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Sunday, May 9, 2004 |
BlogBox Project
BlogBox project - editing objects for your blog's gutter. 
Over a year ago I started working with Laszlo Systems to make sure that they'd be successful. We had spent years trying to develop a 'rich media platform' of our own, so I knew exactly what they needed to do and had a ton of ideas for them. You see (unless it's not evident already - dear readers.....) I'm an idea guy. And since everything we were doing is predicating on having a killer rich media platform to build on - well then - Laszlo was perfect! I also really like David Temkin, Brett, Max, Adam, Sarah, Peter, Antony, Lyndon and all the other folks at Laszlo, so... it was aa no brainer. One of the ideas I had for Laszlo was inspired by Jason DeFillippo's Blogrolling.com service. I had tried to convince Jason to turn it into an entire open distribution system platform, to no avail. [BTW Now that Tucows has purchased Blogrolling.com...... hhhhmmmm.] Well anyway - it's year later now and here are three blogroll objects for you to put into you blog's gutter. The idea is that they're open and free, can be placed into one's blog gutter (or any other web page) and bring to you some of the benefits of rich media platforms. I say some - 'cause we're not done yet! All of this Laszlo source is available - so anyone can take it and run with it. And as long as it's a non-commercial project, educational or non-profit - Laszlo is free. And for developers - Laszlo is free as well. One could even extrapolate that general purpose 'micro-content' editing tools were coming - so one could create reviews, opinion pieces and surveys - that included images, music and wasn't limited by the obviously mutliemdia adverse world of HTML (sigh! grunt! growl!) But before I go off on micro-content publishing systems and open shared servers, let's look at what Laszlo's giving us all. - LinkBox - this was the original BlogBox object and it turns your boring, staid blogroll into a fun, dynamic expand/collapse menu. I don't see how anyone can live without one of these. I'm never going back. Sure sure sure - you can do it in D HTML like Joi has on his blog - but still, this is just so cool, I cry sometimes...... - SoundBlox - so you're sitting there, blogging away, reading other people's thoughts and expressions and you see the classic "I'm listening to this now". Well - I'd rather listen to it myself, not just hear about it! So if you go to MY blog - you can hear two Reggae sets, two R&R classic sets and a bunch of whacko original music I did in the late 70's and early 80's. We called it "electro strobing funk music". SoundBlox is a fully functioning jukebox for your blog visitors (and yours) pleasure! - PhotoBlox - completeing the triumverate is PhotoBlox a fully functioning sldie show, image management tool. Beautiful cross-fades, moves and special effects can be put onto your everyday images. PhotoBlox (like her two sisters) is based upon simple XML files that you create and put up anywhere. You then point the Javascript (which you embed in your blog) at those XML files - and away you go! All three of these BlobBox object are residing in my blog gutter and have been for a while. [Jonas has a saying about 'eating your own dog food' - yum yum.] Look for features that enable end-users to upload images into your PhotoBlox to create your own shared gallery. Also look for MP3 playlist sharing - like WebJay. All in all I'm proud as hell to be associated with Laszlo. They're not only consumate professionals and have killer technology but they're on the bleeding edge, hanging ten, changing the world as we speak. [Marc's Voice] [Metastar]
9:31:30 PM 
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The Image of the City
Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City and Software Architecture. 
I've put Popper aside for a while to read a book I received in the mail the other day, Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City, which after the first twenty pages looks very promising. I've had this book on my list ever since I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, and my interest has only gained since then, particularly after reading what Matt Webb has written about it. When I read Jacobs's book I tried to apply her ideas to software architecture and development.1 City planning seems like a good metaphor for software architecture, and it's alreadyused within the field of enterprise architecture. So far, Lynch's book seems to do a good job at clarifying the ways in which this metaphor is relevant. Lynch introduces the concept of imageability, which he defines as that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. It might also be called legibility, or perhaps visibility in a heightened sense, where objects are not only able to be seen, but are presented sharply to their senses.
The corresponding for (the internals of) software would be how well its source code, when explored by someone new to it, evokes a mental picture of its entirety. I thought about this nearly a year ago, but couldn't express it well. And since then I've realized that it has to do with more than code. In a project I once was in, the architecture was frequently drawn on the white board and explained to various people. I had some problems with some of the decisions behind the architecture, and questioned them, but overall it was okay. As an idea. The biggest problem was that the architecture as explained in meetings was nowhere to be found in code. Well, there were packages and classes mapping to its concepts, but its principles were violated everywhere. Even the architectural decisions I questioned, and which the architect fiercely defended, were invalidated by violations in the code. An architecture emasculated. This situation can be explained as the architect having one image of the system, and the system had low imageability, so the images evoked in the minds of others were too different from the intended image, as is obvious by the sheer number of violations of the architecture. Viewed this way, the work of the architect becomes a process of creating an image of the system, then creating a system with high imageability, with a high probability of evoking images as near the original image in the mind of the architect. 1 See my summaries for March and April last year for posts on The Death and Life of Great American Cities and software architecture. [Tesugen.com] [Metastar]
9:25:47 PM
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Fresco Workshops in Los Angeles
Fresco Workshops (schedule). This Spring and Summer our classes in Los Angeles Will be held at the following dates:
May 13th, Fri. - 17th, Mon
June 3rd, Fri. - 7th, Mon
June 17th, Fri. - 21st, Mon
These courses consist of up to five days of intensive instruction where you will learn how to create true (buon) fresco as artists have done for centuries. [Contemporary Fresco Gazette]
1:07:54 PM
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Why Fresco Painting?
Why Fresco?. This is the question that I encounter the most. The story of fresco painting began over 35,000 years ago in the caves of modern France where the Neolithic man applied natural earth pigments to the moist limestone walls of his cave to illustrate his life and beliefs. Of cause Neolithic man did not call his paintings frescoes. So as every civilization there after had own name for the technique used for the magnificent wall paintings found in it's most treasured environments, temples, public spaces and homes - the only technique that allows us to see those masterpieces thousands of years after they were created. Through the years this technique has been refined and now we know it as Buon (true) Fresco. [Contemporary Fresco Gazette]
12:55:38 PM
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The Mother of All Arts
The Mother of All Arts. During the Renaissance fresco used to be regarded as The Mother of All Arts. Today we understand this as a glamorous statement since the fresco is so grand and we have all these gigantic palaces and cathedrals full of frescos. But at that time the true meaning of the title was that fresco painting requires working with pure pigments and natural elements and it teaches you the understanding of color and relation with itself, understanding of composition and perspective as well as everything else needed in art. [Contemporary Fresco Gazette]
12:53:50 PM
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Balloon Photo by Mike Lee
Billowing Balloon. A rigger works to inflate the balloon sponsored by Constellation Energy for tonight's Preakness Celebration Balloon Glow at the Inner Harbor, which was scheduled for 9pm. I didn't make it back to see the balloons in their full glory... [curiousLee]
9:24:03 AM
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Technical Notes: Read/Write Web Changes Pub. Software
MT Migration - The How and the CSS. Yesterday I explained why I moved my blog from Radio Userland and
today I'm going to explain how I did it. I'll also talk a bit about my
new CSS layout.
The Move
I have to give a big shout-out to Bill
Kearney, whose Radio
Exporter tool made it relatively easy to export all my content from Radio to
MT. There were a couple of gotchas for me though - one was I had to convert the
date format Radio uses (DD-MM-YYYY) to the format MT wanted (MM-DD-YYYY). The
second additional thing I had to do was get rid of all the line breaks I had in
my content - I used MS Word (of all things) to do that. There was some other
faffing about, but eventually I got all the content imported into MT.
The next task was to maintain the same URL structure in my new MT blog, so
that permalinks to past articles wouldn't break. Again Bill
Kearney had solved this - it was a matter of adjusting the date-based
archive template in MT to use the same date format as Radio.
My comments system proved to be the biggest challenge (apart from the CSS
that is, which I'll get to in a minute). I debated with myself whether to use
MT's in-built comments system, or whether to stick with Phil
Pearson's excellent Python Community Server.
I decided it would be easiest to keep going with PYCS, rather than try and
migrate all the comments across. Plus I like the pop-up box method of comments,
rather than sticking comments on the same page as my posts. Although having said
that, I do admit that having comments on the same page as the post encourages community-centred
conversations. But for now I'm very happy with PYCS. A big shout-out here to
Phil Pearson, who has been helping
me migrate my comments.
NB: some of the old comments haven't yet made it across, so if you're
wondering why a comment you made on my blog in the past is no longer present -
it's not because I deleted it, unfortunately it's stuck in transit. It'll be
back soon.
So that was basically how I moved my content across to MT. There were a few
other gotchas along the way, but that's par for the course whenever you move
weblogs - and every person's gotchas will be different, so there's little point
in me describing them here.
The CSS Re-design
Now before I start talking about the CSS, I have to say that I don't think my
new design is - visually speaking - anything to write home about. I'm no Zeldman
or Asterisk or Simplebits.
Those guys are artistes, whereas I'm not worthy to shine their shoes (in
a web design sense). But even though I have the esthetic sensibilities of a bull
in a paint supplies shop, nevertheless I wanted to design my very own style for
my MT weblog. My goal was to design a fairly unique, CSS-positioned, table-less
layout that had semantically meaningful <div> tags dripping from its very
pores.
Last time I
did a CSS design, I borrowed one from the fab CSS
Zen Garden (with the designer's permission of course). But this time I
specifically wanted to create my own CSS design from the ground up. So firstly I
studied lots of existing designs, to see how others did it, and I consulted
various books such as Eric Meyer on CSS
(thanks to Code is Mandatory for
lending me that, plus the Zeldman book).
I noticed that most of the good designs out there are centred and fixed width,
but eventually I decided on a left-aligned fixed width design - to be slightly
different, but also I think the main menu is best positioned on the left
of a page rather than horizontally below the header (where most trendy websites
place it). I also opted for 3 columns, as I wanted to highlight my Quicklinks in
a place that was separate from the main navigation. The right-hand column is
where most bloggers put their quicklinks, and in this case I opted to go with
the common wisdom (Jakob Nielsen would be
proud of me).
The CSS design I created uses 'float: left' and 'float: right' to position
the left and right columns, and the main content area fits in between. All 3
columns are placed within a container div. The effect of the two vertical grey
lines that separate each column is attained via a vertically tiled background
image - see Dan
Cederholm's excellent article on Faux Columns. There is one little gotcha
here that I didn't discover until the morning after I published my new CSS - in
the HTML file, the code for the left and right columns must be placed before the
code for the centre column. This means the left and right columns will render
before the centre column, which will prevent jerky scrolling in Mozilla and
overlaying divs in all browsers.
There are a few other things I need to tidy up in my CSS - e.g. there is an
annoying bug in IE's rendering of pages that include an <em> tag. So if
you notice the right grey line missing on a page which has italics, that's the
reason. This and a few other minor things still need patching up. I also suspect
I haven't covered all bases for backwards compatibility (IE 5 browsers and the
like). Sigh, the joys of CSS design. I will try and fix these things up over the
next few weeks.
One more thing, I will try and jazz up the design some more - e.g. with a
graphical header and some more stuff in the right column...maybe music-logging
(a la Lucas and Seb)??
Hmmm, have to think about that. Any suggestions?
Summary
Well that about brings to a close my latest project - moving to MT and
designing a new CSS layout. I can now get back into writing and other
explorations. I have an interesting RSS article coming up, regarding
E-Government. Stay tuned :-) [Read/Write Web]
9:14:09 AM
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© Copyright 2009 Gary Santoro.
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