Steve McLaren should write Alf Ramsay's biography

OK, this is nothing to do with Web 2.0 but it is pertinent to my life and i've nowhere else to write it and it needs to written!

England lost to Russia on Wednesday night in the Euro qualifiers severly denting their chances of qualification into Euro 2008. The papers are calling for Steve McLaren's head if England don't qualify and many factors are being blamed for England poor qualifying campaign.

However it seems clear to me that within any team the manager gets better with time. Look at Ferguson for Man Utd and Wenger at Arsenal, both been there for years and their teams perform well season upon season. And don't forget that Ferguson was appalling in his first season at Man Utd. I think McLaren is getting better with each game and now a year in, he's starting to get the team working.

So my solution:

• No manager can be sacked for two years unless he fails a number of criteria (such as not winning against Macedonia - joke)
• Every new England manager is tasked with writing the biography of a previous England manager's time in charge of the country.

They've got loads of spare time so it's not as if they can't fit it in and by doing so they'll learn some of the mistakes previous managers make. The general public will also get an insightful biography and the FA can make a bit of cash (like they need it). Everyone wins!

So i eagerly wait for McLaren's first installment, of "Alf Ramsey, the man who won"...

Putting social networking bookmarks on blogger posts

UPDATE: I can't guarantee this still works. I've since ditched it now that blogger provides share buttons as an option (it only took 3 years...).

OK, about 2 hours ago I thought, 'Those bookmark links at the end of BBC articles look really cool and encourage traffic, how would i do something like that?' Scroll down for the answer, read on for my wibbling.

Simple I thought, someone else must have figured it out, i'll just search Google Groups and the answer will appear.

Well lots of answers did appear but not quite the right ones. I want

• Bookmarks appearing at the end of my post
• With little logos for each
• And with nice accessibility touches such as "Bookmark with" and "What are these?" written at the end plus alt text coming up when you hover over the links.
  

Well as you can see I figured it out eventually (except the "What are these?" bit but I'll update this post when I figure that out) and the steps are described below. First off I'll acknowledge the people who helped me on the way.

I first considered the add this option which is really easy but clicking on it does take you to the 'add this' page before the relevant bookmark page which i didn't want. I'd recommend this though if you want a really simple option.

I then thought, well i'll try and figure it out myself! So i copied the source html from the BBC page but that just broke my template funnily enough.

I then found most of the answer on tips for new bloggers (the reason why i'm not just redirecting you there is because they don't add the little accessibility things that i wanted!). I've had a play in photoshop to get the little images looking right and hosted them on my Google Page Creator site (don't use these images on your own blog as i can't guarantee i won't move them at some point, get your own, it's FREE!). Also i needed a Facebook image as the facebook site doesn't have a nice one so I used the png file on this facebook icon request forum. I figured out the alt text using the source i'd viewed on the BBC site.

Also I've written basic html before but as you'll see, this code doesn't look like normal html. For example you use expr:href as opposed to href and instead of "quotes" either side of text you put 'apostrophes'. Well this is because it's in the blogger code as i was told by this new blogger blog site, I'm sure you'll find it thrilling...

Enough of how i've wasted the last two hours, here's what i did:

1. Go into 'Template' > 'Edit HTML'. Save your current template somewhere so if you balls it up you can revert to the old one.
2. Tick the check box 'Expand Widget Templates'.
3. Find (ctrl + F) the bit of code that says <div class="'post-footer'"> and immediately after this put the following code: (change the red text for wherever you host the images)
   <!-- Start of social bookmarks. --><br/>
   Bookmark with:
   <a expr:href='"http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to Digg'><img alt='Digg' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/digg.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://technorati.com/faves?add=" + data:post.url' target='_blank' title='Post this story to Technorati'><img alt='Technorati' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/technorati.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://del.icio.us/post?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to Delicious'><img alt='del.icio.us' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/delicious.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to StumbleUpon'><img alt='Stumbleupon' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/stumbleupon.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://reddit.com/submit?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to reddit'><img alt='Reddit' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/reddit.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=" + data:post.url + "&Title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to Facebook'><img alt='Facebook' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/facebook.gif'/></a>
   <br/>
   <!-- End of social bookmarks -->
4. Save template
5. Admire your handiwork

It's 7.29 on Saturday 13th October and England are about to play France in the World Cup so i'm not staying around here any longer, there's beer to drink!

Don't make me think

If you haven't read "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug and you work with websites please do and then return once you have!

The amount of websites that have no relation to the purpose they are trying to achieve is just ridiculous.

• If you just want people to see a picture of soldiers then the marines website is perfect. What do you click on?! And why do people have to use flash for everything?! (see flashy things in flash)
• And i absolutely love the New Zealand Dept of Internal Affairs.
• Find more like this on web pages that suck (their words not mine).

The sad thing is that you don't need any special equipment, skills or time really to improve a lot of these sites. Yes sometimes you can be restricted by dodgy CMS (Content Management Systems) or the page is built without CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) but for sites like the New Zealand one mentioned above all you have to do is rearrange the information better. It's that simple! Honest! I've tried it (and I'm a donut).

I finish with some wisdom from Krug's book:

"When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground. With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago." - John Frazee

I've just searched for this quote on Google and found a whole world of buttered cat paradox sites, scary...

Flashy things in flash

A friend sent me a link to the World Clock - fascinating stuff.

The World Clock is made by a company called Poodwaddle who offer a load of these flash gimmicks for free. I can't see anything that I'll be adding to any websites i look after but it really shows the potential of simple applications through flash.

I still haven't fallen in love with the use of flash on websites. The Poodwaddle applications i like but when I'm just wanting to access information then what's wrong with html? An example that's annoyed me recently was the revamp of the Honda F1 website [update: this website is now dead] with Flash. As an F1 fan I just want to see the pictures and read the race reports from the Honda's team perspective not have to have a new browser window open up, lose my toolbars and wait for loading, at least they've got the HTML option.

It's probably something to do with the fact that I'm one of the geeky minority who customise their computers, use FireFox, see websites on my terms, with my toolbars, love the user led revolution of the net, are amused by the supposed dumbing down caused by the web (see the article Is Internet Killing Our Culture?). Before i fly off on a completely different tangent I'll save that discussion for another day.

In the mean time, just think, in the time it's taken for me to make this post, 1 species is now extinct, 43 people have been injured in traffic accidents (surely that must be higher?) and nobody has contracted leprosy.

Related posts
A good use of flash (Nov 07)

Stop poking me, I'm bored of Facebook

Well i can't have a blog on Web 2.0 without mentioning Facebook. But who doesn't know anything about Facebook? Well my uncle actually, to whom i spent 5 minutes last weekend explaining what it is, I promptly gave up when i realised he didn't use the internet.

From my experience of it, Facebook seems to be the new mobile phone. If you don't have one you miss out. Depite that Facebook is losing it's appeal for me. Yes it's nice to be able to be in a network with friends, tag pictures and not since FriendsReunited first started have I been in touch with so many people i'd lost contact with but i can replicate all the uses of Facebook far better in other ways:

• Tagging photos of friends - Get a flickr account. You can tag, you can have albums, you can organise, you can link to friends and best of all it keeps the full size image!
• Messaging - Use email of course! The advantages being blatantly obvious, such as anyone can email you not just facebook members, you have an email address, and you can access it easier (for those people who have facebook banned at work). And anyway, Facebook emails you when you get a message, so just cut out the middle man!
  
• Hearing from old friends - Keep in better contact with people by phoning them up or even... meeting up in real life with them. Most of the time if i've lost contact with someone, there's a bloody good reason.
  
• Gifts - How about physical gifts? A real bunch of flowers.
  
• Applications - Buy a Wii. Or Scrabble.
• The Wall - a. Use email, cc everyone in, reply all. b. buy a cork board and some drawing pins.
• Get spyed on by your boss - Regularly email him/her pictures of yourself in compromising situations. Give him/her access to your outlook calendar, and the cork board.
• Poking - ...

Related posts
Everyone's bored of social networking (Jan 08)