Facebook in the workplace

It seems to be a trend these days for companies to ban the use of sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc. for personal use during the working day. Understandable to a point I would have to say, but I would also add that I think it’s also important for staff to have a certain amount of freedom in the workplace and as long as they still produce results in their respective field a little surfing of the web is a small price to pay for a happier workforce.

The truth is that people will find another equally unproductive way to take up that 10 minutes or so of time, only in that 10 minutes they will moan to the person who they are nearest to about being unhappy in their work and the conditions of the place that they work being unbearable.

A former MD of mine told me that I should try and take a 10 minute break from my monitor each hour and break up the day by surfing the web when things where quiet. He added that in my role as a web developer it was good to keep up with popular sites even if they had no relevance to my work. His philosophy was that if I and the other employees where treated as adults and allowed to govern our own web usage we would A) be happier in our roles and B) be more likely to work overtime (which is generally unpaid in this profession) as and when required.

It resulted in me working 7 days a week at some periods to ensure deadlines where met and clients kept happy, but amazingly I still enjoyed and liked my job and the company I worked for.

In fairness I must add that my current employers attitude to web usage has been quite sensible to date although they have just announced a restriction, not a ban, on Facebook and similar sites.

I think also that Facebook in particular can be used as it was originally inteded as a networking site.
There are a lot of groups set up on Facebook that are good for business.

In my opinion people don’t need Facebook or alternative sites to waste time. They’ve been doing that since well before facebook or the internet as a whole was available to them. Whether it be going for a smoke break or simply chatting to a colleague for 10 minutes at a time there will always be ways to slack off.

Time to go mobile?

With internet speeds ever increasing, mobile phone technology ever changing and people becoming more used to what they want when they want, the time to go mobile is finally upon us.

About 6 years ago I developed some WAP sites for the Battlemail gaming platform on the Siemens mobile phones. It was quite a coup at the time, we signed a deal with siemens and it was a buzz to be able to walk into a mobile phone shop and see something we’d actually worked on in the shops.

WAP though was not the perfect solution. This was before we had the full colour screens we have today, and well before having the actual internet on our phones was too imaginable.

Now though with browser applications such as Opera Mini etc there’s no need to develop in a different technology just to see your site on a phone. It’s all there in glorious colour at faster speeds than some people still get at home!!

I have heard the arguments that the internet on mobile phones will never really take off because the screens are too small etc. To those people I’ll say one thing “Wake up!!!” those problems are already being solved with phone browsers showing whole pages and allowing to zoom in to just the pieces of information you are interested in.

The good thing about these great little browsers is this, you probably don’t need to redevelop because they can read your existing site.

True mobile sites are in fact mini versions of our sites formatted for viewing through mobile phones and devices. all in all it’s just another nice big arena for us to show off our wares and we’ll ignore it at our own peril.

Internet development - where to start….

When I started off in Web Development about 10 years ago, there weren’t too many resources to get good tutorials, code examples and just overall advice from.

These days with everyone and their dog developing sites in their bedrooms and calling themselves Web Developers, there are countless sitres offering tutorials and samples for people just starting out.

I thought it might be useful to list a few of my bookmarks.
Places you can get help, tutorials and advice on development.

W3schools

One of the best sites in my opinion on the web for developers is http://www.w3schools.com/
Here you will find tutorials on just about all web development topics.
When I was starting off I bought books such as the “For Dummies” range etc but even they where unclear. At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.

Even for those people who are seasoned developers will find useful reference guides there.

Aspin.com

http://www.aspin.com/ is a resource for all asp scripts and components which can save you hours in development time. If you are not developing using asp then it’s still worth going to the http://www.codango.com/ which is the group site for aspin as they also do sites for JSP, PHP and asp.net

Poll daddy

http://www.polldaddy.com/

Is a site that can provide polls and surveys for your site. Again a great time saver and so easy to implement into your own site.

http://www.wordpress.com

Remember that there are millions upon millions of people on the internet and a hell of a lot of them blog.
What I’m saying is that there are loads of people in the same boat as you, search wordpress or blogger for people who are writing about their experiences.

So take a look and if you have some resources that you think other developers may find useful then please leave them in the comments.