Category: notes from JK

I'm really proud and happy to be able to announce my first ever workshop “Managing Web Projects.” I see this as my contribution in helping to formalise the web industry and to improve the general quality of work we as an industry are doing with our clients.

For a while now I've noticed two interesting, related trends. Firstly, and my clients won't mind me saying this, the vast majority of people responsible for managing web projects at the client end have no experience at all of technology projects or of marketing projects. They may have knowledge of one or the other but not both and developing effective web sites combines both and then some. Often they are given the responsible by their boss and they soldier on as best they can – yet in the meantime there's a whole school of thought emerging on how to best do this web thing. The web industry has been cherry-picking from the worlds of pure software development, ad agencies and coming up with new ideas too. All this evolution isn't really feeding back to clients.

This workshop is for them.

At the same time there are people working really hard in web agencies of all sizes and shapes. Many of these good folks have technical or design backgrounds and have never really had a chance to do some specific formal learning on the management side of delivering web projects. Maybe they want to move up to a job with more responsibility or maybe their agency just needs to formalise a bit, get some good processes in place. There isn't a web-specific forum to learn this stuff – it's either generic project management courses or technology focussed learning programmes. People in web agencies need to learn about more than technology and design.

This workshop is for them.

It's an idea that has been brewing for a long time and has had loads of positive feedback so I'm really really jazzed to be able to say that the plans have been laid and I can announce the first date, guest speakers and more.

I'm really honoured that Antonio Gould a director at 3form will be doing a guest slot on managing the client – web agency relationship. I'm also honoured and delighted that my new friend Andy Budd a director at clear:left will be doing a slot on web standards. Both are at the top of our field and know shed-loads.

I've also been showered with generosity from the lovely people at Omni Group and BrainStorm Software both of whom have offered me a 10% discount on their software for the workshop's attendees. My own company Swing Digital is also offering 10% off their software. As that Iceland ad went “Have we got a deal or have we got a deal!”

The workshop will be a day long learning adventure on 26th January 2006 with cocktails afterwards where everyone, not just attendees, is welcome to talk web. The venue is being finalised next week so I'll let you know as soon as I know!

The workshop site is at:
http://www.kitcat-workshops.com

I've added feeds for each category in the blog – you can also navigate those categories in the left-hand menu now.

I've also done some category tidying – when you see them actually 'out there' on your menu you realise you maybe had rather too many. I'm still tempted to whittle it down some more but with things like postal voting and e-voting it's tough to decide to merge them or not. Yes they're related but they ain't the same thing buddy boy.

I've also ironed out some general date weirdness in all my feeds. Rolling your own software can have it's quirky moments sometimes – feed date formats is definitely one of those times!

I also altered things so that all feeds from this site are full-text.

Let me know if any weirdness ensues.

Isis Crisis – It’s the longest piece of fiction I’ve written in ages and it’s online now.

“Jerry Gordon had arrived just late enough for the biggest deal of his life to get him sweating. Massaging his moist hands into his trousers, heÂ’d waited nervously outside the absurdly sumptuous executive suite of his client. It wasnÂ’t long before a ludicrously clean-cut male assistant was navigating Jerry into the inner sanctum.“

According to Word I started writing in December 2003 but the idea has been sitting in my story file for longer than that even… Odd to see how much time went in. I think it will be the last story in my ‘New Republics’ scenario for a while, I’m already working on something more current.

In the process of posting the story I updated the site’s Creative Commons license to Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 whilst putting all my fiction under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.

I also need to rethink how I work on stories because keeping the formatting in the HTML and text versions was tricky. I know Word isn’t great but I know it so well that I don’t need to think when I type, which is rather enchanting when in the midst of a creative splurge.

View or download ‘Isis Crisis’

Note to self: Moving whilst nursing a heavy dose of jetlag and also trying to manage a huge client load is not ultra-smart.

I'm back to blogging, something which I want to be doing more of. Quick recap for those I haven't had a chance to keep in the loop (something I'm admittedly bad at) – The good Mrs Kitcat and I have just returned from two weeks in Canada. My cousin was getting married so duty called (I wouldn't have missed it for the world to be honest). It had been a while since I'd last visited my family so there was some great catching up, compulsory installations of Skype and so on.

Then, as Mrs K hadn't been to Canada before, we hired a car and drove to Quebec City (gorgeous), Ottawa (ok, I love that Parliament has rabbits and groundhogs nibbling the grass there), Toronto (bleh, big city, nothing special though shoe museum was fun and we stayed with the maddest woman in town), Niagara (which I loved) and then up to Algonquin Park to visit my old camp and show off my canoeing skills. I impressed myself that I could still remember pretty much all of it. Sitting in the middle of a lake surrounded by perfect silence whilst munching a plum is quite divine.

This trip was fun by t-i-r-i-n-g so to be getting the keys to our new place the day after touch-down was a little trying. We've been running until 2am each night and getting up at 7 or 8am each morning in a desperate attempt to empty plus clean the old place while somehow bringing order to the new house. We have a garden now – plus space to park – and it's all a joy. Except…

There had to be one thing and that's our bed. A great deal from Ikea, a queen size bed with integral wooden frame. They don't make them any more and I couldn't recommend them enough, too bad. Only downer is the blasted thing won't fit up our stairs or through a window. So for the moment we're left to sleeping in the dining room. Not so bad but not really a long term solution.

So we're trapped in a delivery hell between Ikea, Furniture Village etc trying to get two single mattresses and bases to slip upstairs and put together. Everything we desire is out of stock and every order we make somehow is getting confused in the computers. How do people actually buy beds, I don't know.

On top of all this, somehow I'm managing the largest load of client work I can recall. It's quite odd as with our recent wedding and honeymoon I've done virtually zero marketing work so this is all word-of-mouth stuff. The best kind of new customer, I know, but also the type where you demand even more from yourself to ensure satisfaction.

Anyhoo (as they say) that's the story so far. I wanted to point to two blogs I've enjoyed during the bit of down time I've had here and there…

• Louise Ferguson has been most enjoyably blogging her struggles with a new Motorola Razr. I can sympathise – my father was nearly brought to tears by a Motorala's arcane menus a few years back. When a T-Mobile chap tried to hawk me a Razr I tried it for all of 2 minutes before rejecting it. The Blackberry I use is a bit slow and difficult to answer in a hurry (too many buttons) but otherwise I love it.

• I'm a new reader of the gonzo-ish Drunken Blog which I'm rather enjoying. It seems to veer dangerously between serious Mac analysis and wild rants about lack of sleep. Fun reading.

• Finally, not a blog, but I just finished Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town. It's a wonderful, weird, sensual novel. Damn that guy can write. It was fun to read just after having visited Toronto as it's set there. Also neat was the book's central theme of free wireless access. Across Canada and at the new house I've been kept going by open wireless nodes from neighbours. I'm keen to return the favour by opening my 2Mb connection. If anyone knows of some group I can register with and use a consistent node naming convention from then I'd love to know.

That's it for now.

I've been doing Internet Consulting since around 1995 and never ever in that time have I had a busy summer of projects. Never.

This summer I expected no less, I've been out of action for a month for my wedding and honeymoon, hence no sales activity whatsoever. So imagine my incredible surprise to be inundated with requests for pricing on work as soon as I opened my laptop after the honeymoon. Strange, but wonderful.

This summer I'm busy and really quite enjoying it.

Mr Kottke has a timely picture post of the Clintons playing table tennis.

Timely because I'm reading Clinton's autobiog at the moment and jolly good it is too.

I thought I had been well prepared for the Monastery as several people I know were deeply involved in its creation. But none of them actually had told me what happened so I was looking forward to the first episode this week.

First, what's it about? Worth Abbey, a Benedictine monastery where I went to school and still occasionally attend mass, hosts 5 men who spend 6 weeks living as monks. These men are all not religious in a formal sense so this is throwing them in the deep end somewhat. They don't just live the monastic life, they also study a course designed by the Abbot to help them understand why the Benedictine monastic life is the way it is.

I was utterly captivated by the program. It's frankness, sensitivity to the participants and the monks as well as the deep sense of spirituality it managed to communicate is quite extraordinary. Truly wonderful television which makes paying the license fee more than worthwhile.

It's Tuesdays at 9pm on BBC2

More info

After a trip to Poland, death of the Pope and a stag night it's time to get back in the blogging saddle.

First things first, some interesting links that have been hanging around on my desktop for far too long.

• The unceasingly excellent Phil Gyford has a great post on Boing Boing credibility and the challenges of the grey areas between amateur, semi-pro and pro in the blog world. Link
• Over at 43 Folders there's a post that any technology consultant will sing 'Amen' to. Check out The Project Triangle

I have a huge postal vote post brewing… every time I get ready to finish it off more happens.

The General Election is pretty boring so far… and this is a junkie speaking. Still we did have the amusing doctored photo incident. This was an astonishingly stupid move by the Conservative candidate.

UPDATE: One more link I forgot to mention. Bruce Schneier's excellent analysis of the rules for electing a new Pope. Better than postal voting by a long way!

May I present you my new look site… it's been a looooong time coming and I'm very happy and relieved to have it out.

I also treated myself to a little iTunes splurge today with the new U2 album, some Moby and some Keane. How do U2 keep producing such incredible albums? Extraordinary.