2,000 links and one new colour

It was recently World Refugee Day (20 June) and for much of the last six months I have been racing to help launch a new website project for the Careif charity where I volunteer my time.

We chose 20 June as our target launch date for CARE - the Careif Archive of Refugee Empowerment. CARE is a collection of resources relating to the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers aimed at both professionals working in these areas as well as those directly affected and in need of help. You can read more about it in the launch news story which I wrote.

I’ve been helping build these pages at Careif since last year. There is a lot of content (it brings together links to over 2,000 external resources) and it means that the number of pages at Careif has effectively tripled.

Building the site

Squarespace page folders

Although there were some talks about whether this might be a completely separate website to Careif, we decided to build it as part of the site.

That has led to a few challenges in working with the Squarespace CMS. Although Squarespace lets you arrange pages in folders, you can only have one level of hierarchy. The new CARE pages predominantly concern adult resources and child resources, but there are also other sections (e.g. resources for humanitarian workers).

I can create URLs for all of these pages that reflect this hierarchy, e.g.

• careif.org/care/adult-resources

• careif.org/care/child-resources

• careif.org/care/humanitarian-resources

However, Squarespace doesn’t let you recreate that hierarchy visually in the CMS. This is because, although you can create folders to help arrange pages, they can only be one level deep (I think the primary purpose of folders is to arrange pages that will appear in navigation menus). This may seem a minor point but I think it points to the challenges of using Squarespace if you are going to develop a big website.

So I ended up having to create three separate folders to make it easier to manage these pages, with one folder each for adult and child resources and another folder for everything else.

A new colour

When building the ‘new’ Careif website a few years ago, I had settled on a very simple colour palette which was based on the (pre-existing) Careif logo. As the CARE pages have greatly expanded the Careif site, I felt like we needed one new colour to be used on CARE pages which was distinct from the existing colours but which still complemented them.

Using one of the many online colour palette tools that you can find (I used the excellent coolors), I settled on ‘raspberry’ as the CARE accent colour. This is applied as an underline on page titles and also as a new secondary button colour.

Rethinking the content model

There is still work to be done in creating one more page of resources for CARE. In putting these pages together, I feel that ultimately all of the page content should be completely rebuilt as some form of database with all resources tagged/categorised appropriately. 

One possible solution for this in Squarespace would be to create every individual resource as its own blog post (with relevant tags/categories applied) and then use a third-party plugin to have a front-end that lets you search and filter all blog posts.

This would be a lot of work but could make managing the content easier as there would only be one content item (a blog post) for each resource, whereas currently some individual resources are duplicated across different pages.

Tackling link rot

Now that the site has grown so much, an additional challenge is to be better at checking for ‘link rot’. With over 2,000 links to external sites, we can expect those links to break regularly as sites shut down, get merged with other organisations, or just rearrange all of their content. This is a common challenge with managing any site that links to a lot of external material.

At RCPsych we use Dr Link Check to find broken links (there are various paid plans available) and I think we will try using this at Careif too now.

Time for a break

This has been a lot of work to get the CARE pages together and it is pleasing to see that they are already generating traffic. For me personally, this is now the third big piece of web development I’ve done outside of work this year. I’ve built an artist’s website for a friend (meganyelets.com), I’ve rebuilt this website and now I’ve helped launch CARE. I think I have earned a summer break now!

Stop opening Outlook just to check your calendar

Away from work, I am a Mac and iPad user. If I want to check my calendar, I open a calendar app. If I want to check my email, I open an email app.

At work though, I’m locked into the standard PC-based, Microsoft environment. My employer expects me to use all of the standard Windows 11 apps. So that’s Microsoft Edge for web browsing, Microsoft To Do for creating to do lists, Microsoft OneNote for taking notes etc.

So this is the problem: if I only want to see my calendar, I have to open Microsoft Outlook and that comes with the heavy baggage of also being my email client. This means that my intention to just check what my day or week is going to look like runs the risk of me seeing my email inbox.

Why is having one app for emails and calendars a bad thing? 

Even the strongest-willed among us will know the feeling of getting sucked into dealing with emails that are sitting in your inbox just because they are there, They tease and taunt us…pulling us in like sirens luring sailors to their death.

You may intend to only open your calendar app but because Microsoft have made that go hand-in-hand with your emails, you might find yourself diverted into reading that new email from your boss, and then that email from a colleague that you were waiting on…and 30 minutes later you realise that you haven’t yet looked at your calendar.

Distractions like this create something called ‘attention residue’. This is a phrase coined by researcher Sophie Leroy in a 2009 article on Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks.

This article refers to the problems caused by ‘task switching’ where even if you do get back to your calendar app, your mind continues to have traces of focus still lingering on whatever emails you were looking at. Every distraction like this might cost you as much as 23 minutes to gain your focus back.

Microsoft created a solution…and then killed it

For a while, there was a glorious solution to this problem, one that Microsoft itself instigated. Windows 11 includes a ‘Widgets board’ that can display various widgets, including weather, stocks, etc. This can be launched by clicking on the relevant icon in your taskbar, but you can also launch it by simply pressing Windows + W.

I used this extensively, as it let you have a calendar widget and a To Do widget. It was wonderful. A simple keyboard shortcut could quickly let me show (and then hide) what my day was looking like. Microsoft clearly understood the issues of having a combined app for emails and calendar and was doing something about it.

Or at least they only understood it until November 2024, when they removed those widgets from the Widgets board.

Microsoft made something that I actually admired and then pulled it out of my hands. This was maddening, but I would not let it rest.

Building the solution that Microsoft doesn’t want you to have

My own frustration with getting distracted by emails when all I wanted to do was view my calendar led me to create a simple solution. I have a Windows shortcut on my desktop that launches an app view of my Outlook calendar (a single webpage but with no address bar, or bookmarks bar etc), and this is all controlled by a keyboard shortcut.

Here are the step-by-step instructions:

1. Right-click an empty area of your Windows desktop and choose New → Shortcut

2. In the Location field box of the resulting pop-up window, add the following (which should work on any corporate Windows setup) "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --app="https://outlook.office.com/calendar/view/day"

3. Click Next

4. Choose a name for the shortcut, e.g. 'Today's calendar'

5. Click Finish

6. Now, right-click on the shortcut icon on your desktop and choose 'Properties'

7. In the 'Shortcut key' field, add the keyboard shortcut that you want to use (I use Control + Alt +C)

8. Click OK to finish 

What your shortcut properties might look like

This will make Edge open the web version of Outlook in app mode (which removes things like the address bar, bookmarks bar, etc.) and display your calendar in 'day' view.

The final result!

If you prefer to view your calendar in a week or month mode, just use the appropriate URL in step 2:

• outlook.office.com/calendar/view/week

• outlook.office.com/calendar/view/workweek

• outlook.office.com/calendar/view/month

Of course you are free to choose any keyboard shortcut for step 7, but first check it is not already being used by Windows.

Hope this is of use to anyone like myself who feels somewhat trapped in a Windows world at work. As a Mac/iPad user who has sometimes tried getting through a work day using nothing but an iPad Pro, I may return to similar issues in future blog posts!

20th century boy

Note, this is a blog post I originally wrote in September 2011 when I lived in Davis, California. It was written shortly after I heard the news that my grandad had died. It was originally posted on the website of the local newspaper (the Davis Enterprise).

December 27, 1918.

Sometimes, when we see dates like this, it is not always possible to truly comprehend the passage of time that has elapsed since that point in history. Let us consider what things would be like if you were born on this date, and you found yourself entering the world at this early part of the twentieth century. How would your life be different if you were a child born only weeks after the first world war had ended?

To begin with, you would be around to experience all of the world-changing events that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.  Most significantly, you would live through both the Great Depression and World War II. You would witness the technological miracles of the age: movies with sound, television, commercial radio, refrigerators, frozen food, and transatlantic flight, to name but a few.

Can you even conceive what your life would be like without these things that we take for granted today? If you were born on this date in the United Kingdom, then you might also have lived under four different monarchs and eighteen different Prime Ministers.

December 27, 1918 was the day that a boy called Dennis was born. Like many of his generation, he was very much a local man and the vast majority of his life was spent in the same house in the same town — a town whose population would experience a more than five-fold increase in his lifetime.

His family had long been established in the local area — at least as far back as the mid-18th century. Although his surname would remain relatively common in his home town, one of his more distant relations would achieve great sporting fame on the other side of the planet.

Sometimes I wonder what someone like Dennis, a man who had never travelled overseas, would make of a city like Davis, California. Despite the large differences in culture between an old English market town and a small, modern California city, I think Dennis would like it here.

He came from a farming family and spent many years working for a local fruit processing company. He was also a keen gardener and had his own allotment for many years. He also kept chickens. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that Dennis would have liked Davis very much indeed. Although he was better known to his friends as “Johnny,” to me he was more simply known as “Grandad.”

RIP Dennis “Johnny” Bradnam
December 27 1918 – September 6 2011

I’ve had the decorators in: new look to website plus accessibility improvements

Regular visitors to this blog — which is probably just me — might notice that things have changed a little bit. I’ve taken some time over the last week to update the look and feel of my site.

Outwardly, it’s not a very bold change. This website still consists of three pages, with the blog page as the main page that includes summaries of each post. I’ve ditched the ‘Read More’ links as each blog post title is also a link.

The most obvious visual change is that I have refreshed the look of the site and doubled down on red as an accent colour.

However, there are many more changes that have happened _behind_ the scenes, including many accessibility improvements.

Squarespace upgrade

The main reason I made any changes to the site is that this website has been running on Squarespace v7.0 for many years. The latest version of Squarespace is v7.1; while this might not sound very different, it’s quite a fundamental change.

Upgrading to 7.1 is a non-reversible action and after I made the change, it immediately changed how my site looked (for the worse). Squarespace 7.1 just does a lot of things differently and some of the things you could do in 7.0 just don’t exist any more.

I have spent many hours just making very small refinements to get the site broadly looking like it used to. Although this was a bit of a time sink, it made sense given that the charity site I manage (careif.org) and the site I built for my artist friend (meganyelets.com) are both running Squarespace, so it makes sense for all of these sites to be running on the same version.

Accessibility updates

One of the things I really wanted to do with this refresh is improve the accessibility of this site. This follows a lot of work I’ve been doing in my main job to help improve the accessibility of the RCPsych website.

This means that this website now includes:

• Improvements to hover states: you’ll see a yellow background when hovering over a link, the link text will darken and the underline will thicken.

• Improvements to focus states: keyboard users can tab through elements and see a black box border on links.

• Use of ‘active’ state: clicking on a link slightly darkens the yellow background colour to reinforce that a link has been clicked.

• Making use of visited link status: if you click on a link, then your browser will remember this and change the link colour to grey. This is not so much of an accessibility improvement, but could potentially help people with memory problems, providing a clearer indication of what they have previously clicked on.

Incidentally, removing all of the ‘Read More’ links on my blog landing page is another accessibility improvement. Link text should be unique on a page, as someone using a screen-reading device would otherwise struggle to distinguish between different link destinations if they all say the same thing.

These are the sorts of improvements that can take a bit of time to implement, but it’s a one-off investment that provides lasting benefits. You will never know which users of your website have disability requirements, so making it as accessible as possible removes barriers that prevent some users from benefiting from content.

Keep on blogging

I surprised myself last week by writing almost 2,000 words for a new post on my ACGT science blog. This post came very easily to me and I would go so far as to say it was an enjoyable experience, reminiscing about a decision I was involved in over 20 years ago to decide a new set of gene identifiers for a model organism database:

• What’s in a (gene) name?

The ACGT blog was something I started back in 2012 when I was an active science researcher at the Genome Center in UC Davis. I had lots of things on my mind from my research and found it a great way to get things off my chest. My first post is still up:

• Adding polish to presentations: 10 tips to make your talk shine

I went on to write another 300 or so posts while I was still an active scientist. Many of the posts that I wrote — particularly my deep dives into how some bioinformatics program worked — have turned out to be ‘evergreen’ content and continue to receive a lot of traffic (over 10,000 visits for the entire website last year!):

Line chart showing yearly visits to my ACGT website since 2014 (data from Squarespace analytics)

My most popular post continues to be a nerdy deep-dive article that I wrote back in 2014 about some particular pieces of bioinformatics software:

Understanding MAPQ scores in SAM files: does 37 = 42?

This post received over 2,500 views last year — over a quarter of all of the website’s traffic! — though I am expecting this sort of traffic to slowly dry up now that AI tools will give people accurate enough answers without the need to read all of the underlying material.

Post-science blogging

After I left science research in November 2015 and moved into science communication (January 2016), I still had some ideas for blog content. Including my recent post outlined at the top of this post, I’ve managed to publish almost 40 ACGT blog posts since then, though very few in recent years (and only three since 2022).

I like the idea that (very) occasionally I have an idea for something that is still relevant (and might even be of interest to people). So I’m happy to continue paying for the ACGT.me domain name and hosting the content for long as there is interest in the content.

Other blogs

In the past I once had an Apple iWeb blog which relived memories of my time at secondary school (age 10-13). Sadly, that was all lost at some point (I’m generally better about saving blog posts these days).

When I lived in Davis, CA I ended up writing some blog posts for the local newspaper (the Davis Enterprise). These seem to still be up, but are now paywalled. One of my favourite posts there was a reflection on the life of my grandad, written shortly after he died.

I still have my Molluskan Zodiac blog (the only blog devoted to molluskan-themed horoscopes that are generated by a Perl script) which is still updated weekly. I’ve also tried a Medium blog about social media analytics (which is still online, but defunct), a tumblr blog that described the 5-star rated songs in my music library, and many more (including a short-lived technology blog which is still technically online but somewhat hidden).

There are other blogs too that I won’t even mention. So I’ve blogged a lot in the past, have been through a relatively quiet period, but hope to gain a bit more enthusiasm going forwards. And this brings me to…

This blog

Away from the active, but infrequently updated, ACGT blog, I obviously have this blog that you (dear reader) are reading now. I started this around the same time as my ACGT blog, but since 2022 I’ve only managed seven posts here. So not exactly proflific, but at least that’s more than twice as many posts as on the ACGT blog. However, I’m trying to be better about coming up with ideas for this blog.

Given that my main job involves digital communications, and that I am a volunteer at a charity where I manage their website and social media, it makes sense that this is a topic I should feel able to write about.

I did make my post earlier this year on dark social web traffic and I will try to think of more things like this where maybe I have something useful to say.

I think I also need to be less precious about waiting for a really good idea before writing something. If I want to get back into blogging (which I do), then it is probably more important for me to write things which might be rough thoughts, not yet fully formed.

Additionally, I also think, that I shouldn’t be precious in wanting to only write about digital communications. So maybe this blog will need to ‘find its way’ a bit for me to better identify what it is that I enjoy writing about.

If you’ve got this far, then thank you and if you are also a fellow blogger, then it goes without saying that you should please keep on blogging.

Rekindling the joy of building a website

Art by Megan Yelets

Last Thursday I was waiting to see my 8-year old’s school play and was chatting to a parent friend who was standing in the line next to us.

She is a great artist who is currently showing her work at an exhibition in London, but she revealed that she didn’t have a website or own her own .com domain.

A couple of hours after the play ended I bought her domain name for her. I also offered - if she wanted - to build her a website for free.

I have quite a bit of experience using Squarespace to build websites (including this site) and I felt like this might be the sort of thing where a built-in template would probably meet most of her requirements without much need for tweaking.

We met the next day to discuss what options were available and less than a week later her website — meganyelets.com — is now live (built to her specifications)!

Building a site for an artist

This is a very different type of project compared to anything else I have done in my years of managing and building websites. After we had reviewed some other artist’s websites, Megan had requested that she wanted a big cover image on the home page that would lead into a gallery of some of her images.

It quickly became apparent to me that we needed the whole focus to be on the art itself. Consequently this led me to keep everything else relatively plain and unobtrusive.

I probably had the first draft of the site all complete with a couple of hours. I then spent many more hours doing lots of fine tweaking.

Frustratingly, I discovered that although Squarespace lets you add custom code and CSS while you are building the site (i.e. while you are effectively on a free plan) but as soon as the site goes live, your custom code will be removed if you are on their base level plan.

I only realised this after the site went live and so I then had to find a workaround as I didn’t think it was worth a £60 per year upgrade to the plan just to get this one extra feature.

Next steps

Megan is very happy with the results and I hope that she now has a platform to help showcase her lovely art to a wider audience.

As for me, there is still some work to be done and I hope to set her up with a newsletter service so she can more easily share updates with people interested in her work.