RKNet Blog... Thing

Day one was fraught with challenges, up to and including having trouble finding the venue. It took a lot of wandering around, a phone call, and I think two concierge desk stops to finally figure out that the Copley Plaza Marriott was in fact through the Copley Plaza Westin and the attached mall. That said, on with the notes.

Session 1: Understanding Web Design - Jeffrey Zeldman

• Missed this session entirely. :(

Session 2: Lessons of CSS Frameworks - Eric Meyer

• Missed over half of this session. :( I blame Mass traffic.
• Hits on server vs. File size. The more hits to the server, the slower the load times. File size isn’t nearly as much of an issue.
• IE(6) does not cache 2nd tier stylesheets. (stylesheets linked from within other stylesheets)
• IE6 wants nothing to do with your fancy link styling. Don’t rely on it to convey critical information if you think you’ll have a significant amount of IE6 visitors. (Know your audience!)
• Mobile phones probably can’t handle your stylesheet (iPhone notably excepted from this guideline).
• create a grid or layout background to use for debugging.
• Create a debugging stylesheet that replaces more subtle elements with large, bold colors to see exactly how your major elements line up.
• Set default colors in the body of the document to override any CSS weirdness or absence.
• Try to avoid measurements in pixels. Percentage or EM will provide better usability and cross-browser support.
• Create a framework file. This is a totally empty stylesheet, containing only elements, classes and ids, as well as comments explaining the general purpose of each. This provides the framework for others to understand your work, and gives you a blank to start from in future work.
• Maintain clean, logical naming conventions. Don’t use .RedBigText use .Header or .CallToAction. This way if you have to make this class perform a function other than red, big text you can make those changes while maintaining your markup.

Session 3: Good Design Ain’t Easy - Jason Santa Maria (turned 30! Happy Birthday!)

• Look to be different. Be familiar with popular box models & learn what you can do to separate yourself from them.
• Print != the web. (!= is does not equal for those who aren’t familiar) Therefore, instead of innovating based on standards of print, we must look to usability standards and concepts to build a better (mousetrap) website.
• Design reinforces your message.
• Design fills in where content leaves off to create impressions.
• Referenced the storytelling power of a mostly visual chart of Napoleon’s progress.
• Pacing must be capable of including all pertinent info. Editor’s Note: I don’t remember what I meant by this note.
• Design must account for flexibility, changes, functions
• Design must be able to demonstrate depth, or give the visitor confidence that they can navigate comfortably.
• Design for your audience, not just to fit your box model.
• Take advantage of the medium, learn to apply the tech to its fullest.
• Plan before you do, and make stylesheets accordingly flexible
• Level of design intricacy hinges largely on the type of content it is meant to showcase and support.
• “Design can’t not communicate.” - David Carson, Helvetica
• The Golden Rule or other ratio is a handy reference for balancing a box model.
• Links:
• A Brief Message
• Fray
• Principles of Beautiful Web Design
• No One Belongs Here More Than You
• We Tell Stories
• “You can have it in any color you want, as long as it’s black.” - Henry Ford regarding the Model T
• Art direction should apply to the web also.
• Evaluate the saclability of unique content art direction (i.e. serious differences between pages, breaking from one standard template between pages).
• Marry your design to your code.

Session 4: Web Application Hierarchy - Luke Wroblewski

• You have approximately 1.6 seconds to make an impression on a first time visitor.
• References Steve Krug’s excellent book Don’t Make Me Think in regards to illustrating how we use the web. We don’t read. We track around the web looking for the next thing to get us to our intended informational goal.
• Great presentation on the web is comprised of a balance between information and emotion, or Visual Organization and Personality.
• Organize things in ways people can relate to. For example, organizing information in a customer lookup system like a rolodex.
• What’s front and center is critical
• Presentation should follow desired function
• Downplay non-critical information
• Create context by applying contrast, placement and seperation
• Consider the color scheme. Contrasting colors attract attention.
• Make uniquely important items distinct from the remainder of the page.
• Focus on your use of labels, whitespace, and the scanability of your page.
• Proximity of items, similarity of items, and pattern of items dictate how noticable they are.
• The more differences between neighboring items, the higher the contrast and the more likely a visitor is to focus on it.
• Orchestrate the distribution of visual weight (what’s most noticable to what’s least noticable) to influence user experience.
• Avoid too many “look at me!” items as it creates confusion.
• Avoid too few “look at me!” items as it leads to disinterest
• Information should not be distributed via firehose
• Be aware of how people access and use your site. Or how it is intended to be used at least. These factors inform how the hierarchy of information should be structured.
• Consider how people find you and what you want them to do when they get there.
• People come to your site for some kind of content. Don’t let the overhead (structural elements of your website, other navigation, etc) overwhelm that content. Give the people what they want.
• Visually prioritize the actions you want or need people to take
• Strive for a clear, logical flow of information using visual cues and standardization of content. (Hint: Centering text is very unhelpful when trying to achieve this logical flow.
• Consider your overall signal to noise ratio when displaying lots of information. Too much contrast and the data gets overwhelmed. Too little and the data itself is overwhelming.
• Luke’s site: Lukew.com

And then it was lunchtime! Will talk more about that when I get around to my travel log post. I’ll have the rest of day one in a seperate post, so keep your eyes open, and if you aren’t already subscribed to the RSS feed, by all means hit the GIANT PURPLE BOX at the top of the site to do so. :)

Looks like I had spoken too soon about URLtea being back in it to win it.

An astute commenter on my previous “URLTea Dead” post just tipped me off to the site being dead, again.

Below is the text I got when visting the main site.

Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.

error id: “bad_httpd_conf”

Of course no word from them using Twitter. Although funnily enough when I went to check their twitter profile to confirm…

Another Twitter outage. Nothing new. Still, at least with the screen (as shown in the image above) I was given upon hitting the site, I was immediately aware of the issue, and was given some kind of assumed reassurance that the Twitter team would be working to repair the issue. URLTea’s “error page”? Not so much.

Once again I wish to invite the URLtea operators to touch base with their users, and let us know about outages, and the future of URLtea. With a growing number of URL-shortening services out there, it becomes less and less apparent why I or anyone else should use URLtea. If you guys are interested in building a service, or a company, which people feel comfortable sticking with and recommending, it is in your best interests to communicate once in a while.

Twitter is notorious for outages at this point, but they’re discussing it publicly and making it clear that they are working to fix these issues. Dreamhost has issues regularly, which they report to customers via RSS and other direct-to-customer methods (i.e. not just posting it up on the site and assuming people will go there to read). Rackspace has blown up a couple times, too, and they sent out a slew of direct-to-customer emails. The reason these companies still get the attention that they do is because they respond to these incidents.

So what’s the scoop, URLtea?

I have noticed that on two perfectly functional laptops (running Windows XP Pro) that when using Digg, Opera 9.27 crashes. Not just a hangup, or a page malfunction, but a full on Windows application error which forces me to end the process and restart the browser altogether.

Having using Digg a fair amount in the past with various versions of Opera (this one included), I can only conclude that this is a new issue and is most likely due to a change in the code which runs Digg. Does anyone have any insight into this most unfortunate turn of events? Error pasted below for those who can interpret these things.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 5/20/2008
Time: 6:27:57 PM
User: N/A
Computer: GIANIA
Description:
Faulting application opera.exe, version 9.27.8841.0, faulting module opera.dll, version 9.27.8841.0, fault address 0×001b4c12.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 6f 70 65 ure ope
0018: 72 61 2e 65 78 65 20 39 ra.exe 9
0020: 2e 32 37 2e 38 38 34 31 .27.8841
0028: 2e 30 20 69 6e 20 6f 70 .0 in op
0030: 65 72 61 2e 64 6c 6c 20 era.dll
0038: 39 2e 32 37 2e 38 38 34 9.27.884
0040: 31 2e 30 20 61 74 20 6f 1.0 at o
0048: 66 66 73 65 74 20 30 30 ffset 00
0050: 31 62 34 63 31 32 0d 0a 1b4c12..

P.S. I am still bubbling over with anxiousness for the official release of Kestrel!~

I was poking around for more information on Liber AL Vel Legis earlier and found SourceryForge.org (I c wut they did thar). A little further sniffing about turned up this really neat Tarot spread generator. Though still under construction, it offers four types of readings: single card, 3 card relating to influence, 3 card relating to time, and a celtic cross spread. (The celtic cross spread function is the part that’s still being worked on.)

It allows you to choose whether or not cards may be shown as reversed, it allows you to restrict your results to Major Arcana only, also. Each card gets linked to the appropriate page in the SourceryForge wiki so you can read more about it as you choose. And of course a code generator so you can embed it into your blog like I have done above.

Looks like a neat little tool, and probably useful for those who are making a study of Tarot and cannot afford a deck, or are familiar with Tarot and wish to see how a digital deck holds up to their more traditional experiences.

As an Opera desktop edition user, I am part of a browsing minority.

I started using Opera years ago, back when they still had banner ads to support their desktop offering. Some friends recommended it to me as a browsing alternative, if I recall correctly. I was getting sick of IE, and all the Netscape users I knew were either holier-than-thou about their quirky browser or said it wasn’t really all that great. Don’t recall anybody mentioning Firefox at that time. I tried Opera out, but I didn’t quite “get” it back then, so I stopped using it. IE was just going to have to be good enough, and I didn’t feel like configuring something just to surf the web.

Time went by and I got sick of Internet Explorer and its unwelcome antics, so I went and got Opera again, thinking it was worth another try. It had improved massively, and as I figured out the features I got really comfortable using it. Everything worked, everything displayed right, I had tabs, I had mail, I had RSS, I had IRC. Life was good.

Well, the tech being used on the web has accelerated rather quickly, particularly where java, flash, and creative CSS are concerned. As these cutting and/or bleeding edge techniques were adopted, I started having trouble. Flickr was basically unusable. A few others had some really agitating quirks, too. My enjoyable IE alternative was becoming a liability.

Also, Pet Peeve time: If you run a website, do not tell me I am using the wrong browser, do not refuse me your content because you assume my browser will not display it. That is the absolute fastest way to send a visitor packing. That would be like going to the grocery store and getting yelled at by the produce guy for bringing your own shopping bags. Usability testing means making sure YOUR site works. Complicated sites may not work in all browsers. If your functionality demands things be done a certain way, and it won’t work in all browsers, then do the testing and find a non-insulting way to inform your clients of how to get the most out of your site. It’s very bad business to decide who gets to view your site and how. I’d rather surf a site that displays a little funky in Opera then show up and be told that I’m not allowed to view the site until I change browsers.

As new releases of Opera come out, the challenges do lessen. Yet with the latest update to WordPress, I am faced with a rather irritating challenge. The “Add Media” tool is now a (very slow) AJAX-type pop up window, rather than the on page form used in previous versions. It absolutely will not work in the most current version of Opera. I have to use Opera 9.5b (aka Kestrel) or Firefox to make it work. (Haven’t bothered testing in IE 6, and IE 7 is out of the question because I won’t upgrade.) I have yet to find a simplified plugin or fix for this issue, so for the time being if I wish to use images or embed any other kind of files, I’ll just have to use another browser. I prefer not to, it’s just a simple matter of convenience.

So I feel inclined to ask, what are your browsing habits? Do you use more than one browser on a regular basis? (Note: Usability testing in multiple browsers doesn’t necessarily count, unless you do it all day.) Do you run across sites that tell you that you’re doing it wrong, and don’t come back until you get one of the browsers we bothered to test? Do you ever run across sites that just plain don’t work?

Possibly most importantly, What is the responsibility split between content developers and browser developers for making sure that web technologies work for internet users?

I personally feel like it’s 70/30. The browser developers have a responsibility to build a platform which will support the latest approved standards. The content developers have a responsibility to utilize those standards to develop what gets displayed in that browser. It stands to reason that if something is coded correctly, it will display correctly. (I realize that’s not always the case, but generally, it is true.) If someone wants to employ bleeding edge code, hacks for cross-browser compatibility, or just generally be sloppy, they shouldn’t expect people to conform to the browser in which it happens to work best. At this time I know this site needs many improvements in this regard, something which irks me every time I go to post, because I know what I should be doing is a code audit. (Incidentally, I am still seeking willing contributors, if you’d like to help me keep the good times rolling while I take care of such matters.)

Weigh in, web denizens! Your voices shape the tomorrow of our future, or the future of our tomorrow, or the flatulence of our tomatoes or something like that!

URLTea used to be my favorite URL shortening service. Emphasis on used to be. For (and I’m guessing here) I’d say the better part of a month, every time I have attempted to make a shortened URL or visit the site, it’s been coming up error, 404, you’re looking for what again?

Does anyone know what became of URLtea? Their last post to Twitter was 6 months ago. Their Google code page doesn’t have any news. Alex King seemed to predict its downfall but none of the commenters have anything helpful to add.

URLtea creators and primary supporters! Where have you gone? Will you be bringing the site back?

I liked your tea towel background and your awesome bookmarklet tool. Don’t let me suffer in a sea of plain jane tinyurls!

• @rodzilla I like the idea of searching for music a lot more than I do uploading it all ala muxtape’s model #
• @rodzilla it’s so much fun, I’ve already done at least 3 #
• @rodzilla hahaha. that makes sense, I’ve been going ga-ga over the service lately #
• going to play on mixwit now, I just can’t help it #
• @rickjulian Fage is the beeeest! Oh my goodness. with cherries? nom nom nom #
• @rickjulian even better! I wish it wasn’t so expensive. you ever try Kefir (yogurt drink by lifeway)? #
• @rickjulian lucky! :) i wonder if it’s safe to mail order yogurt… #
• @rickjulian is she still raving at whoever will take the bait? #
• got some curious traffic earlier, makes me wonder if I’m being watched (in a good way i hope) #
• @geechee_girl I stil haven’t quite gotten the hang of hash tags #

Editor’s Note: Seriously, non-stop Tweeting all weekend.
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Into every life, a little ridiculous, standardized bureaucracy must fall. In the case of mine, I have encountered the insurmountable juggernaut that is “Dress Code”. This has come up about five or six times in my time here, but never really stuck before. Thank goodness. Working for an Internet company who doesn’t really handle walk-in business (with rare exception), I’m stunned and frustrated by this repeated insistence upon doing things the “meatspace” way. I’ve never been the best at maintaining a budget, a laundry schedule, or a steady weight. These powers combine to create a condition by which I rarely, if ever, have anything that will pass for “Business Appropriate”, whatever that means. As a result I typically make-do with jeans and some kind of shirt that doesn’t look too grubby or trashy. So far so good I wager.

Yet I digress. Dress Code Part 2: Electric Boogaloo, has descended upon our merry band of rascals to lay some foxes in otherwise rather content hen houses. A condensed beam of sunlight seeking out worker ants whose exoskeleton is improperly decorated by worker ant standards as set out in Tomes of Olde. Presumably the goal is something of a mimicry of those who came before us. Even Jack Parsons wore a suit to work, and he was some kind of crazy-ass pagan/rocket scientist who did a lot of field work (in both areas of his life).

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty. The actual body of this extremely local legislation.

“Please use Dress Code Common Sense Law; If you aren’t sure, then don’t wear it!”
What if you’re a self-conscious person, or a fashion hound, or it’s early and you’re hung over and easily confused? Any of those three means that the odds are pretty good you aren’t sure about what you’re wearing for the day. What if you can’t decide what shirt to wear? Does that mean go without one? Technically that would follow that law to the letter. It’s a logistics nightmare. There’s also the believe that “common” sense is by no means common at all, but that’s another discussion altogether.

There’s a statement against wrinkles too. Wrinkles? Wear clothes without wrinkles? Whoever first decided that that was important needs to go right to hell. The individual who first decided that wrinkles were a detriment to one’s business ability doesn’t live in any reality I’ve ever been privy to where people wear clothes and they get wrinkled.

Casual Friday’s entry isn’t even complete in this official document. It’s both curious and a little frightening. As if to suggest the robot overlords terminated the author prior to their completion of the thought.

With the idea appearance directly affecting one’s worthiness as a business associate, or affecting the opinion of visitors so negatively as to be disgusted, I have come to the conclusion that the comedians are right: Business office atmospheres should be soul-crushing places, brimful of quiet desperation.
All employees should wear gray from fear of being offensive, except for the one guy whose wife makes him wear the pink shirt because Marie Claire Magazine told her that it would help him boost his confidence.
Everyone will spend all day whispering about him in lieu of anything worthwhile going on in their miserable lives, and smile really nicely when he shows up at the coffee pot to get his 80th cup of the morning.
In truth, this is just another way of burying his frustration at his utterly failed marriage, and dead-end job.
By the end of the week, he will be found hanging from his belt in the men’s room. No one will ever use the big stall ever again out of discomfort rather than respect and all silently curse their own fates, but express their misery just a little more openly.
But hey, at least they look business appropriate.

Why is this machination - this plot to undermine people’s abilities by overwhelming them with trivial appearance issues - desirable? I’m at an utter loss. Explain please!

“The belief that “order is true” and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.”

~ Principia Discordia

50,000,000 Blank White Pixels for starters. Although I prefer to see it as an exercise in photoshoppery, combined with an unwillingess to stagnate into the blah conformity of constant stress.

My private, LAN-based ShoutCast radio station. I enjoy sharing my musical collection and providing my co-workers and myself with an enjoyable soundscape for the day. Incidentally, the Last.FM stats seen here are coughed up by the box running the Shoutcast. Which means the presented stats aren’t all “me” in the strictest sense.
Work. Always with the work.
I’ve been playing a lot of Pokemon Pearl since I got my hands on the game. The changes they’ve made (like time-sensitive events, better dual-pokemon battles, etc) really add a new level of enjoyment to the standard of gameplay they’ve set up. While I agree with my friend John that the battles themselves are still sort of slow, I’m pretty accustomed to that from years of RPG-type “random encounter” battles. It’s really not that much of a sacrifice. Besides, I got a freaking Abra before I even got my first badge! What’s up now, bitches?! (Incidentally, I don’t have a good place to connect for WiFi play, so no friend code action until I get a real wireless router.)
This blog. Yes it’s true. I spent a few hours last night just slapping social widgets and whatnots into the template. Of course, this template is highly temporary. I have every intention in the world of redoing the entire site to something more cross-browser compatible and attractive… or at least more cross-browser compatible.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time on IRC and a lot of time playing with Twitter. I’m in the mood to absorb ideas and assimilate people into my “circle of contacts”. There are few things I like more than knowing who to ask about certain subjects. The internet is a vast array of tubes crammed with all the information I could ever want, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to just ask somebody about something you’d like to know.
Yeah. Anyway. Time to stop wasting time and figure out what to do with the rest of today.

First the preamble:

I use a few Linux distros at home and at work, and being a half-baked nincompoop, I prefer the shiny new ones that end in “buntu”. The 64-bit version of Kubuntu is what I run at the office, and I have installed my preferred web-browsing application, Firefox 1.5.x, with my favorite themes, and a ton of useful extensions, most of which I need for work.

Among these extensions, there is a slick little application called Sage. This is an RSS reader embedded into Firefox, which is almost unspeakably convenient. I am expected to do research at least some of the time because my job demands it. Therefore, I am subscribed to numerous feeds, some authored by unabashed marketroids in Manhattan, others by squirrelly black-leather-jacket types in exotic places like Prague.

Every once in a great while, the workload becomes, um, constipated. Don’t get me wrong, there’s never a shortage of things to do around the place, but lately we tend to hyperfocus on a few high-priority items at a time - as opposed to taking a more holistic view (as in “HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE HAVE SO MUCH TO DO HOW THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO DO THIS GIMME A CIGARETTE YOU PEEEN-ARSE YES I KNOW I DON’T SMOKE” etc). It might be perceived as inefficiency but our deliberately selective awareness of imminent doom allows us to actually get things done without the embarrassment of pissing our collective pants in abject terror after suffering massive aneurysms.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. Slow day at work. Reason: we have a balky cms built in deprecated php. The code is liberally commented in at least one Central European language, but aside from that, documentation is scant. This cms has the quirky habit of eating posts according to some fiendish glitch. Programmatic functionalities combine with traditional meatbag error and really weird things happen to our precious data. We would like to begin serious repair of the website but there is no way to do this, at this time, without using this cms. (By the way, if you want to know what using our cms is like, imagine if Franz Kafka wrote Catch-22).

So, we must wire Switzerland and tell them to put their finest gnomes to work. By tomorrow, we expect these gnomes to be busily engaged in pulling meaningless strings of ones and zeroes from the mysterious innards of the database and weaving them into more or less normal html.

In the meantime, there’s various personal crises and dramas to fill the available time. All this stuff, on top of a two-long-island-iced-tea lunch and a nasty sugar crash caused by socially mandatory birthday cake, makes me stupidly susceptible to opening up the feedreader and clicking links. As a result I am now fully briefed on a variety of current events in the nerd universe.

First, let’s start off with what we already know. At 9pm EST yesterday, instead of deleting forum spam like a good boy, I was glued to my monitor, drinking a beer and watching as Digg rioted. This was absolutely fascinating. I’ve tried to spam Digg a few times so I know what kind of raw power was needed to unleash something like that, and believe me, the power level over there was waaaaaaaaaaay over nine thousand. A few places like the nefarious Forbes.com (more on those assholes later) were Diggbaiting this story earlier today (reposting a similar story at their own url in an attempt to attract backlinks), and earning upwards of 1000+ diggs. If I was into AdSense arbitrage I would have done the same thing. Digg is famous for funneling huge traffic to popular pages, enough traffic to crush a server. Some of those visitors will click an ad or two. Wash, rinse, repeat - voila! There’s your business model.

What was most interesting was Kevin Rose’s attitude. I was really impressed that he decided to side with the majority of Digg users. Unfortunately this flies in the face of all business sense (wherein you are supposed to avoid getting sued and do nothing except increase shareholder value, regardless of the collateral damage). In the more profit-minded areas of the intarwebs he has been damn near vilified, not so much for taking a stand, but the manner in which he took it. However, this issue involves more than just money. This is a matter of ethics. The future is at stake here, and rather than defer to the corporate interests involved, Kevin Rose did what was right. We won’t know the outcome for a while, but a line has been drawn in the sand, and a million computer enthusiasts are loudly saying with one voice “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

But, I’m beating a dead horse with all this Digg stuff. We all know about that shit. What I am really interested in is space.

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