This hack allowed someone to delete all the uploaded images on my blog, but fortunately is fixed now and was no threat to the server. Time to go through my hard disk and find all those images again!

I’ve not been really happy with this theme anyway: perhaps its time to focus on a simpler, more typographical-oriented them; watch this space.

Hope to see you there: book now for the earlybird price.

I saw something in my facebook feed that I hadn’t seen before: a media player for an entire album. I had a quick listen and really liked what I heard. All the links point to bandcamp, where you can purchase the release.

$5? I clicked buy without thinking about it much.

The payment options are good: I can use a card or paypal, thereby avoiding entering my card details. The price is the same regardless of format. Once I had paid, the download started automatically.

If I had one criticism, I’d say that the price should be advertised in the facebook player: that might have tipped the balance for some people.

Well done bandcamp for designing the player, Asthmatic Kitty for the music and the progressive pricing (and I suppose facebook for allowing this kind of media in the news feed!). If only other labels would wake up to these approaches: it really is about the experience.

Really looking forward to it.

http://2010.uxbrighton.org.uk/

RSI is not something that most sufferers ever fully recover from. Once it happens, that’s when people start taking their ergonomics seriously, but that’s usually too late. RSI is like a Pandora’s Box: once its there, you’re looking at a lifetime of somewhere between mild discomfort and daily pain, depending on your case.

My Story

One day in 2004, a colleague of mine, a developer decided to get angry at his keyboard (or perhaps Windows!) and hammered the delete key in a repetitive manner a few hundred times. The next day, he’d lost the use of his left hand. He has never really recovered; good job he’s no longer a developer!

This put our office under extreme pressure for months. We couldn’t easily buy in help, and I took up most of the slack. Years of poor posture/ergonomics, plus a few months of stressful, additional workload resulted in constant pain in my hands, arms, shoulders, and neck. Many days I couldn’t manage to work at all.

To this day the tension has never been fully alleviated, although I did learn a lot along the way about how to cope. I took up hot yoga, tried physiotherapy, received regular sports massage, and changed how I work. Fortunately, I’m not coding much any more.

Let’s take some day to day examples: some do’s, some don’ts!

Posture

Legs Crossed at Desk

Here’s someone with his legs crossed under the desk, a big no-no. Good posture requires that the weight of your body is evenly distributed.

Sitting up straight, close to the desk, with a slight tilt backwards is the ideal. Feet should be flat on the floor with legs at 90 degrees. This often requires chair and desk adjustment in tandem.

Position

Laptop Use

Here’s something we see often at The Werks, laptop jockeys looking down. This is no good for your back and neck, the top of the monitor should be level with your eyes.

Laptop Stand

Here’s a quick, cheap improvement: using a laptop stand to raise it up.

Keyboard And Mouse Too Far Away

Here’s an example of the keyboard and mouse being too far away. Eyes are at roughly the correct height, but there’s a stretch to reach the mouse and keyboard.

Elbows should be tucked in to the body, roughly level with the desk, and there should be minimal reaching to use the keyboard or mouse.

Equipment

If you think about it, the typical keyboard and mouse arrangement is extremely unnatural for our hands: the ideal position is more like wielding an axe, rather than laying your hands down flat.

Split Keyboard And Tablet

That’s why I use a split keyboard to soften the angle that my hands work at, and a pen tablet instead of a mouse. Split keyboards are expensive: a cheap alternative is the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard. Pen tablets can be had for around £50, but are harder work to adjust to.

Chairs are a very important, potentially expensive investment, but also a very personal thing. I find arms restrictive, but they are recommended. I’ve tried the big daddy of ergonomics (the Herman Miller Aeron chair) but I found that I felt too far back in the seat (although it is very comfy for most people). I’d recommend trying as many chairs as possible, and making sure the lower back is supported.

Software

One of the main problems we tend to suffer from is the sedentary nature of our desk work.

I use software that forces me to take a break every 40 minutes. Some have a really hard time adjusting to this, but in the long run I’ve found that my concentration improved with regular screen breaks. I think this helps you see the wood from the trees.

Incidentally: some of the best known, innovative design firms in the world (Ideo, Adaptive Path) try to spend as little time at the computer as possible – being constrained by the desk and screen is seen as inhibiting creativity.

For Windows or Linux try Workrave, for OSX try Anti-RSI.

Hope you’ve found this useful: I wish someone had gotten me to take it seriously before I was in a lot of pain. The costs are nothing if you consider the long term implications.

Special thanks to those who I’ve used as examples!

One of the more interesting talks was given by Denise at moo.com. Moo make mini-business cards with your own photos printed on one side. Denise’s talk was about how to address a user of a website, and how to create character for your site by thinking carefully about how you address users. Her advice is very valuable, because moo certainly impressed me, and left me with a warm fuzzy feeling.

I hadn’t heard of moo before, but I have been handed business cards created using it, and wondered where they came from. Becoming aware of moo was timely for me: I need a new batch of business cards. The thought of handing someone a business card with this photo on it both amused me and filled me with horror.

I’ve just finished creating a batch of simple business cards using it, and I really had to blog about it, simply because it was one of the most pleasant web experiences ever: short, sweet, easy, cheap, and even though I’ve left the site, I’ve got something personal to look forward to in the post.

Users of flickr can just click the moo link on the home page of flickr to get started. Some plus points:

• its very cheap. £13 gets you 100 cards (with as many photos as you like within that 100)
• I filled in virtually no forms (I paid using paypal, which had my delivery address)
• I uploaded no photos (my entire flickr set was retrievable through moo)

The only vaguely involved task was to choose the photos and define a crop, which was simple and fun. I’m going to order some more fairly soon (creating greeting cards from your photos is another option), just to examine the interface more closely!

The tight integration with third parties (flickr/paypal) was very impressive. I am reminded of my first painful experience of ordering photo prints online: moo was an absolute joy in comparison.

Highly recommended.

I’m not an addict, but I am certainly deeply interested in twitter.com as a social enabler. Twitter is hard to explain (so I won’t bother): you can explain the mechanics quite easily, but people just stare at you blankly, because its hard to grasp the benefits of using it.

If you’re at all interested and want to have a go, you’ll need at least two other people willing to start at the same time as you and become ‘friends’ on twitter.

One principal benefit of using it has been called ‘ambient awareness’ – and that’s my favourite part of it. I can be aware that a group of people I know are socialising casually in a time and place without any of them explicitly inviting me.

This benefit is one of the reasons I love living outside of London, in smaller places. When I was growing up in London, my social life was almost entirely prescribed. You had to arrange to meet people. Moving to a university campus changed all that. I could randomly bump into people I knew every day. Brighton’s good for this.

This has got me thinking lately about what mobile phones are NOT doing for us. They could be telling us when we’re near friends, for impromptu gatherings. They know where we are, they contain a list of people we know…. why not?

Anyway, give twitter a try: its not for everyone, but we’ll see more and more services like this in the near future. The mobile phone networks are behind in this respect, but I’m sure they’ll catch on soon.

In fact, I was breaking one of my own mantras of web development, which that a website is always a work in progress, something that non-web developers (i.e. decision makers) need reminding of!

I’d like to spend a few days preparing this blog, but that’s a few days I won’t have for a while. In any case, the topic of this blog is still a little hazy. I haven’t been able to summarize it effectively yet, although I have a whole queue of articles that need writing/are in draft form. Watch this space!

Ben