I received the following comment on my Please start from the beginning… with Ben Bodien interview:

Dear Ryan,

Thanks for this wonderful series which i’ve been following while residing abroad in a country with a high speed internet connection.

Now that i’m back in my native country and on my dial-up, i have a serious challenge to enjoy this wonderful content and would appreciate so much if you could put up a transcript (if you have such) of the interviews, it would make your website accessible to so many more who would really enjoy it. Andrew at Mixergy has similar series which comes accompanied with such transcripts, i don’t know how he does the transcripts though, i don’t think there is any automated process to it.

Looking forward to it (btw if you would be able to land an interview with Andrew as well it would be neat ;))

Once again thanks soo much for the inspiration you keep on pouring on the poor souls of internet citizens.

Gobezu

I couldn’t agree more! I’ve wanted to have a transcribed version of the Please start from the beginning… interviews ever since I started the series, infact I wrote transcribed highlights for the follow interviews before Christmas:

• Chris Mills
• Alex Hunter
• Greg Wood
• Eric Meyer
• Leif Steiner

I’ve subsequently not had time to transcribe further, it’s an unfortunate fact that there’s only so much one man can do. So I’m attempting to rectify this now!

For Boagworld we have a team small army of transcribers that cover interviews completely volunterally and for which we credit them and link to a website of there choice in the show notes.

Would anybody be interested in becoming a transcriber for Please start from the beginning…?

What’s in it for you?

If you become a transcriber for Please start from the beginning… you will:

• have your name, twitter ID and URL editied into the video that you transcribe for
• be credited in the episode notes
• get to see the interviews before anybody else!
• be helping make Please start from the beginning… more accessible for everyone

If you are interested please send me an email at ryan@havocinspired.co.uk

Thanks in advance.

Can you believe I’ve been interviewing industry professionals for 6 months already!

As a personal project I’m really enjoying putting Please start from the beginning… together. I’d like to thank the people who have allowed me to interview them, and I’d also like to thank my viewers for all the positive feedback you’ve given.

I’ve decided to take a break with the series over the Christmas period. You’ll be able to catch the next episode on the 11th January 2010. I can tell you now that this is a great interview is with Andrei Zmievski, formally from Digg and the Lead Developer for PHP6.

I’m very much interested in hearing your views on the series so far:

• Do you have any suggestions on how it could be improved?
• What you’re personally getting out of the series?
• Which professionals you’d like to see interviewed in the new year?
• Do you think the series has run it’s course?

I’ve also included a couple of polls below so if you have time that too would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks everyone. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Things have changed a bit around here. I’ve revisited Havoc Inspired and made what feels like hundreds of little changes mainly to improve the usability of the site.

You’ll notice that my homepage boasts a completely different layout. When I first designed Havoc Inspired v3.0 I wasn’t producing “Please start from the beginning…” and as a result had not accounted for it in my layout. Therefore the episodes were previously clumped together with the rest of my posts, this was one of the main reasons for the realignment of the design. My Blog and Please start from the beginning… are now separated into their own sections so you can see at a glance the current and previous two episode of the series.

I wanted new area to be able to display relatively temporary pieces of information about what I’m up to, for example that I’m one of the judge for the Webvanta Design Contest in Janurary 2010 were the first prize is a Macbook Pro. So I’ve built a billboard type gallery that transitions every 10 seconds (a time period I‘m hoping is long enough to not be distracting to visitors).

I was also previously listing the boagworld show I’ve been vocally involved with, however this was starting to become a very long list (as Paul keeps taking holidays) so now I’m only showing the most recent.

I’ve made tweaks to my typography, copy and calls to action as well as going over my markup with a fine tooth come and cleaning things up a bit.

I’m a lot happier with the layout, but hey I’m a designer, that won’t last long. :-P

I hope you guys like it too, I’d love to hear your feedback!

About a month ago I blogged to let you guys know that I had written my first tutorial for .net magazine explaining how I achieved the fading effect on the navigation of this very website. Now that that issue has come off the shelves I can re-post the article hear for those of you who missed it…

And here it is:

Click the tutorial to link through to my Flickr account were you can view a larger version of the tutorial...

View a larger version of the tutorial

I hope you find it useful. I’ve had some great feedback so far and would love to know what you think of the technique so leave a comment! :-)

This months issue of .net magazine features a tutorial that I have written on how to achieve the fading navigation effect I use on this very website.

Since the launch of Havoc Inspired v3 I’ve had a lot of people asking me how it is done however Dan Oliver (Editor of .net Magazine) beat you all too it and asked me to write the 3-page tutorial for their August issue.

.net Magazine Issue 193

I really enjoyed the experience of writing for .net. The guys do an awesome job with the magazine every month and if my tutorial isn’t reason enough for you to go buy a copy there’s also a great feature by Elliot Jay Stocks entitled “Become a one man web agency”, a Q&A with Khoi Vinh from NYTimes.com, an interview with Irene Au from Google and lots more!

I’ve also been told that I can release the tutorial myself once the issue comes off the shelves so for those of you who can’t get .net, keep an eye out for that in about a month.

As requested the “Please start from the beginning…” series is now available on iTunes!

Subscribe via iTunes

Thanks for all your feedback guys. The series is turning out to be a great success and I’m very excited about the future interviews I’ve got lined up, I’m sure you’ll enjoy them too!

Thanks also to Paul Boag, Drew McLellan, Mel Kirk, Jonathan Snook, Sarah Parmenter, Ryan Carson and Elliot Jay Stocks for taking the time to participate. You can watch all their interviews here.

I can reveal that next weeks interview is with Mr Loverman (Dan Rubin) whom has official beaten Drew’s record of longest interview by prattling on for 50 minutes, I’m sure you’re going to love it.

Remember if there’s anyone in particular that you’d like me to try and interview leave a comment and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Plenty of people have custom “404 Page Not Found” pages. A quick search on google reveals plenty of galleries of such examples and Barry Wardrop appears to have been the first to spot mine.

Very nice site Ryan, glad to see it now with the kerning is sorted, absolutely love your 404 page error!! I nearly pooped myself thinking oooh what have i done!

that was great ;)

Have a look for yourself here: 404 link

So what are the benefits of having a custom 404 page:

• Your site doesn’t feel broken when a visitor hits your 404
• Server generated 404 pages tell visitors nothing, which means they are more likely to give up and move on
• You have control of your own 404 page, which means you can encourage visitors to keep looking for what they are after, for example by providing them with search facilities
• You have the opportunity to make light of what is basically a failure to provide
• It shows your visitors that you care about the details

It’s so easy to add your own 404 page to your site. If you’re using Apache web server and .htaccess files are supported you can simply add:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

And style notfound.html to your liking.

If you’re using a CMS/Publishing Platform such as Wordpress (which is the case for this site) you can add a 404.php file in your theme folder.

So there’s no excuse not to really.

What great 404 pages have you come across?

I was growing really tired of Havoc Inspired v2. I suppose it had served me well for a while, appearing in .net magazine readers sites section and on design meltdown, but it had become a real bind to update and I feel the focus of the site was all wrong.

Havoc Inspried v2

I wanted a more professional looking site for my freelance work, with some fun aspects hidden away for those interested in exploring.

I’ve removed the necessity to have a thumbnail image for every blog I write, this was a real pain!

I also seem to be doing a lot more interviews and show for boagworld and I wanted a more prominat place to shout about it.

I’ve moved from Movable Type to Wordpress, and so far I’m really happy with it. Being able to manage my blog from my iPhone is a nice touch.

There are a few niggles that my pixel perfect eyes keep spotted, but for now welcome to Havoc Inspired v3.

I’d love to hear what you think. :-)

Update: Thanks for the feedback guys. I’ve made a few updates to the site based on your suggestions. The foremost being the kerning issue. :-S

OK, I’ve not written one of the six page spreads’ whose titles adorn the front cover (yet), but I am very proud to appear in the Readers’ Sites showcase on page 16. I’ve come across some great designers in this section since I’ve been reading .net and it humbles me to appear alongside them.

My slot in the readers sites showcase

I wrote:

Havoc Inspired is the home of my personal blog and portfolio and has just undergone a major redesign conforming to web standards throughout. My aim has been to link all my online personas into one central hub, giving visitors small snippets of what’s going on in my life as they move through the site. The blog is powered by Movable Type using my own templates, CSS, PHP and jQuery for elements such as the Ajax comments and preview. I used a neon brush set in Photoshop to achieve the flame effect and experimented with gradients and filters for the background texture that is designed to pull your focus towards the centre of the site.

Thanks .net people for including me!

Havoc Inspired v1

As I write this blog, I’m in London, attending @media. I’ve been on the verge of officially launching Havoc Inspired v2 for a few days, but I keep finding little tweaks I want to make. It wasn’t long ago that I was reading Jeffery Zeldman’s blog on the vanishing personal website, and Paul Boag’s responding blog on does it really matter. It was only after a length discussion with a friend, Paul Stanton yesterday evening that my thoughts on the subject had come to some kind of fruition. Paul had asked the question, “Why blog? What’s the point in trying to build a community around your site when there are services like Twitter out there?” It did get me thinking, but I also realised that I’d already been considering it all along, on a some what subconscious level, because I think my perspective of a blog has changed over the last year or so, and I’d been taking that into account with my design.

Time was that the primary way to get your voice “out there” was to write a blog. All the “greats” of the web industry have blogged for years, and many where among the first ever to blog. But with the introduction of more and more social networks and services, like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr the need to write frequently has reduced. In the past, blogs where treated as a type of online journal, stamped with a date. If you wanted to know what a blogger was doing last week you looked in their archive around that time period, but now we have Twitter and that‘s no longer needed, you can just look back at their history. The same goes for photographs, bloggers would integrate a gallery into their sites or simply embed images into their blogs to show what they had been up to, but with Flickr that’s no longer needed either. So a big chunk of blogging has now been replaced with much easier and much more focused services. But that doesn’t negate the need for a blog in my opinion; it just means that a person writes fewer blogs in conjunction with what they are doing through their other online presences.

The various social networks offer very powerful API’s to allow you to integrate them into your site and that’s what I intend to do throughout Havoc Inspired. I’m not going to replicate my content, onto this site, instead I’m going to just offer a glimpse of “what I’m doing over there” and if people are interested they can follow through. People are already starting to take this approach with their sites; a great example is Elliot Jay Stocks site and I think this is the direction that personal sites as a whole are heading in.

So I’m really pleased to be blogging again. I hope some of you find what I have to say useful and I think it will be interesting to see were people come from to read my blog, and were they go too once they have.

In the mean time welcome to Havoc Inspired. It’s not perfect and there are bits missing at the minute, such as a sensible link to my RSS feed (see the site information at the bottom), but I’m trying to get out of the habit of polishing absolutely every I release to a crystal shine, and instead just getting it out there and seeing what happens.