James Wilding's Weblog

Month: March, 2010

March 8, 2010

Internet Growth 1998–2008

From the BBC: an interactive map showing the growth of the internet over ten years (1998 to 2008). Those dates have some special significance for me, because they coincide exactly with the year I started using the internet regularly (1998) and the year I started working full-time as a web developer (2008). I don’t think I had much effect on the overall numbers though :)

Back in 1998 I was surfing the net on Windows, using Internet Explorer (shudder) and publishing stuff on Geocities (remember them?). One year later, I went to university, got access to shared computers and found a new search engine called “Google”.

Back then, the only countries that had a significant online population were in northern America, Western Europe, and Australasia. It took until 2003/2004 for Russia and China to get a real presence online, and even then only around 20% of the populations of those countries were using the net. That low figure is probably a product of demographics as much as technological uptake, but still — it shows you how young the net really is.

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March 5, 2010

Hello HTML5

HTML has just reached a major milestone with the publication of six working drafts of the markup language’s specification (via).

Despite being technical documents, these specs also make for interesting reading if you’re at all curious about the evolution of the web’s mother tongue. A great place to start is the history of HTML in the main HTML5 spec: there’s some detail here about how HTML5 came to be, as well as some brief information about the aborted XHTML2 effort. This section helps you understand why HTML5 exists at all.

Next, you’ll want to know what elements are available for HTML5 authors: for this, start with “The elements of HTML” (again, in the main spec). This section lists HTML5′s tags and explains how to use them; new tags such as section, nav, article, and aside are covered here.

As a web developer, you’re going to be writing HTML5, so also read “The HTML syntax” for more detail on how HTML5 documents should be structured. The section called “Writing HTML documents” is especially useful, and includes information on the doctype (previously important but now “a mostly useless, but required, header”).

If you’re put off by technical language, be reassured that the spec makes an effort to be readable by humans too: after the spec for doctype syntax, for example, we get this summary:

In other words, <!DOCTYPE HTML>, case-insensitively

Despite all the HTML5 websites out there, I think it’s really important for developers to go to the source and read the original spec: it’s surprisingly accessible, and even glancing at it will help you understand where HTML5 is coming from.

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March 4, 2010

Microsoft, Apple, and Creative Business

Wil Shipley, Mac developer, on imitation by competitors:

I like it when competitors copy me because it means they aren’t about to leapfrog me: they’ll always be playing catch-up.

Copying your competitors is magnificently stupid. It’s a great way to ruin your business and a sure fire way to give yourself a headache. Also, it makes you look tremendously uncool (think of Microsoft and the Zune, which was oh, I don’t know, “inspired” by the iPod).

The main problem I have with copying isn’t that it infringes some kind of creative individuality, it’s just that it’s such a bad idea. When you copy a more successful business, you aren’t copying the reasons for their success; you’re copying the results of those reasons. Big difference.

Apple, for example, have a well-earned reputation as a creative, forward-thinking, innovative business. Microsoft do not. When Microsoft went to get in on the MP3 player market, they just make an iPod clone — small box, plays songs, has a music store. How’s that working out then? The problem of course is that you can’t build and market a massively innovative music device unless you’re actually massively innovative. Copying the result just doesn’t cut the mustard.

When you see someone doing something you admire, don’t try to imitate what they do; find out why they’re doing it and learn from that instead. Any business that wants to be like Apple should forget about being like Apple and just go innovate. Forget the accepted ways of doing things and dare to be different.

What will end up happening if you just copy other people’s success is that you’ll become a husk of a business, without any fresh ideas and with no internal drive, other than to latch on to the tail ends of other people’s success. You’ll also spend your working life feeling ever so slightly lost, because just copying behaviour never feels quite right: there’s an element of pretension about it that you can never escape.

So, in the spirit of this post I’d encourage you to ignore what I’ve said and go think for yourself about how to make something cool!

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March 2, 2010

The Most Important Thing About Starting A Business

If you’re not a hacker or a technology pundit, you’ve probably not heard of Y Combinator. They’re a group of investors who do seed funding for startups: this mean they give money to groups of people who have an idea but don’t have a business — yet.

Y Combinator are good at what they do, and have a refreshing approach to funding new businesses. They don’t ask for massive control, don’t look to take a large share of the business, and are happy for startups to sell early if they want to. It’s a refreshingly relaxed and down-to-earth attitude, and about as far removed from Dragon’s Den as you could hope for.

When I was reading Y Combinator’s website this morning, this sentence on their about page really stood out:

Most successful startups change their idea substantially.

This is so true, and by extension most successful startups need to be prepared to change their idea substantially. In my mind, this flexibility and initiative is the most important thing about starting a business. All the other important things — financing your business, finding customers, creating new products — rely on the ability and willingness to create and adapt.

If this sounds obvious, consider starting your own business.

If you stubbornly hold on to your founding idea when you start a business, you’ll most likely fail. The reason for this is that as soon as you start to put your idea into practice, you’ll learn that something’s wrong with it. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way business works: as you work, you learn. You learn that your ideas needs to change, and if you don’t go with those changes your business will die.

Starting a business as a vanity project to promote your great idea is stupid, unless that idea is really well researched. What you really should be doing is going into business for business sake, with a broad set of boundaries around what you will and will not work on: that will give you the flexibility to change when you need to.

When I started working for myself, I was doing small business websites exclusively. Now I’m working with a graphic designer doing small and medium business websites, consulting on Rails development work, and developing a few web apps (for fun and profit) on the side. Things change, things grow. That’s what makes business fun!

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