Richard's Online Journal

[11/03/09] PC Plus: World of Wordcraft

Guess what game I was playing a lot of that month.

Where do the techie words we use every day come from? PC Plus 279 investigates the jargon files, from AAA to ZIP. Discover the etymologies and industry terms you never knew existed, from the Scunthorpe Problem to the size of a Nybble.

This was a fun article to write, even if I’m sure there’ll be at least one folk-etymology in there. I also managed to sneak in quite a few gags, which was a refreshing change from the norm. I love words (and highly recommend Bill Bryson’s books on the subject, especially Made In America) and it’s always good to know obscure little things that will trip you up in techie quizzes, such as where the word TWAIN actually comes from (it’s not an acronym) or the definition of ‘recursion’.

In retrospect, we should have left more space for the actual article part that runs along the bottom. When we planned out the page designs, we weren’t sure there’d be enough interesting stuff to say, but in the end it had to be cut down from about twice the length. It amuses me that while both ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ are often seen as interchangeable, they in fact stem from completely opposite ends of some imaginary freak-curve. Still, no matter. I think it’s quite a fun little feature.

[06/03/09] PC Plus: Kindle Guilt

Wanting an Amazon Kindle makes me feel dirty, but there you go. Had Jeff Bezos announced the UK availability of the latest version, I’d have had one on pre-order before he’d finished the sentence. It’s probably a good thing he didn’t. I’m not sure I’d have been able to face the accusing glare from my bookshelves when I returned home.

[03/03/09] PC Plus Issue #1

Technically, it’s Issue #3, but only because the first two were supplements in another magazine. My recent office project was scanning in the complete first issue of PC Plus, which hit the shelves back in December 1986. Trying to get a bit of traffic for this one, so please:

Click here to read it.

You’ll see the state of the art, back in the days when even DOS was considered new, and the idea of buying a PC to help kids with their homework was still only the third most naive thing a parent can do. There are exclusive reviews of the latest Infocom text adventures, including the infamous Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and its conclusive proof that games reviewers will always opt to play the female character given a choice. Sir Alan Sugar was still just plain Alan, but we think you’ll recognise his style as he deals with his critics over an overheating scandal. You may even see the dawn of Clippy, as one company tries to claim that a word processor with character is just what the disk doctor ordered. Just don’t try subscribing to get the free binders.

[14/02/09] Aching Solitude Awareness Day

PC Plus: “Once again, it’s that time of the year when the lucky folks in the office engaged in loving relationships are busy planning their Valentine’s Day dreams, while the rest of us sit and glower, Iago style, hoping for chaos. This year’s method of retribution? A brand new version of rickrolling, now based around romantic sounding links leading to Wikipedia’s page on chlamydia. But I digress...”

(And if you’ve been reading for a while, don’t forget last year’s celebration.)

[22/01/09] PC Plus Website 2.0

Finally, after no small amount of screaming at Drupal, it’s the new PC Plus (the magazine I work for) website. If you don’t get the new one - in other words, the one updated this year - try again a little later on. The DNS is still working its way round the system.

And it looks a little something like this…

This one’s a relatively simple build, mostly constrained by the platform we were using - Drupal, shared out amongst several different magazines, making it important to keep the number of modules in use to a minimum, and hacking of the source itself to roughly never, squared. That meant going with clean minimalism, and dirt simple HTML/CSS so that everything can be expanded and built on in double-quick time. Given a free hand and a copy of ExpressionEngine (oh, how I love ExpressionEngine), I’d have been able to do a hell of a lot more, but hey. It’s a chance to try out a few ideas I’ve had about how to do websites in support of magazines. That’s a good start.

The basic design is built on two pillars - a clean interface, and the promotion of the magazine. Most magazine websites are pretty terrible, shoving the product they’re meant to promote into the background in favour of trying to challenge dedicated portals with roughly 10% of their team’s time. I wanted to try something different; a straight blog structure for interesting, opinionated updates, wrapped in reminders of some of the ways that magazines still beat the web (such as design, for obvious reasons, and the fact that people are more willing to read a long article in print than a long scrolling screen, even if that infinite canvas definitely has its up-side too). With that foundation in place, the website can develop more naturally.

(Most attempts to cross the boundary end up feeling pretty weak. Even though every article starts as nothing but pure text, its destination, form and function tend to vary dramatically between page and screen. What feels like a satisfying chunk of story while sitting in the sofa can quickly read like a ramble when you put it online, to say nothing of how elements like boxouts and other entry-points on pages affect the reader’s path through a particular article/publication. This is something we’re currently dealing with via PDF downloads, but that’s a Band-Aid fix at best. I have more...)

Anyhoo, enough of that stuff. Go take a look at the site, leave a comment, download an article. There’s not a lot of content on there yet, mostly because the old site was such a nightmare, a blank slate was the only possible way to restart things. That’ll be changing pretty soon, with more full articles, columns, and regular old blogs.