Readmill Blog

We’re back with another exclusive commentary, this time from Andrew Travers — author of A Pocket Guide to Interviewing for research. Andrew has took some time out to delve deeper into some key parts of the book, giving you a peek behind the scenes at each. Check it out.

create a rhythm and flow to your interview, but don’t be afraid to deviate from it and circle around the topic areas as suits the interviewee’s conversational style. Let the interaction between you and your interview find its natural course. How you structure your interview will be influenced by where your research comes from, whether you are engaged in testing a previously established proposition or hypothesis, or using the research process itself to establish one.

For me, this is partly about managing your time well, but mostly about confidence and experience. The more comfortable you get with allowing interviewees to elaborate, while remembering you’ll need to bring them back, the more you open up opportunities for the interviewee to take you to places you perhaps hadn’t considered and uncover insights a more rigid format wouldn’t have allowed.

When speaking to others, it’s natural to want them to like us, but a research interview isn’t the place to do it. When responding effusively to an interviewee – “That’s great!” – you risk inadvertently drawing the interviewee into saying what they think you want to hear. It’s difficult to resist but try to position yourself as neutral and naive, an outsider filled with curiosity.

Whether you’re new to research or not, I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be to keep your distance but maintain empathy. But just as we reassure participants in usability testing that no-one’s feelings will be hurt by their feedback, so we must let interviewees tell their story, their way. We’re there to observe, not judge.

That’s why the most critical moments in an interview occur not when you are asking a question, but during the work you do when someone else is talking.

Good listening as an interviewer isn’t just about hearing what the interviewee is saying. It’s about understanding why, observing how they are saying it. It’s about thinking about what might need further clarification, anticipating what follows on from their response (rather than your previous question).

Before you interview, think about how the information you gather is going to be used. If you (or your client) aren’t going to watch hours of video footage, don’t spend your time – and their budget – videoing the interview. Projects are different, teams are different, and what they need is different – don’t rush to assume one audience type needs one format. The right format is the one that’s right for the team you deliver to.

Often, the problems that I’ve seen with research delivered by third parties can be found right here. Tired, set formats, over-engineered slide decks and bound reports aimed at those who commissioned the research rather than those required to act on it. When setting up your research, determining who it’s ultimately there to inform is critical (and not always easy).

quotes are only ever part of the story and a partial retelling of an interview. Like live-tweeting a conference talk, quotes are a useful hook but they lack context and can obscure and even confuse the wider meaning. An interview isn’t a competition for most eloquent interviewee, but too often this is exactly what happens – we gravitate towards the people who are most quotable. They aren’t always the most insightful

There’s a tension here between the undoubted power of the soundbite and the need to tell the fuller story, and an onus on us to tell that story in a compelling way. But there’s a note to be made here about honesty, too. About the importance of reflecting what we were heard, not just what we wanted to hear. Interviews can challenge our preconceptions as much as those of our clients. We need confidence to share that with our clients.

We take a weekly look at some of the best, most interesting highlights on Readmill. From silly to serious, we’ll hand-pick some gems and help you find your next read.

Niklas Jansen highlighted in UX for Lean Startups

Nothing is ever really finished. It’s just ready for its next iteration.

Manik Rathee highlighted in Jenius

Less means more. Less means less to manage. Less means less waste. Less means less time away from family. Less means less employees. Less means less taxes.

Michael J. Metts highlighted in Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

We work in a society that judges us primarily by our own contributions, rather than the way we allow others to make theirs.

Richard Eriksson highlighted in These Days

There was something complete and truthful and comforting about making food.

David Kjelkerud highlighted in Dad Is Fat

I have more photos of my children than times my father ever looked at me.

Earl Migriño highlighted in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible.

gordon1 highlighted in Kaiser Fung

The More We Know We Don’t Know

Katy Watkins highlighted in The Name of the Wind

The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Being able to delete highlights is rather important. Sometimes we miss a few words, sometimes we take too many. You may be familiar with this on Readmill.com and iPad, but have you found out how to delete highlights on iPhone?

It’s all in the swipe

Tap the Readmill icon at the top of your book, and then swipe left on a highlight. A little trash can will appear - hit that guy, and you’re done. Our latest update makes the swiping a lot easier than previous versions. Give it a go!

Maik Schmidt joins us this time around for another instalment of our exclusive commentary series. Schmidt, author of Arduino, has lovingly left some extra bits in the margins for you all to enjoy. Check them out! 

An LED has two connectors: an anode (positive) and a cathode (negative). It’s easy to mix them up, and my science teacher taught me the following mnemonic: the cathode is necative.

Whenever you learn something new, mnemonics are very helpful. My science teacher taught me this mnemonic when I was a child. Although he taught it in a completely different context, I still remember it after all these years.

Ah, obviously object-oriented programming is not only for the big CPUs anymore!

Devices like the Arduino might seem to be limited if you compare them to “real” PCs. But the gap between embedded systems and desktop systems isn’t as wide as it was a few years ago. It’s no longer necessary to permanently optimize your code, and for many applications you can completely ignore the fact that you’re working on an embedded system. These days, many Arduino libraries have a nice object-oriented interface, and they don’t waste a lot of resources.

Measuring distances automatically and continuously comes in handy in many situations. Think of a robot that autonomously tries to find its way or of an automatic burglar alarm that rings a bell or calls the police whenever someone is too near to your house or to the Mona Lisa. All this is possible with Arduino.

I think it’s amazing how a little add-on like a distance sensor opens a whole new world of applications. In principle, an Arduino is nothing but a regular computer, but you’d never think of such applications when programming your PC. It still amazes me how a small sensor can lead to an explosion of creativity.

The physical world often is far from being perfect. That’s especially true for the data many sensors emit, and accelerometers are no exception. They slightly vary in the minimum and maximum values they generate, and they often jitter a bit. They might change their output values even though you haven’t moved them, or they might not change their output values correctly.

Working with sensors makes many programmers a bit nervous. Software developers are used to deterministic behavior. Running the same program twice with the same input will always lead to predictable results. Programming embedded systems is often different and can teach you many helpful lessons that will make you a better programmer in more regular environments, too.

Although we use remote controls every day, few of us understand how they work.

Devices like the Arduino have the potential to bring important knowledge back to the masses. There was a time when it was really difficult to explain the inner workings of a simple device, like a remote control, to your child. Now with the Arduino and the Internet you can build and program one in less than two hours. You can even build a replacement for an existing one that you don’t like or that lacks some features. Of course, this holds true for many more devices too.

We all just got back from Sweden — Gällnö, to be precise. We spent five days in the summer sun for our company retreat, talking books and other kinds of cool stuff. At Stockholm Airport we managed to grab a quick team* snap. Look how big we’ve gotten!

*David was behind the camera, but joined in with the smiling.

Today we’ve introduced something very exciting. It’s like a bookstore, except everything is free. With a single tap, you’ll be able to read classics such as The Great Gatsby, Metamorphosis and Anna Karenina. Not only that, today you’ll be able to pick up premium books that usually have a price tag for free — only for 24 hours. It’s all part of our new Explore section.

11 stellar books free of charge, with thousands more inside

We work with fantastic publishers, retailers and authors across the globe. With their help we’ve selected some of the best books out there, books we know you’ll love, and will be offering them to you completely free for 24 hours through our mobile apps. Explore will rotate through new books regularly, but up for grabs right now are these beauties:

Get the update now

Our new Explore section comes as an update to our mobile apps, available right now in the App Store. You’ll also find some other small changes and improvements which we hope you’ll like. 

                                         

Robert Mills, author of Practical Guide to Designing the Invisible, dropped by Readmill this week and left some extended commentary on five key parts of his own book. Enjoy these extra bits, and check out the popular highlights if you haven’t already.

Invisible communication and storytelling are perfect partners, and their child is a great user experience.

I know I wrote it, but I do love this quote. It’s more true now than ever before as well with more immersive experiences taking place on the web.

“The simpler you keep colour, the more you can say to everybody. You don’t want to have to get users to work things out if they are only on your site for a few seconds.

This is a great quote from Mike and is true beyond colour.

Red is linked to ‘stop’, and green is linked to ‘go’. If we changed the colours people expect to see on signs we could confuse them.

This is about using conventions to your advantage to communicate effectively and efficiently. Sometimes though, other elements might influence the design decisions you make such as brand guidelines.

In UK store Argos, for example, the enter button on their in-store product ordering system is red because red and blue are their brand colours. Google also use red for their call to actions but they seem to make it work!

Semiotics “Semiotics is the study of how meaning is socially produced through various languages or codes such as colour, gesture and photography.”

Semiotics is a fascinating topic that anyone who works in web design should take the time to read up on. Work carried out in this field still heavily influences the way we construct and deconstruct texts today.

If you’re short in time then Semiotics for Beginners by Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz is a good start.

Another essential read is This Means This, This Means That by Sean Hall.

We live in a world where we are inundated with invisible communication.

This is more true now than ever before and is really what inspired the writing of this book. As a media studies student I was made aware of the influence the media has on us, often subconsciously, in our everyday lives.

If you stop and consider all the times during an average day you are exposed to some sort of media, it’s incredible.

Billboards, films, websites, radio stations, adverts, branding, social media, word of mouth, shops, direct mail … The list is endless and each one of these media types have been carefully constructed to convey more than what meets the eye.

This is a guest post from Steff El Madawi, a mature student from Halifax, UK.
You can follow her on Twitter here, and catch her reading here.

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I was introduced to Readmill whilst researching a second year assignment in literature and critical and cultural theory. It was suggested that ‘social reading’ could assist with the development of ideas for the essay, but I must admit I was sceptical. After compiling masses of notes, quotes and index tabs in my hard copy of the text, I thought it couldn’t hurt to see what else was available as I was struggling to keep my ideas in order.

My peers were reading the texts on Kindles and mentioned the highlight tool, which allowed for annotations to be made and referred to later. I ran an e-copy on Kindle desktop parallel with my ‘analogue’ copy and found that Readmill offered a tool - the bookmarklet -  that would allow me to sync my highlights for discussion with my classmates and tutor ‘inside’ Readmill.

Once I mastered the the syncing process, I found I could record my thoughts and ideas as they happened. I then went on to discuss and explore my findings with input from my tutor and my peers, which allowed me to efficiently and systematically cleanse and collate my data ready for the writing-up phase. It was extremely helpful to know that every scrap of an idea was retrievable along with the thought processes that brought it into being, and all in a forum that allowed me to engage my tutor’s guidance without the inconvenience of meetings and emails.

I achieved a very high first for the assignment; Readmill played a significant part in my process and I only wish I had looked past my technology snobbery sooner! I’d highly recommend it, especially to readers of physical books who need a way to organise their many and messy observations.

We have some more exclusive commentary for you today, this time on one of Readmill’s most popular books - Responsive Web Design. Ethan Marcotte has highlighted 5 important parts, and has left some additional commentary and background on them. Enjoy!

What’s fascinating to me is that architects are trying to overcome the constraints inherent to their medium. But web designers, facing a changing landscape of new devices and contexts, are now forced to overcome the constraints we’ve imposed on the web’s innate flexibility. We need to let go. Rather than creating disconnected designs, each tailored to a particular device or browser, we should instead treat them as facets of the same experience. In other words, we can craft sites that are not only more flexible, but that can adapt to the media that renders them.

Reading Michael Fox and Miles Kemp’s _Interactive Architecture_ (http://interactive-architecture.com/) was a revelation. Actually, that’s not quite right—it was a proper kick to the head. Kemp and Fox not only showed me a more interactive side of architecture I’d never seen before, but painted a clear picture of the challenges that caused it: crises of economy, of climate, and of sustainability that, taken together, demonstrated the need for a more flexible, more _responsive_ form of architecture.

These are, I think, crises we were dealing with in our own medium, as we started to design beyond the desktop. And we’re still working through them, I suppose.

It’s all too easy to fill a desktop browser window with social media toolbars, links to related articles, battalions of RSS links, and tag clouds galore. (This process is called “adding value,” I believe.) But when we’re forced to work with a screen that’s 80% smaller than our usual canvas, nonessential content and cruft quickly fall away, allowing us to focus on the truly critical aspects of our designs. In other words, designing for mobile devices first can enrich the experience for all users, by providing the element often missing from modern web design: focus. That’s not to say that our client’s pages are light on content, or lacking in features. But by framing our design process with that simple question, we’ve gained a handy acid test to apply when considering each proposed element, each new piece of functionality.

Dave Rupert said recently that responsive design is allergic to complexity, and I think there’s something to that. Every responsive project I’ve worked on has benefited from borrowing a page from Luke Wroblewski’s “mobile first” mantra, from rethinking design elements if they’re not right for small-screen, handheld devices. Responsive design isn’t just about making elements _fit_, but making sure they’re appropriate for _all_ of your users—regardless of the size of their screen. And if you can use a responsive redesign as an opportunity to simplify your work, the result will be much, much better for it.

But most importantly, responsive web design isn’t intended to serve as a replacement for mobile web sites. Responsive design is, I believe, one part design philosophy, one part front-end development strategy. And as a development strategy, it’s meant to be evaluated to see if it meets the needs of the project you’re working on. Perhaps there’s a compelling reason to keep your site’s desktop and mobile experiences separate, or perhaps your content would be better served by a responsive approach. Only you and your users know for certain.

The original article on responsive design just turned three years old, which means this little book of mine’s about to turn two. And even after a bit of time, a number of questions pop up from folks who see responsive design as a sort of “all-or-nothing” approach: that they have to ditch their existing mobile experience, or replace their existing desktop site, or toss out various babies with sundry bathwaters.

The thing is, responsive design doesn’t mean you have to tear everything down at the outset. There’s room for more nuanced approaches, where you might test the responsive waters a bit. For every wholesale responsive redesign like The Boston Globe (http://bostonglobe.com/) or Disney (http://disney.com/), companies like The BBC (http://m.bbc.co.uk/news), The Guardian (http://m.guardian.co.uk/), People Magazine (http://m.people.com/) take more conservative approaches, experimenting with responsive design on their “mobile” sites before opening it up to wider parts of their audience.

That’s not to say that the context question isn’t valuable, or that we shouldn’t be thinking about these difficult questions. But we can’t simply infer a user’s context from a class of devices—in many cases, the implementation of these separate, “context-aware” sites can often be lacking (FIG 5.1). Relying upon all-too-convenient terms like “mobile” and “desktop” is no substitute for conducting the proper research into how your audience accesses your site: not only the devices and browsers they use, but how, where, and why they use them.

I don’t have much to add to the sentiment here, but in rereading it I realized terms like “mobile,” “tablet,” or “desktop” _rarely_ pop up in my work these days. The teams I’m working with usually talk more broadly about specific challenges around resolution (small-screen, mid-screen, or widescreen), input type (touch, mouse, keyboard, hybrid), network type (low-end, broadband), and so on, instead of falling back on stock device classes.

Like I said, not much to add here. But it did strike me that the language I’ve been using has gotten a bit more nimble, as the lines between device classes have gotten much, much blurrier.

If you’ll permit me one fanboyish outburst: media queries are downright awesome. They let us conditionally serve up CSS based on the capabilities of the device rendering our sites, allowing us to more fully tailor our design to our users’ reading environment. However, media queries alone do not a responsive design make. A truly responsive design begins with a flexible layout, with media queries layered upon that non-fixed foundation.

The highlighting stripped out the emphasis, but “_media queries alone do not a responsive design make_” is, I think, one of the key lines of the book. The best responsive sites I’ve seen all let their foundation—the fluid grid—do the heavy lifting, treating media queries as the final layer in the cake.

Earlier this week we announced our very first Readalong. We hope you’re excited to join in! Four books were up for vote, and one has clearly come out on top. Join us this Sunday to read A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Here are the details.

                                   

Matthew from Readmill will be starting the book at 1pm CET. If you’re in Europe we hope you’ll join in from then onwards. If you’re elsewhere in the world, you can start reading at a time that suits you.

Highlights, comments and closing remarks are encouraged, and we’ll be posting a recap of the Readalong next week including our favourites. Oh, and the hashtag on Twitter will be #readmillreadalong!

This readalong has finished! Check back soon for another!

See you on Sunday!
Matthew.

We take a weekly look at some of the best, most interesting highlights on Readmill. From silly to serious, we’ll hand-pick some gems and help you find your next read.

Matthew Bostock highlighted in Privacy and Big Data

In 2009, the digital universe grew 62 percent or almost 800,000 petabytes (think of each petabyte as a million gigabytes, which translates into a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to the moon and back).

Arvid Andersson highlighted in Do Improvise – Less Push. More Pause. Better Results. A New Approach to Work (and Life).

Nietzsche, himself a great thinker, famously suggested that all great ideas are conceived by walking.

Jonas Hjalmar Blom highlighted in Quiet

It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while their introverted peers are asking “what if.”

Max Fenton highlighted in Don’t Go Back to School

She talks to strangers and is notorious for opening doors that say “Do Not Enter.”

Gabriela Salinas highlighted in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

I leaned over the edge again and looked down into the darkness, anticipating nothing in particular.

Miguel Amaral highlighted in Hackers & Painters

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

William Melody highlighted in Mindfulness in Plain English

escape into reality, rather than from it

Karen McGrane, author of the widely popular Content Strategy for Mobile, has dropped by to give you some exclusive content. She’s handpicked 5 important parts of her own book, and added some further background and stats on them. Check it out!

It’s fine to optimize the mobile experience for the most common tasks. But that doesn’t mean that you should exclude valuable content.

Google reports that 90 percent of users start a task on one device, then complete it on another. Most commonly, people start a task on a smartphone, then complete it on the desktop. How confusing if they get different content and navigation on two different devices! All the more reason to deliver the same content to every device.

http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-new-multi-screen-world-study.html

In developed nations, a large and growing minority of users are mobile only.

22 percent of visitors to both Amazon and Wikipedia are mobile-only users, according to comScore. Only Apple, at 35 percent, is higher, but that number reflects Apple’s investment in its app ecosystem.

http://allthingsd.com/20130325/among-big-properties-apple-and-amazon-have-greatest-portions-of-mobile-only-users/

What’s more, forty-two percent of smartphone owners aged eighteen to twenty-nine say they mostly go online using their phone—they rarely use the desktop web

Fifty percent of smartphone owners aged twelve to seventeen say they mostly go online using their phones. If your organization wants to communicate with or market to the teen and young adult audience, you need a content strategy for mobile.

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teens-and-Tech.aspx

First, they need to support customers who use their smartphones to “pre-shop” stores, compare prices, and look up product features and customer reviews before deciding to transact.

When searching for local products and services, an astonishing 46 percent of mobile users said they rely exclusively on their mobile device to conduct pre-purchase research, according to the Mobile Path-to-Purchase study.

http://www.mobilepathtopurchase.com/

“Mobile” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re on the move.

Google reports that 77% of searches from mobile devices take place at home or at work. The “on-the-go” mobile user isn’t the primary use case we should be designing for. (If you need to optimize for local use, then call it local, not mobile.)
http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/creating-moments-that-matter.html

Have some spare time this Sunday? We’re hosting our very first Readalong, where you can pick up a great book and flip the pages with Readmillers across the world. 

It’s dead simple: read, highlight, and check out what others have to say! We’re going to keep this first Readalong short, so we’ve picked a handful of books that you’ll be able to get through in an hour or two. Fancy getting involved? Vote to read your favourite!

The Invisible Man (Free)

Another classic from the man that bought you The War of the Worlds. This story follows a scientist named Griffin who has discovered the means to invisibility, but who has gone a little mad in the process. He fails to reverse the process, and a “Reign of Terror” follows. Check out some highlights here.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost ($9)

Author Rebecca Solnit explores the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. Don’t let the title fool you though, we’re not only talking about getting lost in space here. Solnit touches on many meanings of being lost, such as death, love and misplacing items. Check out some highlights here.

Metamorphosis (Free)

If you’re one of the last people on the planet that hasn’t read this classic from Kafka yet, this Sunday is the perfect time to do so. Gregor wakes up one morning to find he has been morphed into a huge beetle-like creature, and you’ll follow him as he tries to adjust to his new form. It’s cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century. Check out some highlights here.

Driving Blind ($4)

This book is a bit of a cheat, as it’s actually 21 short stories in one. From the author of Fahrenheit 451, Driving Blind is a stunning collection of fiction - most of it based on a dream Ray Bradbury had, where he was blindfolded and drove to destinations unknown. If you like the weird and the wonderful straight from the pen of a celebrated 20th-century American writer, this one’s for you.

Vote for your favourite!

The book for this Readalong has been picked! Check it out here — we hope to see you there!

Speak soon!
Matthew.

The sixth author in our exclusive commentary series is Joe Kutner, author of the fantastic Healthy Programmer. Joe has highlighted 5 of his favourite parts of the book, and explained why they’re important. Check it out!

Small spurts of exercise in between Pomorodos can have profound effects on your health. In fact, these micro-activity breaks may be more important to your health than longer workouts.

These micro-activity breaks are the basis for the Pomodoro Workout. Set a timer for 25 minutes and start working on a single task. When the bell rings, take a 5-minute break. But instead of surfing the web or checking your email, get up and walk around or do some bodyweight exercises. Studies have shown that spreading exercise throughout your day is more beneficial to your health than one trip to the gym. Furthermore, when you return to your desk for the next 25-minute iteration you’ll be recharged. Your mind will be turned on. Oxygen and glucose levels in your brain will be elevated, and that can produce a short term improvement to cognition.

Overeating, however, is not necessarily characterized by weight gain. Instead, scientists are starting to recognize a behavior that can best be described as a loss of control for the sake of food. Dr. David Kessler M.D., the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), calls this “conditioned hypereating.”

We eat subconsciously. It’s the biggest challenge we face when it comes to taking care of our health. That’s why the goals in this book center around taking control of your eating habits through experimentation and iteration.

studies have shown that regular exercise can improve problem solving skills, fluid intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and memory.

There is a deeply rooted connection between your mind and body that’s only been discovered in the last few years. Physical activity stimulates the production of proteins in your brain that strengthen neuro-chemical pathways and protect neurons from damage and stress. But not all exercise is equal, and the book provides some guidelines for getting the most out of your workouts. Sometimes, these workouts can be as short as five minutes.

The initial difference between walking and not walking provides the biggest impact towards improving your overall health.

Walking is the single best thing you can do for your health. But most programmers don’t do it enough. The average programmer takes a mere 4,300 steps per day. That’s less than half of the 10,000 steps that recommended by most health organizations. Our modern world makes it too easy for us not to walk. We take the elevator instead of the stairs, or send an email instead of walking down the hall to talk to someone. Those little missed opportunities add up and have a big impact on your risk of disease and even a premature death. In fact, many studies have shown that people who work in professions that require them to walk more, tend to be healthier.

sitting is not the metabolic equivalent of breaking even — it’s far worse.

Sitting is killing us. That may sound brash or overstated, but there are a number of studies that link the time you spend sitting in your life to your mortality. The book explores this problem in detail and suggests some activities and lifestyle changes you can make to decrease your overall sitting time without negatively impacting your work. In fact, getting more movement might actually improve your work products.

Rosenfeld are back with another title, and we’re here to celebrate with a giveaway. Something a little different this time around, we enter the world of healthcare with Design for Care.

                         

What’s it all about?

This book acts as a superb guide for service and information designers working in the ever-changing world of healthcare. You’ll explore current compelling healthcare design and information issues, and the results of taking a systems perspective in healthcare practice.

15 copies up for grabs

This giveaway has ended! The winners are:

Matthew Barge
Aaron Awad
Nana Abeeku Thompson
Kristoffer Roupé
Clóves Cardoso
Chris Adams
Anna Bowers
Samuel Larsson
Joseph Connor
Rik Runge
Jeremy Hulette
Elan Kiderman
Tiago Dias
Edu Fernández
Alejandro Masferrer

Open up Readmill and the book will be there, ready to read! Thanks to all that entered.

Matthew.

We take a weekly look at some of the best, most interesting highlights on Readmill. From silly to serious, we’ll hand-pick some gems and help you find your next read.

Alasdair highlighted in Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said

Her entire face had pinched and constricted; her body so retracted that it looked as if she were trying to ingest herself

Andrew Doran highlighted in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings.

Paul Jarvis highlighted in Be awesome at online business

Be different, be valuable, be awesome.

Erin Gallagher highlighted in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

Teddy Zetterlund highlighted in Do Disrupt — Change the status quo. Or become it.

If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you always got. Henry Ford

David Kjelkerud highlighted in Dad Is Fat

The only thing weaker than a toddler’s handshake is their immune system.

Victor Segell highlighted in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Allow yourself to daydream. Daydreams are our own little stories: they help us learn from the past and plan for the future.

Nicole Jones highlighted in Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place.

The fifth author in our exclusive commentary series is Drew Neil, author of the widely popular Practical Vim. Drew has highlighted 5 key points in the book, and has given us some exclusive commentary on them. 

“The painter does not rest with a brush on the canvas. And so it is with Vim. Normal mode is the natural resting state. The clue is in the name, really.”

I find it helpful to compare Vim’s modes of usage to the actions of a painter. Being in Insert mode is like applying the paint to the canvas with a brush. It’s an essential part of making a painting, but it only accounts for a fraction of the painter’s activity. Being in Normal mode corresponds to everything else that a painter does: studying their subject, adjusting the lighting, and mixing paints into new hues.

“The combination of operators with motions forms a kind of grammar. The first rule is simple: an action is composed from an operator followed by a motion. Learning new motions and operators is like learning the vocabulary of Vim. If we follow the simple grammar rules, we can express more ideas as our vocabulary grows.”

Vim’s vast command set makes more sense when you think of it as a language for manipulating text. When you grok Vim’s grammar you can stop trying to memorize commands and instead focus your attention on understanding them.

“The dot command lets us repeat the last change. It is the most powerful and versatile command in Vim.”

Seriously: mastering the dot command will give you text editing superpowers! Chapter 1 is devoted to the dot command, and this theme pops up again and again throughout Practical Vim.

“Text objects are the next level up. If the f{char} and /pattern commands are like a flying kick to the head, then text objects are like a scissors kick that strikes two targets with a single move”

The karate kick similes are accompanied by two awesome Ben Cormack illustrations. If you want to see them you’ll have to read Practical Vim!

““Do one thing, and do it well” is a principle of Unix philosophy. Vim provides wrapper commands that make it easy to call external programs such as make or grep. Some tasks require deeper integration with the text editor, so Vim provides native tools for spell checking and autocompletion and also provides a built-in :vimgrep command.”

The final part of Practical Vim covers tools. Vim has some excellent built-ins, as well as providing wrapper commands for external tools. You’ll never look back after realizing how Vim integrates the external grep command with its built-in quickfix list.

The fourth author in our exclusive commentary series is Paul Jarvis. He’s popped some extra commentary in his fantastic book Be Awesome At Online Business, and shares some more background knowledge and understanding on key parts. Enjoy!

“Your website won’t earn money, but your business will.”

Too many times people come to me wanting a website, thinking it’s the start and finish of what they need to do to have a successful business. That’s never the case, even if it’s the best website ever (i.e. every website I build for clients). There is so much more involved in running a business, and a website is just one aspect of it.

“The web design is as important as the photography, which is as important as the tone and content, which is as important as the actual offerings, which are as important as how the website actually works. If you do one of these things badly, the whole site can fall to pieces.”

I often see folks spending a good chunk of change on a website, only to use myspace-style photographs (don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean). Having even one part of the website looking amateur will make the whole thing look poor and even worse, less credible. Every element is important, no exceptions.

“Focus less on building numbers (like followers or stats or mailing list subscribers). These numbers are vapid and ephemeral, because they don’t accurately gauge your real and lasting audience. Instead, foster relationships, engagement and provide value to people who will truly benefit from what you have to offer.”

Don’t focus on the wrong things. Likes, followers, stats are great, but they’re only a piece of the puzzle. They can change on a whim, whereas building a loyal audience, even if it’s just a small army (to start) will help much more than “likers” who might not even know or care about what you do. I personally struggle with this, since everyone likes to be… liked. But I’m working on it. Go and read ‘The Small Army Strategy’ by Srinivas Raos on this subject.

“Be different, be valuable, be awesome.”

Often people try to emulate success. This tends not to work, since those successful people probably didn’t emulate anyone to get where they are. Even starting out, it’s important to be real and be you. It works.

“Putting sharing buttons on each blog post is not a social media strategy.”

I put this in because it’s something every designer/developer is asked to do on every client website—kind of like being asked to make the logo bigger. But I see measurable proof every day in my stats and my client’s stats that you don’t need a branded SHARE THIS buttons cluttering your website for people to share good things you create. If it’s good enough, they will.

Get the book with a special discount!

Paul has been super kind, and offered all of you Readmillers a discount on the book. Get it for $10 instead of $17! Head over to his Gumroad page, and pop in the code “readmill”. Enjoy!

It’s time for another Pocket Guide launch! This time Five Simple Steps are marking the start of their third collection with two great new titles: Colour Accessibility by Geri Coady and CSS Animations by Val Head. Read on to learn more.

Both ebooks, along with all the others in the series, are practical, concise and timely reads, making them the perfect way to fit a little burst of knowledge into your day. Colour Accessibility by @hellogeriwill help you create beautiful designs that are accessible to people with colour-blindness. CSS Animations by @vlh will show you smart and effective ways to get your work in motion with CSS.

Five copies of each book up for grabs

This giveaway has finished! The winners are:

Max Gfeller
Dan Leech
Daniele Borghi
Erin Brown
Christian Nalica
Caroline Hu
Justin Rent
Kris Bulman
Katy Watkins
Aurélien Foutoyet

If you’re up there, check your email inbox :)

Thanks to all that entered!
Matthew.

TWiT’s latest iFive episode features a lovely segment on Readmill. Sarah Lane walks through highlighting, commenting, library and everything else that makes up Readmill. Check it out!

Until next time,
Matthew.