RKNet Blog... Thing

The truth hurts

So after watching the press conference this morning and getting super mega ultra excited, I spent a good couple of hours mashing F5 in anticipation of pre-order.

The press conference was interesting but not mind-blowing. It was, however, nice to get a better feel for the features and see some nice, shiny demo videos. Update: Engadget Mobile has posts galore about today’s unveiling. I won’t get into the few parts I gleaned from the demo.

This eventually lead me to log in, which had me so pumped I thought I would explode. Then… over an hour of server errors.

Eventually T-Mobile disabled phone upgrades altogether - right around 1pm, if I remember correctly - probably to figure out how the hell to handle that much traffic. If I were them, I’d see if they could borrow a server farm from Larry and Sergey until the pre-order is all over.

T-Mobile, taking a page from Pandemic's President Madagasgar, SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING. Ok, just the upgrade section, but still.

I will be poking at their servers for the rest of the day. While I realize this adds to their server load, I will not be the only person doing this, and with this kind of outage, coupled with the knowledge that there are supposedly 400,000 up for pre-order, it’s either be aggressive or get left scrambling on October 22nd.
Success must be mine! Wish me luck. :D

I DID IT!

FUCK YEAH

After a day of confusion and mild frustration, as of approximately 3:26pm EST, I am now one of the approximately 400,000 to secure a T-Mobile HTC G1 with Android and all that good stuff!

Because I could not stop for success, success kindly stopped for me. I had taken a break from my rabid F5-ing and decided to socialize with my co-workers, then I decided it was a good time to hit refresh on my T-mobile account page. LO! The upgrade phone link was back! I hit the promo image on the site and it actually worked! Not only did it work, but the site loaded as quickly as you please. I completed my order in nothing flat.

The phone cost, with the “upgrade fee” comes in at $197.99. Just under the originally predicted $199.

The G1 should be in my hot little hands on or about October 22nd. There will be an unboxing and setup post when I get it. Assuming I don’t get so excited that I just tear the whole package apart like a tazmanian devil.

For anyone curious, here’s the official T-Mobile overview page for the phone.

pardon my sloppy line up

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. :)

• @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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Because I’ve caught a serious case of Twitter fever, I’ve added the TwitterTools plugin, which will daily dump my meaningless tweets (from my personal twitter, not the RKNet twitter) into a single post. The benefit of this is that you, gentle readers, will be privvy to the exciting (HA) life of yours truly, and get the added benefit of all the neat links that I tweet, but neglect to del.icio.us and totally don’t bother blogging about.

The other plugin is more for me, and doesn’t have nearly as much of a direct effect on the content of this blog (yet). I finally got around to adding the WPStats plugin and I honestly don’t know how I went without it for so long. Granted, the stats provided by FeedBurner are pretty good, but I need something more directly related to my actual site traffic. While additions like Clickheat are fun, they aren’t necessarily the strongest measure of visitors and activity. In a text-based medium, you’ve got to know what text brings people to you, and what text keeps them there.

Pretty excited about the whole thing. You should be too! It ultimately means I can monitor to see what makes you the visitors the most happy, and increase the volume on those subjects to 11.

P.S. How do the google ads look? Obtrusive? Not awesome enough? Discuss. I’m hoping that they will eventually start actually trending towards being “contextual” so there can be some halfway decent sponsors in the mix. I also have designs on cleaning this place up (a lot) and re-appealing to Project Wonderful’s review staff so I can then allow real humans to display fun ads for their neat stuff on my blog.

Today I put a click mapping app on RandomKitty.net. It will give me “heat maps” of where people click when they are on the main page of the blog. I may add it elsewhere, but the home page needs an overhaul before I do that. If you’d like to view the current heat map of RKNet, go to http://www.randomkitty.net/clickheat and log in with the username and password of “checkit” (no quotes obviously). You’ll have to look at the whole week or the whole month to really get any data, and most of that was me clicking random areas to generate data that I could view to test my installation. I look forward to getting a little eye-tracking information for the site. I’ve been doing a lot of usability reading lately and I know that observing the patterns of people who visit your site is a great way to learn how to cater to them in a more educated fashion. (Or I could just ask: how do you like the site? Is it easy to use? Entertaining? I love feedback, good or bad.)

I also signed up for a Twitter app that will now auto-feed the new posts to the RKNet twitter account. I’m hoping that it will spread the news a little more effectively, maybe get a couple more people on the proper RSS, so they can tell me the Twitter update is annoying and can I please turn that off? I’ve also collected a lot of unique and bizzare followers on Twitter here lately, although I did end up following zefrank, and I even participated in a project to tell really short bedtime stories. (There are some really sweet ones in there.) I’m contemplating signing up for a reverse item, that will post my tweets to the blog, but that could be pretty blah if it’s just me. It would be way more fun if the other writers also posted their tweets.

I just got turned down for displaying Project Wonderful ads, but I’m not down about it. It’s just inspiration to really clean up the home page, get some content squeezed out of the fascinatingly weird group I hang out with, and resubmit. Besides, setting up a PW account was an important step for me. Not so I can subject you the viewer to ads here, but so I can eventually promote RKNet and monetarily support sites that I visit and enjoy at the same time! Win win. Besides, I am in the process of setting up another app that will hopefully drive some more traffic, maybe provide you the gentle readers with some links to other fun internet items (as if you need anything else but RKNet! PFFT!), and perhaps even drag in a little cash for yours truly. Mmm… delicious petty cash.

Speaking of del.icio.us, I finally figured out how to get a feed of links put up by people in my network. It’s like a whole world opened up. I suddenly understand the social value of the site with stunning clarity, and I have to say I’m networked with some folks that have great taste in linking.

The more I experiment with the various services, apps, and information sources that are out there, the more fun I have. It may not all be terribly productive, but most of it does provide me with opportunities to meet new people and learn new things, and I think that’s pretty valuable, don’t you?

Don’t get me wrong, I do love my job, and I am sure that the people at Valleywag, Wonkette, Gawker, Gizmodo, and Defamer all have to work very hard. Still, with this disclosure of the new pay scale for 2008, I can’t help but be ridiculously jealous. Who wouldn’t want to get paid money in buckets for coming up with the hottest dish? I had a flash in the pan when I got that inside tip on the Rackspace situation, even if it turned out to be a bit off. (The article should be accurate overall, or at least provide sources to the final, real scenario.)

Oh well. Maybe some day this blog will fall into an update cycle and I can stop dreaming about making money for writing on the internet, and actually start doing it. Does anybody have any good books or blogs to recommend for achieving such a goal? Or would anyone with insight on the matter like to help by writing about experiences writing on the internet? It would be a lot of fun to interview someone who has made a living from strictly internet-generated revenues.

In recent weeks I feel as though in the struggle to constantly produce content, I Can Has Cheezburger has slowly changed formats from its origins of “amusing image macro cats of various internet origin”. At this point it seems to cater less to savvy internet addicts with a general fondness for cats and seems to be favoring crazy pet owners who enjoy photographing their pets in specific poses so they may then make up a lengthy caption that explains the entirety of any joke they may have been trying to drive at, even if it’s not actually funny when done with subtlety. I will cite examples that have lead me to a reaction of *cutcutcut* instead of I LOL’D!

• Is this supposed to be a lol-dog? More like a corndog amirite?
• A primary example of what I like to call “Trying too hard”.
• Should have been “Diabeetus”. Seriously, what else do you do with a cat like that besides make fun of Wilford Brimley?
• Yes, we get it, you own a cat and a giant stuffed Ewok. Does anyone care? Is this funny to anyone?
• No, David Bowie has one “stuck” pupil, not two different colored eyes. Thanks for playing though.

I actually unsubscribed from the RSS feed after a rash of this nonsense. However, going back to look for the links of what I feel were the biggest offenders I do admit I saw several from the last few days that did in fact make me LOL. I definitely respect the site for being on top of the petfood issue, since undoubtedly a large part of the audience isn’t just basement-dwelling nerds, but actual pet owners who love their animals. Nevertheless, I’m discouraged to see some of the posted submissions turn towards the dark side of generic 40-cats-crazy ladies posting photos of their “babies”. Keep it sharp, ICHC!

And lest I forget, HEY ICHC! A Challenger Appears! (They always do.)
LOLBots - A collection of image macros and captioned photos of various robots. A co-LOL-ction for those with animal allergies? A site for the more technologically inclined? Generally freaking awesome? You be the judge. They’re out to prove that “Robots are the new kittens”, which I take to mean that they want to prove robots are just as adorable and LOL-worthy as any ol’ LOLcat ever was. They’ve already been linked to by a few webcomics, like Diesel Sweeties and Questionable Content. The traffic generated from those links was enough to force them to throw up a makeshift splash page. Plain though it is, you get an immediate taste for their sense of humor with a photo of Data LOL-ing with the caption “INVISIBLE EMOTION CHIP”. How nerd-tastic is that?

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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Last month I posted an article about a little blog that thought it could, but failed pretty hard. My hypothesis was that by advertising using Google’s services (most notably in this case the web clip news ticker in Google Mail), the intrepid blogger had underestimated the amount of traffic that would draw and got himself shut partly down.

The link reappeared in my Google Mail news ticker this evening so I decided to see if it would finally work out for me.

Not only was this blogger’s site not restored, but that’s all that was left of it! Not even the shell and the company’s logos. This guy got owned and owned hard. Your guess is as good as mine as to what finally killed it. Bandwidth? Inappropriate content? The user’s inability to pay for services? It’s a mystery for sure.

I’ll keep an eye on my news ticker in the future. If this link continues to come up, perhaps some light can be shed on the subject.