Posted by Jacob Harris
Fri, 16 Sep 2005 01:49:00 GMT
It’s an interesting time for web development. Not only is Ruby On Rails steaming along towards version 1.0, but it’s spurring the development of other web frameworks in the MVC mold.
As a case in point, consider Django, a new web framework written in Python. Now, I have been dabbling in Ruby on Rails, but I don’t really have the time to learn Python yet sadly, and I can’t really figure out which would be better to do a site from scratch in. What is a developer to do?
Thankfully, fellow blogger Jeremy Voorhis has stepped into the gap. If you haven’t seen it, be sure to check out his entries on working with Django on his blog.
Incidentally, there does not seem to be much ire or competition against relative newcomer Django by the Rails people. In truth, there never should be. It’s a big enough web for both, and I think there are some things that each framework can learn from each other (Django could benefit from something like ActiveRecord, Rails would be improved if it had Django’s mechanism for specifying database schema). Such situations are rare in the computing world (see the eternal flames of emacs vs. vi, windows vs. mac, compiled vs. scripting, typed languages vs. dynamic typing, etc.), which makes such cooperation all the more remarkable.
Posted in Web Design | Tags django, jvoorhis, rails | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Tue, 07 Jun 2005 21:32:18 GMT
For an amusing joke (if you're a web geek that is), look at the announcement for
Web 1.0 at House of Shields (Wednesday, October 5, 2005) in San Francisco. From the agenda:
We will meet to discuss line breaks, spacer gifs, and the ability to launch links in a new browser window.
Cutting edge stuff. Although I am surprised there is no seminar like "The <blink> tag: how much is too much?"
Posted in Web Design, Silly | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Mon, 16 May 2005 18:35:00 GMT
Steps I have taken trying to download the updated VPN client for Cisco firewalls
- Click on link to download from VersionTrackers, gets login form
- Fills out a 4-page registration form to get an account
- Waits 20 minutes for an email confirming the account to arrive
- Click on activation link to activate. Try to search for VPN software. Search functionality is awful
- Go back to original link, enter username & password; informed that account not found
- Click on activation link again. Login successfully I think, but taken to Cisco front page where there is no indication I've logged in.
- Find an indication I am apparently logged in with a guest status and need to provide more information to get access but no indication of what that information is.
- Find the location for Cisco VPN software in the tree navigation finally. Then click on a link to Downloads (aha!) only to be told "You are either not logged in, or you are currently visiting this page with public or guest access."
And this is where I give up briefly because I have real work to do. Honestly, can anybody explain why Cisco's website sucks so horribly? I know there might be export controls for some of their software, but I just want to get an update for their VPN software for my operating system, an update that is late considering they've had months to work on it, and their stupid website keeps getting in the way of what I want to do.
Posted in Web Design | Tags cisco | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Wed, 11 May 2005 21:55:00 GMT
In an
excellent followup to his
earlier post on the problem with tag clouds, Jeffrey Zeldman looks at tag clouds a bit more critically and reaches similar conclusions to my own
concerns about tagging and design (
If you don't know what a tag cloud is, here's a good example):
Tag clouds remove the guidance and artistry from our side of the equation, offloading all the work to our users. What’s popular? What’s important? Users decide. This might be okay if the process did not create a false intellectual equivalence between high- and low-level topics, and if it did not skew toward popularity at the expense of findability.
As tag clouds come to replace expert taxonomies in common practice, carefully constructed hierarchies vanish. In their place is a flattened world where every idea, at any level, is a topic as worthy as any other. Eight Mile is a topic at the same level as Detroit, which is a topic at the same level as Cities, which is a topic at the same level as United States, and so on.
Which is an excellent point I neglected to touch on. The truth is,
hierarchies are powerful. For instance, when it comes to geography we have generally accepted and useful geographical hierarchies like so:
Earth → North America → United States → New York State → New York City → Brooklyn → street address OR latitude/longitude
And by thinking of things this way we can easily control the level of detail (and the number of matches for a search) by moving up and down the scale. Which is why Google Maps has the useful slider on the left. The problem with tagging is that it has no hierarchy. Even worse is that tagging can sometimes imply a hierarchy that it doesn't support. To see why this might be a problem, imagine I tag a photo "Eight Mile" like in Jeffrey Zeldman's example above. most people would also expect it to show up if you searched for photos of "Detroit", but it won't since I didn't tag it at that hierarchy. So, I've broken search just like that, in that I force the user to adapt to the system rather than handle search requests (imagine having to find photos of New York by doing searches like "(new york) OR (brooklyn) OR (empire state building) OR (statue of liberty) OR...", but that's the only option available if we discard taxonomies. And this quite frankly sucks. It's ambiguous (lots of errors) and even worse, assuming you could get your query perfect, it's so very slow.
Of course, there are areas where taxonomies can be nuisances too. But taxonomies are perfect for navigation, because they mirror the way we structure our knowledge of the world. And while folksonomies are great for filling in additional details, a site that relies on them exclusively is a nightmare to navigate because there is no starting point for me to narrow down from and no way of knowing that any view is comprehensive for all the things I think should be in there. Folksonomy needs taxonomy to create a logical sense of things and how they relate, and taxonomy needs folksonomy to handle new content and additional information that taxonomy is too rigid to use.
As an aside, perhaps this realization about the navigational shortcomings of a pure folksonomy scheme is behind the sudden interest in geotagging Flickr photos with latitude/longitude (see Geobloggers for an example of this). Essentially, latitude/longitude is just the lowest level in a geography taxonomy and by using a consistent markup, it's essentially the same as if Flickr provided a positional hierarchy of its own).
Posted in Web Design | Tags folksonomy, tagging, taxonomy | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Wed, 20 Apr 2005 06:28:00 GMT
Congratulations, AJAX! As a piece of techno-jargon, you've really arrived. Buried deep within the article
An Update on Stuff That's Cool (Like Google's Photo Maps), there's the quote
The real importance of Google's map and satellite program, however, is not its impressive exterior but the novel technology, known as Ajax, that lies beneath. About that, and its implications for Google and other companies, there will be more to say in a future column.
Oh, James Fallows, you're such a tease! Still, it's nice to see AJAX getting the attention. And downright startling to see all the AJAX targeted AdSense entries on the right. For a recently coined term, this really has legs. Now to see if the hype and the interest leads to better websites too.
Posted in Web Design | Tags ajax | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Wed, 20 Apr 2005 06:26:00 GMT
The digerati are all abuzz about Fred Wilson's recent seed funding for
del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking/tagging service. What's especially interesting is that Fred himself concedes he has no real idea of what the business plan for his new investment might be (see
Funding Del.icio.us):
The question everyone asks is "what is the business model". To be completely and totally honest, we don't yet know. This was a seed investment and none of the investors put up very much capital. Joshua retained complete control of the service and is going to focus on making it better. That is all anyone wants to see happen right now. In time it will become clear what the business model should be. And there are a number of them to choose from for sure.
Now, this has attracted
some snarkiness and derision from those of us who remember the dot-com boom and the days the hype subsequently died. But I think Fred Wilson is acting smart here. It's hardly a stretch to see that del.icio.us is a wonderful nimble platform for people to build things and there are some great web technologies at work behind the scenes too. It is becoming more feasible to work within a browser and choose sites like you would normally evaluate software packages. So, it's easy to see that Del.icio.us is likely to become part of the future user's toolset (like word processors and such today) and I think Fred's seed investment is mainly to ensure that when that big thing happens he has VIP access.
I found this entry of Seth Goldstein Media Futures: Alchemy to have an excellent analysis of why sites like del.icio.us might turn out to be more than just toys in the long run (it's also where I got the quote in the title about del.icio.us). Seth seems to be a very smart guy, and he is the person who introduced Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us to Fred Wilson:
This is consistent with what I see happening online, where meta-data (information about information) is creating significant economic value, from the many millions of Google and Overture keywords to the emerging class of Flickr, Del.icio.us and other tag-driven systems. Our browsing, clicking, searching and tagging behavior are the base metals which alchemists like Josh are turning into precious datastores.
I would underscore that what we are seeing here is a change in the Internet model of consumers. In the early days, the idea was that advertising revenue would drive the business and consumers were valued as passive
eyeballs, essentially a broadcast model in a new medium. But as we have seen in Wikipedia, with Flickr, and with Del.icio.us, there is real stickiness in sites that let users create, moderate, and control the content. And there is a real market for services that allow people to manage the metadata for things in their lives without imposing extra restrictions. So, Flickr makes photo sharing and classification easy, but more importantly, it makes it
fun. Ditto with del.icio.us for bookmarks. Yes, eyeballs are still important, but I think part of the Web2.0 experience is valuing the brains of the user as well.
Of course, Seth has noted all this too and suggests "it would seem that there is simply no way to create long term sustainable value online without engaging consumers in the act of media production." And yet, he notes that even the seemingly open players like Yahoo and Google are creating their own complementary suites of products so that users are limited to creating only within a particular company's sites. Will this turn the web into another AOL vs. Prodigy situation, or will there be independent and cross-provider toolsets for us to use? I suppose time will tell.
Posted in Web, Web Design | Tags delicious | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Tue, 19 Apr 2005 22:55:33 GMT
Jeffrey Zeldman coins this lovely phrase in a mild criticism of tag clouds (see
Tag Clouds Are The New Mullets) as the new senstation that's sweeping the nation:
Like mood rings and fanny packs, like mullets and the Macarena, the weighted tag clouds meme popularized by Flickr and Technorati is about to cross a permanent cultural shame threshold. Brilliant as the idea remains, faddishness is choking its air supply. Damned clouds are everywhere.
A tag cloud is one of those displays where they'll have a bunch of one-word tags as links and each link is sized based on how popular it is (more popular = larger font) You've probably seen them on places like
Flickr or
Del.icio.us. The problem snarkily alluded here by Zeldman is that tag clouds (like your favorite indie band) are not as cool when everybody knows about them, and it is dead certain you will see them sprouting up more and more, including commercial sites.
The thing is, I don't personally think they are that brilliant. I'm no visual designer (paging
Edward Tufte), but something seems to be missing for me. I know they are visually arresting and can provide a high-level view of comparative popularity, but looking at the things often gives me a real headache too. I would argue it's actually harder to find less-popular items in a tag cloud than it would be in an unadorned list (seeing the forest for the trees). And in accessibility terms, it's still no better than an ordered list with counts. For small lists, they're pointless and for large lists I find it easier to scroll down vertically than read down and across. I think there is a better interface out there and perhaps it will take the faddishness of tag clouds to give us the necessary backlash for something new.
Posted in Web, Web Design | no comments
