chrisduran.eu

It’s been pretty hectic with the PhD and Cognicology.com this month: I’m trying to wrangle a trip over to the states in January for a conference related to my PhD, which has taken a fair amount of my time. It is amazing the loops you need to jump through to organise this sort of thing. Between trying to secure a talking position, apply for travel funding and contacting other institutes to visit and talk sciencey things with, I’ve been kept pretty busy. Adding to that, Alborz and I have also been pretty busy with organising and preparing videos for the Cognicology.com site which has been a blast. As exciting as my day-to-day life is (assuming exciting is a relative measure, and you consider paint drying to be an extreme sport) it isn’t really the reason for this post.

The new Cognicology.com design has been up for about a month now, and whilst the design is a definite improvement over the last design, it still isn’t our ideal layout. I actually had a meeting with Al today about the design of the site and we’ve both come to the conclusion that we want something that is a little more ‘full and exciting’ and a lot less minimalist. At around the same time as we’ve been thinking and discussing this, I’ve been following the blog of Smashing Magazine which has some great in-depth articles revolving around online design. I first found Smashing Magazine when I stumbled upon their great collection of monthly desktop wallpaper calendars during one of my procrastinatory searches for an inspirational (and anti-procrastinatory) desktop image. I mention these guys because by chance they have published a great article on the wireframing stage of web design projects.

I’ve knocked up a quick wireframe outline for a possible new Cognicology.com web layout. We will pass it on to the peeps we know in the business and get comments/ideas from them on what they think of the arrangement of elements.

The other cool thing related to Smashing Magazine is that I’ve pre-ordered a copy of their upcoming book, The Smashing Book. To quote them directly:

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

The book is due out late September, and they are giving a pre-order discount of 20% off the price of the book. Check it out here.

Filed under: Projects by Chris

I feel like I’ve been saying this for almost everything I am involved in at the moment, but there has been a lot of behind the scenes work going on for Cognicology. Some technical (we’ve moved to better, faster, stronger hosting for one), some strategic.

In terms of technical, we’ve moved all (well, nearly all) of our hosted services from GoDaddy hosting to hosting through Knownhost. GoDaddy hosting was cheap enough but it had a tendancy to suffer really slow loading times during peak US hours – not really acceptable for a blog delivering video content (see strategic below)! We now have a virtual private server with Knownhost and the service has so far performed flawlessly.

On the strategic setting, Alborz and I have decided that we are going to move away from the traditional text-heavy blog or online magazine format and move towards delivering Cognicology primarily as a video blog, or vlog (not the biggest fan of the term vlog – sounds like something Richard Branson would call his blog). We both currently have to do a load of writing through our other commitments, so switching to video was a great way to get some more of that tasty spice known as variety.

We’ve now got a completely redesigned website for cognicology now that is really strongly centred around video delivery – it has a whopping big space at the top for our videos and the video content is prioritised in the category browsers, etc.. In terms of actual recording style when it comes to the videos we are going for a fairly organic style with little to no scripting – we want to deliver our opinions, ideas and tips on the cognicology subject manner with authenticity and ernest which I think is best captured with unscripted dialogue.

Anyway, check out Cognicology!

http://www.cognicology.com/

Filed under: Projects by Chris

I haven’t updated this blog for a few weeks, which is my bad. I’ve updated my project sites even less frequently, which is badder! I’m off on a surf trip this extended weekend starting after I hit submit, so I’ll have a lot of time to talk about what has been happening RE projects next week. I’m also going to take loads of photos with my Geo-tagging Blackberry (a cool feature I discovered it had) and see if I can use it to construct some sort of travel map. Especially hopefully using OSM (see below)

Lately, I’ve been in discovery mode and found a lot of ‘new’ toys. OpenStreetMap is probably my favourite new toy(guess why) and also openSUSE and the stable version of Processing is amazing.

I’m also really getting my hands dirty with techie things like Python, Javascript, JSON, AJAX, message digests, etc. Web development in the Web 2.0 world is damn fun.

Oh and I have a security patch looming, apparently.

Projects, in brief

Cognicology:

• I have a couple of articles in the pipeline for Cognicology, that will be up next week.

• Alborz is back from Europe in about nine or ten days, and we are finalising a really exciting product to coincide with the official launch of Cognicology, which is coming up soon… I’m pretty excited about this, and more to come about it as the due date impends…

WiFi in Australia:

• I have some really exciting and major developments with regards to WiFi in Australia… The key though is open = better. Always.

PhD:

• Tomorrow marks the first day of my final year… Or the beginning of the end of this saga. There is a bucket load of work to be done, but I am definitely on track and am confident about a timely completion.

• I have three 1st name peer-reviewed articles out there in the world now… You can find them on my publications page

Looks likely I will be heading to San Diego in January next year for the Plant and Animal Genome conference. Should be a great opportunity to drink coronas and meet greats in the field (probably not in that order). It will be my first trip to the states, and that will be ace.

I’ve noticed Alborz has a bit of a projects page on his blog, I think I am going to have to steal that idea…

Filed under: general by Chris