Infinite Web Design

Digby has opened its doors to the public and while there is clearly work to be done I’m pretty impressed with the software. Digby is a desktop application that puts all your instant messaging, email, and social network updates in one spot. The interface is nice, with some basic themes you can choose form. I like the simple system notifications as well. The IM one is really cools since you can respond from the notification bubble.

They also offer a nice embeddable chat widget you can add to websites. I’ve the one below to our Contact page. It took me about 5 minutes to customize and add to the site. I love that it lets a visitor instantly interact with me if I’m available. I’m looking at adding these to more of our sites to help with customer service. Google Talk has a similar feature that works much the same way. Both are free and easy as pie to add to a site.

One small thing I’d like to see in the chat widget is a change in the Edit Nickname at the bottom. It’s not obvious that you should select it and change it. I’d like to see that as a more apparent form field and for the text to highlight when selected… I don’t see many people putting in a useful name when they start chatting using the widget on a site.

I got an email today from a teacher friend of mine telling me that the Mandy & Pandy website was blocked by the internet filter at his school. They apparently thought that the nice site selling children’s books to teach kids Chinese contained sexual content - the official categorization from the Websense Enterprise filter was “Sex”. Now, having built the site I’m pretty confident that is a pretty wildly inaccurate categorization of the site. In fact, I don’t see how anyone who looked at the site or even spidered the content of the site could find anything even slightly sexual on it. It’s about a little girl and talking Panda who do such things as walk in the park and learn to count. I did contact them, though I had to go through a long registration process where I was forced to put in a lot of really inaccurate, made up information about myself before I could point out that this was stupid and should be fixed.

So, it seems that a site that could help a kid learn about China and how to speak Chinese is not available at a school and who knows where else because someone set up this very dumb filter and the makers of this dumb filter went out of their way to make it hard to report the blacklisting of the site as foolish. It makes me ask how many other educational opportunities kids are missing out on because of these dumb filters. Perhaps it would be better if young kids were properly supervised when online at school and once they are given internet access, they are taught about what is and is not appropriate content to view. Instead of just using a stupid filter that blocks good things and can miss bad ones, lulling people into a false sense of security, we should focus on educating kids and teaching them about exercising good judgment when online. That is a basic life skill now and should be taught from a young age so it is ingrained as a habit. Kids need to know about not giving out private information, about using good judgment when deciding what sites to visit, how to sift out good things from bad in search engine results, and how to read a web site critically as a source of authoritative information.

But, if you are going to have a filter, at the very least make it one that uses a blacklist produced by smart people with good judgment. Reviewers who are smart enough not to put Mandy & Pandy in the “Sex” category.

Jesus was a carpenter. He built things out of wood before he got into the whole Son of God / Prophet / Messiah thing. He was known for being relaxed and groovy and exceptionally forgiving and fault tolerant. If the Church is to believed he befriended Mary Magdalene despite her being a whore, if the Da Vinci Code is to be believed he married her. I imagine that when he built a staircase he built it to work even when someone jumped up and down on it, slid down it on a rug, stacked scrolls on it, or used it in some way other than walking up and down the middle of it. He built it to be resilient. I bet that staircase wouldn’t completely collapse even if one of the steps cracked a little. Of course, that’s how it should be.

Tim Berners-Lee and his contemporaries took some lessons from Jesus when they designed the system for the Internet. Like Jesus’ staircase the Internet is forgiving and fault tolerant. It doesn’t shut down when used in new or unexpected ways. Bits of data are regularly lost when sent somewhere yet your email to Grandma arrives complete because the system is designed to be fault tolerant and survive errors. The Internet and World Wide Web are one of the coolest, most world changing technologies ever. Web technologies work and have spread and grown in popularity because they are forgiving and fault tolerant.
Continue reading What Would Jesus Build?

At some point in time it happens to everyone, you make a mistake. Sometimes they are big, sometimes small and sometimes they are perceived by others to bigger or smaller than they are. How you handle your mistakes can make a big difference in your relationship with a client. There are no hard and fast rules for handling these things. You have to apply some judgment based on the people you are working with. Are they fixated on blaming someone or on fixing the the problem? If their focus is blame, then you are dealing with a dysfunctional, paranoid culture, the type of environment where CYA (Covering Your Ass) is the most important activity you can participate in. If their focus is on fixing the problem then you’re in luck, assuming you are willing to work quickly to correct your mistake and move forward.

Web sites change quickly and are made by people. This leads to bugs and typos and other problems slipping through. Sometimes the pace of development and changing technologies means that you miss an update to a standard or the new best practice. Well, the bad news is you screwed up. The good news is that you don’t need to ship anything to fix it, you just have to update the site and FTP the changes to the server. Sometimes the error was a simple oversight and sometimes you didn’t know something you should have; either way you fix it, learn from it, and move on.

Handling the Blamers

Some people aren’t happy unless they have someone to blame. If they can’t move on without a scapegoat then own up to the mistake, point out your fast response once the mistake was pointed out, and assure them that you will do everything you can to prevent it from recurring. It takes a lot of the wind out of their sails when you cut off their finger pointing with a blunt assessment of your mistake. Just don’t dwell on the screw up, focus on the fix and your plan to move forward. If they continue to focus on blaming you for the mistake instead of the positive changes you just made they come out looking bad to everyone else.

I was at The Bang! on Saturday and my friend Tom was talking about how some of the music just wasn’t danceable. He made one of the more profound comments I’ve heard in a while. The problem, he said, is that “DJs don’t dance”. Simple and true. DJs often play music that is hard to dance to. You’ve seen it when you’re out at a club and a new song comes on. Suddenly the dance floor clears out. A few people try to hang in there but the beat is so bad that their gyrations start to look more and more like a seizure. The song may be a great one. It may be the song everyone sings along with on the road trip. It may be awesome at the start of the Detroit Pistons game. However, the song just doesn’t work when you try to dance to it. If the DJ had to dance to their own music this could be avoided. They’d quickly recognize that the song they were bobbing their head and singing along to failed to move their feet.

The same thing can happen when you don’t use the things you build as a designer. Try filling out the forms you built and you’ll realize that the instructions are not as clear as you thought. Try using the web app for a while before you expect someone else to. We’ve found that this is especially useful when looking at the backend of a site. Try administering the site yourself for a while. Use the form you built to add a lot of content. Do it for days on end. You’ll find what works and what doesn’t then. You’ll find out which steps could be automated with a little more effort or creativity when you have to do them. Just like the DJ who has to dance to his own music you’ll find out what really moves people and what doesn’t.
Continue reading DJs Don’t Dance

Just a few links to sites that I’ve been enjoying lately. 24ways.org is a sort of blog advent calendar. It’s a collaborative effort by a number of talented designer / developers. There is a nice mix of topics and fresh content every day until Christmas. I’ve enjoyed the articles on Ajax and blockquotes. Check it out for yourself, there is a little something for everyone.

Lifehacker is a blog full of tidbits that are of interest to the modern web geek. It’s got a number of contributors that post on topics such as being more productive, new software tools, fun web sites, and more. New content is posted throughout the day Monday through Friday and they seem to take the weekends off. I’ve been reading it for a few months and picked up plenty of helpful ideas to help “hack my life”.

Forever Geek is part of the 9rules Network and keeps me up to date on lots of the latest gadgets and gizmos that come out as well as happenings in the tech world. It’s by geeks for geeks and it tends to be updated frequently so there’s always something new to read about.

Today we are going to talk about what colors say. For instance, Green often says “it’s not easy being me”… Okay, Green doesn’t really say that, we all know that Green only speaks Dutch…

Colors convey important information, however they sometimes tell us the wrong thing. A green stop sign is a great visual contradiction. We learn from a young age that “green means go”, “red means stop”, and yellow either means “slow down” or, depending on your parents, “go like hell”. So what happens when you switch around the colors on a traffic light? You get a whole bunch of accidents when people receive conflicting signals.
Continue reading Green Means Stop

Good news out of Redmond. Chris Wilson posted some new information on the IE Blog. Looks like they will be adding support for alpha transparency with PNG images. This will allow designers to layer images that are partially transparent in IE 7 like they can do in other modern browsers. Alpha transparency support will enable drop shadows, partially transparent gradients, and other effects to be used in more complex layouts and will allow background colors to change without reworking non-rectangular images. I think we’ll be seeing an explosion of creativity as the new browser gains widespread acceptance and we don’t have to worry about so many visitors seeing designs broken by incomplete PNG support.

The IE team is also working on some well documented CSS rendering bugs in current versions of Internet Explorer. This is great news, as the browsers support a single standard developers will be able to spend less time working around odd browser bugs and more time on making good designs. Kudos to the IE team for their work on the new browser. It sounds like they are heading in the right direction.

Molly Holzschlag and Cory Doctorow discussed the idea of linking polices recently. I actually wrote a short paper on this in school a few months ago and I’m glad that web sites that try to restrict links to their site are being publicly mocked and brought to task for making such egregiously stupid and misleading statements on their sites. Cory stated:

?The Web exists because no one has the right to grant or withhold permission for links. Fast Company exists because of the Web. Accordingly, we neither grant nor deny permission to link to our site, and urge you to do the same.?

Linking polices are bunk. The Web is built on the idea that everything can link to everything else freely. Tim Berners-Lee wrote about this on the W3C site 7 years ago and explained how linking prohibitions violate the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web.

The following is my paper on Deep Linking and link policies written in May of 2004.
Continue reading Linking Policies