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135 results for “kbradnam”
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'To sidebar, or not to sidebar' - by Michelle Drumm.
Good overview of the pros/cons of having a sidebar on your website. The rise of mobile has changed the balance a bit I think (i.e. typically sidebar content is moved the bottom of a page on mobile devices).
https://www.newwhyweb.com/blog/to-sidebar-or-not-to-sidebar/
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@kbradnam That’s pretty cool. The old gas storage on the edge of Dundee will be transformed into an #EdenProject garden - looking forward to that.
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I set myself a goal this year of writing at least one blog post a month and I’ve managed to bookend January with a post on both the first and last day of the month.
My latest post focuses on deciphering website analytics and this is probably something that I’m going to write more about going forwards.
Yesterday’s post looks at why I find it increasingly challenging to make sense of website analytics data:
#analytics #GoogleAnalytics #WebsiteAnalytics #DarkSocial #AI
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My 7-year old collected 32 conkers while we out for a walk this morning (still not quite sure they all fitted into his pockets).
Nerdy dad saw the opportunity to introduce him to basic descriptive statistics. He weighed each conker and I set him up with Numbers on his iPad so he could create his first ever spreadsheet.
He seemed quite comfortable learning about basic functions to work out things like sum, average, min and max.
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And it gets a bonus point for discussing its genome and referencing The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR).
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I'm happy to reveal that I have finally managed to get a new internship scheme launched at my College! I want a Digital Communications Intern to join my team at The Royal College of Psychiatrists for a 3-month internship.
This would ideally suit a UK-based PhD student who is taking part in the PIPS scheme. Sadly, we cannot pay for this internship so it would need to be funded via an academic programme.
This internship offers the opportunity to gain practical, hands-on experience working on live digital projects within a professional communications team. You’ll build your understanding of digital strategy, content development, and analytics, while developing transferable skills in research, communication, and collaboration.
As a former PhD student who went on to a research career, I'd also hope that I could be a good mentor, especially regarding any discussion around transitions to a post-research career.
Find out more here in link below. Please share with anyone you think might be interested.
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Although I almost never post to my acgt.me #genomics blog anymore, there are some historical posts there that continue to get a lot of traffic.
I published almost 400 posts over the last 10 years (the vast majority of them them between 2013-2016).
Here are the #TopFive posts (as judged by total traffic):
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Repost from previous instance…
This might seem weird but I keep a daily log of how many emails are in my inbox and how many items are in my ToDo app. Collectively they form my 'Barometer of stress'.
This doesn't help me directly reduce the number of emails or ToDo items, but it gives me a chance to step back and realise 'yep this is an abnormally busy time' and that helps me.
The big email spike in 2022 was from taking a two-week holiday.
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This might seem weird but I keep a daily log of how many emails are in my inbox and how many items are in my ToDo app. Collectively they form my 'Barometer of stress'.
This doesn't help me directly reduce the number of emails or ToDo items, but it gives me a chance to step back and realise 'yep this is an abnormally busy time' and that helps me.
The big email spike in 2022 was from taking a two-week holiday.
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I've just discovered that in the official Fantasy Premier League (a fantasy football competition based on the English football Premier League) there is seemingly an anti-competition to see who can finish last.
This is an intriguing challenge. You can lose points for making excessive transfers but also players can can lose points for conceding goals, being awarded red cards etc.
Out of the over 12 million managers who play this, there are currently just nine managers who are all tied on -608 points (that's negative points) 😀
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Bornholm, a Danish island with a population of about 40,000, is trying to achieve a zero carbon society by 2025 and a zero *waste* society by 2032. Great #CrowdScience podcast that looks into how they are doing this.
Inspiring to hear of communities that are pushing hard for more #sustainability.
What does a sustainable life look like? — CrowdScience https://overcast.fm/+Ip7bA_PCY
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More of these please!
A #GridServe EV charging station in the UK (near Braintree) which features about 40 spots to charge your car (up to 360 Kw per hour…if you car can handle it).
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I think there is a truth in #DigitalCommunication that if you ask 100 people to send you a landscape video — and if you clearly show people what a landscape video is — that you will get at least a third of your responses sending you a video in portrait orientation.
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I don't really use #Instagram much these days. As someone working in #DigitalCommunications I feel I shouldn't shut myself off from some platforms like this but I rarely ever post on my own account.
Today I did and I noticed that the default profile grid of *square* photos has been changed to 3:4 portrait ratio pictures!!! Apparently this happened early last year.
I was an Instagram user back in the day when the app *only* allowed people to post square photos. Videos, reels, algorithmic timelines, shopping etc - none of these things existed and Instagram was a better place because of it.
I've stubbornly continued to only post square photos to Instagram and today I realised - with horror - that it is now automatically cropping
all of the previews to fit a 3:4 ratio which destroys my carefully composed photos.I feel this is the end of our relationship Instagram. I will use you if I need to for work-related purposes, but that's it.
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Final comment on this…
Even when projects are properly assessed at their conclusion – incuding looking at
both the overall level of engagement and a breakdown of what that engagement looks like – it feels very rare that projects assess (or even track) how much *time* is spent on the
#DigitalCommunications aspects of it.I.e. what is the ultimate cost for each click or page view.
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For bigger projects I feel that they should not only end with a report that looks at the success (or failure) of any digital comms, but that the success metrics should be established *before* the project commences.
In my own experience, this almost never happens.
I have helped deliver so many digital content projects that are judged a success mostly by virtue of the fact that a) content was produced and b) it received some level of traffic.
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It’s common to have other stakeholders ask me ‘How many hits?’ did something get but there is often no interest in knowing any nuance in the details.
E.g. if your UK-based campaign webpage gets 100,000 hits some people might be pleased to see a big number. But if those 100,000 hits are from 10,000 *visits* and if they are mostly from the USA, then this might be due to spurious traffic from some automated web service (this type of thing happens).
The devil is often in the details but people are sometimes too busy (or disinterested) to want to know that detail.
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I’ve been doing #DigitalCommunications as a full-time job for a decade and doing it as part of my previous career as a scientist for much longer.
There is a recurring challenge that I have noticed regarding the people who request ‘content’ to be put out on digital channels (websites, emails, videos, podcasts, social media etc).
Whether it is a single social media post to promote a webinar or a bigger coordinated campaign running for months across multiple channels, people often like to see that something has been published but are far less interested in how it performed.
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It was genuinely fun to help build a website like this as it is so different to most of my usual day-to-day website work.
Effectively, once I had the assets from her the first draft of the site (built with #Squarespace) took only two hours.
I then fiddled and tweaked for many more hours after that. Frustratingly, Squarespace won’t let you add custom code or CSS on the entry level plan but you can when you are building the unpublished site for free.
This meant that one of my changes became undone when the site went live and I had to find a workaround as I didn’t think it was worth a £60 pa upgrade for this.
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I then tried submitting feedback to #Squarespace about their tiny accordion editing window. Ironically, their feedback tool gives you a single line with about 5-6 visible words in which to provide feedback.
Only after submitting my feedback did I see that I had exceeded the 128 character limit...but unhelpfully, it didn't tell me how many characters I had used.
I then realised that you have to click the chevron icon next to each field in the feedback form to turn it into a tick sign before it will submit the feedback.
Room for improvement in their feedback process I would say.
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The charity that I volunteer at uses #Squarespace as their CMS. If you want to edit an accordion item in the CMS, they give you a tiny pop-up window which appears next to your accordion. This window shows 8 lines of text with about 3-4 words per line.
It's driving me crazy as it makes it so hard to edit long accordion items.
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One of my last #DataLogging work-related goals for the year was to get my email #inbox below 100 items. Let's see if I can keep it in the two-digit range for at least a month next year before things start accumulating again.
I actively file a lot of incoming emails so any left in the inbox items represent things where I feel I'm meant to be doing something.
Not #InboxZero.
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One of the common challenges in managing a large website with thousands of pages is dealing with #BrokenLinks.
One source of broken links is organisations that change their name. Sometimes this is from mergers with other organisations (very common with charities) but often it is because of cultural changes.
This week I fixed a broken link on our site from an organisation that has changed its name *many* times...
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In the Amazon Prime day sale last year I splurged to get a #WalkingPad. I've been using it most days since I purchased it and have slowly been able to increase the amount of time I use it.
Over the last month I've ended up keeping my standing desk permanently in the up position as I stand all the time now, even when not walking.
I'm a spreadsheet-data-logging-obsessive kind of person so let's take a look at what I've been tracking...
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I figured, correctly, that you need to get here early to get a place in the gallery where you have a good view of the screen. #RoyalAlbertHall
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We are in the cheap seats…which is to say no seats at all, we’re standing in the upper gallery. But what a view of this beautiful building!
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In re-reading some of my (many) older blog posts about the CEGMA tool, I came across this one which I wrote over a decade ago. However, I think this contains some advice which remains relevant for anyone who is involved in maintaining a software project (especially if you didn't write the original code!):
Let me repeat the six tips in that article:
#genomics #software #ProjectManagement #CodeDevelopment #documentation #bioinformatics
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In re-reading some of my (many) older blog posts about the CEGMA tool, I came across this one which I wrote over a decade ago. However, I think this contains some advice which remains relevant for anyone who is involved in maintaining a software project (especially if you didn't write the original code!):
Let me repeat the six tips in that article:
#genomics #software #ProjectManagement #CodeDevelopment #documentation #bioinformatics