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Do Kids See What We Wish We Could See?
A few weeks back, my four year old daughter Salem was still awake and chattering away in her bedroom, despite being in bed for over an hour.
When I went in to give her a cuddle and ask why she was still awake, she whispered to me, “She’s here.”
“Who’s here?” I asked.
“The girl.”
I pulled away a little and looked at Salem, who was looking intently behind my shoulder. “What girl?”
“The girl in the corner.”
I looked behind me to the corner of Salem’s room, where there was a little bit of shadow, but couldn’t see anything. I looked back at Salem, who smiled at me and said, “She’s gone now.”
To say I was a little freaked out is understating it. It probably didn’t help that I had recently watched The Conjuring, where a family has a not-so-pleasant experience with spirits in their new home.
It’s not the first time that Salem has had “conversations” in her room that we can hear through the monitor. Usually we just put it down to her telling herself stories to fall asleep, but after that recent “the girl” exchange, I’m not so sure.
Seems I’m not alone, either…
The Vision Only Kids Have?
When I shared this story on Facebook, many of my friends left examples of their own kids.
CREEPY! But probably true. Lauren used to wave and laugh at someone in the corner of her room when she was a baby. She also knew my dead father’s name when she was only 2 years old…also super creepy!
I used to volunteer at a daycare. One of the girls named her boy doll “Mushu” – which is kind of an odd, Asian name, right? So her mom asked her why she named him so, and the girl said “He told me.”
My son also had “a friend” growing up. He talked about him often and one night while checking on him before bed I saw him in the corner of the room watching over him. We even had to have a chair at the dinner table for him.
The overarching connection between each example is that they all refer to children, and not adults.
In addition to those, another friend suggested the reason for this.
Some children are more sensitive than others. Spirits know when people can see them and are drawn to those people.
Which made me wonder if the innocence of young children allow spirits to be seen as physical beings, and we lose that as we grow into adults and see life in a different way?
The Time I Saw a UFO
I think I believe in ghosts, or whatever spirits are, or the friends that my daughter and the kids in the examples above talk to. I’m not 100% sure, but there’s too much to discard completely.
Do all kids simply have imaginary conversations, or are there spirits of kids that died early that roam the earth looking for friends to keep them company?
Do all kids find a storytelling gift early, and it’s only when they go to school and are taught that it’s “bad” to use your imagination that they lose the will to converse with someone that isn’t there?
The reason I’m not sold on the belief that ghosts don’t exist is that many people claim that there’s no such thing as UFO’s – and yet I clearly saw one when I was a teenager in Scotland.
My sister and I were coming home from a movie, and something caught my eye. I looked up, and there was a light traveling at crazy speed, in three different directions in about the same amount of seconds.
The light stopped, hovered, rose, and then dropped. Then it scuttled one way, then another. It took one final swoop, for about five seconds, then shot up into the air beyond the clouds.
I looked at my sister, who was nine at the time, and she said that was the coolest thing she’s ever seen. To this day, I believe we both saw a UFO.
So if I saw something that so many adults say doesn’t exist, doesn’t it stand to reason our kids see things we say don’t exist?
The Things We Wish We Saw
I don’t know.
I do know that I’m extremely jealous of my little girl, if she has a ghost for a friend. How cool would that be? As long as it’s like Casper and not Chucky…
While I don’t recall our son Ewan having the same experience, my wife recalls him also having conversations, but the cats we used to have kept the ghosts at bay (seemingly cats are very good at this kind of thing, as shared by others on that same Facebook thread).
As an adult, it’d be nice to have something whimsical, or imaginary, but that’s also real to believe in.
The world is a cruel, cold place at times. It’d be nice to be able to see old friends no longer here, or loved ones long since passed.
But perhaps the realities of the world have made it too late for us to go back to that.
It reminds me of the scene in the Christmas movie, The Polar Express. The main character, a little boy who refound his belief in Santa Claus after an adventure to the North Pole, is given one of the bells from Santa’s sleigh.
On Christmas Day, only the boy and his little sister can hear the chime when they shake the bell. His parents can’t. As the voiceover of the boy-now-an-adult shares, even his sister lost the ability to hear the bell as she got older.
Not him, though – because he’d seen with his own eyes, and he believed.
Perhaps we’ve lost the ability to see beyond our eyes, and believe that which we no longer do. If so, that’s a shame.
Then again, we could always let our kids show us the way again…
original: Pure Blogging
Do Kids See What We Wish We Could See? originally appeared on Danny Brown – – all rights reserved.
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“Web Design Is Dead.” No, It Isn’t.
Every now and then we see discussions proclaiming a profound change in the way we design and build websites. Be it progressive enhancement1, the role of CSS2 or, most recently, web design itself being dead3. All these articles raise valid points, but I’d argue that they often lack objectivity and balance, preferring one side of the argument over another one.
These discussions are great for testing the boundaries of what we think is (or is not) possible, and they challenge how we approach our craft, but they don’t help us as a community to evolve together. They divide us into groups and sometimes even isolate us in small camps. Chris Coyier has published a fantastic post4 recently covering the debate on the role of CSS in light of growing popularity of React.js, extensively and objectively. That’s the quality discussions we need, and that’s what keeps us evolving as a growing and maturing community.
Web technologies are fantastic — we all agree on this. Our tools, libraries, techniques and methodologies are quite fantastic, too. Sometimes they are very different and even contradictory, but they are created with the best intentions in mind, and often serve their purpose well in the specific situations they were designed for. Sometimes they contain mistakes, but we can fix them due to the nature of open source. We can submit a patch or point out solutions. It’s more difficult, but it’s much more effective.
There are a lot of unknowns to design and build for, but if we embrace unpredictability5 and if we pick a strategy to create more cohesive, consistent design systems6, we can tackle any level of complexity — in fact, we do it every single day. We solve complex problems by seeking solutions, and as we do, we make hundreds of decisions along the way. Yet sometimes we fall into the trap of choosing a solution based on our subjective preferences, not objective reasoning.
We tend to put things into buckets, and we tend to think in absolutes. Pro carousels or anti carousels; pro React.js or anti-React.js; for progressive enhancement or against it. But the web isn’t black and white — it’s diverse, versatile, tangled, and it requires pragmatism. We are forced to find reasonable compromises within given constraints, coming from both business and UX perspectives.
Tools aren’t good or evil; they just either fit a context or they don’t. Carousels can have their place when providing enough context to engage users (as Amazon does). React.js modules can be lazy-loaded for better performance, and progressive enhancement is foundational for making responsive websites really8, really9 fast. And even if you have extremely heavy, rich imagery, more weight doesn’t have to mean more wait10; it’s a matter of setting the right priorities, or loading priorities, to be precise.
No, web design isn’t dead. Generic solutions are dead.11 Soulless theming and quick skinning are dead. Our solutions have to be better and smarter. Fewer templates, frameworks and trends, and more storytelling, personality and character. Users crave good stories and good photography; they’re eager for good visuals and interesting layouts; they can’t wait for distinctive and remarkably delightful user experiences. This exactly should be our strategy to create websites that stand out.
There are far too many badly designed experiences out there, and there is so much work for us to do. No wonder that we are so busy with our ongoing and upcoming projects. Proclaiming our craft to be dead is counter-productive, because we’ve shown ourselves and everybody out there what we are capable of. The last fifteen years of web design were nothing if not outstanding in innovation and experimentation. And it’s not about to stop; that’s just not who we are.
If we can’t produce anything but generic work, other creatives will. The web will get better and it’s our job to make it better. It won’t be easy, but if we don’t adapt our practices and techniques, we’ll have to give way to people who can get it done better than we can — but web design itself isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
It’s up to us to decide whether we keep separating ourselves into small camps, or build the web together, seeking pragmatic solutions that work well within given contexts. We might not end up with a perfect solution every time, but we’ll have a great solution still; and more often than not it’ll be much, much better than the solution our client came to us for in the first place.
(og, ms)
Footnotes
- 1 http://tomdale.net/2013/09/progressive-enhancement-is-dead/
- 2 https://medium.com/seek-ui-engineering/the-end-of-global-css-90d2a4a06284
- 3 http://mashable.com/2015/07/06/why-web-design-dead/
- 4 https://css-tricks.com/the-debate-around-do-we-even-need-css-anymore/
- 5 http://timkadlec.com/2015/06/thriving-in-unpredictability/
- 6 http://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/chapter-1/
- 7 https://www.flickr.com/photos/empty_quarter/12108068015/
- 8 https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/performance-rwd.html
- 9 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/09/08/improving-smashing-magazine-performance-case-study/
- 10 https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/weight-wait.html
- 11 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/07/06/hunt-for-the-webs-lost-soul/
The post “Web Design Is Dead.” No, It Isn’t. appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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Survey: SMBs Boosting Digital Media Spend Because Of Competition Not ROI
More small businesses (SMBs) are devoting more of their resources to digital media but that may be creating more challenges than it solves according to new survey data from Thrive Analytics in its 2016 Local Pulse Report. The survey captured responses from 1,116 SMBs and covered a range of topics…
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
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How I Use Social Media to Promote My Blogs
Building on work from ChrisBrogan.com this post shares how I promote my blogs using social media and other websites.
Is The Internet Killing Creativity?
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The internet is a wonderful place (mostly). An unprecedented revolution in communication, it continues to empower more people to publish and share their knowledge than any other phenomenon in history. It is a limitless playground of ideas and unbridled creativity. Or is it?
In 2014, Elliot Jay Stocks declared that designers have stopped dreaming. That we’ve stopped being creative. That every site looks the same. A crazy notion, considering the magnitude of tools and resources we have at our disposal. But Elliot’s been right before, and he’s not alone either.
The post Is The Internet Killing Creativity? appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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OVERVIEW: Nuffnang Blogopolis 2011.m4v
On July 30, 2011, some 300 Australian bloggers converged n Melbourne venue Zinc for the inaugural Nuffnang Blogopolis event. The event featured Problogger Da…
How I use Google Analytics ‘Compare’ Feature to Motivate Me to Grow My Blog
This morning, a reader asked me this question:
“How do you motivate yourself to grow your blog traffic from day to day?”
We’ve covered a whole heap of techniques for growing the amount of traffic you attract to your blog in our Blog Promotion category (also check out this ‘how to find readers page‘ and listen to my recent finding reader webinar) but one thing that has helped me on the ‘motivation’ front lately is the report below in Google Analytics (click to enlarge).
What you’re looking at is the traffic so far today (the blue line) on Digital Photography School compared to the traffic on the site one week ago (the orange line) – arranged by the hour.
I’ll tell you how to get this report below but first, the reason I love this report is that it tells me whether I’m on track to get as much traffic to my site today as I had this time last week.
Having something to compare traffic keeps me motivated to better the previous week’s result.
Note: I always choose to compare traffic from exactly 1 week previous because on our site we see quite distinct rises and falls in traffic on different days of the week.
In the chart above you can see the day’s traffic started well, with the first 4 hours between 1.7% and 18.1% higher than the previous week.
This all happened while I was asleep so when I checked in at 9am I was pleased! However, I also saw that from 6am-8am that we were beginning to slip behind.
Knowing this gave me a little bit of motivation to find some ways to drive more traffic to the site today.
I took a look at the schedule of Facebook updates that I had planned for the day and decided to move a status update I thought would drive some traffic to be earlier in the day.
That status update went live at 9am and resulted in a nice bump in traffic to get the blue line trending up above the orange again.
I also identified some older posts from my archives that I then scheduled to be tweeted throughout the next 24 hours (based upon my advice from last month to promote old content), which I thought would help us to keep nudging the traffic up higher for the rest of the day.
Having this report open is a great little source of motivation to keep working not only at writing great content but also driving traffic to it.
I also find that having this comparison open during the day (and watching ‘real time’ stats) helps me to spot anomalies in traffic. It helps me to quickly spot if there’s a problem (server issues) or on the flip side it shows me when a post might have been shared on a big blog or social media account.
Knowing this information helps me to react quickly to fix a problem or leverage a traffic event.
UPDATE: here’s how the traffic looked at the end of the day in the comparison view:
Things slipped for the last hour or two but over the full day visitor numbers were up by 4.22%.
While a 4% increase in traffic isn’t the most spectacular result I see it is a small step in a larger race I’m running. I know if I can see even a 1% increase in traffic each week that over a year or longer that it’ll significantly grow the site over time.
How to Get This Report
For those of you new to Google Analytics here’s the easy process to get this report (it will only take you a couple of minutes).
1. Login to your Google Analytics Account
2. In the menu click on the ‘Overview’ link under ‘Audience’
3. By default you’ll be looking at the last months traffic. You want to drill down now to today so in the top right corner click on the date range and a calendar will open up like this:
4. Select today’s date.
5. Check the ‘compare to’ box and then in the new date field that opens up underneath you can put in last weeks date by clicking on the day you want to compare it to. Once you have – click ‘Apply’.
6. You’re almost done now. You should be looking at a report that compares the two days but by default it’ll be showing you the total of the days in the chart as two dots. You want to view this now as ‘hourly’ so hit the ‘hourly’ tab.
You now should be looking at the comparison of today’s traffic with the same day last week (note: your current days report won’t yet be complete unless the day is almost over and it does run an hour behind).
Variations on this report to check out
This comparison tool is really useful for a while heap of reports.
For example you can choose to compare one week with another:
In fact, any period of time can be compared with any other period.
Also, with a date range locked in you can drill down into many other metrics.
For example, earlier today I was doing some analysis comparing this last week with the corresponding week in September, which was just before we did our new redesign on Digital Photography School.
A day by day comparison showed a great improvement in overall traffic.
Drilling down further, and viewing the two weeks by the hour, was also fascinating and showed that the two weeks had remarkably similar patterns in traffic from hour to hour – so the increase in traffic was very even across the week.
Under that chart was some interesting data:
Not only were Visits and Page views well up – but being able to see that bounce rate was slightly down and that average visitor duration was up was encouraging. Seeing Pages Viewed Per Visit was down showed we have an area to improve on (we’re already working on this) and seeing that we had a good rise in ‘new’ visitors was something that should be investigated further.
To investigate the rise in ‘new’ visitors I moved into the ‘Acquisition’ menu on Google analytics. The same date range and comparison is still selected so now I’m able to compare the two periods when it comes to different sources of traffic and see why we’ve had rises in traffic:
It turns out we’ve seen increases in a few area:
Search Traffic is up:
Facebook Traffic is up (due to my recent experiments):
But interestingly Feed traffic is down (giving us something to investigate).
There are many other areas you can drill down into with the comparison tool – almost anything that Google Analytics has a report for you can compare from period to period and get a great overview of how that stat compares very quickly.
Have a go yourself – do some comparisons and let me know what you find in comments below!
How I use Google Analytics ‘Compare’ Feature to Motivate Me to Grow My Blog
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