Lockdown has given me the three-plus hours a day I spent commuting to and from the office back, and I’ve spent some of that time giving my blog a cosmetic makeover, making it fully responsive and moving it to a more up to date hosting partner.
But, after taking a long hard look at the content on the site, it was also time for some aggressive use of the delete key.
Over the last half-decade, I’ve become a product specialist, focusing more on roadmaps, emerging technologies and strategy development.
Although I still get my hands dirty with a fair bit of UX design work and prototyping, it’s becoming more and more challenging to find projects to feature in a portfolio. A lot of what I work on now isn’t visual, and the outcomes are more likely to be proprietary, so the ‘projects’ section of the site is now in the recycle bin.
Having said that some of those projects are still worthy of discussion and hold lessons for today. For example, one project has UX designs featuring the first generation iPhone. However, it was delivering online learning at scale to over 10,000 people every day, so I will be taking a leaf out of the Guardian’s book and publishing a few “how we made…” articles in the future.
The blog itself is also starting from a blank page. The content there hasn’t aged well. It’s not that all my pontifications about the future haven’t turned out to be correct. OK some of them were correct – a few of them.
It’s the speed with which technology relentlessly moves forward that has rendered my earlier blog posts redundant. There’s no value in discussions on how to migrate content from Flash, nor extolling the virtues of services and platforms that turned out to here today and gone tomorrow.
One final piece of functionality I’ve deleted from the site is the ability to comment on articles. When I started building websites, the Internet was going to be a place for the civilised exchange of views, knowledge and understanding.
Today we know that wasn’t how things turned out, and I’m spending far too much time deleting spam and bots from the comments section. I’ll cross-post most of my articles on LinkedIn or Twitter, so please do feel free to respond or debate on there.
Right, now I’ve deleted everything I better start writing!