Thoughts From Eric Archive

In keeping with last Saturday’s post on audiences, I’ll post today with a question for the audience.  Well, a segment of the audience, anyway.

It looks like I’m about to switch from cable to a satellite TV provider, partly because of economics but also because I’m just sick of propping up my local cable monopoly, a company I disliked from the moment they arrived in town.  (Hint: their headquarters are in Philadelphia.)

I’m interested in HD programming, since I have a massive new HD TV set up in the newly refinished basement, and I know both DirecTV and Dish offer HD packages.  They also both have DVR, in which I have some interest.  I’m looking to get the best combination of both, and to be with a service that will rapidly expand HD offerings as networks switch over in the next year.  Broadband is not an issue, since I have DSL through my other local monopoly and not through a cable modem.

So—which one would you recommend I get, DirecTV or Dish, and why?

• Satellite Choices was published on Saturday, August 20th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been twenty-six replies.

Everything old is new again: Jeff and Doug have been contemplating conference crowd behaviors in the presence of wifi.  It’s been a year or so since the last time this came up, so I guess we were about due.  I’ve certainly noticed the sorts of things they’re describing, and it’s particularly acute at SXSW.

In an unsurprising case of adapting to fit the times, there are those speakers who make use of the available network, opening IRC channels for parallel commentary or inviting instantly messaged questions, as Jeff does.  From the audience side, I’ve made use of the wifi to IM other people at the same conference in order to coordinate later meetings, or even to comment on the presentation in progress to friends in the room.  Typing strikes me as being marginally more polite than whispering, in such a case, though it’s probably rude either way.

There are potential speaker costs from this behavior, as Doug points out.  If the audience is unresponsive due to being absorbed in their work (or for any other reason), it can seriously sap the spaker’s energy, which leads to more audience apathy, thus starting a vicious downward spiral.  On the flip side, an engaged audience can charge up a speaker, creating a powerful positive feedback cycle.  It’s also the case that at some conferences, the only pay the speaker receives is the audience’s response.  Take away that response, and you’re taking away their payment.

Now, I will say that as a speaker, I don’t find wifi junkies terribly disturbing.  From the podium, there’s only a minor difference between people sending e-mail and people taking notes on the talk.  The difference is that the note-takers look up more often, and focus on me when they do.  The wifiheads only look up every now and again, and only do so out of a vague sense of social expectation.  You can read it in their body language: “Uh-oh, it’s been ten minutes since I acted like I was paying attention, so I’ll gaze in the vague direction of the stage while I mentally compose my next e-mail message.”

But this isn’t just about the speaker, as most of the real cost is borne by audience members.  While it’s certainly easier to ignore tapping keyboards than whispers, the fact remains that being surrounded by furious typing is distracting to those who really do want to pay attention to the presentation.  It’s not so much rude to the speaker as it is to other attendees.  When I’m up there on stage, I always focus in on the people who are really paying attention, but they’re often scattered throughout a sea of hunched typers.

So here’s my (hopefully modest) proposal.  Let’s collectively adopt a social convention where the people who want to actually pay attention to the speaker sit near the front of the room, closer to the stage; and those who are more interested in the wifi sit toward the back of the room, which is probably closer to the wireless access point anyway.  So you’ll get a stronger signal, and the folks up front won’t have to deal with the constant clatter of keys.  The speaker can focus on the people who are really interested, and if he’s smart, he’ll also open side channels for the wifiers to use as well so that they become more engaged.  Everyone wins!

I may well put up signs at the door of my next presentation suggesting this to people as they enter the room.  It would be very interesting to see if people followed the suggestion, and how it changed the room dynamic as a result.

• Clickety-Clack, Move On Back was published on Saturday, August 13th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been nine replies.

Remember how, back in July, I ventured across the Atlantic to give two full-day workshops on XHTML and CSS in London?  Well, this November the workshop is crossing the ocean: announcing “Professional CSS XHTML Techniques” this coming November 3rd in Chicago, Illinois.

Ryan Carson, one of the two founders of BD4D, is putting together a heck of a workshop series, as you can see by visiting the Carson Workshops home page.  There you’ll find my workshop listed, as well as seminars from Cal Henderson, Joe Clark, and Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke.  So far, they’re all headed to London, but given the past history of Ryan’s efforts, I think it’s a good bet some or all of them will be headed Stateside in the future.

As in London, your registration gets you a copy of the “XHTML / CSS Survival Kit”, a disc containing all kinds of examples, articles, tools, and so forth.  You’ll also get a whole day of high-tempo, practical instruction in CSS-driven design, with plenty of opportunity to pose questions and get answers.  I had a great time in London, and the attendees seemed to have just as good a time.  I’ll be doing an updated version of what I did there, so if you wanted to attend the London event but couldn’t swing the transoceanic airfare—well, here’s your chance to make up for it!

Addendum: you know, I was so excited to tell you that the workshop was going to happen that I completely neglected to mention that registration is already open!  So get yerself on over to the Carson Workshops site, click on through to my seminar, and sign up already!

• Workshopping in Chicago was published on Wednesday, August 10th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, and Speaking categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

Some of you may have tried to comment recently and been hit with a “comments are closed for the time being” error.  That was Gatekeeper, actually, and it was being tripped even by valid responses to the Gatekeeper challenge.  The weird thing is that some people were able to comment, whereas others were not.  I have no idea why this was happening.

The point of this being to say that I’ve updated Gatekeeper to return a more helpful error message, and also believe some changes I made should make gatekeeper less random.  If I’m wrong and you get an error, please use the e-mail link in the error message to send the error to me.  If I’m right and you get no error, then no worries.

If I get a lot of error reports, I’ll hobble or disable Gatekeeper, but I hope it doesn’t come to that.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, my sincere apologies to anyone who got bitten by this bug, and I hope things will be better from here on out.

• Comment Turbulence was published on Saturday, July 30th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Projects and WordPress categories.
• There have been five replies.

Oh, sure, I build a slide show system specifically because of a bug in Opera 7.5, and despite that I go fairly far out of my way to make sure that Opera will still be able to display the slide show using its unique and groundbreaking feature, OperaShow, and now I’m the bad guy.

A little history: the first version of S5 was meant to recreate what OperaShow did, except do it in other browsers.  That was pretty much it—but as I was fiddling with the JavaScript to make that work, I realized I could build my own navigation menu in the JavaScript.  So I did.  Then, when I tested to see if it worked in Opera, it didn’t.  I tried for a while, but couldn’t make it work.  So I decided to hide the menu from Opera.  Better no feature than a broken feature, and besides, it was the only one so hidden.

When I tossed S5 out to the public, I figured maybe twelve other people in the world would be interested.  It was one of those, “Hey, this is something I hacked together, look how geeky I am!”

And the crowd, against all expectations, went wild.

So the list of things I thought would be interesting to add some day suddenly took on extra weight.  There were people out there who actually wanted to use S5, and wanted things like font scaling and incremental display of slide content.  Furthermore, there were people contributing code to improve the system.  Out of nowhere, a little open source project erupted in the comments of my posts.

In order to keep things from bogging down, I defined a feature list for S5 1.0 and shipped it out.  All along, I made sure that the slide show would fall back to OperaShow in Opera.  To do so, I had to write a routine (called notOperaFix() because it had to fix things for browsers that aren’t Opera) that swapped around the media values for various linked style sheets, among other things.  I also had to define the S5 format so it was compatible with the OperaShow Format specification.  That meant changing some things from my original file format, and in my opinion not always for the better.

Despite a few people telling me to just drop OperaShow and OSF support because it wasn’t worth the effort, I kept those mechanisms in place as we moved to version 1.1.  I figured that since Opera had a slide show system, I’d let people use it.  Besides, any time I created a test copy of S5 that didn’t let Opera drop back to OperaShow, it completely failed to display the slide show.

Now S5 1.1 is out, and it has more features that people asked for—font scaling based on window size changes, incremental display, more keyboard commands, and so on.  Throughout it all, I made sure OperaShow would still work.  And it does.  It doesn’t get the keyboard commands, or the font scaling, or the incremental display.  I did try.  I couldn’t figure it out.

Now, there are those who apparently think that this means I’m a liar when I say S5 is cross-browser.  I admit it—S5 doesn’t work in Mosaic 1.0.  It also quite likely fails in IE5.0/Win.  Actually, I think it fails in IE5/Mac, which is ironic since my starting point for S5 was a rudimentary slide show system written by Tantek Çelik.  But it does not fail in Opera, because it’s quite intentionally designed to be OperaShow compatible.  It isn’t feature-identical, but then, the features in (and version number of) Opera for the Mac usually lag behind Opera for Windows.

Lying about S5’s cross-browser nature?  Giving Opera the cold shoulder?  Utterly wrong on both counts.  I’ve done everything I can to make sure Opera is still at this particular table.  Giving Opera the cold shoulder would have been me saying, “Screw it, I’m not providing a fallback to OperaShow and if Opera users don’t like it, they can install Firefox”.  And I’ll be totally honest: I’m sort of tempted.  I could clean up the markup; cut out some JavaScript gymnastics, including a backflip over a Gecko bug when dynamically changing media types, which I wouldn’t have to do if I weren’t still supporting OperaShow compatibility; and simplify my life.

After all, it’s not like I sprang this on the world.  The last eight beta and release candidate versions of S5 were published here.  Comments and contributions were solicited and welcomed, and many were received.  The state of Opera support has not changed one iota in all that time.  There were several months in which anyone could have stepped up to the plate and contributed fixes for Opera.  Did anyone?  No.

I’d do it myself, except I’m not sure I can.  For example, I just a few hours ago made a copy of the S5 package, unpacked it, and edited the JS file so it did no Opera detection: the scripts all ran on Opera the same as they do for any other browser.  I loaded it into both Opera 7.5 and 8.02 for OS X, which is what I have right now.  You know what happened?  Nothing.  The slide show didn’t happen.  The outline view came up, changed slightly, and then sat there.  And do you know why?  Because Opera defaults to identifying itself as Internet Explorer.

So I fixed that in the preferences, and tried again.  Everything worked just fine except for two things.  One, the browser window had a vertical scroll bar for no apparent reason.  Two, the controls were nowhere to be found, either by hovering over where they’re supposed to be or using the “C” key to toggle them.  I’m not sure why these two things are happening, because the JavaScript console reports nothing amiss.  That has me kind of stuck.

So here’s the deal.  Want S5 to be feature-equivalent in Opera?  Fine.  Take the S5 1.1 package and fix it for Opera—preferably version 6 or later, but I’ll take what I can get.  Liberally comment your code so I know what you did, and why, or else post fixes here.  I promise that, if this is done in such a way as to not degrade behavior in any other browser—because, remember, they don’t have anything like OperaShow on which they can fall back—and so that the code is maintainable, I’ll roll the changes into my version of S5, and release it as 1.1.1 or 1.1o or something.  (The same is true for any other browser, in fact.)

I’ll help out where I can, if anyone has questions about this bit of JS or that bit of CSS in the S5 directory.  Post them here and I’ll do my best to answer.  If I get hit with a bolt of genius and can suddenly fix the problems myself, I’ll do so, but odds are that won’t happen.  It will therefore be up to the community to help out.  This isn’t just me, as the credits page makes clear; S5 has long been a community effort.

Put another, more succinct way: don’t complain, contribute.  It’s more satisfying in the long run, and it’s more constructive.

• Opera and S5 1.1 was published on Friday, July 29th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the S5 and Tools categories.
• There have been seventeen replies.

I admit, this took a lot longer than it should have, but at long last I’m publishing S5 1.1.  No beta number, no release candidate status—just the plain old version 1.1, final.  The S5 pages are updated to reflect this, and to make it a little easier to get around the S5 area of the site.  There’s also an updated introductory slide show for your consideration.

Here’s the biggest change: S5 is now explicitly in the Public Domain.  In the end, this best reflected what I wanted for the technology, and a poll of contributors-to-date indicated no objections to this change.  Version 1.0 will stay as it was, under a Creative Commons license, but version 1.1 and later will all be freely available to anyone to do with as they please without fear of licensing restriction.

As part of the 1.1 package, I’ve included the introductory slide show, the default and I18N themes, all relevant documentation, and XOXO versions of the introductory slide show and the structural references.  A future version of S5 will probably be better harmonized, so I don’t have to have two versions of the references.  I’d have done that for v1.1, except it’s already long past time to ship. 

As always, share and enjoy!

• S5 1.1 was published on Thursday, July 28th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the S5 and Tools categories.
• There have been fifteen replies.

Partially because it’s been touted as a great XHTML+CSS-based application, and partially because I could use better invoice management, I signed up for a free Blinksale account.  Having spent some time fiddling around with it, I’ll be the first to say that I’m pretty impressed by what’s under the hood.  The markup is just about as clean as a Web application gets, and it generally uses the right elements in the right places.  It might be a little div-heavy, but that’s not an easy thing to avoid.  The gang at Firewheel has done solid work there.

On the other hand, the visual design of Blinksale totally hurts my eyes.  Those are some amazing shades of green, boys.  I really wish they didn’t clash in quite that way.  Also, the entire application feels rather like a copy of Basecamp, from the way it’s organized to the ability to get activity feeds to the “Remember me for 2 weeks” login option.  Those are, of course, all nice options to have in this sort of application, but they still feel like copies.

The help system, on the other hand, turned out to be an enormously deep resource once I drilled in a bit.  Just about anything you could possibly want to know about Blinksale is in there somewhere, I’d wager.  Firewheel has definitely raised the bar there, and gets an enthusiastic round of applause for it.

Beyond that, Blinksale seems like it would be great for hourly consulting, or for invoicing items that are shipped to the customer.  For my purposes, though, it isn’t really an invoicing system.  Most of my work involves traveling to clients to conduct in-person training, so in addition to the consulting fee, there are expenses to bill and receipts to submit.  In some cases, there are clients who would likely refuse to accept a web-based invoice.

So I could use it as a way to track which invoices have gone out and which have been paid, but I could do that with an Excel spreadsheet or a Filemaker Pro database, or heck, I could even whip up my own little PHP/mySQL solution.  Adding in all the extra stuff, like e-mailed invoices and reminders and thank-yous, would be time-consuming, and it would be a truly major effort to add my own PayPal integration, as Blinksale has done.  It probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as polished (although it also wouldn’t have those retina-searing color combinations).  For basic invoice tracking, though, I’d be able to do everything Blinksale offers me, and not have limitations like only being able to store a total of three clients, or being limited to three invoices per month.

Now, remember, I’m talking about what it will do for me.  I’d like to stress that my situation is somewhat unique: not many freelance consultants earn a living in training.  For a freelance designer or even a small design shop, I can totally see Blinksale as being a great application to use.  I doubt I’ll see a need to upgrade to a paid account—but your mileage, as ever, may vary.

• On Blinksale was published on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been seven replies.

Between last night and late this morning, no mail was delivered to any address (mine, Kat’s, anyone else) at meyerweb.com.  This happened because the mail server was so overloaded by the latest joy and sunshine from our bretheren in the mass-mailing industry that it basically died.  Those lovable little spammers—is there anything they can’t ruin?

I’m told that, in theory, any mail that was sent during that period should eventually make its way to us.  However, there’s always a chance that an upstream mail server would decide to drop the mail instead of retry delivery, so there’s no guarantee of its arrival.  If you’ve sent us anything critical in the last 24 hours, you might want to send it again, just to be on the safe side.  If it’s non-critical, better to wait a few days to see if there’s a successful redelivery attempt.

• Mail Turbulence was published on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There has been one reply.