Being Mark Cohen

I was lucky enough to get to go up on stage and present a small case study for DelicateGenius and ShaneMo art Remix this year, in Sydney and Melbourne. Remix rocked. I presented some cool stuff done by some of the smart guys who work on my team, focused on http://drive.com.au. Before I go much further I need to acknowledge the guys who did this stuff in the Drive team – it’s their work.

Compatibility Meta Tag

Our sites have been developed to make heavy use of css, and there are a lot of workarounds and hacks in the stylesheets to make everything work on all the various supported browsers. To make the transition to a css compliant IE easier, there is now a meta tag that allows sites to force IE 8 to use IE7 compatibility mode:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

Adding this meta tag to your sites’ headers will buy you time to manage the changes rather than forcing you to do some rapid-fire audits and further hacks to your css. The example below shows the massive impact of css compatibility in IE as seen on Drive.

Webslices

The Drive tech guys added a webslice on their homepage, which allows IE8 users to clip content to the browser’s shortcut bar. When the featured article on the homepage changes, the browser alerts the user by updating the title in the webslice and bolding the text in the toolbar. This extends the reach of the site and allows a “call to action” to be triggered in the user’s browser when they’re not on your site.

Activities

Activities are a great way to extend the reach of functions within your site beyond your site’s domain. The Drive guys built one that can be seen here: http://www.drive.com.au/activities

This activity uses their free text search capability and extends the reach of their search function to any site with relevant text. The guys at Microsoft identified a pattern in user behavior which involved highlighting some text on a web page, copying it, going to another page, and then using the text. Activities offer a way for site owners to make this action that much easier for a user – and to extend your reach into your competitors sites.

To grab a copy of IE8 and for more info on webslices and activities go here.

Inspired by recent posts by Duncan Riley and Josh Anstey, and discussions with Seth Yates, I took a long hard look at my old blog and started feeling it needed a creative refresh. I spent a few nights trawling through the usual sources of Wordpress themes but in the end decided that my old theme was closer to what I wanted than anything free or commercial that I could find.  So I did some mods to the stylesheet and images using borrowed inspiration from some major sites for layout, and a fair amount of trial and error with IE ,Firefox and Safari.  I did most of the css mods using a trial version of a really cool mac tool called Coda (by an awesomely-named company called “Panic”) and most of the image editing using a tool called cropper to screen-grab and paint.net to edit.  In the end I’ve come up with a theme that I really like, and I think will last a few more years.  Let me know what you think

Dogs are amazing.  Immediately loyal, always forgiving, and always happy.  I had a dog my whole life, up until we moved to Sydney.  Now after several years here we finally got another dog.  A very little dog.  My boys have gone mad for her.  They compete for her attention, and my big guy makes her dinner.

Having a dog in the house changes the whole dynamic.  My kids seem happier, and now I have some company when I spend all night busy on the computer   Most surprising is how my wife has taken to her – she keeps coming home with new treats and toys.  This is going to be one spoiled little dog.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mums out there, and good luck to all the dads who forgot

The ABS posted some interesting stats in a media release, reproduced and linked below highlighting added by me:

Mothers’ day facts and figures from the ABS (Media Release)
Mothers’ day facts and figures from the ABS

* The median age of mothers who gave birth in 2006 was 30.8, up from 29.2 in 1996.
* Women could expect to have 1.8 children in their lifetime in 2006, the most since 1995.
* Births are up – Australia registered 265,900 births during 2006 – more than in any year during the last three decades.
* More mothers with children aged under 15 years are employed than in the past. Almost two-thirds (63%) of mothers with children aged under 15 years were employed in March 2008, compared with 54% ten years earlier.
* 60% of employed mothers with children aged under 15 years worked part time.
* As employment among mothers has increased, the use of formal child care has also increased. The percentage of children under the age of 12 years attending formal care increased from 14% in 1996 to 23% in 2005.
* In 2006, mothers with children aged under 15 years spent, on average, between 16 hours per week (for those employed full time) to 28 hours per week (for those not employed) caring for children.
* In 2005, 83% of employed mothers with very young children (aged under 2 years) used some form of working arrangement to help balance work and child care responsibilities. The arrangements most commonly used were flexible working hours, used by 44% of employed mothers; permanent part-time work, used by 39%; and working from home, used by 27%.
* 67% of mothers in a couple family with children aged under 15 years, and 61% of lone mothers with children aged under 15 years, reported in 2006 that they ‘always or often felt rushed or pressed for time’

These stats scream out for more online facilities aimed at mothers who are caring for kids. One such site built by two mums is Part Time Online, a job portal aimed squarely at the part time / jobsharing market.

Aother observation: Most mothers feel time-poor and ironically more mothers who have a partner feel time-poor than single mums. That says something really bad about some of us dads….