Category: This Blog

These are the top 10 posts in each of my normal categories for the second quarter of 2014.

First up the normal posts:

1. A Lack Of Planning On Your Part Does Not Constitute An Emergency On Mine
2. BYOD and Productivity Statistics
3. Axiom: People join companies, but leave managers
4. Office Speak and Buzzword Density
5. The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS)
6. Productive Workplace: The Trans-disciplinary Space
7. The Productive Workplace: The Space for Computational Thinking
8. Because it’s Friday: Giant Popping Bubbles – The Slow Mo Guys
9. xkcd: Turbine
10. Slow Logon v Slow Applications

Next are the quotations:

1. “You will never change your life until you change something you do…
2. “Only three things happen naturally in organisations…
3. “This happens to companies all too often. Unless the company…
4. “They’re not employees, they’re…
5. “After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when…
6. “The man who does things makes many mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake…
7. “Real communication happens when…
8. “If you start today to do the right thing, you are already…
9. “The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after…
10. “A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to…

And finally all of those Because it’s Friday posts:

1. Because it’s Friday: I dare you to watch this entire video
2. Because it’s Friday: Emotionally Intelligent Flight Safety Briefings
3. Because it’s Friday: Massive Game of Jenga
4. Because it’s Friday: Not Available on the App Store
5. Because it’s Friday: Fun with Office Supplies
6. Because it’s Friday: More from the Action Movie Kid
7. Because it’s Friday: Flying Robot Rockstars
8. Because it’s Friday: The ancient hand whistle
9. Because it’s Friday: Huge Puddle Splash by the Slow Mo Guys
10. Because it’s Friday: Q2 Spaces – Interviews with artists in their spaces

I thought I would start 2014 with a bit of a design refresh on this site and over on Blessings too.

This site has had the same design for some years now and I fancied a change.

The main reason for the change was a desire to go Responsive. Nearly 40% of visits to this site in January 2014 are from mobile devices (up from 10% in January 2013) and I wanted to make sure that I gave those visitors the best possible experience. The old theme was a bit clunky for different screen resolutions.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to change the way that I write posts. Within WordPress (which I use) the Featured Image is becoming increasingly important. As an example, it’s the Featured Image that gets defined within the Open Graph Metadata and hence it’s the one used by Facebook and others when the post is publicised there. I’ve deliberately chosen a theme that makes use of the Featured Image in the heading of a post too. Previously I have written posts with an image inside them to give a bit of graphical interest. Now that the featured image is in the header I don’t feel the need to do that and hopefully that will make the reading a bit clearer while maintaining the graphical interest, and there is consistency of imagery across the various access points.

Some of the Featured Images will appear quite grainy in the post header, on older posts, because they are up-scaling small images. I might go back and change the ones on popular posts but don’t have plans to update them all in the short-term.

The great thing about using WordPress is that I can, for the most part, simply switch on the new theme and everything changes.

There are still a few glitches, the main one being that I’m having to reformat each of the quote posts because the way that this theme and the last one handled them is different. This will take me a little time to fix, but I’m getting there. Also, these posts haven’t previously had a featured image so I’m using this as an opportunity to give them one. If you see anything else please leave me a comment to let me know.

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

George Bernard Shaw

“If you never change your mind, why have one?”

Edward de Bono

It was my blog birthday back on 04/04. I have an excuse though, I was on holiday.

Amazingly it’s been 8 years.

Like all polite people I started with a welcome a welcome that I still extend to all of you.

At 1,200 posts I’m never going to be the most prolific writer, but that’s not why I do it. I write because I enjoy it, I just hope that the experience isn’t too painful for these of you who get to read it.

(That’s Jimmy back in 2005, he doesn’t seem to have aged anything like as much as I have)

I was offline for a while yesterday, but all should be good now.

Of course you wouldn’t be reading this if it wasn’t, so it’s a pretty pointless post.

What I am writing is clearly self-evident, but all the same I thought I would let you know

“Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.”

Mahatma Gandhi

There’s been a few discussions internally (at my employer) about blogging in the outside world and how to avoid releasing important company intellectual property.

My own approach to this dilemma is as follows:

I avoid talking about things that I am directly working on, I’m never going to talk about a customer project, for instance.

If I’m doing some research to formulate a point of view, for the organisation, I might talk about the reference sources (if they are publicly available) but I’m not going to talk about the research itself. I’m not releasing any secrets if information is already known, and it’s already known if it’s published somewhere on the internet.

If the reference source is available to me in a privileged way I’m not going to even acknowledge its existence, but there are fewer things that are like that these days. Thankfully, we seem to be heading to a more open world.

I feel quite happy to talk about methods of doing things. In talking about Rich Pictures and Concept Mapping I’m talking about methodologies that are, again, publicly known. I’m not going to talk about how I have applied them to a specific customer problem or project though.

I might talk about my personal experience, as I have in the my changing workplace series (which I must get back to), but I’m going to do so in a generic or abstract way. Again, I’m not going to talk about customers or colleagues which is as much about privacy as anything. I am likely to talk about technologies, but that’s because they are publicly known.

There are lots of things that I talk about that aren’t directly linked to my job, and there I make a judgement about whether the subject is near enough to what I do to avoid it, or far enough away for me to talk about it. My recent post, The Light Bulb Conspiracy: A Documentary is a good example of this, I experience the impact of planned obsolescence so I’m interested in it, but it’s not a direct consideration in my work. My post The March of the Freelancers is a bit closer to my work, but I still concluded that it was far enough away and already publicly available so wasn’t an issue.

All of my Because it’s Friday or quote posts are publicly known and rarely relate directly to my work so don’t give me to much to worry about.

There’s also a whole load of posts that you could fit into the title: have you seen this? Here I’m just trying to link the people who read this blog with something interesting. Again, it’s publicly known, I’m just pointing it out, a bit like a guide on a walk pointing out the scenery.

You’ll also notice that I don’t have any form of disclaimer on my site about it being my personal opinion, the reason for this is that I’ve concluded that they don’t make any difference. You’ll also notice that there aren’t any copyright notices, because I’d rather be open, I have considered putting a creative commons notice on just to make it clear where I stand.

I know that others work to different frameworks, but I thought I’d highlight mine.

I’m currently going through an experience that I’m sure many people go through at this time of year.

It isn’t possible for me, or for many other people, to leave on summer vacation with a clean plate and a clear mind. There are inevitably things that continue on while we are away and there are things that we need to pick back up on our return. These things aren’t just ‘work’ thinks, there are many things outside of my workplace that are also in the same place.

I try not to multi-task anything because I know that I’m very poor at it (I’m also quite sceptical of anyone who tells me that they are). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things which are part completed or tasks that follow-on from other tasks left floating in mid-air.

The problem is that sometimes it’s not always easy to pick up where we left off and there are follow-on tasks that we know are there but can’t remember quite what they were. We have lists and write reminders to help us, but they don’t always quite get us there.

One good example of this are the set of blog posts that I’ve been writing on my changing workplace. If you are a follower of these updates you will have noticed that I haven’t written a new one for a couple of weeks. The truth is that I wrote the last post prior to my two week break and scheduled it to be published on the first week of absence with the intention of writing another one on the week of my return. The problem is, I’ve forgotten where I was up to. The thread of thought and the progress along that thread has slipped out of my memory and I now need to go back before I can go forwards.

It doesn’t help that I’m a better starter than I am a finisher. I’d rather pick up a new thread than finish the old one. So sometimes I get part way through a thread and just leave it there.

So apologies that you haven’t seen more meaningful updates from me, they will be coming, but it’s going to take me a little while to get back up to speed.

(I’ve also got some photographs to upload from our holiday, not many this time, but it’s another job I need to get around to)

Notice anything interesting about the chart below? It’s a chart of the number of visitors to this site:

Apart from a small general uplift in overall visitors across the period shown the most significant factor is the number of visitors on a Friday. I always get way more visitors on a Friday when I publish a Because it’s Friday blog which always reflects the lighter side of life. It’s a good job I’m not really writing for popular appeal .

When it comes to referrals Google is still the absolute king (at least on this site).

The following chart shows the percentage of visitors that I received by location for all of last year.

At 62% Google generates, by far, the most traffic. Those young pretenders to the throne Twitter, Facebook and even linkedin barely register on the radar, I get more traffic from all of the people using an RSS reader:

Is there any wonder people give so much attention to their Google ranking!