Ben Seymour

Ben Seymour

eCommerce & Dynamic Content Specialist | Responsive Images Advocate | Author | Husband & Dad | Code Club | Motorsports & cycling | though not in that order...

Blog post archives

Careers Thoughts

How do you quantify the value of a job? a.k.a. “Should I stay or should I go now?”

Drexler Sibbet model

Having pondered the nature and needs of high performing teams for some time, I;ve just discovered the Drexler Sibbet model, which gives a fantastic guide wit...

Short Lessons for the Kids

I’m writing this while at an altitude of 11,582 meters somewhere over Western Canada, on my way to San Francisco. For those who know me, or who have seen my ...

Cloudinary Images

Having recently joined the team at Cloudinary, it’s brilliant to be able to start leveraging their our amazing dynamic media APIs.

Essential First Aid

TL;DR Follow this link to book a first aid course. These are definitely lessons to learn before you need them.

Fight or Flight

“Everything you ever wanted is on the other side of your fears.”

The Struggle

If you’ve seen any of my old demos, or seen some of the examples from ebook, you might have noticed that I rather like using images of butterflies as my demo...

Getting Kids Into Coding

I work in software development, and I’ve loved experimenting with computers for nearly 40 years. I don’t think that everyone should become a developer, just ...

NaBloPoMo Finale

On November 1st, in a rather impromptu fashion, I decided to commit to both Movember and NaBloPoMo. (Jump to: NaBloPoMo summary)

Live Fully Now

Now. Now is precariously balanced between the impermeable weight of the past and the incalculable potential of the future. Looking to surf that sweet spot be...

Blog Posts - Categories & Tags

In migrating from Wordpress to Jekyll, I’ve been updating and changing many aspects of my personal site and blog. One area that is overdue for some attention...

Sales

Over the last decade or two, I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved with a fairly wide array of roles, including (but probably not limited to):

Content Consumption & Sharing Workflow

I find myself awash in an ever-expanding sea of content. This is in part thanks to the web’s empowerment of self-publishing, combined with social networks ma...

Moving To Mac

Having used Windows and Linux for several decades, I only started my foray into using a Mac when I moved jobs about 5 years ago. I can still recall my initia...

Another Lap of the Sun

I started on another lap of our star today, and so spend the day enjoying time with my family, rather than writing a proper post. Hopefully this isn’t too ou...

Another Lap of the Sun

I started on another lap of our star today, and so spend the day enjoying time with my family, rather than writing a proper post. Hopefully this isn’t too ou...

The Ratchet

A ratchet is a mechanical device that allows continuous linear or rotary motion in only one direction while preventing motion in the opposite direction. When...

What Motivates Us

Studies show that: As long as a task uses only mechanical skill, structured financial rewards work as expected i.e. higher rewards lead to greater performanc...

Capturing Whiteboard Photos

For as long as I’ve worked in software a big whiteboard has been a core tool in figuring out complex problems, especially when working in collaboration with ...

Focus

How’s your to-do list looking? What do you use to track it? If it’s anything like mine, then it regularly runs the risk of becoming unmanageable. That the ta...

Alan Watts

In case you’ve not come across Alan Watts already, he was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern ...

Home Photography Workflow

As discussed yesterday, I consider the capture, curation, sharing and archiving of the photos and videos of our family’s precious memories to be extremely im...

Curation is an act of love

Possessing an always-connected, socially-integrated smartphone triggers any number of life changing behaviours, attitudes and potential, including the rather...

Making the most of your fears

I’m not a fan of flying. I have a pretty good cognitive grasp of the physics, engineering tolerances, flight crew’s ongoing training and testing procedures. ...

Halfway

At the start of November, and with very little prior thought, I commenced two month-long activities: “Movemeber” and “NaBloPoMo”. Here we are, at day 15 - h...

We’re In This Together

I wonder if there is any industry which changes faster than Web Development? I wonder if there is another industry in which people so freely relinquish their...

Jekyll Embedded Video - timelapses

In moving to Jekyll I really liked the idea of managing/writing all my content using just markdown. While it is valid to include HTML in your markdown, I rea...

Reflecting On The Weekend

As I mentioned yesterday in a regular routine. such as traveling for work, it’s easy to switch on to auto-pilot, to to get side-tracked into the gnarliness o...

Photo365 - Flickr API

My working week typically starts with a 2 hour drive/train/walk /tube/walk to the Shoreditch office (or flight out from Heathrow visiting our Continental Eur...

Dynamic Images 101 - NaBloPoMo #10

I mentioned ‘Dynamic Imaging’ systems in yesterday’s post. While these services are growing in popularity, they are still somewhat niche, yet they have the p...

Getting back into blogging - NaBloPoMo #1

As you may have gathered from many of the recent ‘test’ posts, after many years of relatively happy self-hosted Wordpress blogging, I’ve recently completed m...

Testing testing 123

Testing the Workflow app -> 1Writer -> Git2Go The workflow includes building a skeleton for a Jekyll blog post with dates auto-encoded

Assert Your Freedom of Attention

This week’s Breaking Borders had two superb talks, one from Christopher Murphy the other by James Williams. While there is no way I can do them justice, I wa...

Be A Better Me

At the top-centre of the whiteboard in my home-office is my current prime theme. It is intended to be short, mantra-like, and the broader perspective to whic...

Lean Startup

“Minimum Viable Products are optimized for learning, not scaling.”

Tate Worlds : reimagined in Minecraft

The Tate have been working on an amazing project to create virtual environments inspired by some of the artworks from their collection, in a most wonderful w...

WordPress Migration

This post is only on the new location for the ALL BS site – seeing it means that the migration was successful…. and actually surprisingly painless.

Make More of Your Videos

Note: This post originally appeared on the blog at Amplience.com (however the images were lost using a migration).

The Apprentice Bowl

During our anniversary trip back to Ireland we went back to Waterford Crystal. After the initial confusion of us returning to the factory which they apparent...

Bluebell Wood : Photosphere

Captured my favourite photosphere to date in nearby Bluebell Woods yesterday – unfortunately, there isn’t yet a mechanism that allows me to directly embed a ...

Wireless Headless Node Server

We are looking to use the Raspberry Pi as a motion triggered camera for our bird feeder. This was my son’s idea for his poster for the Raspberry Pi Poster Co...

Lightening Review of 2013

Inspired by @rem’s review, but lacking the time to do a proper post, here is my lightening review of 2013, (sorry I didn’t have the time needed to make it sh...

Node.js : hour 1

During half term, Em and the kids were off visiting family for a few days.

Preventing Google Shared Endorsements

Google have been really up front about their intentions around Google Shared Endorsements, which kick in on 11th November. If you’d rather not have your Goog...

Terminal Velocity

I had one of those problems to solve, that initially had me toying with blowing the dust of some Python, but in the end it struck me as the perfect time to g...

Sync All The Things

While we love DropBox and Google Drive for cloud based file sync’ing across all our devices, today I’m trying out an option for local-network Mac/PC sync’ing...

Timelapse Workflow Update

We’re on holiday up on the stunning Holy Island, and it’s a perfect opportunity to make some improvements to my current Timelapse workflow.  I’m now using my...

Web Performance Optimisation: hour 2

After Saturday’s rather fruitful hour, I set myself the follow up challenge to see how much more could I improve the Web Performance given a second hour.

Fluid – websites as Mac apps

I’d heard mention of Fluid app in few recent articles, but hadn;t appreciated just how simple it would be to implement. As I’m now using Trello more in my ho...

Posting from my phone

Just came much closer to being feasible. I’m not at all a fan of typing on soft keyboards, and have tried a couple of folding Bluetooth keyboards but rarely ...

VMWare Fusion and Windows Live Writer

I’m not a massive fan of writing in-browser, and so being recently new to Mac I’d been quite enjoying MarsEdit. However, as the 30 day trial came to it’s con...

Drawscript and HTML5 Canvas

Drawscript is a very interesting Adobe Illustrator extension (currently in beta) which converts vectors into graphics code. This can then be used to make UI ...

Responsive Images in a Responsive Layout

I’ve been meaning to update my previous responsive images example to be in conjunction with a responsive grid layout (rather than mapping to the whole page w...

Image SEO & Dynamic Imaging Systems

At this time, the image and video verticals in search engine results pages (SERPs) do not yet tend to be as hotly contested over as the textual content eleme...

Nexus7 Screen Grab

None of the usual tricks worked for taking a screen shot on the Nexus7, but it turns out to be:

Read it all later

Everyday I come across rather large quantities of very interesting materials, insightful articles, tools, libraries, that inevitably need to go on my to-read...

Upload all the things!

After 9 years as our ISP we move away from @EclipseInternet. After a crazy amount of problems and delays with the sales/ordering process, which took 2 months...

Nexus7 + OTG = freedom

We’ve been loving the Nexus 7 – it’s an Android which is so responsive, it starts to be in iPad territory.

New family photo workflow

Adobe Lightroom is importing 45GB of photos – so I might take advantage of having a few spare moments…

Change

Change : absorb – accept – adapt – respond – optimise : iterate

Olympic Torch relay

As we left the house to walk in to town to see the Olympic Torch relay pass through our town (Wallingford, Oxfordshire) I mostly grumbled about why on earth ...

Olympic Torch

The Olympic Torch has been very busy doing the rounds all over the UK in preparations for the 2012 London Olympics, and we were lucky enough to get hands-on ...

Set Your Rich Media Free

I enjoyed another new challenge today as I took part in Adobe’s Digital Marketing Insights Webinar series (Adobe Webinar Wednesday). While there were people ...

Responsive Images – test #2

Here are details of my second test implementation of Responsive Images (a.k.a. Fluid Image) using the and jQuery approach along with Adobe Scene7:

Responsive Images – #intro

Since I first saw Simon Collison’s beautiful and responsive site ( http://colly.com/) I’ve been enamoured by the prospect of Responsive Web Design.

Origin pull on Amazon Cloudfront

Since mid 2010 Amazon Web Services Cloudfront CDN has supported origin pull from non-S3 storage. I’ve been using Cloudfront for some time, but always S3 base...

Adobe Summit

The new Adobe Summit app was just launched, and it’s really good – and after a quick download, it already has the majority of info offline if needed.

How to transfer domains away from 1&1

After the frustrations as detailed in my earlier post (‘Savings not worth the cost‘) there were unsurprisingly more frustrations ahead I as started transferr...

Raspberry Pi is nearly being served

A lovely shiny 27″ iMac had been top of my wish list for many many moons, before it was finally knocked off the top spot by an item costing around 100 times ...

New (Elegant) WordPress Theme

I’ve been meaning to experiment with different WordPress Themes for this blog for some time, and recently came across another blog that I really liked the fe...

Telephony as a Service – Twilio

With Twilio  now offering full UK telephony support*, I spent part of my day off today exploring their platform – and I’ve got to say, I’m thoroughly impress...

2012 Olympics Gymnastics qualifiers

I was lucky enough to get an unexpected ticket to join my wife and son to see the 2012 Olympics Gymnastics qualifiers on Tuesday (10at the O2 Arena in London.

Dalai Lama: humanity and money

I first read this on a G+ post, and it appears there may be some doubt about the accuracy of the citation, but regardless of that it is a great for providing...

Picasa to Lightroom

For 5 years Picasa has been just what we needed for family day-to-day photo management, but lack of sync between multiple machines means it’s no longer tenab...

20 more years…

I read an article today describing how half of today’s 50 year olds would need to work until they are 77 in order to make ends meet.

Amazon Route 53 with S3/Cloudfront

I’d been meaning to investigate Amazon Route 53 for a few months, but the addition of Route 53 support to the AWS Console (hopefully) just makes this even si...

Stallman – free not open

I was fortunate enough to see Richard Stallman’s (rms) talk at Oxford Uni today titled ‘For A Free Digital Society’.

Windows 7 restore group

For the few months since I switched my main PC to Windows 7, I have generally been pretty happy with the experience, however there has been an annoyance whic...

Stay hungry, stay foolish

Like many, I find myself watching this more than once today. Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address:

Virtual Machines : VMware & VirtualBox

With the arrival of a nice new PC (HP HPE-599, i7-2600 based) I finally plan to spend some time using local machine virtualisation to change some of the fund...

Google Tasks

For day to day task lists, in addition to my whiteboard for day-to-day use, I really like MS OneNote, but the lack of utilisation/sync’ing for smartphone/tab...

Jetlag survival

I’m not a big fan of flying, but holidays, client site visits and forming a better working relationships with remote colleagues means that it is likely to ke...

Microstock photography

My wife and I have rather different photography skill levels. Em can typically visualise a photograph and get the composition just right, I generally take th...

fail constantly

“The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly” : an interesting blog post:

Starting over with Facebook

After a really interesting and insightful presentation by Christian Hernandez (Facebook’s Head of International Business Development) at the Adobe Omniture S...

No longer reading the negative space

Having recently moved to a tablet device running the kindle app, the white background – being actively emitted was just too jarring. So I switched to white t...

Simplify

Scruffy minded : I prefer to refer to it as being a creative trait, but undeniably I have a tendency to clutter my desk, my office, my plans… some aspects of...