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Week 52 at work

This week marks the end of my first year in my role and the start of the next year! This week I got up to:

  • agreed in principle that phase two of the website project should focus on our education offer and sat with fffunction so that we can get an estimate
  • attended a half day workshop on online shopping platform Shopify which I wrote about earlier
  • set out a new workflow for internal requests for design work and immediately got swamped with requests
  • Met with a Microsoft researcher and University students about working together on an interesting prototype
  • Attended a half day workshop hosted by HLF and National Archives about digital and archives!
  • Heard that we have been successful in our Nesta RnD fund for the arts project with aardman and the University of Bristol!
  • Took Friday off

I need to write an end of year wrap up…

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Introducing shopify

At work I’m currently working on delivering a project to offer online shopping to the public. So 2005 I know but better late than never. In the web world Shopify rings bells so I figured it was a safe bet to experiment for us. One of my favourite companies abookapart uses shopify and having been on the customer stand I feel happy with the platform.

I’ve just attended a half day workshop led by Keir Whitaker from Shopify which was an introduction to the platform with time to have a little dig under the hood. The session gave me the confidence that shopify should meet our immediate needs and longer term needs. The point of sale (POS) rollout in 6-12months is also pretty exciting. I made a few notes:

  • Shopify is a theme based e-commerce hosted platform
  • you can try out the partnership platform for testing out the entire process and flow for internal stakeholders
  • uses an open source template language called liquid
  • at present over 110,000 stores
  • Shopify uses stripe to handle payments but accepts many other gateways
  • examples of great shops included – United pixel workers, Greats brand, Herb Lester
  • essential cheatsheet for code snippets
  • you can use www.fetchapp.com for handling digital products
  • there are new EU rules coming into force in 2015 that need exploring around item returns and digital downloads from 2015
  • if you’re a mac user like me you can use their free desktop app to edit themes on your computer
  • get used to making shudder for, else, if statements
  • one product can have multiple variates e.g. a product is a t-shirt but the sizes are variates
  • building a theme consists of HTML, CSS,  javascript and the liquid template language
  • uses five folders (assets, config, layout, snippets, templates) and 11 core files.
  • #shopifyu

I’ll let you know how we get on in July!

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Week 51 at work

This week i’ve been up to:

  • Shorter week due to being at the Le Mans 24 race in France
  • Shut down over 200 web pages which were scattered across the retired mshed.org website and Bristol City Council pages
  • Set up 301 redirects which are critical to help Google know we’ve moved the content. Where possible I have mapped old URLs to their new home
  • Met with Bristol Record Office to review their web section
  • Went on a fact finding mission to see how we can improve our performance data gathering
  • Enjoyed being part of the IT Desktop user group giving feedback about what needs to improve: start up and shut down speed, unrestricted web access and skype!
  • Carried out my final team members six month review
  • Improved the staff ebook I released last month
  • Sent the director my draft plans for the next few months: interpretation, website phase two and more!
  • Spent a lot of my time with my head in the GDS measurement guidance and coming up with key performance indicators based on our Council and Arts Council measurements
  • Agreed to start a ‘behind the scenes’ breakfast instagram and blogger tour of the sites
  • Chopped it up with Sarah Saunders about images, metadata and engagement
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Week 50 at work

I’ve taken the second half of this week off to enjoy the Le Mans 24 hour race in France. But I managed to:

  • Setup 301 redirects for mashed.org for next week
  • Respond to an foi request 
  • Agree July as our launch for an online shop
  • Finish our end of year report 
  • Suggest my workplan for the next few months 
  • Tinker with my process for getting stuff done 
  • Clean up our public digital roadmap on trello 
  • Review and improve our seo efforts with the new website 

 

 

 

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Week 49 at work

This week I have been:

  • Doing the six month PMDS for all the team – review of last six months and looking ahead to the next 12 months
  • Doing the Arts Council end of year return
  • Handover with fffunction for phase one of the website project
  • Checking the M Shed kiosk move is working to plan
  • Met with the BBC to discuss how we can support one of their community projects around ‘Bristol sounds’
  • Welcoming Ray Barnett to twitter
  • Had our first staff meeting with the new teams that are now being rolled into the service, we have expanded to include events, film and festival teams
  • Chopped it up with Phil about what my team could do to support the public programme team
  • Explained to conservation what types of blgo post i’d love from them
  • Met with the central comms manager to agree how to reduce our presence of their main website
  • Fired the starter gun on the learning team using mailchimp for their teachers newsletter
  • Got to sit with our IT account manager to agree how we can best work together to ensure both sides have a happy marriage!
  • Decided that we should implement the use of tablets for getting visitor feedback
  • Penciled an outline of my work plan for the next 6-12 months which involved a few surprises
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Week 48 at work

A four day week due to a bank holiday made coming back to work easier:

  • This week the new proposed service structure was released
  • Produced and released our first ebook internally for use by our visitor assistants. The ebook covers all procedures for our current exhibition English Magic, background information on the artist and an introduction to ‘what is contemporary art?’
  • Worked out all the old website traffic redirects that we’ll start to place in place throughout June
  • Took hold of some ibeacons for a citywide app that we agreed to be part of
  • Met with Isla from the collections team to look at how we can start to use 3D printing
  • Reviewed our exhibition evaluation plan with the programming team
  • Agreed what stuff I needed to get ready for the Arts Council end of year report
  • Reviewed and tweaked the Bristol Record Office web pages
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A few thoughts on in-car technology

View of the cockpit from the drivers seat

This is a post about how in-car technology has clearly moved on since our 2001 car was built.

Last week I rented a Nissan Note for our week in the South of France. I grabbed the keys and found my silver car in a long line of shiny new cars. I pressed the unlock button on the key fob and jumped into the driver seat. Everything lit up like a runway and my immediate thought was what the heck do I do now AND don’t touch anything. I moved to put the key into the ignition and realised it didn’t have a keyhole but those ‘push to start’ buttons. The car knows i’m the driver as it senses the key fob close enough. The last time I saw this feature was on Top Gear with a Ferrari. At this point I think must people will try and press the button to start the car but they’d be wrong. You need to press the clutch at the same time or the car won’t start – i found this out a few years back when I wasted 15 minutes failing to work it out on a previous rental. Once the engine started I decided to check my surroundings properly. My dashboard displayed a range of completely comprehensible details, which I later learned stood for ‘range of fuel left’, how green I was currently driving, current fuel level, gear etc. My steering wheel also had a number of buttons which I steered clear of initially. These controls allowed me to change the radio settings, activate cruise control (which I played with at 130kph to learn…!) and mess around with bluetooth devices.

In short, things have moved on in 10-15 years but not massively and I was a little bit disappointed. In addition to the above, I had a front and rear camera to assist parking (a bumper is a much simpler feature ha PLUS I built a parking sensor in college in 2000 for under a fiver), LCD display control unit with GPS and some odd flashing lights for whenever I was very close to a car or wall when driving – something that is required to drive those amazingly twisty narrow roads like the D44 between Plan De La Tour and Le Muy.

We are looking at buying a larger car yet I can’t help wonder who would pay for all these ‘features’ which basically poorly replace good road craft. Also I can’t imagine the LCD screen or many of these features still working perfectly in 10-15 years.

The best features? a cup holder next to the driver seat and a cubby hole under the boot, which probably is possible with a small spare instead of a full blown wheel I lug around.

At least now I can rest easy just looking for a second hand car with a decent cup holder and the will to carry me around.

A few details:

  • Approx £190 for seven days rental from the airport
  • We covered 650KM for £40 fuel

 

 

 

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Week 46 at work

This was a mighty week of grinding that probably saw me tipping towards the most i’ve had to work in a single week thus far in this role.

  • On Monday I headed to London with my two Nesta partners from University of Bristol and aardman respectively. We had a one hour interview to explain our proposal for the £125,000 Nesta R + D Fund for the Arts. We find out on the 1st July. Everything crossed.
  • Much of the mid week was spent writing for the website, reacting to bugs and comments from all angles.
  • Tuesday afternoon was a great break to pop along to the University of Bristol student project showcase. We had three groups making us digital projects so it was not only good to show our support but to be amazed by the other projects.
  • Met with a Watershed sandbox project to hear how they might use RFID for a test in our “stuffed animals” gallery. It was a shame we couldn’t be involved in the planning and design of the project…
  • At 2pm on Thursday 15th May we quietly slipped our new service website onto the web http://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/ an achievement I will write about soon but it marks a major milestone for my team and the service.
  • On Friday we played host for the Museums Computer Group Museums Get Mobile Conference. We had around 70-80 people from all across the UK meet to hear about everybody’s challenges, big wins and frank honesty about how hard working with mobile can be. We had a few week earned beers that evening!
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Week 45 at work

This week was nicknamed the calm before the storm, due to the hardcore schedule that will be week 47. There may only be a few bullets listed below but this was a long work and a critical point on the website delivery plan. Anyway this week:

After the bank holiday, Tuesday onwards was dedicated to making sense of our content audit and then mapping what pieces of content were required for our 70 or so key new website pages. I met hourly with various people required to contribute to writing for the web. We used a content table to plan each piece of content. We nervously laughed, we nearly cried, we wrote and rewrote. We signed off content and moved on!