Friday, November 15, 2002

What's your site's content size? Sun, 8% of text :-) 12:27:03 PM      comment []

Blogger Pics. New babies seem like a great form of finally seeing who our fellow bloggers are. Just recently, I got to see a pic of Matt and Jim, both with their respective little ones in hand. Very Nice! I hope our next kids is a girl, pink's a cute color on a baby... Most of the Mini/PersonalBloggers have their photos on the top left like me which I really like. It gives a face to the opinions... some people are starting to say that weblogs are going to become your avatar online and I agree. Your image is part of that, IMHO. The thing about pics is they're really static. My words and opinions change every day, but the photo stays the same. That pic was the best I had on hand when I started the weblog. It's from a dinner in January 2001 in Segovia. I'm actually leaning over to get closer to a friend of mine for a shot, that's why the background is tilted (if you haven't noticed before). I've changed it once, then changed it back... it's sort of an icon on the blog now. I've lost some weight and gotten a little greyer since that shot... but I'm sorta remiss to change it. Wouldn't it be cool if it was practical to change the image every day? Actually, it probably wouldn't be that hard to do. I guess I could wire up my webcam, and every morning when I start to post, take a snapshot of me in that moment... Hmmmm. I'll have to take a look at the MiniBlog code to see how difficult that would be. -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] 12:24:59 PM      comment []

What's the Common Thread?. Chris complains that Linux is ugly. Sam says that Windows installations have a half-life (something I truly believe was brought about by the invention of the registry). Robert thought Linux would come up and challenge Windows on the desktop, but was surprised when Apple became cool again. What's the common thread (aside from them all being right)? Windows is, in itself, a leaky abstraction. Every layer makes things seemingly simple, while the innerds are actually more complex. Witness Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. The user and developer saw great improvements, but having an install that lasted perpetually was a thing of the past. That's why it has a half-life. People shake their head when I tell them I reinstall Windows every 3 to 6 months. I say, try being a developer and not doing it. Unix appeals to geeks (especially me). I started out with a Commodore, but I had my first PC in high school. When I got to college, I was exposed to a lot of stuff (VMS, Solaris, 360/370, etc.). The one that hooked me was Unix, especially when running on plain ol' commodity PC hardware. It started with Minix, but before I left college, I had a box running Linux before the kernel was 1.0. It's always been ugly, though. Even now when Linux is looking as good as it's ever looked, it's still not as good looking as Windows. Enter the new Mac. It's the damn sexiest OS ever, and oh yeah, it runs Unix. It's a BSD derivitive, which I like because it doesn't embroil itself in GPL politics. It's a better CPU architecture than Intel, although they really need to get moving on the clock speed. On a modern machine, OS X is hot and fast and an absolute pleasure to work with. Robert throws in a monkey-wrench: tablet PCs are definitely sexy. Are you listening, Apple? Make a tablet, make it sexy and hella-fast, and we'll be there. Link   Discuss [The .NET Guy] 12:19:02 PM      comment []

Tailor-made DOM-powered web pages are not difficult to implement: they're difficult to design Two DOM ideas. In an evolt.org article posted earlier today, Peter-Paul Koch advocates using the W3C-sanctioned Document Object Model (DOM) in new, innovative ways in order to empower users to create their own interfaces to Web sites: Basically, since the W3C DOM allows us to completely rewrite the page according to the wishes of the user, we should design web pages in a new way. We no longer need to take serious decisions about how the site will work, how the navigation, the forms and the other elements interact with the users. Instead, we can offer the user a way to create his/her own web page, with exactly those elements and that interaction he/she wants, likes or needs. Thus one web page can look completely different for two users. Koch presents a DOM-driven example page -- an item-entry form that replicates itself infinitely, based on how many items the user wants to add. He also cites the International Herald Tribune's site as "the best practical implementation of the unique possibilities of the W3C DOM so far." (The IHT uses the DOM to give users limited control over how news articles look. For instance, users with DOM-compliant browsers may switch between a three-column view and a one-column view.) Heeding Koch's advice to start thinking of good DOM uses, I have two ideas I'd like to see implemented on news/information sites: User comments within articles. Let people insert text anywhere in any story. This could be limited to a paragraph level -- i.e., user comments only appear between text paragraphs -- or, more radically, within text itself. (Any kind of comment would be acceptable: fact corrections, editing corrections, opinions, sarcastic remarks, you get the idea.) Importantly, make it easy to distinguish between "official" content and user-provided content. Make it easy to turn comments off and on. Give each comment a "type" -- "additional fact," "opinion," "correction" -- and enable users to show and hide the comments by type. (e.g., "Show me just the corrections, and no opinions." Or, "Show me just the witty remarks, not the sarcastic ones.") This would turn a single story into a multilayered experience, with different parts accessible via different clicks. User-manipulated stories. Let users reorder the facts in a hard news story. We journalists value highly our news judgment -- that is, we like to think we know which facts are more important than other facts -- but we shouldn't be elitist about it. Give the people a voice; let them call us on it, right on our site. (This ties in with recent comments about users "building their own internal narratives" over at Hypergene MediaBlog.) Log individual users' changes and manipulations, and present an alternative article, created on the fly, based on "collective user judgment." Do the same with the home page, but on a broader (story) level instead of a factual level. [Holovaty.com] 2 cool examples. I like the Herald Tribune feature: this is useful and well thought out. What is difficult in implementing these ideas is not the technical aspect so much as the usability: this is where the real challenge is. For example the Herald Tribune features: make text larger, smaller, 1 column, 3 columns are cool, but not that well thought out in terms of usability. The buttons are at the bottom of the page. If you click on "A+" to make text bigger you go back to the beginning of the page. I tested it on an article: because of that if you want to experiment before finding the right size for you you have to scroll down to the bottom of page everytime. This is a usability problem for a very simple feature: 4 buttons. Now think of the usability challenge for "in-text" user and editors comments ! We need a mix of Edward Tufte and Allan Cooper to solve this :-)   11:38:43 AM Google It!      comment []