Snow on your website?

Posted on 16 December 2011 in Code Snippets, Self-Help, Technology

If you live in the northern hemisphere, it’s winter, cold and very nearly Christmas, Yuletide (and others). The days are short, and warnings of snow are being broadcast across the UK almost daily. If you want a very simple way of adding some festive snow to your website, I’ve found a simple script being distributed by Scott Schiller which has a nice simple install which makes adding snow to your website a piece of Christmas cake… or yule log… If you’re reading this in December 2011, you should see it’s effect on this very page. If not, then it’ll look a little dull and featureless.

To install snow on your website:

  1. Download this zip file: snowstorm
  2. Extract snowstorm.js and upload it to your web server (take note of any folders you add it to, it can go anywhere)
  3. Add this line between the <head> and </head> tags of your template or page(s):<script src=”js/snowstorm.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
    (substitute ‘js/’ for the folder you uploaded to, or remove it if it is in the same folder as the page)

    If using WordPress, you might want to include the file in the template url :
    <script src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/js/snowstorm.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

  4. Upload and check!
  5. If using wordpress cache extensions, be sure to flush the cache before testing as like me you’ll waste valuable minutes debugging it when it doesn’t work.

Upload snow storm file, point at it, and you’re done! Snow on your website.

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Broadband Speeds throughout the day

Posted on 16 November 2011 in Press, Technology, The Internet

Uswitch released a report today studying UK boadband speeds vary throughout the day, and found a massive 35% drop between 7-9pm. The report suggests that to obtain maximum speeds, users need to be online at 3am.

 

What does this mean? Well actually in terms of speed, very little. But we can assume that speed is inversely proportional to Internet traffic. There is a significant drop in speed leading to business open at 9am, the line tries to steady out but does get progressively slower throughout the day. There is a trough as I would have expected as the children return from school, but not nearly as deep as I would have guessed. It then seems we’re using the Internet most between 9-10pm before everyone goes to bed.

So if you’re getting frustrated at 9-10pm at slow page load times and crashing websites, wait an hour or two or try again in the morning. While this isn’t a fair problem bandwidth limits are bandwidth limits so it won’t be going away any time soon.

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Chat Roulette – Online Marketing Potential

Posted on 03 April 2010 in Marketing, Multimedia, Networking, Technology, The Internet

Web marketing is fairly unique to offline marketing in that the technology and trends are changing constantly. Audiences move from site to trend by the time a campaign hits the last one.

April fools day coupled with the random 1-2-1 webcam website chatroulette provided a great opportunity for one soft drinks manufacturer to show that they are indeed looking into these new crazes.

ChatRoulette provides an interesting platform and who knows what the potential is here. This is however a very slow and narrow market especially for someone like Dr Pepper who rely heavily on volume rather than quality sales, would someone be able to use the same platform for quality sales?

This video however is topical, has been well edited, it has elements of the reality ‘hidden camera’ which has always been popular. So may well go viral. I’m assuming this was the goal of the campaign from the get-go.

At this time, the video has been seen only 27,000 times but it has already surfaced on viral sharing websites so keep an eye on it.

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Web design – simplified

Posted on 03 April 2010 in Blogs, Business, Personal, Technology, The Internet, Web Design, Web Development

No amount of Jargon-free sales pitches will ever truly get across the benefits of working with Zako Media. But for a REALLY dumbed down version. I turn to my old friend XKCD who help keep me sane in times of computer trouble, car trouble, dog trouble… well general problems:

 

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First attempt at a virtual tour

Posted on 20 February 2010 in Graphic Design, Marketing, Multimedia, Technology

After buying a tripod for the animal rescue video project (more on that later), I decided to experiment. This is my first attempt at a virtual tour. If I can perfect the technique, perhaps we can offer it as a service. For the time being however, there are too many niggling problems at the moment.

The Japanese Bridge at Clyne Gardens in Swansea

Not bad, but could be better. Click and drag image to view. (may take a while to load on slow connections)

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WE CANNOT ENHANCE!

Posted on 09 January 2010 in Graphic Design, Multimedia, Technology, The Internet, Web Design

Well it’s happened again and inspired me to write a short blog. Digital photographs (including scanned, downloaded, stolen from Google images and digital cameras) are known as bitmaps. ANY TIME a photograph or video (different to some line drawings, see later) reaches the computer screen, it is converted to a bitmap (if it wasn’t one already). A bitmap is a grid with a finite number of pixels (digital cameras are measured in Megapixels (10M, 5M etc.), computer screens are also, 1024×768 etc), each pixel is assigned a colour. When these tiny pixels are zoomed out, shrunk down to individual points, the squares appear invisible and we see a complete photograph of a tree/landscape/dog/your mum.

When we zoom into the bitmap, these squares will become larger and detail in the photograph is lost. There is no way to magically split a pixel out into it’s composite parts, it is a single colour and nothing more, the information isn’t there to enhance! A low quality image or video will ALWAYS BE a low quality image or video.

I can’t blame you for thinking it is possible. I mean Hollywood shows this happening all the time, but it is physically impossible with today’s technology. Even future technology will not be able to improve photographs and videos created with the old technology. It’s IMPOSSIBLE.

Scan back to the start of the film… enhance the image. See the guy in the blue coat on the floor in the reflection of the computer screen. Enhance it, turn him round and lift him up so we can work out how tall he is. Look, can you see what he ate for Breakfast? Check his stomach contents, looks like it came from McDonalds on Regent Street at 11:02-11:04am this morning, lets go speak to Magda who served him to get an ID.

It’s just NOT possible!

The exception comes with some digital line drawings (with or without colour) but not all. The rule of thumb is, unless a graphic designer has issued you with a vector format file (Illustrator, Fireworks, Some PDFs etc.) then it’s probably not high enough quality to enlarge or print in high quality. Most images from your old website will be shrunk to just the right size for the screen, generally these can not be enlarged, printed for publication or improved upon, including logos. These would need to be retaken, redrawn or the original obtained.

Tomorrow’s blog: Time Travel – why a new website and graphics cannot be designed, built and tested before last week.

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Twitter for good and Twitter for evil

Posted on 27 June 2009 in Multimedia, Networking, Technology, Twitter

twitterdevilThe news of Michael Jackson’s passing was quickly widespread, it was probably the fastest news story ever to reach the world and it did so because of technology, namely Twitter. Within minutes of the article appearing on TMZ’s website, it was global! I was following closely using one of my favourite Twitter news tools; Twitscoop (http://www NULL.twitscoop NULL.com/) which analyses public tweats looking for patterns in real time and shows emphasis on the most common subjects.

Through Twitter, I watched accusations on Michael’s Doctor, I saw mass hatred of Parez Hilton for accusing Michael of faking his collapse.

Yesterday I saw the start of the mass moonwalk in Liverpool Street Station, I even got to watch it live online through someone’s mobile phone!

Twitter is a wonderful thing because it allows mass communication spread instantly throughout the world.

While watching the trending keywords on Twitter however, something strange happened. Jeff Goldblum’s name popped up and quickly grew. After looking into it, news of his death was spreading just as quickly. Harrison Ford also cropped up as having died or gone missing depending on the source.

News of Michael Jackson stopped people in their tracks and brought them online to Twitter. Now people are poised for news, this story went even faster!

At the time of writing, both Jeff Boldblum and Harrison Ford are alive and well (and no doubt questioning that fact Sixth Sense style)

Before Twitter, reporters researched stories before publishing. All information needed some proof before it would get published.

With Twitter, the information leaks uncontrollably and is retweeted and spread with little or no such research.

The world has become a nation of well connected, free publishers. Is this a good thing? The alternative Orwellian Internet doesn’t bare thinking about but we should learn to be ever more careful about the source of our information.

We need to learn to fight the urge to become the ‘first’ and instead become the ‘best’. I wonder where else that lesson could be applied.

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