yppahpeek

A friend recently asked for my advice on their personal, professional website. The experience allowed me to reflect on all that I have learned about digital communication. I thought I would share my notes below. Perhaps they will help with a digital project you are working on.  I've got a couple of notes on web design and also on editing content for a website. I've then added a list of tools I find really helpful when writing web content. This photo of a tree during sunset in autumn doesn't illustrate my points at all. I just like the image. Notes on the design More and more, I  think "good digital design" means "design which is accessible to all". Web content should be clear and easy to understand. It should also be accessible to people who have a disability which makes reading or looking at a screen hard.  There's a heap of advice about making the web more accessible. I follow some basic principles with my own content: Use high contrast between tex...

Hop aboard the Wayfarer  for wholesome, sci-fi escapism. I give this book a human thumbs up, an aandrisk nose nuzzle and a grum hoot. Throughout 2021, I want to read more new(ish) sci-fi from a diverse set of authors. Most of the sci-fi books I've read (and therefore most of the books  I've read) are written by white men. And I mean to cast no shade on the likes of Iain M Banks, Terry Pratchett or China Mieville - they're some of my favourite authors. But it's nice to mix things up.  Get on with it, Andy!  The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet  by Becky Chambers follows a cast of human and alien characters as they navigate their spaceship, the Wayfarer , towards a wormhole-tunnelling job.  The  Wayfarer  is a 'tunnelling ship', building wormholes to join distant parts of the galaxy together and is home to a unique set of characters. The plot follows each in turn, and I uncovered secrets and plotted plans with most of them.  There's the irreve...

OK, I'm not going to pretend I've been sprinting this whole time. As I've stated before, my intention with 'living' agile for a year was to help me to find new ways of organising my time so that I could get the most out of life. I wanted to keep learning, keep developing my career and be better at meeting up with friends and organising fun events. And although I don't have sprint burndowns to show for it, I have  achieved all of that. I've found it incredibly useful to have my "to do list" (if that's what it's called) broken down into bitesized, achievable chunks. Just these last two weeks, I've started to process of editing a podcast together and have organised trips to Edinburgh, Yorkshire and Wilthsire (for fun, for a funeral and for a wedding in that order). I've started using Trello, and honestly it's so easy to use - much better than my hobbled together spreadsheet. I can move 'tickets' through from 'Plan...

It's been a while. A large part of that, I think is because I haven't felt I needed to get anything done. I had put a lot of low priority tasks in my backlog basically just to keep me busy. But as summer approaches, there seems to be more planning to keep on top of. Friends are getting married and holidays need booking. So I've set up my sprints again! Over the next two weeks, I intend to transcribe a couple of interviews for my podcast and will book travel and accommodation for the first of this year's weddings.

I had fun playing a massive board game last night. Today, I nerded out and wrote a match report of the game. I hope you enjoy it... Dear Members of the Galactic Historical Society, Let me share with you events which occurred one Earth year ago in our galaxy which was once controlled by the civilisation known as the Lazax. The power vacuum created when the Lazax left filled our five civilisations with the desire to expand towards the hub of Lazax culture - the planet known as Mecatol Rex. My friends, a peaceful race of scientists based on the planets of Jol and Nar, found themselves - due to massive blunders by The Creator - surrounded on one side by the diplomatic 'Space Turtles' of the Xxcha and on the other side, a race of opportunistic 'Golems' known as the Yssaril. Sitting the other side of the galaxy were the Naalu collective, those speedy serpents, hard to get a grip on. Next to them, a band of pirates known as the Mentak coalition. The first couple...

A bit delayed with this post, but that's because I've been busy this week. I've been busy with personal development, busy seeing friends (I weird way or wording it, I know - it's not a chore, it's a good thing) and busy singing in a choir! Here's one of the songs we sing... So, I don't think it's a problem that I haven't kept up with process. The whole reason for me living 2017 in a series of sprints was so I could try new stuff and better myself. I feel that I am still doing so. Sprint review It's the same old pattern, I seem to do a lot during the weekend, and forget about my sprints during the week. Again, I feel a lot of this is down to being busy, bettering myself during the week. But a lot of it is also due to being exhausted after a day's work. I wonder if adding smaller tasks (but more of them) to my list will help me spread out the work across the whole two weeks. I will try this with the next sprint. I've do...

The further into the year I get, the slower my sprint velocity is becoming.  I'm worried that the excitement and inspiration that comes at the end of a round of A uld Lang Syne  has melted into Playstation and television. So I'll make a real effort on the next sprint in the hope that I just need to get into the groove again.  Excuses follow... It's been a busy couple of weeks in work. We've had an exciting restructure of the digital team and the first week of my sprint saw me attending interviews for one of the new roles - Digital Content Producer. Week two was packed with brand and tone of voice training, along with ways of working meeting. On one hand, I really like that we've been given the chance to feed into the digital strategy, but on the other, it's been very time consuming and stressful.  Funnily enough, after spending a long time worrying about how sprints work in the office, I haven't felt the desire to work on my own sprint. I ...