also essential if you’re writing a series of related posts.

But one result of linking between posts has always bothered me. Trackbacks or pingbacks displayed in the comments on your own post don’t make sense in the context of your own site; trackbacks and pingbacks only make sense where other people link to your post.

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Selection of links I’ve bookmarked recently:

• West Midlands Regional Observatory dashboard on Pageflakes
• Commentariat WordPress theme: Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills
  WordPress theme designed to allow collaborative reading and commenting on a document. Code released under GNU Affero licence.
• Beyond cut and paste: the professional skills every government web publisher should have
  Neil Williams has summarised the core skills required in web publisher or web editing role. The majority of the skills are applicable to any web publisher role, not just within government or public sector.
• Is Google News ignoring meta “description” tags?
  Article by Murray Dick on how “meta ‘description’ text used to summarise some news articles, is not being displayed in their Google News results summaries.”
• Tracking documents and external links in google analytics – iQ Blog
  Add this single javascript file to enable tracking of document downloads and clicks of external links.
• OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles : Tim’s Blog
  Tim Davies lists 50 small hurdles to successful online engagement that, while small individually, can stack up to prevent success. The list is also applicable to large organisations outside government. The good news is that these small hurdles can be overcome individually. Add a comment on how you did it or write your own blog post and tag ’smallchallenges’.
• ConsultationXML: getting reusable data out of horrid PDFs – Archive – The Dextrous Web
  “Making consultation documents easier to use”
• SEOmoz | Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
  Useful introduction to the new canonical URL tag, which site publishers can use to suppress duplicate content being indexed by search engines.

See more bookmarks like these on Delicious.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been photographing some vintage cameras and scanning the instruction guides. This is partly to preserve them (graphically) and also to act as a small kind of tribute to a special person who owned these cameras and was passionate about his photography.

Here’s the set on flickr and here’s the slideshow:

One of my photos of Kenilworth Castle has been included in the Schmap Birmingham Guide. Schmap’s online guides integrate maps, photos and place reviews.

Kenilworth Castle sample screen on Schmap for iPhone and iPod Touch

I’m chuffed to bits (and very much surprised) to have one of my photos included!

Some links for you:

• Innovative Interactivity
  "For those who are curious about the ever-evolving trends of interactive multimedia, who’s doing it best and the tricks to staying on top."
• Am I An IA? – Information Architecture Institute
  You know, I think I just might be.
• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture | UX Booth
  Great introduction to the role of Information Architects, what they do and the tools they use. Lots of resources are included to explore this area further.
• Data Store: Facts you can use | Data Store | guardian.co.uk
  The Guardian's compilation of publicly-available data for others to re-use.
• Directory of Usability, Information Architecture, and User Experience Design Software
  List of software by Windows and Mac OS versions with full descriptions, license details and user ratings.

A project I’m currently working on involves analysing a large amount of legacy web content and restructuring a public sector site with a new, straightforward, navigation. Findability and interesting, relevant content is key.
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Some links for you:

• Hitsville Soul Club of America
  Site for fans of rare soul, Detroit and R&B music
• Manage your online reputation
  Flowchart on listening to what people say about you online and the considerations on whether to get involved, where appropriate.
• Jesus Rodriguez Velasco
  I tagged this site for its amazing typography and small, detailed visual elements.
• Free Sand Textures | Raymond Selda
  41 sand textures from Stock.xchng
• High accessibility is effective search engine optimization
  Article by Andy Hagans on how designing accessible websites that work well for people – by following the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – can also provide benefits in terms of search engine optimisation.
• WAVE – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
  Add your URL to see a visual representation of your web page with embedded icons and indicators revealing accessibility information. Firefox toolbar available.