I will dedicate today’s post to something slightly out of the ordinary, as I’m not going to discuss some coding, or other jQuery plugin I have tested lately, but instead spend a few of my un-precious minutes on something which may be very helpful to you.

If you’re (like me) a twitter addict and you like sharing loads of good stuff with the ever-growing webdesign community on the now-famous birdy application, then on one or two occasions, you MUST have found yourself looking for something YOU had tweeted about.

It’s on the tip of your tongue, you know it, you’ve posted it on twitter a few months ago, but still, it ain’t coming back to you. If this has happened to you, and since it’s only a matter of days before your tweets become untraceable, you must have thought: “I need to get a backup of my tweets one of those days”.

Well this is what i thought of doing only a few days ago, and when I saw a number of tools advertising the possibility to integrate a backup of tweets into Google Calendar, i thought my alcohol-hit memory problems were past.

Unfortunately, i quickly found out that tools such Twistory could do very little if Google were to change their settings and change the behaviour of their calendar utility. I did look for alternative solutions but wasn’t able to find a working one.

I then decided to do this the hard way, i.e. manually. It doesn’t take neither a genius nor an hour to do this so I thought I would share it with you, bearing in mind that something automatic (with the folks from Twistory or others) is likely to come out very soon, and help you get this done in a more smooth and lazy-do-it-for-me manner.

Any way, talking is over. Here’s how I did import a backup of more than 700 tweets into my google calendar, in order to make them time-stamped and easily searchable.

Backup your tweets

Get one of those Twitter backup solution to extract all your tweets in one go. Be careful to do this before reaching the limit of 3200 tweets. I used for this Tweetake, third-party app which lets you backup your tweets but also your DM’s, favorites and more. I don’t have any preference as far as those tools are concerned. I’m in no way affiliated or sponsored by this particular one. It’s just Tweetake is the first one I have tried, you log in using Twitter’s OAuth system and it works straight away. Extract your tweets into a csv file. You will get something like this:

Manipulate your CSV

Then it’s only a question of manipulating the CSV file to make it compliant to the Google Calendar importing tool. I can only encourage you to read the Help about CSV file, which you’ll find here. It states that the minimum requirements are a Subject AND a Start Date, but really you’d need more than that to make your backup a precise one. I replaced the ‘status text’ header by ‘Subject’, did some manipulating (text to columns) on the ‘status date’ to isolate date and time on the right format (as you can see below). And I copied and pasted a few columns to duplicate Start Date and Start Time to get End Date and End Time.

Import your data into Google Calendar

This all done, you can log into your Google calendar, go to the settings panel, anc click on Calendars. Click on the import link and browse to your CSV, and you’re done. A minute or so later, all your tweets will be saved as single and time-stamped events in your calendar, and you will be able to search through them using the google search through my calendars functionality.

As I stated it below, while waiting that one of those third party services gets it right and makes it all easy for us, we can find a minute to do this manually, a few times a year.

Simple things are most of the time the most appealing ones. It is so true in life, and this happens to be true (this is my opinion anyway) in web design. I often take peeks at minimalist web designs thinking “this web site has got nothing on, yet it looks wicked”.

Now, this post is not about entering into a real debate on how one would qualify a site as being minimalist. We can use ‘plain and simple’ or ‘clean’ websites if the ‘minimalist’ term bothers you.

Cut a long story short, I reckon simplicity, ie the removal of superfluous links/pictures/distractions and the look for simplicity on a web page often do the trick and bring so much more appeal to the eye,… and the brain.

Today, I have decided to push this minimalist approach one step further, by removing (temporarily) navigation links, footer, (more if you like) from an already-clean-cut website to emphasize my theory on minimalism.

I have created a fake analytics firm delivering usage reports through smart phones (in this case I used a picture of the iphone), and decided to have a little play around with the moto of the company (based on the concept of control and measurement), and allow visitors to interact with the layout of the site by pressign down the Control Key.

The idea of course is to let visitors land on a mega-clean webpage where the main product, company logo and moto only would feature before revealing (by pressing down the CTRL key) the rest of the site (ie navigations links, sections, footer…etc).

I used jQuery for this, but im sure there are many other ways to do this.

Here’s the jQuery code I used if you are interested. I’m simply toggling classes of elements (between nodisplay and display) with function(event), and specifiying the event as being event.ctrlkey.

jQuery code

<script type="text/javascript">
		$(function() {
			$(document).keydown(function(event) {
				if (event.ctrlKey) {
					$('#nav').toggleClass('display');
					$('#any other div').toggleClass('display');
				}
			});
		});
</script>

That’s it folks! You may apply this technique to your own minimalist designs if you like the visual effect.

Don’t forget to check the demo.

I guess everybody has his/her own way of scanning through a newly-found website. Some people might focus on the services, the portfolio, the prices, the product range….etc
However, one thing all of us do certainly have in common is our interest in the company/shop/service provider’s reputation and basic information.

Trust and credibility are very important in the virtual world. No doubt we would go and check the shop, meet the artisan or assess the chosen venue physically if it was just a question of walking round the corner, but the fact is we cannot. Therefore looking for basic information, potential credentials, is something more than natural.

A Must-do

Sharing this basic information on an ‘About’ page has therefore become a pre-requisite when it comes down to building a website, web designers and other web professionals aware that the presence of such a page is likely to boost their site’s or their customers’ sites’ conversion rates.

Of course, anybody building a website could lay down the wildest hallucinations and other porky pies on their ‘About’ page, but let’s give the millions of honest people out there some credit: the basic information found on those pages is usually not only true, but also verifiable.

Boring your audience may harm your website’s health

Golden rule when building an ‘About’ page could apply to all the presentations you may give an audience. Don’t make it a boring one. Who is going read a 2500-line manifesto looking more like terms and conditions of a contract?

Don’t give your readers an old-fashioned sales pitch either. We are here to serve our customers, and tell them the truth, during both good and less-comfortable spells. On top of that, it is more than likely somebody out there is doing a better, quicker and cheaper job than you ever will be able to do. Hence, unless you really are, just drop the ‘we are the world leader in our area’ marketing gimmick.

Make this page a concise, straight-to-the-facts clean one. Give your readers a bit of historical data about your structure, and more importantly a clear understanding of the mission statement of the company. Answer the basic who-why-where-whom-when questions, and add a few credentials/customers’ references if any.

Anonymously yours,… NOT!

Acquiring the trust of your visitors is, as stated above, a must-do if you want to convert those leads (visits to the website) into what could become a great opportunity to build a relationship between both the customer and you. One thing I like doing when visiting company or service providers’ websites, is reading a few words about the business owner and his staff.

For a start, it shows the decider took some time to gather valuable information about his personnel, and is not considering his business as a one-man band (unless it is!), by bringing colleagues, collaborators, friends-on-board (whatever you may call them) on the front stage.

I also find it so much more polite to get introduced even virtually with some people I may hand my house, money, or projects, even for a short and temporarily mission.

Finally, I appreciate relate to those people one way or another when taking a look at their pictures, roles, experiences and maybe hobbies. And knowing that decisions (including buying or hiring ones) are more than often based upon emotional factors, it emphasizes the importance of a well-constructed but more human-friendly ‘About’ page .

Practical example

Enough chit-chat, let’s take a Practical example and therefore a look at something I would recommend to do on an ‘About’ page, i.e. focus as briefly mentioned above on presenting wisely the company staff.

Go to: Spice up your ‘About’ page with a jQuery Zoom effect on your Staff presentation.