On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

So let’s see what I have running in my household (which consists of me, myself and I):

• OpenSUSE 11 on the laptop
• Windows XP and 2000 on the Dell
• Windows NT 4 Server on the other Dell which is a glorified NAS (Network Attached Storage) box
• Mac OS X 10.4 on the eMac
• Mac OS 9.2 on the iMac

A balanced lot I think. The top two get the most use in general. The time has come however to take the jump and start plugging away with Windows Vista.

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I have seen a fair few sites who have employed the famous ’star rating’ gadget that has become one of the hallmarks of the Web 2.0 world shall we say. Aside from implementation (i.e. creating them from gracefully constructed forms with radio buttons when JavaScript is disabled/not present) there is the actual nuts and bolts of what they do.

I have noticed a worrying trend that if taking the angle that they are to get a public ranking of the page/item etc. most of them fail.

• Some use the star rating as a personal rating that only you see. Not particularly useful to yourself (you know what you said surely?), not useful to others (i.e. a poor item will not be flagged as such) and worse still of no use to the site designers/coders as they won’t get this feedback.
• Some use the star rating system but upon clicking then reveal a hidden form that has even further options. I don’t like this. I clicked on the star rating because I assumed it was a quick way for me to feedback a quantitative opinion on an item/article without needing to fill in a form, without needing to sign up etc. This switches me off.

The latter is a personal hate.

So, algorithmically I have the following star rating plan:

• It is a quick one hit quantitative way for every user to rate the current page, for this to be sent back to the server (anonymously) and where ratings exist for it to be factored into the average that is displayed by defaul to user when first visiting the page. I think the average used would be a ‘median’ value if my statistics memory (which is worse than very poor) serves me right.

So the sequence I am employing for a website… is:

1. User visits page
2. Page queries database for current average rating which is displayed to the user
3. User can submit rating by clicking their star rating which is fed back to the server and factored into the current average. If no record for the page exists a new record is created with this new average.
4. Score is updatd on page to reflect new average and star control is locked to read only to save on multiple submissions. (A crude way of stopping abuse by multiple clicks — of course this will be undone when the page is refreshed; but this means that no server side recognition of the current client is required and therefore no private data or user data is submitted or stored on the server/database.)
5. Every page has a link to a feedback form which the user has to explicitly elect to visit and send, rather than it being sprung upon them. This would take the HTTP Referer string to capture the page which 97% of the comments will relate to. (Experience dictates that ~3% will use the most obscure of forms that they find to submit utterly unrelated queries. I have had a complaint on general service submitted to a grafitti form before now….
6. Goto 1

This will let users see what others generally think, submit their quantitative opinion without hassle and for the site creators/maintainers/analysts/coders to use the data to evaluate website content quality.

Of course so much of this is very basic but so often I see such  bad implementations of so many things that I only wish time and effort was poured in, even to the smallest of things.

Quick post this one as the web dev type will clearly poke around the code (I want you to!) — this evening I have created some very quick but potentially very usable code that progressively uses Javascript to create a ’sidebar’ element on a webpage for widgets that you could change the order of, and potentially close or add to depending on your preferences.

http://www.sunshinesista.plus.com/worthing_test/sortables.html

This code creates a page and if Javascript is enabled creates the sidebar and a cookie that is stored on your PC for 7 days. This notice will pop up just so that privacy with regard to my code is transparent.

The sortables are then set up in this floating side bar and then you can re-order the examples and exit the page, browse away, whatever. When you come back, the order you created will be restored neatly.

By all means use it yourself I know I will be… (I’ll add ‘remove/hide’ and ‘add’ code but that’s it)

Hope it’s useful. It uses jQuery, an absolutely superb Javascript library.

Ahhh what a weekend it was at Barcamp London 3, held at Google’s UK offices in Buckingham Palace Road. It was good fun and very informative. I’ve learnt a lot, more in some areas than others such as jQuery, Caja/Open Social, more on the semantic web, the future BBC homepage and more still. I also did three sessions. Sort of. I talked about Liberating the Writer and The Art of Self Publishing. I feel a bit of an imposter talking about anything as I am very quick to self deprecate and devalue the worth of my knowledge. That said, I think I do the latter things very well and I was very comfortable talking about them. Liberating the Writer particularly was a more impassioned piece as I really was in the mood for extolling the virtue of content when much of Barcamps are (and as they should be) are about presentation and the technical underpinnings of what delivers content.

The third was the geek quiz which started off as being about Linux but soon encompassed all manner of geekery. We did it like QI, although I only came up with some questions but we had buzzers that were the Mac startup chime, AOL’s ‘You Got Mail‘ sound, ‘Fucking Windows 98‘ from South Park and Steve Ballmer’s ‘Developers! Developers! Developers!‘ We also had the stupid answer sound and flashing text. Awesome stuff. It was a lot of fun.

I’m in the middle in case you can’t tell With my trusty beat T40

Apart from that mind (and the slides will be online soon) I met up with some friends and had a wicked time. I mean Google’s offices are cool; a bit more snazzy than the average employer. I mean they had Ben & Jerry Ice Cream Sandwiches; and they were just there in the fridge for the taking. Seriously! If I worked for Google (and I wouldn’t want to) I’d be 350lbs in no time; not good. But the food aside (and it was just fabulous, Thanksgiving Dinner was spectacular) the place was cool. Games room with a billiards table, giant jenga, table tennis, consoles and an arcade machine running something like MAME–it had just about every arcade game ever.

I also got a chance to ride a Segway and crashed it. Repeatedly. Again and again. It was funny and I couldn’t stop laughing.

There was lots more too, from lots of free beer and wine, very intelligent talk and more drinking beer afterwards. And getting progressively hammered to the state that by the time I left Victoria station I had drunk some six pints of lager and was paying heavily for it. Not drunk that much in a long time! It was a lot of fun though.

I’ll write some more about it soon but I’m tired and I just want to go to bed now and read my book.

Oh whatever can she mean? Has she in fact held hostage a talented and qualified web designer under her desk whilst passing off the work as her own? Or is she in fact stealing all of her designs from somewhere else? Maybe she has only been making websites since 2000 and not 1995?

Well none of those are the case. My first web sites were developed and tested using NCSA Mosaic on my Amiga in 1995, and all of my work is my own (except for the snippets of fixes that I occasionally need for Internet Explorer 6…)

My secret is in fact that very reason I have used a blog as my main website. I rarely come home these days and sit on my computers to do further website development. I get my quota at work 5 days a week. That’s not to say I am not interested in it really, far from the truth. I think the web is just about the most fabulous thing in the world. (Just think how different out lives are in the past decade because of the Internet and specifically the web.)

You don’t need a moving eulogy to the web though. What I mean is that since mid 2006 I have not maintained my own website, I use the blog as good way to get my work out on the web with minimal effort. I don’t run a CMS system (it’s only me after all, bit overkill) and I don’t run a web server.

Shadowplay Design Specification

Anyway I have knocked together my website over this weekend using a killer style that I have developed which I am going to be putting to good use elsewhere. This is my so-called Shadowplay design. It uses a number of things that I have wanted to achieve:

• Accessible design: First and foremost navigable easily with mouse, keyboard and other input devices.
• ‘Scalable’ in two senses:
  • Just as suitable for small sites and large sites alike
  • Increasing/Decreasing the font size yields a gracefully shrinking/enlarging ‘zoom’ as found in IE 7 and Opera and soon Firefox 3.  (NB: This is based on my flex CSS design idea but this is slowly becoming redundant with the majority of browsers having page magnification instead of vanilla text size increase. This is a back of a fag packet calculation that ~40% of users use IE7 and soon 15% of the public will use Firefox 3.)
• Little to no CSS ‘hacks’: I detest with a passion CSS hacks using commenting side effects. I respect these were once needed if you wanted your site to work on Gecko based browsers (Firefox/Netscape 6+), IE 5 (Mac and PC) and IE 6 but these days–no need if you know what you’re doing and your target is:
  • Internet Explorer 6+, Safari 2.0/Konqueror, Firefox (Gecko based browsers) and Opera.

  That is pretty much 99.9% of the web browsing platforms in use today (according my statistics.) The only ‘hacking’ is PNG transparency for IE6 via Javascript and the DirectX filter, and a couple of selective comments for IE6. That’s it.

  This is good because it means the core CSS file for screen output is clean and when IE 6 dies (hopefully a slow painful choking death…) I won’t be batting my CSS styles into shape with drastic surgery removing obscene looking CSS comment hacks that I will have long forgotten their function.

  That said I am still catering for IE6 as it’s the most modern Internet Explorer browser that can be run on Windows 98, 2000 and NT 4 (Of which cumulatively makes up ~10% of the browsing market) although I’m really hoping it’ll start to dwindle into 2008 allowing me to leave some of the slight IE6 glitches ‘unfixed’ as I think there needs to be an element of carrot in front of the horse here.

• Modern design that leverages the best of CSS based design, contemporary web design trends (the dreaded 2.0 aesthetic which on the whole is downright gorgeous in my book) and using ‘progressive Javascript’ that doesn’t break the site in its absence but subtly improves things without interfering with accessibility. (jQuery)
• Be a design that doesn’t shout about how good it is, but subtle and something you just appreciate its aesthetic without necessarily consciously acknowledging it as such. The same could be said about the commodity value of Helvetica as a beautiful design that’s just there.
• Small nimble size: How does 90KB in its vanilla form sound including jQuery! This includes all the graphics including gorgeous transparent PNGs.
• Valid XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1 and up to WCAG 1.0 AA (Priority 2) spec.

As you can see the design brief was quite a tight one. And I am glad to say that I have met all the things I wanted to with this design.

Open Source

The other great aspect is that I developed it using open source free software. Virtually everything worked as well as it has done on proprietary systems in fact in most respects it was better as my humble T40 just soldiered through the work without missing a heartbeat. Whereas I would usually use Notepad, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I used GEdit, Gimp 2.4 and Inkscape. Apart from one minor skirmish which infuriated me in Gimp it worked a treat. In fact I do have virtually whole hearted praise to the Gimp team as 2.4 is such a vast improvement in my book as a Photoshop user that it’s just not funny. It’s like using a new program with all the annoying as hell bits ripped out of it. The new design uses graphics generated solely with Inkscape and Gimp.

GEdit does some funny things though on occassion, pasting doesn’t always happen at the cursor insertion point but I just kept an eye on this and I was fine. I don’t know whether this is a bug or not?

Summary

Anyway I’m going to quit jabbering on and I’m going to upload my new website (which will be a companion to this blog, the blog remaining my main area of concentration online) and post the link here and then you can decide for yourself

The other good thing is I have a website of my own to brandish at Barcamp London 3 next weekend Fancy that, was I the only web developer at Barcamp Brighton without my own personal website that I had designed?

I won’t go into this one in a big way as I’m still taking it in. That said, as much as I openly put my foot down to outright Microsoft bashing (and there is a lot of it) they also manage to come up with just as much baloney sometimes.

Recently Stephen Shankland over at CNET News enquired with a certain Clint Patterson to what extent it embraced competition from say Thunderbird (an email client) and also to assisting the developers with Exchange server support.

The open-source development model has yet to demonstrate the ability to support profitable software businesses that can drive the coordinated research and testing necessary to sustain innovation…

On the face of it that’s a fairly sensible comment if you purely look at things from the perspective that research and innovation can only occur with financial inputs. Notice also the clever drop in of ‘coordinated’ in that sentence to suggest that open-source projects lack co-ordination. In some sense that has certainly been true, but it’s now not quite the case as the Ubuntu project shows that the effectiveness of open source collaboration and coordination is no longer the disaster zone it once was.

Ok so on what grounds am I arguing against Mr. Patterson? I think it’s related to what I wrote last night; that there are many other forces behind the innovation on the web front nowadays, more than anything: passion. And maybe ‘profit’ looking at it from the word’s etymology is not just about a financial profit, but a profit of goodwill, support, emerging community, openness, user directed control.

And is support purely a carrot dangling on the end of the string? Or rather ponying up the dough (money up front) to get people to work on such things. No. What open source does very well is foster innovation by people who have a genuine passion to hack away into the night as it were, and do it just for the love of it. Apart from a ego massage, what other incentive do open source developers have? It has to be their passion for creating the wonderful software that they do.

If anything web development is partially open source because whilst it’s an unspoken truth to say that our designs may sometimes pass a resemblance to something we saw elsewhere and liked a lot–that is what happens. That’s design and art forms. Having influences that guide us to the next stage. Coders may peek into the source to look at various techniques and whilst Ctrl + C is not the solution so to speak (that’s copy, not break!) but we are influenced by the implementation. Even reading people’s websites, blogs and forum comments on how to solve a bloody Internet Explorer 6 layout issue is an open form of collaboration; we aren’t downloading proprietary binary objects to solve the problem; we are sharing the solutions and ideas in geek readable form!

Is this not in effect an open source model? Whilst I’m not saying we should now go and create a direct copy of say Flickr, some users may already be thinking, I wish it did this and that, and they’ll probably go and do it and be influenced by Flickr but they won’t necessarily leech the code; various parts of the process (design, code prototyping, implementation etc.) will be influenced by what has gone before. It’s an art form, and the creative person will have their influences and then chuck it in a pot, mix it up and have something that’s their own. It’s like my writing: my big influences include Jack Kerouac, JG Ballard and Will Self; but I’m not writing books exactly how Kerouac would. I’m not copying his words. They’re at the back of my mind when I write, as are the influences I get from everywhere. Web design is the same, be it code or visual–it has influences that whether it’s for a public, private or open entity–the same work practice has gone into it.

Can you honestly say that you have written a piece of code that hasn’t had even a minor influence in implementation or reason of coding it in the first place? (e.g. x didn’t work so I decided to start on this: y; to the solve the problem.) Can you say you sat in a dark room for a year and then designed a website (appearance) that had no influences at all but only your own concoction? Probably not. In fact as a writer I like identifying the prose that has influences from my favourite authors: like I say might call a certain sentence very Kerouac inspired (’Go cry…’) or perhaps Will Self (I was impressed with the writing on the A41(M) and the mention of Lutyens… yes I know this shit man! It made it OK to write about Owen Williams’ bridges of the future–that’s the original 1959 bridges on the M1, OK?…) etc.

Maybe the web developer should be able to say, my design is influenced by the aesthetic of Flickr, the usability of Google based applications (which always have an aesthetic of their own)–and so forth.

So to wrap up, where does this leave Mr. Patterson’s statement? The point is that profit isn’t just about financial gains, there are profits from open source that we can all benefit from. Profits such as fostering the ability to contribute, be in control and do something yourself in the vein of your influences to communicate what you want to. Innovation sometimes seems to be seen as copying features from Windows, or Mac OS X and any other direction within that and some of it will. Apple did with what they saw at Xerox and Microsoft inevitably did with what they saw from Apple. But it’s putting your own spin on it. Can Flickr be called a bootleg or copy of what Yahoo! Photos was? No, it does the same thing but with its own spin on it. Operating systems do the same. Innovation will always sprout so long as someone has the ability to think, the ability to do it, the will to communicate and the passion to drive them there–regardless of the financial incentive to do so.

For this reason, I believe Mr. Patterson’s statement on the front of it is reasonable if a slightly dated view, and a very close minded view of what is needed to drive innovation. After all, I don’t remember there being any financial incentive when fire was ‘invented’?

Think outside of the box there are many other reasons aside from money. I’m not saying open source will beat Microsoft one day, maybe it will, maybe it won’t? Does it matter? The point is that the success of the web over the past ten years proves that open collaborative environments can foster innovation and do so incredibly successfully without precluding the financial gains that may come from it, but neither is it a prerequisite in my view. I.e. I could create something fantastic website and advertise and promote it for free (bar my ADSL monthly fee) and it might just gain traction. After all, it’s not exactly big well known brands and corporations behind some of the Web ‘2.0′ successes; though eventually they do become them themselves.

The web has levelled the playing field of opportunity. Maybe Open Source will do the same for the computer’s local environment; and maybe with the playing field levelled, that is what Microsoft is having a harder time of getting their heads around and how to leverage it for their business model.

Note, this is a long heartfelt blog post. It’s not the usual web evangelism angle but a unique one. Whether you give it the time of day is neither here or there but the matter remains–what I’ve written here means a lot to me.

Interesting is how I would call the past couple of months or so. I don’t tend to write personal stuff on this blog because I don’t think this is the place. That said that wasn’t the case even just a couple of months ago when I wrote far too much personal stuff which has now been channelled into Memoirs of a Time:

I finished as soon as I could in the service station [Knutsford on the M6] and dashed back out into the rain to fumble with my keys getting them into the door lock, jumping into my steel cocoon and just sat cowering. Everywhere I went there was a superlative in human form to compare myself to. The end result was a lasting impression of inferiority. The Lakes were my dearest hope that peace to quell the thunder in my heart would come. I just needed to calm down; inhale the crystalline air and listen to platitude; feel clear sparkling water run through my thoughts, that would cleanse and quench my thirst and resolve my war.

from Memoirs of a Time “Northern Links” by Victoria J.K. Lamburn

The thunder was quelled and since then I have really got back on track with so many things. One of those is really taking a good hard look at what’s happening in the world of web development and ultimately the career I absolutely love with a passion.

This isn’t an exercise in bragging though; rather an explanation in my words of something I have ‘hit’ that has been a part as much as anything in digging myself out of the rut I had got into this year up until mid July.

I was talking to Cotia (one of my best mates) the other night over what soon ended up almost three bottles of wine between us (didn’t feel drunk at all, quite odd, felt very tired the next day and still paying…) and we were talking about when we started University in 2002; by which point I got really excited because that is exactly what I wrote about (although about September 2007 rather than October 2002) is that Autumnal air that we all feel press down on our shoulders, like a familiar face leaning over your shoulder radiating a perverse warmth in the cold biting air.

I am a very reflective person, I value halcyon, I harbour the past with me even when I look forward half of me looks over my shoulder with a smile. I’ll always be like this, and I like being like it. I look back on that innocuous and mundane time of waiting for a train at Moulsecoomb station in Brighton in October, in the afternoon of a dawning winter with the perfectness of fading light. So what is it that I’ve hit?

Nothing bad but something to look forward to. Earlier this month I went to the Barcamp in Brighton which was a real eye opener. Not so much on the technical front which was just phenomenal some of things that are being done with the web a mere 12 years after I got into creating my first web page. (In 1995, things were primitive and in my case it was an Amiga 1200 running AMosaic in 640×512 resolution. Yes, not the first but I was there in the days of NCSA Mosaic. *takes a geeky bow*)

The thing that took me aback was actually how much of a community circuit seems to revolve in the web development game and how deeply collaborative it can be. I’m very much a share and share alike person (there are reasons aside from price to be an exclusive Linux user) and I was impressed by this. In fact the collaborative nature of the beast wasn’t purely one upmanship but seemingly the product of passion. When you use a website, have you considered whether the people/person behind it was thinking, “I really want them to enjoy this site, I hope they like it.” Passion, flair, creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, exactitude and dynamism is what drives the web economy and its this marvelous afterglow that makes the Dotcom burst of 2000/2001 seem not a surprise but an inevitability of naievty in the market at that time. Now there seems something so much more soulful behind the motivation of the true pioneers. (I’m not one of those, I follow once the path is well trod–I suppose I’m the Slackware of web developers!)

Notice I am hesitant to say ‘Web 2.0′ as it’s become almost a joke in itself but when you cut through the hype and increasingly nonsensical descriptions, I personally can see the marked difference in the web of today to that of even 3 years ago. In three years time? That’s the buzz, that’s the excitement. What other industry is on the cutting edge of enterprise like that of the web developer?

I’ve hit that realisation that whilst I don’t hope to really create the next killer web app, or killer web site, it’s reinvigorated an enthusiasm inside of me that is just sitting there with me when I write that first line…

<!DOCTYPE html...

Isn’t that a wonderful feeling!

I suppose there is only one thing more that I love more than designing and coding websites, and that’s writing:

At the same time with the flowing patience was a lowered tone in my subvocal thoughts that enunciated my conviction’s brevity to every syllable. That dreadful Monday night changed from the most terrifying of storm clouds to the gentle drifting wisps in the sky whose shadows did not leave me in the shade. Because soon whichever way fate played it, I knew at last I could be free of everything that had raged inside of me, all of that which has brought me down at the slightest faltering step.

from Memoirs of a Time “Elysium” by Victoria J.K. Lamburn