What is URL rewriting?

According to Wikipedia’s entry on Url Rewriting, “A rewrite engine is software located in a Web application framework running on a Web server that modifies a web URL’s appearance. This modification is called URL rewriting. Rewritten URLs (sometimes known as short, fancy URLs, or search engine friendly – SEF) are used to provide shorter and more relevant-looking links to web pages. The technique adds a degree of separation between the files used to generate a web page and the URL that is presented to the outside world.”

This is fairly common on most modern websites. For example www.domain.com/article_on_puppies looks much better in the address bar than www.domain.com/10987/article.aspx?id=3546728. The former is relevant, much easier to read and subsequently easier to remember! Search engines know this as well, and tend to award better rankings for webpages that have ‘friendly’ URLs.

“So why not simply make ALL URLs look ‘friendly’ from the start, rather than mucking about with this fangled URL rewrite business?” I hear you ask (I’m picturing my readers to look and behave like the monocled businessman from Monopoly, sorry about that). This would of course seem like the most obvious solution, however we’re developers. We don’t work with nice looking text. We work with databases. Using those ugly looking codes are far more efficient to work with, and actually make OUR lives easier. And you wonder why we’re such geeks?

In the beginning

Warning – contains technical stuff!

It started out as a simple requirement. A pre-defined list of ‘friendly’ URLs needed to be implemented which would redirect to the applicable page on the client’s site. For example, a URL like www.ourdomain.com/descriptive-category-one/friendly-title-three would redirect to www.ourdomain.com/category_1.html?s=3. The list of URLs was fairly large, so we wrote a script to generate a mappings file that would be read in by Helicon’s URL Mod Rewrite Engine, and apply the redirect. The mappings were placed in a text file named map.txt that looked something like this:

/descriptive-category-one/friendly-title
/category_1.html?s=1


/descriptive-category-one/second-friendly-title
/category_1.html?s=2


/descriptive-category-one/an-entirely-different-title
/category_1.html?s=3


/descriptive-category-two/easy-title-one
/category_2.html?s=1


/descriptive-category-two/another-easy-title
/category_2.html?s=2

The rewrite rules in the .htaccess file were required to read in the above mappings file applying the rewrite/redirect, if a match was found.

These are the rules which were added to .htaccess:

1. RewriteEngine ON

2. # load in the mappings file

3. RewriteMap map txt:C:/path/to/file/map.txt [NC]

4.

5. # If a match is found in the map, apply the rewrite rule, otherwise do nothing.

6. RewriteCond ${map:%1|NOT_FOUND} !NOT_FOUND [NC]

7.

8. # Perform rewriting (in this case a redirect, remove the 'R=301' flag for a plain rewrite) if the record was found in map-file

9. RewriteRule .? ${map:%1} [NC,L,R=301]

Nothing fancy and certainly nothing we couldn’t handle. It’s quite straight-forward and fairly well explained in the Helicon help system. Apache’s mod_rewrite documentation covers it in detail. In no time we had applied it to the server and headed out to the local for a couple of rounds of lager and mutual back-slapping at how darn clever we all were.

And it completely failed to work…

Searching for the answer

Going through the rewrite engine logs, we came across an issue none of us had ever seen before. Turns out the incoming URLs were having what appeared to be random junk text appended to the end of them before the rewrite engine could process them. For example, the request for ‘www.ourdomain.com/descriptive-category-one/friendly-title-one’ was being processed by the rewrite engine as ‘www.ourdomain.com/descriptive-category-one/friendly-title-one/eurl.axd/0ecb46028938824286f4a4614c5f94c8′, so of course none of the mappings worked, because they didn’t match. Even worse, the bit after the ‘eurl.axd’ was different every time, even if we were processing the same initial URL. After a bit of hair pulling of collective head scratching, we fired up our trusty search engine (sounds like ‘oogle’) and discovered this interesting explanation

See, if you’re running .Net4 on IIS6, you have a handy little feature enabled by default that handles extension-less URLs in a very special way, called the ‘ASP.NET v4.0 Extension-less URL feature on IIS 6.0′. Actually I have no idea what it’s called, but this feature appends ‘/eurl.axd/GUID’ to extension-less URLs very early in the page request life-cycle, to allow the newly built-in isapi filter (aspnet_isapi.dll) to do its work, and then restores the original URL when it’s done. Thomas Marquardt’s blog has a good explanation of how this works which is beyond the scope of this post.

To solve it then, we had a few possibilities:

Option 1 was to downgrade the project to .Net 3.5. This was not satisfactory, since we spent a long time doing what we love doing: writing a bunch of code using the latest features in the newest version of our chosen platform. Downgrading to 3.5 would have meant undoing cool stuff we had already done and retesting everything.

Option 2 was to disable this feature as described in the article cited above. The problem with this approach is that it’s an all or nothing proposition; you disable it in a registry key that will affect the entire server, so no sites running on that instance of IIS would have access to this feature. Hopefully, when it matures in future versions of .Net, it will be configurable on a per-site basis, but right now that’s not the case. Since our project was to be hosted on a server with dozens of other sites of the client’s, we were stuck with it.

The light bulb

Option 3, therefore, was to tackle the bugger directly by stripping out the stuff we didn’t want and THEN applying the mapping and rewrite rules.

The final version of the .htaccess looked like this:

1. RewriteEngine ON

2.

3. # load in the mappings file

4. RewriteMap map txt:C:/path/to/file/map.txt [NC]

5.

6. #Strip out .Net 4's eurl.axd feature

7. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)/eurl.axd/.* [NC]

8.

9. # If a match is found in the map, apply the redirect rule.

10. RewriteCond ${map:%1|NOT_FOUND} !NOT_FOUND [NC]

11.

12. # Perform rewriting (in this case a redirect, remove the 'R=301' flag for a plain rewrite) if the record was found in map-file

13. RewriteRule .? ${map:%1} [NC,L,R=301]

Line 7 is the winner. This simply matches the ‘/eurl.axd/GUID’ part in the URL, and line 10 references the bit without it (%1), effectively stripping it out of the equation. This worked like a charm and lager drinking and mutual back-slapping resumed with haste.

Helpful links:

http://www.vanadiumtech.com/OurBlog/post/2011/08/12/Cause-of-eurlaxd.aspx

http://www.helicontech.com/forum/15029-ASPNET_40_MVC_and_ISAPI_Rewrite_3.html

As long as it benefits the company, it’s ok.

For mine, I wanted to do something fun and learn how to use JQuery at the same time….

The Idea – A SharePoint Morphing Carousel

Many web sites include an image carousel. For example, there’s currently one on the BBC’s sport site.

Mostly, these carousels fade one image into the next. I wanted to create something a bit different: a carousel that morphs one image into the next.

The Result

Without further ado, here’s a short (real time) video which shows the finished carousel in action. In this example, a “Staff Carousel” morphs several faces:

How I made the Carousel

Overview

In a nutshell, the plan to implement the carousel was:

1. Generate morphed images.
2. Upload the images to SharePoint.
3. Render the images on the client-side in quick succession; creating an animation where one image appears to morph into the next.
4. Use a multi-layer server-side architecture to enable easy porting to another CMS (if necessary).

The solution had to be kept simple as:

1. There was only me working on it.
2. I only had one day to finish it.

Image Morphing

There wasn’t enough time to write my own morphing code, so I searched and found a Windows application on CodePlex, written by Poulicek. [All credit to him for the morphing code].

Poulicek’s application allows the user to map points on a source image; and then do the same on a target image. The application then does the maths to generate the morphed transition images; and you can choose how many transition images you want.

The image below shows how key points on a face can be mapped:

However, there was no easy way of exporting all of the images. Fortunately, the application’s source code was available and so I modified it to enable the source and target images, as well as all of the transition images to be exported to a Windows Explorer folder.

Note that, if the target CMS supports WebDAV, the images can be exported directly into the CMS (SharePoint already does that).

The following image shows some example images imported into SharePoint:

These transition images were created by using a 36 point mesh. However, you get a much better morphing effect if you use more points, say 400 – it just takes much longer to do the mapping.

Also, you don’t have to use faces – the morphing works well for any type of image.

Room for Improvement

By the end of the day I had created a working prototype; and I’m really pleased with the results. However, the solution is a little rough around the edges. For a production version I would:

1. Modify the JQuery to pre-load images and use double-buffering to improve the transition effect.
2. Handle users who do not have JavaScript enabled.
3. Perhaps add Next and Previous buttons.

All of these would be very straight-forward to implement.

Technical Detail

Here are the main technical details of how I built the carousel and integrated with SharePoint:

1. The source, target and transition images for a particular carousel are stored in their own SharePoint Asset library, split into folders.
2. The folders have several custom fields which enable a content editor to change how the carousel renders the images. For example, the editor can change the order in which the images appear. They can also set an image caption for the source images (as in the demo video), change the pause-length for source images, etc.
3. The carousel is built as a web part, which enables content editors to easily add the carousel to pages, and to specify which Asset library to use for the image data.
4. The web part renders JQuery, which makes an asynchronous call to a 3 layer SharePoint architecture. The call goes up through the layers to the data access layer, where the Asset library is queried and the data returned via business objects. These business objects are eventually serialised into JSON, which is then sent to the client-side.
5. Caching is used in the UI layer to improve performance.
6. Further JQuery on the client-side then loops through the JSON, rendering the images, captions and other content (if set). This is done using the image “onload” event and a timer.

Howard Bayliss

3D printing looks like it’s going to have a huge impact. It has the potential to revolutionise prototyping and product design, manufacturing, and retail over the next several years. This promises to be as huge a sea change as the internet has been to the way we live, work and communicate nowadays.

The new generation of 3d printers are accessible, affordable and promise to open up 3D printing to everyone. There’s never been a more exciting time to explore this new technology and that’s why we’re rolling our sleeves up and seeing what this technology can do

Our 3D printer

We’ve decided to build our printer from kit form. A decision that was made out of curiousity, geekiness, a sense of adventure, and the hope that a deeper understanding of the printer’s workings will help us with trouble shooting should it ever fail.

The printer we’re building is a RepRap Mendel Premier Axis 2.1. The Axis is proven to perform day after day with very little maintenance, so it’s well suited to getting plenty of use and abuse from all our staff and friends. When it’s complete it will weigh 15.5 lbs, sit 20” x 16” x 14” and print with ABS plastic filament, laying down 0.012” thick layers with a positioning accuracy of 0.004”

We bought the kit form from RepRap Central who have been very helpful, offering plenty of advice, encouragement and excellent support.

Self replicating

A key feature of RepRap machines is that they can replicate themselves.
Our kit is made up of metal parts (bars, nuts, bolts, & washers), electronic parts (motherboard, motors, sensors, switches), and plastic parts (body parts, structural parts, gears). If you can source the metal and electronic parts then you can print the plastic parts using an existing 3D printer.

The idea of a self replicating machine is amazing. Perhaps the printer we’re building will one day become a parent, grandparent, or great grandparent and we’ll be deafened by the patter of tiny ‘extruder nozzles’

The build so far

The build has gone smoothly so far. It’s been easier than expected and quite good fun. It was a little daunting at first, but we’ve put together a small team who’ve been brilliant and made it look simple.

We’ve completed the early, easier, stages of the mechanical assembly, and we’re eager to continue and move on to the electronics, wiring and firmware installation. We’re following instructions from the RepRap wiki that are a mixture of diagrams, 3D graphics, text and videos. It’s well up to date and isn’t as complicated as it first appears.

The kit that RepRap Central have put together for us is first class. All the pieces are clearly labelled and ready to use, and any items that need cleaning or cutting to size have already been prepared.

Our staff have once again amazed us with their hidden skills and talents. Who knew we had experienced engineers and electricians amongst our designers and developers?

There’s also the support we’ve had from RepRap Central which has felt like a safety net stretched out beneath us.

What are we going to print first?

The first thing we hope to print will be a shot glass. We’ve heard it’s the traditional way to celebrate a successful build and toast the birth of a new printer, so who are we to argue with that!

We’ve started playing with simple 3D programmes like Google SketchUp and Blender and created some models that we’ll line up for printing. There’s a miniature version of our building, cuff links for emergency meeting use, and a cube made out of arrow shaped cursors.

We’re quite excited about a more code-based approach to creating 3D models too. Programmes like OpenSCAD make it possible to easily create complex geometric shapes like spirals and fractal like forms.

And after that?

Well, there’s a whole host of inspiration on sites like Thingiverse and Ponoko.

We are big fans of projects that produce objects with extra layers of meaning and value like Minature Moments, The Light Poem, and TheVibe

But the projects that stand out for us are those that have a social responsibility side to them.

In Scotland the NHS have cut costs and lead time in complicated bone surgery by producing cheap and quick physical replicas of what the surgeons will face during operations.

Project Shelter, initiated by Makerbot called for printer owners to print new shells for hermit crabs to address shell shortages in the wild. When 3d printers become common place in our homes, think what we’ll be able to do in times of disaster and relief efforts!

To be continued…

As with a lot of our innovation projects, our adventures in 3D printing are more about the journey than the final destination. Who knows where exactly we’ll end up? For now we’re happy exploring, experimenting and learning. We’re a creative bunch though, who love problem solving, so I know something will click into place eventually.

It’s a fabulous time to get involved with 3D printing and see for ourselves what this technology can do. We’ll let you know how we get on.

This crisis will be caused because, as emerging countries crack-on with emerging, there will be a huge increase in the demand for energy world-wide.

There won’t be enough energy to go around; not even if we build large numbers of new nuclear reactors, wind farms, etc, etc.

Howard Bayliss wonders how an energy crisis would affect the way we use the web?

The Size of the Problem

In a Stamford University paper [2], it was stated that “Electricity used in global data centers in 2010 likely accounted for between 1.1% and 1.5% of total electricity use“.

1.1% may not sound like a lot.

However, consider that:

1. The Stamford paper also states that (for Google Inc.) “less than 1% of electricity used by data centers worldwide was attributable to that company’s data center operations”, and that
2. The New York Times [3] equates Google Inc’s usage (alone) to “almost 260 million watts — about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant”

OK, not all data centre usage powers the web; but these figures give an indication of the huge size of the problem.

Crisis

cri•sis/ˈkrīsis/ Noun: A time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.

If there’s not enough energy to power the data centres, and as energy prices soar, the web will certainly face a time of intense difficulty.

Here are some suggestions as to what might happen:

The cost of content

The huge price paid for energy by the data centre owners will be passed onto you, the web consumer, in a number of ways:

1. Sites will charge you (a lot) to access their content. Poorer web users will be priced-out.
2. Web site adverts will be even more numerous, even more persistent and even more annoying.
3. Both of the above

As a web consumer, you will become very choosy about the content you access.

Rationalisation

If you own a web site, and it cannot generate revenue (as per above), it will die – you won’t be able to afford to keep it running.

Content will be only provided by a small number of super-providers, who will develop in the way a few key super markets have taken over our food supply.

However, just as with lending libraries (where people who cannot afford to buy books are able to borrow them instead), maybe the government will fund a municipal hosting platform so that Mrs Miggins (and her pie shop) can still have a limited web presence?

Rationing

No amount of revenue charging will help though if there simply isn’t enough energy to power the data centres. In that case, we might well see rationing e.g. the population of a particular country might only be able to access the web for an hour a day.

Of course this would create a serious bandwidth bottle-neck, which in turn might impact the type of content available on the web – think an end to video streaming and a return to text-only browsing?

Summary

Professor Cox and his peers are attempting to avert the energy crisis issue by recreating nuclear fusion on earth. Apparently that is quite tricky. However, if they don’t manage it, the way we use the web will change dramatically.

You have been charged £4.99 to view this web page. [4]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)
[2] http://www.analyticspress.com/datacenters.html
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-and-defends-its-use-of-electricity.html?_r=2
[4] It’s only a matter of time.

We have big plans for 2012, it promises to be one of the best on our continuing journey. But at this time, it’s worth looking back on last years work and some of the projects that got us shortlisted for a third year in a row and saw us regain the trophy as reigning innovation champions.

Let’s start with our environment. Collaboration and communication are key for innovation. We’ve created fantastic new spaces to help us share ideas and talk through solutions.

We’ve thinned out the usual office furniture and opened spaces up so we can work flexibly as teams, often inviting clients in to be part of the process at crucial stages.

We continue to run our Innovation department which has become a power house of creative thinking. It’s an oasis for staff and friends to share ideas, explore new areas, and experiment with new technologies.

We gave five of our teams a chance to show off, giving them 36 hours between paid projects, to bring a crazy idea to life. The results have been amazing, tackling numerous issues: room booking via mobile, knowledge sharing using Xbox Kinect and bolstering our green credentials with waste and energy tracking, live info graphics, and a bin that’s connected to the internet.

Hack projects have changed our staff’s mentality, added energy, allowed expression, and given us new tools and techniques to work with. The most exciting development however, is that clients are now getting involved in our hack projects, setting us problems and then rolling their sleeves up to work along side us. We can’t say much more right now, but we hope to go live with a very cool product shortly.

Our student internships continued and we welcomed students throughout 2011. Notable work included mashing Twitter with Instagram, an app that creates unique graphics based on your voice, and a display app that describes the local weather with a mere glance.

We accepted invitations to share our knowledge and experience whenever we’ve been asked, whether that’s been locally or abroad. We believe in being open and honest with those working for the same goals and we hope we’ve been helpful in some way.

For younger students, we mentored a local school to victory in the No10 Big Society Awards and BIMA Digital Challenge 2011. The project involved mentoring members of the elderly community on internet use.

Through our work with the Arts University College Bournemouth, we were able to provide printmaking workshops and life drawing classes for our staff. Learning new techniques and solving unusual visual problems helped heighten creativity and visual communication. And it wasn’t just designers who took part.

Our commitment to the digital and creative arts community of Bournemouth continued. We handed over the Meetdraw networking event we founded, and got involved with new ventures such as: Show & Tell, a platform for local creatives; Design Buddies a mentoring scheme for AUCB students: and Creative Crawl, a problem solving, drawing based, pub crawl for creative teams.

We try not to take our selves too seriously, and end of year Christmas projects area perfect chance to play around. Last year we made a bell ringing iPhone app, got dressed up and tried our very best to ring out a tune.

So there you have it, 3 years in the making and our ideas, activities and innovative projects are snowballing more than we ever imagined. We set out to put innovation at the heart of our agency, and we’ve certainly achieved it. We now have a heart that beats more strongly and healthily because of it.

This is not a blog post reiterating all the excellent points, techniques and snippets of information shared at the conference, you can see more about the talks themselves at http://lanyrd.com/2012/jquery-uk/. This is my own interpretation of the broad range of techniques, code libraries and approaches that are used today and how these have come about.

Libraries such as jQuery and Dojo came about to help Front End Developers to build rich JavaScript functionality into site builds quickly and easily. Eradicating the inconsistencies across browsers, which in the past was extremely difficult to work with, and I’m sure had a large impact on the number of Flash based sites that were being produced. Now jQuery has overtaken Flash in usage online!

These libraries are open source projects, many available to the development community on github, allowing us all to contribute and extend them. This approach to coding has generated a fast paced progression and enhancement of the tools available to us all. Without the continued involvement of the development community, jQuery would not be the powerful library it is today. This approach has also bred many other open source projects such as, jQuery Mobile, jQuery UI, numerous plug-ins etc.

So if we share our code solutions with others, in the open community, or even within our own professional networks, we should find that our code will soon become better, more efficient and even extended further. Multiple minds will always have the capacity to create better solutions than just the one.

As said by Christian Heilmann at jQuery 2012, “Strive to make yourself redundant, that’s how we make good stuff”, we should not be afraid of this approach. When writing code we should all be considering how the code can be understood, reused and extended by others. The deciding factor in creating the best possible solution is not simply how efficient the code will run, but should encompass all these factors.

That brings us up to the present, so what about the future of Front End Development? With the influx of mobile browsing and native device applications, clients are expecting even richer functional experiences for their projects. This is leading us into much heavier script based applications, which require much more of a modular and structured approach to our coding. This makes the reuse and extensibility of our solutions paramount.

With the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3 technologies and the ever increasing functional support from browsers in this area, the future is looking pretty exciting. The inconsistencies between browsers are gradually being eradicated and many of the things we use code libraries for today may not need to be relied upon so heavily moving forward.

To conclude, we really need to make sure we question our own code, allow others to do the same and really take pride in what is produced by the Front End Development community as a whole.

We can all be a part of it!

At Redweb we are currently developing our own JavaScript library to support key functionality we reuse throughout our projects, we will be releasing this to the open source development community on github soon!

Sweater Colour

First, have a look at the picture below. What colour is the sweater?

Your average Developer would simply say blue, where as a Designer would say cobalt, lapis or even cerulean – Designers notice and care about that sort of thing; where as Developers don’t.

Indeed, when it comes to the different ways in which Developer / Designer brains are wired, the idiom “never the twain shall meet” is never more true. Here’s some more sweeping generalisations:

The Designer

• Lauds anything made by Apple Corp. Ltd
• Thinks the Fiat 500 looks best in pink
• Thinks Developers should take themselves less seriously

The Developer

• Enjoys a good game of chess
• Likes anything running the Android O/S as it’s not made by Apple Corp. Ltd
• Thinks efficiency and robustness are more important than making something look pretty

The last point is really just a way of saying they think function is more important than form; and here’s some proof to backup that premise – the US Air Force A10 Thunderbolt:

This aeroplane is so ugly its nickname is “the warthog“.

Its form maybe sub-optimal. However its function certainly isn’t, as some British soldiers nearly found out to their cost. The action was caught on video:

Warning – contains expletives…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkkhYg8F2og&t=19s

Tellingly, when debriefed after the attack, the soldiers said that the shark-tooth detailing (added by a Designer to “improve” the aeroplane) had made no impression on them what-so-ever.

Art

But we need Designers – without you, the world would be a much poorer place.

I mean, what would the Sunflowers have looked like if Van Gogh had been a Developer? Here’s a non-artist’s impression:

Function without form looks pretty dull.

Synergy

As a digital agency, Redweb employs both Developers and Designers. We have to work together to produce excellent websites. So it’s not a case of Form-over-Function, or Function-over-Form – they both have to be held in tension; this (and the different people who work here) makes Redweb a very interesting place to work.

Without going into too much detail, the session I attended focussed on Education data and its online access by public and professionals alike.

The surgery is very strict in timekeeping with 10 minutes to ‘pitch’ and 10 minutes of Q&A questions. I used my time to try to enhance the vision. I tried to emphasise the need for any large ICT solution not to be pre-prescribed and devoid of exploration, ideas and imagination.

This approach was as a result of being involved in many Government tenders where the ITT (Invitation to Tender) already defines the solution or concentrates on areas which I consider should only be defined once the scope is known. The existing approach maybe ideal to get comparative costs from suppliers, but it doesn’t allow boundaries to broaden or innovation to flourish.

The project I discussed at the surgery is extremely exciting. The potential to benefit the education sector is huge. But to realise the opportunity you need to understand the needs and expectations of the people who will ultimately use the solution. You also need to understand how they want to use it, benchmark other applications and think of the roadmap.

For this project expectations should be high, as it is obvious that the age group of teachers and parents is increasingly inline with the expert/web savvy users of the internet.

With audience groups defined and willing to contribute you can discover not just what they feel, but also use face-to-face sessions to brainstorm and innovate for the future. Using prototypes, sketches, proof of concepts and good old drawings, ideas can come to life and stakeholders can start to recognise the impact and value that can be generated. Add benefits and business case data to support this and the design phase becomes very compelling.

The future of digital is changing. People’s expectations of accessing data are becoming much more demanding. Ownership of 6 connected devices (Desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile, games console and TV) is becoming increasingly commonplace. New sites will need to cater for these varieties of interaction methods. The advancement of Responsive Web Design will be key. Sites built over the next few years will need to realise this.

So my message to Government was that they need to provide the mechanism for ideas to be explored by designers in an environment that is not prohibitive. We can’t do this work during a tender submission and we can’t quote for the unknown as we become uncompetitive. Hence innovation is left at the back door. If you ask for X you get X but what if Y was better (or X.5)!

Creating a distinct design and research phase will allow the opportunities to be explored and then when new business cases are built you can confidently set budgets and define technology, methodology etc.

With projects as large and important as tendered by DfE, I’d imagine that you’d even be able to invite agencies to work together at this critical stage for the good of the nation.

It is great that I was given the opportunity to attend. There seems a real shift in Government to change thinking and improve interaction between the wider business community (SMEs) and central departments.

The UK excels at creative services. For the government to get the same level of innovation and design as the private sector has to be a target.

Find out more about responsive design at Smashing Magazine.

Box 1 – Letterbox

When was the last time you wrote a letter? Not a business letter, Christmas card or complaint, but a heartfelt, personal letter?

When did you last receive such a letter?

For me it was about a decade ago and I’ve almost forgotten how good it feels to open a letter, personally written to me.

It seems that personal letter writing is dead. Generally speaking, the only things dropping though my letterbox now are junk mail and bills.

Box 2 – Inbox

I guess it was email that killed personal letter writing. And why not? Email delivery is pretty much instantaneous; and you don’t need to buy a stamp.

However, it appears that what-goes-around-comes-around as email is going the same way as the post. Now my inbox just fills up with marketing material, job adverts or emails from people who want a piece of me.

Box 3 – Soapbox

So the joy of receiving a long, personal letter or email has gone; replaced by look-at-me social media.

Why take time to “touch” someone on a personal level when you can climb on your soapbox and broadcast to all of your friends at the same time, particularly if you can do it in 140 characters or less?

But let’s face it – they’re mostly not your friends anyway; they’re just people you know. A little.

And why write something personal to someone, then post it somewhere 1100 people can also see it?

Indeed, I think that social media *can* sometimes do more harm than good. After all, do you really get a truthful picture of how someone is doing, based on their updates? Of course not. When did you last see an update like: “I’m really struggling with life at the moment“, or “No one takes an interest in me“?

Likewise, you can look at people’s airbrushed updates, and end-up feeling inadequate and unappreciated.

The Next Big Thing

I assume that social media (as we know it today) will go the same way as the post and email. I’m therefore going to chat with the collective creative genius at Redweb to see if we can come-up with some concepts for the next form of digital communication:

• It needs to be easy to use
• It needs to be fun (email is passé)

Above all though, it needs to recapture something of the joy of receiving a letter, knowing that it’s personally written to you (and only you). There’s real value in that.

If you would like to comment, please use the social media links below. Or, instead, why not surprise me by writing me a letter?

Yours sincerely
Howard Bayliss

The future of publishing is an interesting topic that’s been floating around for a while. The written word will forever be popular but what formats are best suited to deliver it in, now and in the future? And how will traditional publishing and revenue models have to change to keep up?

The room was full, with a mix of authors, publishers and digital folk. Through each session: ‘innovation and the book’, ‘making money from digital’, ‘Pioneers or playing it safe?’ and ‘inventing the future’ there was a great sense of openness and honesty. It was clear that each section of the audience had a lot to learn but was equally eager to help where they could.

We saw some wonderful new work. Meg Geldens of Touch Press showed off a couple of beautiful iPad apps that bring content to life in magical ways. Dave Addey of Agant Ltd walked us though their Malcolm Tucker: The Missing Phone app that reinvents what you think ‘book’ content might be.

There were many more examples highlighting that if we can mix the best from the publishing world with the very best of what the digital world has to offer – agile approaches, digital strategy and engagement models, people shaped design, experimentation and innovation, then the future of the book, whether in body or soul will be an exciting landscape.

The last session ‘How to innovate’, was when I left my comfortable seat behind and had to get up and onto the stage myself.

I talked briefly about hack projects, why we often work this way and how we approach them. For us, hack projects have proved to be low cost, low risk, liberating, fast and exciting ways to get experimental work made and functioning ready for evaluation and improvement. A very pure, yet realistic way of innovating.

Here’s my slides:

And yes, while I was in Bristol I did collect Damian’s Champagne, and he was very lucky to get it back unopened!