Posts in the Web Category

After a couple of months of fairly determined avoidance, I finally joined Twitter a week ago.  I’m already thinking about leaving.  Have been for the last six days, in fact.

There are two easily-explained reasons why I want to just walk away.  The first is that in order to have a public comment stream and also be able to share more private messages with my friends, I have to have two accounts.  If I could post friends-only messages to an otherwise public account, then I’d only need one account.

And why would I use a public commentary service for private information?  Because it is a very good way of keeping my friends informed of where I am, where I’ll be headed next, what’s happening in my family life, and so on.  That’s not public information, to my mind.  Using Twitter is a lot easier than setting up a private blog to distribute the same information.  (Side note: if you had a friendship request with me declined, this is why.  No, I don’t hate you.)

The second reason is that I don’t have a way to filter out people who are swamping my Twitter stream.  Yes, I’m very glad that you have so much to say, but you’re burying the other people who are just as interesting but not quite so loquacious, obsessive, or just plain bored.  In my current short list of friends, I have two that are, um, extra-expressive.  (Both women, in fact.  No comment?)  I want these people to remain friends so they can get my updates, infrequent though they may be.  I also want to see what the rest of my friends and followed are saying.  How to resolve it?

Sadly, “leave” only filters their stuff out of phone and IM updates, neither of which I use.  It doesn’t take them out of the RSS feed nor the web view, both of which I use.  Is the solution to de-friend them and let them just follow me?  Sure, for the public account.  For the private personal-info account, that solution fails; they’ll stop getting my updates.  I just wish there was a way to say “this person is my friend, but I’d only like to get updates from them through the following services”.  That way I could set the chatterers to show up in the web view and nothing else, thus restoring some sense of balance and diversity to my RSS feed and thus to Twitterific.

Then there’s the bonus reason I want to throw the whole thing into my bit-bucket:  the way people are using Twitter right now, it’s rapidly becoming the most inefficient and unusable version of IRC ever.  Look, people, if you want to chat, then get a chat room.  You know?

I know, Twitter is new and growing.  Feature sets and social conventions are still in flux and expected to evolve.  Personally, I feel like there’s the kernel of a really good service in there, only not quite the one they’re offering.  I’m not saying Twitter is useless or somehow wrong: it clearly provides something that some people want, and it does what it does fairly well.  I just have the sense that there’s a similar service with a different focus that would provide something that some other people want, myself among them.  Anyone else feel the same way?

• The Twitters was published on Sunday, January 21st, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Web categories.
• There have been thirty-seven replies.

Looks like the idea of a professional organization for web designers is back in the feeds.  Mark Boulton, after listening to the Hot Topics panel from @media 2006, had quite a bit to say about the idea.  Richard Rutter followed up with thoughts of his own, and then D. Keith Robinson chimed in.  There are probably more posts out there by more people, because this is one of those topics that just spreads like a virus, infecting host after host with a copy of itself.  (If you have one, feel free to drop a link in the comments.)

Since Mark started things off by mentioning my comments about education being behind the times (but didn’t actually link to me like he did everyone else; where’s the love, Mark?), I’ll start there.  I still hold that certification is much too premature for our field.  Even if we could wave a wand and create a good set of certification criteria in the next week, it would be out of date within a year.  Anything that wouldn’t go out of date that quickly would be so basic as to make a mockery of the whole idea of certifying someone as competent in the field.

I’ll concede that if a relatively well-funded organization took on the task of creating and (more crucially) keeping up to date the criteria, they could be kept useful.  Hey, maybe an independent W3C!  Well, it’s a thought.

The deeper problem is in deciding what constitutes professional competence.  Does using AJAX get you bonus points, or automatically disqualified?  Does absolutely everything a developer produces have to validate, even if that breaks layout or interactive features in one or more browsers?  Web design isn’t like chemistry, where the precipitate either forms or it doesn’t.  If chemical engineers had to work in conditions equivalent to web developers, they’d have to mix their solutions in several parallel universes, each one with different physical constants, and get the same result in all of them.

Richard’s take is that certification could be based on relevant education and cross-discipline experience.  Well, that leaves me out: my degree in History isn’t likely to be considered relevant.  Then again, I’m not actually a web designer, so maybe Richard’s organization isn’t for me.  I might be considered a developer, but on the other hand, maybe I’m just a technology writer and need to go apply for membership in their club.

Richard’s approach doesn’t really seem to make the “what qualifies” problem go away so much as it abstract it into a non-issue.  You just have to have experience in a discipline.  Nobody says it has to be particularly good or bad—though evaluating that would, apparently, be up to the peers who review your application.  This introduces an interesting subjective element, one that I think may feel foreign to those of us who like to work with computers.  In any organization composed of humans, of course, you’re not going to get away from subjectivity.

In all this, though, the people who are interested in creating a professionals’ organization will have to answer a fairly tough question.  Given that both the World Organization of Webmasters and HTML Writers Guild already exist and offer certification, why aren’t they more widely known or highly regarded, and how will any proposed organization do better?  What will make it better or more influential?

Of everyone, I think Keith’s got the best idea with his proposed professionals’ network.  It’s probably game-able, but heck, so is entrance into a professional society.  I know I’d be very interested in participating in such a network, especially one that let people indicate who they’ve worked with, and on what.  Analyzing those link patterns could be endlessly fascinating.  If it includes community features similar to those of the original MeetUp, thus encouraging physical meetings of members, as well as the endorsement and networking features of LinkedIn, I’d be there in a hot second.

So… who wants to start forming the team to make that network come alive?

• Being Professionals was published on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Web categories.
• There have been thirty replies.

Jeffrey wrote yesterday about some Flickr problems he’s having, and while he’s found resolution, his post brought to my forebrain some problems I’ve been having with Flickr.  So I’ll record them here.  Wooo!  Flickr pile-on!

Actually, I really only have one problem, but it manifests itself in multiple ways.  The problem is this: any photo with a privacy setting other than “Public” doesn’t ever show up in Flickr RSS feeds.

Here’s why that’s a problem, instead of a good thing:

• If one of my contacts has marked me as a Friend, and they post a photo that’s visible only to Friends & Family, that photo does not appear in my RSS feed of photos from my friends and family.  These same pictures show up if I go to the “Photos from your Contacts” page on the Flickr site.  In the feed, they’re entirely absent.

• If I post a photo that’s visible only to Friends & Family, any comments made on that photo do not appear in my “Comments on your photos and/or sets” feed.  So I don’t know what anyone’s saying about pictures of my wife and child unless I go to the “Recent activity on your photos” page on the Flickr site.

• Bonus related limitation: only comments appear in my recent activity feed; things like added tags and favorite-photo designations don’t show up in the feeds either.  In fact, the feed link on the Flickr site says “Subscribe to recent activity on your photos” but the only activity shown in the feed is comments on public photos.

There may be other, even more subtle hindrances in that vein, but those are the ones that have annoyed me the most.

So why is it that stuff I want to know about—in fact, the stuff that I probably want most to know about—is only available on the actual web site, and not in the RSS feeds?  Flickr knows exactly what it can show me and what it can’t when I visit the site, but when viewed through the lens of RSS, it suddenly forgets what non-public access I’m allowed to have.  To steal a perfectly appropriate line from Jeffrey’s post:

A user experience mistake like this feels quadruply wrong precisely because user experience is what Flickr typically gets so right.

Update: it seems to be a security thing, as a few people have already commented.  I guess I understand the concern, but it’s hard for me to give it a whole lot of credit: if I were that paranoid about people seeing photos I consider truly private, I wouldn’t put them on a central server that anyone can visit in the first place.  Yes, I’ve withheld some photos from being fully public, but that privacy effort is one security breach or late-night coding goof away from total failure.  (Remember when Amazon accidentally showed the real names of reviewers instead of their account names, thus exposing some authors as having slammed books competing with their own?)  So if my personal “recent activity on your pictures” and “photos from your contacts” feeds were based on long randomly generated tokens, and not the discoverable user IDs, that would seem to be private enough—for me, anyway.  Your paranoia may vary.

• Forgetful Flickr was published on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been thirteen replies.

The new weekly web-design ‘zine Vitamin (a.k.a. Yet Another Major New Project From The Carsons) launched earlier this week to generally positive notice from the design community.  I was glad to see this for three reasons.

1. I wrote one of the launch articles, “Making Popular Layout Decisions“.  Although now that I think about it more, maybe that should have been “Making Unpopular Layout Decisions”.  Anyway, it’s a commentary piece that will probably annoy a few hard-core purists.  That always makes for a success in my book.
2. I’m a member of the Advisory Board, so I have some stake in seeing it do well.  I’d hate to have things go badly due to my being a bad advisor!  Especially since I’m kind of new to the advisory game.
3. It demonstrates that there’s plenty of room in the web design community for such resources.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what we have—after all, I love A List Apart so much, I wrote the markup!—but it’s a sign of renewed health and interest in the field.

Oh, and speaking of Carson projects, I hear this May’s Professional CSS XHTML Techniques workshop is almost sold out—so if you’re interested, better get cracking.  (The same is true for AEA Chicago, as it happens.)

• Taste the Vitamin was published on Thursday, April 20th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Web and Writing categories.
• There have been seven replies.

At the risk of being a bit backward-looking, on 21 December 2005 I was quoted in the article “Year in Review: CSS, Standards, Microformats and Flash“.  (And I wasn’t even the one who talked about microformats, Jon!)  This was the second half of a year-end review by Stephen Bryant; part one, “The Highs and Lows of Web Design in 2005“, is also online and quotes many familiar names.  I was going to blog both at the time, and, well… I forgot.

For historical purposes, here’s the whole block of text from which I was quoted, in response to the question “Generally speaking, did you see much progression in the adoption of Web standards this year? In CSS use? Can you give some specific site examples?”:

As in previous years, 2005 saw standards adopted more slowly than I’d have liked, but faster than in previous years.  I think this was the year when it became self-evident that standards-oriented design is the way to go.  I can’t remember the last time I had to defend the practice, and whenever that was, it wasn’t in 2005.  At this point, it’s basically all over but the training.  I think the biggest gap now is between the people who want to go standards-oriented, and their ability to do so.  That’s not an easy gap to bridge, but I think we’ll get there.

I mean, it’s the point now that desktop applications are using XHTML and CSS to drive their layout.  Just recently I discovered that Adium, a multi-service chat client for OS X, uses XHTML+CSS for its chat windows.  [E]very chat session in Adium is just a single XHTML document that’s dynamically updated.  Which means that you can define your own markup and CSS to create your own chat window theme.  It’s amazingly slick and powerful, and some of the themes are just gorgeous.  There are other programs doing similar things, and I expect the trend to continue.

The new-in-2005 CSS-driven sites that immediately come to mind: Apple, Slashdot, Turner Broadcasting, AlterNet, McAfee… and I’m sure there were hundreds of others I missed.

Hopefully this won’t lose me the bonus points Jeremy awarded me.  C’mon, man—at least I didn’t post my answer to the question “Best books, blogs, design? Best CSS layout?”!

• Before I Forget was published on Monday, January 9th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Web categories.
• There have been five replies.

Quite suddenly, workshops and seminars seem to be all the rage, don’t they?  The Carson Workshops schedule keeps growing, and the shows selling out.  They recently announced a Web applications summit in London that frankly sounds amazing.  UIE recently announced a six-city roadshow, and seats are already selling.  Clear:left is sponsoring a one-day show on Ajax programming starring the indominitable Jeremy Keith.  And then of course there’s my personal favorite, An Event Apart, which sold out six weeks before the Philadelphia event (which is, yikes, now only a week away!) and is soon to visit other cities.  Keep an eye on the AEA RSS feed to get the latest on those cities, by the way.

Look over all the workshops’ line-ups, and you see a lot of big names and smart people standing on stages (or at least in front of rooms) talking about some truly important and interesting topics.  A determined workshop-goer could run him- or herself quite ragged trying to catch even half the shows, given their geographic dispersion and temporal proximity.  It’s almost a shame, because every one of them sounds really, really interesting.  Have I said the word “interesting” enough times yet?

But really, the most interesting part to me is not that these seminars are being announced, but that they’re generating such strong interest—that they’re selling out.  It’s another indicator, and a very clear one, that the industry is well and truly recovering.

Addendum: just to add a little bit more support to what I said, 37signals announced their overhauled Basecamp seminar, The Getting Real Workshop, and sold all fifty seats in twelve hours.  Whoa.

• So Many Stages was published on Sunday, November 27th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been six replies.

For those of you who’ve always wanted to hear me talk very quickly over a phone connection: AIGA has put up a podcast of me talking with Liz Danzico about design, code, and An Event Apart.  At the end of last week, they published a similar interview clip of The Zeldman.  There are more interview clips to come from each of us in the next three weeks, so keep an eye on the AIGA site or their feed.

Originally these weren’t quite podcasts because they weren’t part of a feed, and thus had no enclosure to download through your aggregator.  AIGA has fixed that now, and you can grab the AIGA podcast feed via the Podcast directory page.  Or, if you want, go to the previously-linked individual resource pages and download the MP3 files directly.  Either one works for me.

• AIGA Interview was published on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Web categories.
• There have been four replies.

Over at UIE‘s Brain Sparks, the brilliant and lovely Christine Perfetti talked recently about the 7-11 Milk test, and how web sites fail this test 70% of the time.

I’m glad to see that they intend to do more research on the topic, because I think there’s a lot more to the story than just buying milk, and I hope that’s factored into the future research.  Buying on web sites, to me, is not really a 7-11 milk purchase.  It’s more like trying to buy a wood screw for a specific purpose at Home Depot when I’m used to buying them at a corner market.

See, 7-11’s are all pretty much the same.  If you’ve been in one, you know where to find the milk.  Even if the one you’re in is laid out differently than you expect, the conventions are all pretty much the same.  Even if you’ve never been in one before, it won’t take long to get the lay of the land and find the milk.

But walk into a Home Depot and you’re immediately overwhelmed.  I want to find this one thing that’s so tiny compared to what’s in front of me!  There’s an immediate low-level feeling of futility.  Furthermore, any expectations I might have from my local market experience are useless, or even counterproductive.  And even better is when I ask for help and get sent to the wrong place, as has happened to me many a time in Home Depot.

Once I do find the wood screws, then I’m presented with a wide range of choices, and I have to determine which one is best.  Odds are that there won’t be anyone there able to help me make a decision, either; I’m on my own to try to figure out which is the best wood screw for my needs.  The feeling of futility returns.  If I’m not particularly invested in buying this wood screw, I might just give up at this point: faced with too many choices, most of which are going to be wrong, I might decide to make no choice at all.

Furthermore, it’s much easier to bail out of the buying process on a web site.  If I’ve gone to the time and effort of finding and visiting a Home Depot, I’ve invested something in achieving an outcome.  With a web site, I can just come back later.

You can probably draw analogies between the experience I just described and shopping on a web site: the overwhelming home page, the search to find something resembling I want, the misleading cues, the array of choices once I get there.  If web sites were as consistent as 7-11 stores, and online purchases were as simple as “I need milk”, then yes, a 70% failure rate would be abominable—almost unimaginable.  Neither is the case, though.

Mind you, this is not to suggest we should shrug our shoulders and accept this state of affairs.  I think that UIE has an opportunity here to identify the chokepoints (and I use that word on purpose) in the shopping process.  Done correctly, what they find could be applicable in physical space as well as on web sites.

• Milk vs. Wood Screws was published on Monday, September 26th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been eleven replies.