Posts Tagged ‘ web ’

Form can inform content. Sometimes.

Changing the “look and feel” of my blog made me reconsider the tagline, what it really meant, and how I could express it best.

You may have noticed, I’ve changed the “theme” of my blog.  I like to keep things simple, and though I will probably add a touch of colour here and there, I hadn’t noticed this particular theme, called Hemingway, before.  Not that I’m a big fan of Hemingway, the writer, but this theme really appeals to my sense of simplicity.

But there was one problem: the tagline, that sound bite-ish blurb that describes the blog.  It was originally a couple of dozen words long.  It fit nicely in the old theme (Redoable Lite), but in Hemingway, it just didn’t render properly because it was too long.

I could have tried to mess with the template for Hemingway, but there was no guarantee that I could alter the bits of CSS needed to render the tagline better.  So maybe, I reasoned, I should consider a shorter tagline.

I ended up with “design is essential, but it isn’t normal.”  Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

I like this new, much shorter, tagline because it connects better to the name of my blog, and also says something interesting (hopefully) about the content.  In a world that seems obsessed with very superficial and naive design (witness, virtually any of the design shows on television these days), I want to bring home the point that design is not something that we (North Americans) are really used to at all, while also emphasizing how important I think design is for the world generally.

It may not be the perfect tagline, but I think it’s better than the old one.

The interesting thing is, though, that what drove me to think up a tagline that is – in my mind at least – very noticeably better than the old one is a simple rendering/positioning/visual feature of my blog.  This is interesting, I think, because there are many people who think that design is only superficial when it deals with simple appearances.  But here, I hope, I’ve shown that if you think about it properly, even what might be thought of as superficial can lead to rather deeper considerations.

Don’t get me wrong: I still firmly believe that form must follow function.  But sometimes, if the form is there already, it can really help figure out new forms to fit function or, in this case, content, better.

2009
05/29
CATEGORY
design
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Four Firefox addons to help Google

Firefox and Google play nice together.  Here’s four Firefox addons that enhance Google’s behaviour.

Google is a wonderful thing.  But if you’re running Firefox, you can augment your googling experience with some add-ons.  An add-on is a downloadable chunk of code that runs inside Firefox only and changes its behaviour.  Using add-ons is a great way to improve your productivity with Firefox (or any other browser that supports them, of course) because add-ons fine-tune the browser’s behaviour to suit you – not the other way around.

Let’s start with a screen grab showing Firefox running a couple of the add-ons.

GoogleEnhancer and DeeperWeb running together

GoogleEnhancer and DeeperWeb running together

GoogleEnhancer

Let’s start on the left side, the side that looks almost like a typical google page.  Here we see GoogleEnhancer running.  The most important thing to notice is the date beside each hit.  That’s the date that the corresponding web resource was first created (or at least, as near to that date as Google can get).  Think about that: now you know how old those pages are.  No more following links with wildly interesting titles that take you to a page that hasn’t been updated in 10 years.  That in itself is, as they say, worth the price of admission.

Notice that the blue bar that reports the number of hits also includes the timeframe covered by the reported hits – in this case “over the past year.”  You can change the period of time by using the new pulldown beside the search box at the top of the page (it’s marked “anytime” in the screen grab).

You can also search for specific file types only by using the “Any file” pulldown by the search bar to chose which file type you’re interested in.  You want to find only MP3 files?  Or just PDF files?  Just choose it from that pulldown.

GoogleEnhancer can do a number of other things, like search for web resources in specific languages only, each of which can be separately enabled through the add-ons control panel (in the Tools menu).  It’s a “light” add-on (it won’t slow the browser down), and it’s so useful that I can’t imagine googling anymore without it.

DeeperWeb

The right side of the image shows another add-on, DeeperWeb.  This add-on uses a database maintained by the developers to generate quite quickly additional information about your search. Basically, this add-on puts a bit more structure on Google’s query results.  It’s a tricky balance: too much structure and it becomes too rigid to capture the broad variety of stuff Google can show you; to little structure and there’s no point to having the add-on at all.

Most importantly, DeeperWeb creates a tag cloud (the jumble of keywords at the top of right sidebar).  Each tag in the cloud will filter the search results to favour those with the keyword.  The bigger the keyword’s font size, the greater its occurrences in the search.

Notice that one keyword in the tag cloud (“graphic”) is coloured differently.  This is because my mouse was hovering over it when I took the screen grab.  If I clicked on the green part of the highlighted keyword, DeeperWeb will interact with Google to refine your search by refining it to those hits that contain the keyword.  For instance, in the screen grab, I had searched for “design.”  If I then selected the green part of the “graphic” keyword from DeeperWeb’s tag cloud, the next search would be for “design graphic.”

And if I selected the red minus sign on the “graphic” keyword, Google would search for “design,” excluding any hits containing “graphic.”  (In Googlese: design -graphic.)

Below the tag cloud, DeeperWeb offers the top hits from a number of other search engines as well – because sometimes Google isn’t exactly perfect – and includes things like searching for blogs that contain your query, searching Wikipedia, and so on.

The one reservation I have about DeeperWeb.com is that I get there feeling from its announcements that there’s a bit of a bias towards using its software to attract business (as possibly implied by sentences like, “In addition to these, there are several clever business, internet marketing and SEO applications to the DeeperWeb’s Tag-Cloud extension….“)

GButts

That’s right, I said “GButts.”

Actually, this stands for Google Buttons.  Very simply, it lets you add buttons to the Firefox main toolbar to access virtually any Google app.

GoogleButtonsImage2009

Ignoring the appearance (I use a Firefox theme called Glaze Black), notice the set of toolbar icons between the print icon and the address bar in the top row.  You’ve got Google mail, Calendar, Docs, Groups, Picasa, and Reader.  The last icon (it’s a gear) allows one to change the settings of GButts and add or remove other Google apps.

A brilliantly simple change really helps me control all the other links I’ve got embedded in my toolbars.

GoogleFx

Lastly, there’s GoogleFx, which is not really for beginners, but can be quite useful.  GoogleFx doesn’t play nicely with DeeperWeb and GoogleEnhancer, but it can replace them.  GoogleFx is more flexible, though not quite as pretty, as the other two add-ons.

GoogleFxImage2009

Like GoogleEnhancer and DeeperWeb, GoogleFx catches output from Google and rewrites the web page to appear more organized than the original.  GoogleFx lets you tweak the layout (notice how the titles of each hit are in a larger font), adds thumbnails of each hit (some people really hate this – I’m not one of them), and provides a right sidebar with all kinds of extra items (if it can find any) and related searches.  You tweak the appearance and options via the preferences button that shows up in the GoogleFx entry in Firefoxs’s add-on management tool.

GoogleFx has a number of tools (at the top) that can be useful, like searching only for resources that are recent.  It also lets you get rid of the advertisements that usually run down the right side of the page, and it rewrites the web page URLs so that they don’t bounce through Google before directing you to the actual site.  These last two I don’t like so much, because those ads pay for Google freedom, and the redirection trick is how Google gathers data to rate the most popular sites.  Both of these need to keep going if Google is going to thrive.  If you like Google, leave these features alone, or you’ll be actually holding them back.

There is a bit of a trick to install GoogleFx.  It’s a greasemonkey extension.  Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that lets you modify how specific pages are rendered in Firefox via other Javascript code.  So first you have to install greasemonkey.  Then you install GoogleFx.  It’s not as hard as it sounds – it’s only about a 3 click process – and the next time you do a Google search, you’ll see a substantially different page layout.

One word of warning: the default values for GoogleFx’s look and feel may not be to your liking, so be ready to spend a little time tweaking which GoogleFx options you like best.

The Bottom Line

These add-ons are really easy to install, yet provide very signficiant improvements in how you can use Google in Firefox.  This means you’ll get more done.  Or, if you’re like me, you’ll get the same amount of work done in less time – and then go spend more time having fun.

2009
05/10
CATEGORY
productivity
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Welcome to my wordpress

I’ve changed blogging site.  Again.

I know: I’m a bit schizo to change my blog again.  But I have my reasons.

The first blog I had was on Vox, because I’m involved with some research projects that use it.  At the time, I just couldn’t get the look and feel of the thing to work for me.  Maybe that’s superficial, but not to me.

So I switched to Blogger.  It was actually easier to create blog items, and Blogger has more flexibility in changing themes and skins.  And I’ll admit to a tendency to prefer Google-ish products.

But I recently noticed some problems.  First, no matter how hard I tried, I still couldn’t get the look & feel right.  OCD?  Maybe.  More seriously, though, I found it was very difficult to add images at arbitrary spots in an entry (they all seemed to appear right at the very start of the entry, no matter where the insertion point was) and Blogger also seems to have signficiant trouble with tabulated data.  This was a problem because – as you’ll see in a few days – an article on decision making in design depends on charts and tables.

Before checking WordPress, I double checked Vox.  If it did images and tables well, perhaps I could learn to love it’s suboptimal (to me) theming.  Vox does a much better job with images.  But it still gagged on tables.

So, here I am at WordPress.  It seems to handle both images and tables quite well.  And there’s sufficient flexibility in the theming that I can tweak things to my satisfaction.  I “bought” the css upgrade so I can tweak the themes, and Bob’s your uncle.

And, if I ever get my dander up, I can actually download the WordPress engine and run it on my web server.  I’m loathe to do that now because I doubt I can administer the software as well as the fine ladies & gentlemen at WordPress.com, but it’s nice to have as an option, especially for a geek like me.

So there you have it.  I’m at WordPress now.  Hopefully I won’t switch again for some time.  I’ve imported my articles from Blogger too, so this blog is pretty much complete.

2009
03/02
CATEGORY
design
2 comments

Ecofont swings – and misses

Ecofont is a font that uses 20% less ink; but there are other ways….

I’ve recently seen several postings about Ecofont, a new font that allegedly uses up to 20% less ink. The trick is that an Ecofont character is filled with small, ink-free circles. If the point size is big, then the holes are visible and – well, weird. But if the point size small (like the font your seeing now), then the inkless areas aren’t individually visible.

It’s a nice idea – ink is a “resource” that tends to be dirty, environmentally speaking. But I would like to suggest an alternative that is both green and gives you a surprising variety of font style….

Use grey letters. Since you can’t produce white ink by combining colours, it seems obvious that grey is just less-ink-than-black or whatever combination of colours your printer uses to get black. And you can make any font grey – you’re not stuck with the helvetica-like style of Ecofont. You can even beat Ecofont’s 20% savings, by choosing a really light shade of grey.

Sorry folks, but Ecofont swings…. and misses.

2008
12/17
CATEGORY
design
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My web presence, III: a first attempt

The road to bad software is paved with good intentions.

In “what’s my problem,” I described why I wanted a web presence. Now it’s time to explain my first attempt, why it failed, and why it still remains my ideal.

I was always interested in using computers to keep information organized. Back before the Web, I played with lisp code for Emacs, creating little hypercard-like modules that would let me link words in one file to other files. And once I’d discovered CGI scripting for the web, I often tried to figure out how to interact with web pages through a browser, but never had that breakthrough moment. I had to wait for Ward Cunningham to have it for me. A programmer with an engineering background, Cunningham invented the first wiki (which continues to thrive at c2). The instant I saw his solution, everything fell into place. It was without a doubt one of Those Moments in my intellectual life.

I began to experiment with all kinds of wikis: oddmuse, mediawiki, twiki, kwiki, moinmoin…. I was, one could say, rather promiscuous in those days. I was convinced that there was a way to make a wiki solve all my problems.

But no matter what wiki I tried, there was always something that chintzed me off – the look and feel was wrong, the editing shorthand was arcane, the API was obtuse, there weren’t enough functions, there were too many functions, performance was sluggish…. It was incredibly frustrating because the more I worked with wikis, the more I became convinced they were The Right Answer, but I could never find The Right Answer For Me.

So I decided to write my own wiki engine. And thus was born xiki. I’ve been putzing around with xiki for years now. I even have a tiny bit of research funding to develop it as a tool for engineering designers. Xiki is written in perl, and is quite fast, faster than most other wikis I’ve tried. It has a syntax that is quite concise, compared to many other wikis. Of course, it’s nowhere near as robust as most popular wikis, and I’m sure the code would make good perl programmers break into hysterical laughter. But it works well for me and my grad students.

Or so I thought.

Once I had the basics running, I started having big dreams about building into xiki all kinds of functions to help me handle my web presence. But as I started figuring out how to implement those big dreams, I started to discover problems in xiki.

For instance, it has a module to handle bibliographies in a reasonable and handy way. But it’s really slow when you want to search a bibliography. Also, a xiki page is processed and then spat out right at the end. So xiki cannot build output a bit at a time. This is something most other wikis do, and for good reason. Even though it makes the software trickier to write and slower, it appears to run faster, because it starts producing some output much faster. That’s one of those little tricks computers can play on the poor human mind. More practically, producing output a bit at a time does let one build pages in increments. These are things xiki just can’t handle.

Adding event handling (like an appointment calendar), aggregating RSS feeds, and tagging interesting web sites are all things I want to add to xiki. But I can’t – not at least with xiki as it is right now.

I ended up writing code that suffered exactly the same problem as every other wiki I’d tried – frustratingly close to what I needed, but not quite enough.

In the meantime, I still needed functionality and I couldn’t wait for myself to get xiki right. So I started using other things. I use a web-based calendar system called Calcium to keep my work-day appointments. Calcium hits as close to the sweet-spot as it gets: it’s dead simple to install and use, it’s robust, it’s flexible, and it lets others book appointments without needing accounts. This means my students can just book an appointment to see me whenever I’m free. As far as it goes, it’s been a life-saver.

Another thing I’d been doing for years was accumulating links to interesting web sites. I had no idea what to do with these. I tried all kinds of social bookmarking software (like delicious, diigo, and twine), but they all suffered from the same problem: I could only browse by the labels with which I’d tagged web sites. This is a problem because sometimes (often, actually, I want to look things up by keywords that I hadn’t thought of adding as tags. So I’d end up spending a lot of time browsing through many links without finding what I wanted – which rather defeats the whole point.

Also, as anyone knows who has been tagging things for any length of time, your tagging habits change with time. It happened to me. After months of tagging things, I found that the tags I’d used on my earliest links were somehow wrong. I tried to develop a taxonomy – a classification of tags – so that I’d have a usable set of rules to assign tags. But there was no way to develop a taxonomy that would cover all the tags I hadn’t yet thought of. So the taxonomy kept changing… which rather defeats the purpose.

Then one day I realized that the reason I kept using so many tags is that I was trying to capture every keyword that appeared in the web site I was tagging. What I needed, I realized, was a way to tag web sites, and also index them (like Google or Yahoo do).

Of course, there was no software that did that. To this day, I still can’t find anything that both tags and indexes web sites. So I wrote my own. The current incarnation of that software is called serf – and yes, it does look a bit like delicious. It uses a cool search engine library for Perl called KinoSearch. The neat part of serf is that it can search on either tags or keywords or both. Since most web pages have lots of good keywords in them, I need fewer tags. And also, those tags can be more consistent because they’re more general – specific tags are just keywords, already in the index for that web page.

I still use, and develop, serf. But I wish xiki could have done it.

Serf may be working out well, but it’s the only part of this sorry state of things. Xiki works fine as a plain wiki, but it needs serious help before it can replace any of the other tools I’ve become accustomed to.

Things finally came to a head a few months ago, when I realized I was spending more time pissing around with different bits of code and web apps than actually gathering information and using it for something. I realized I had to do something, because my productivity was shot. (Don’t tell my boss.)

And being a designer, I decided I had to start designing a better answer. I’ll write about that, next time.

2008
12/02
CATEGORY
design
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ISPs bickering like schoolyard pre-teens

Cogent & Sprint ought to be sent to their rooms without dinner for their puerile behaviour.

Ars Technica reported a “disagreement” between Cogent Communications and Sprint. Cogent is a relatively large American wholesale Internet Service Provider that services business, government agencies, and universities. Sprint is the well-known network that services individuals and small groups.

Spend a few minutes reading the Ars Technica article, and I dare you to tell me this doesn’t exactly mirror a childish schoolyard argument.

I’m not interested in which mega-corporation is right. As far as I’m concerned, they’re both wrong, because the only real people who are suffering are the employees of the Cogent’s client firms and the customers of Sprint. And they get no say in this whatsoever.

And yet, it’s companies like Cogent and Sprint that form the backbone of the Internet and allow all the rest of us to get real, meaningful work done.

I so sincerely wish these big, dumb companies would just frickin’ grow up. Let’s face it, corporate entities that remain that distracted and even engaged by their own and their competition’s witless behaviours shouldn’t be trusted with keeping the Internet running. If they can’t keep their eye on the ball, then they’re going to produce buggy networks, dropped calls, poor Internet connections, insecure data transfers,….

Right. Stuff we regular “user” folks are already putting up with. And it’s time we regular “user” folk started making more noise about not tolerating this kind of crap. Of course, without proper competition among telecom providers, we’ll have little alternative – unless we go back to pen & paper, which may not be such a bad thing. At least it will get us to focus more on the present and pay attention to what we’re doing and saying and writing. Too much of today’s Internet traffic is dedicated to shallow, ill-considered sound-bites. Maybe putting the Internet on pause for a while is just what we need. And it would surely teach mega-childish mega-companies a lesson.

2008
11/02
CATEGORY
non-design
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My web presence II: what’s my problem?

I realized my web presence was all wrong. This was the first step: recognizing imbalance.

I’ve already explained what I mean by web presence.

One day, I realized that my web presence was slowing me down. And then I thought I must be an idiot for not having noticed before, because I also realized that my general frustration with syncing my web presence with my self had been going on for some time.

Why hadn’t I noticed sooner?

I think there’s two reasons. First, though my conscious mind hadn’t noticed any deep problems, my subconscious ming had. This is just how the brain works. A huge amount of cognitive computation is done unconsciously. Indeed, it seems that parts of the nervous system like the retina, the optic nerve, and the spinal cord are not just cabling trunks that transmit stuff to and from the brain, but are in fact essential processing units. Consciousness only lives in the cortex; we’re just not aware of all the “thinking” that the rest of the nervous system does.

So, part of my brain recognized the problem, but had nothing to “report to management” as it were – nothing to pass up to my conscious mind. In the meantime, my conscious mind, living in blissful ignorance of what the rest of my brain was thinking, kept on doing business as usual, convinced that it was doing the right thing.

But the brain is not a serious of compartments; it’s just one big thing, and there’s bleed-over (like dreams) between it’s elements. So my subconscious mind kept niggling my conscious mind that something was wrong, and my conscious mind kept telling it to shut up.

And that’s what my frustration was: the mismatch between what the conscious and the subconscious parts of my mind wanted me to do.

The second reason that it took me so long to recognize that I was doing something wrong was that I was unaware of all the possible tools I could use to create and manage my web presence.

I’m an old-school UNIX geek: in my day, if you needed some software to do something, you wrote it yourself. I know that must sound terribly parochial today, but that’s how I was growed up. So it never even occurred to me to look for software that did what I needed. And even if it had, I wouldn’t have known what keywords to give Google to look for it. It was only dumb luck that I came across some of the software, and, over time, studied more of it. Eventually, the amount of stuff I learnt reached a critical mass. And then it all made sense.

I’d found all kinds of services on the web, each providing a certain kind of functionality. What I needed to do was match up my needs with specific tools. DUH! (Yes, it’s embarrassing to admit I fouled up like such a newbie.) Once I did that, everything started falling into place.

So what are my needs?

Create a Body of Knowledge about Designing. This is my windmill against which I tilt, and probably will for the rest of my life. There is a huge amount of information about designing, but it’s not yet been integrated into a sensible body of knowledge. So I need a way to create suitable content for this.

Collect Bits of Information. Some things interest me. Bits of information about those things are scattered around, in assorted web pages and especially blogs, all over the world. This isn’t just trivia. It’s useful information that I find forms the subtext of things I think about, write about, and do in my research. When I find these bits, it’s important to save them because I can’t be sure I’ll ever remember where they were. So I need a way to capture and organize those bits of information.

Keep Current on Certain Topics. Besides the bits of knowledge floating out there in the ether, there’s also a good amount of information on current events. As a designer, it’s important to understand the context of design problems and solutions. I get the context by keeping up with current events. This comes through blogs (at least, the good stuff does). So I need a way to organize how I read blogs.

Share What I Find. Besides the pragmatic concern of making good information available to my students, I tend to want to share what I know and learn. This means that whatever bits of information I do gather, I want to make public. This also affects the way I present it – I would want such information to be arranged in a way that (as far as I can tell) will be usable to others.

Share What I Think. The information I gather informs my thinking. Sometimes this results in “research,” other times in opinion. Pure research I save for official publications in journals and at conferences. The opinions, however, can also be quite useful. Having to explain one’s thoughts to others is an excellent way of clarifying those thoughts to oneself; as they say, the best way to learn something is to have to teach it. So I need a way to communicate that’s more than just passing along bits of information.

What’s important to note here is that even my identification of these needs emerged only as I struggled to create a solution. Looking for the solution helped me understand the problem. Some designerly folks call this co-evolution (the problem and solution evolve together).

So how did I get to the point of understanding what the problem really was? That’s what my next post will be about.

2008
10/15
CATEGORY
design
productivity
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My web presence, I: What’s a web presence?

As promised in a previous post, here’s the beginning of the explanation of how I am designing my web presence.

Web presence is the term I use to describe the abstraction that is the sum total of everything I put on the web. My web presence not me, like some avatar or simulation of me. It’s what I leave behind; it’s the things I build and give some purposeful shape to on the web, the things that are still there after I log off that others will use or abuse for their own purposes.

My web presence not an artifact, like a product I might design, because once the artifact is done and out the door, I’m through with it. My web presence is different because I’m always revisiting it, tweaking it, disassembling and reconstructing it to better reflect me, help me, stimulate me. It grows and evolves with me. I do log off, but I always log back on, loaded with new ideas and bits of information that I want to add to my digital universe-self.

Everyone’s web presence is different. Discovering what exactly your web presence is can be alot like a vision quest; you have to start seeing yourself from the outside and relate your self to the rest of the (digital) world. Your web presence will also evolve over time – partly because the web itself continues to change and evolve. The services that you can use today to express your web presence are far more sophisticated than what was available just a few years ago.

And if you want to have a true web presence – a presence that is true to you – then you need to learn about the alternatives. Don’t just use facebook because everyone you know uses facebook. Use it because it best suits your web presence.

My web presence is that of a geek with a slight case of OCD. I like to order and organize the things I know. And I like to keep up with certain kinds of information, even though that information isn’t directly useful to me in my career. I also like to express myself – not in social settings, but in more one-way settings. Hence this blog, and my wiki.

2008
10/13
CATEGORY
design
productivity
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I will now predict the future!

A heads-up on forthcoming entries.

Looks like I’ve decided to stick with Blogger. It seems both functionally & aesthetically sufficient to me. The details of this decision will appear in a future entry too, because these were design decisions. Indeed, the point of my first few entries will revolve around why and how I came to need a blog.

I’ve been worried that my web presence has gotten too scattered, too disconnected, and that I have been spending too much time pissing around with different software tricks to try to make everything stick together.

So I decided to make a conscious effort to plan out my web presence – in other words, I designed it. This blog is (part of) the result. And since this is a design-oriented blog, then reflecting here on what I did rather makes sense. So upcoming blogs will cover:

  • What exactly was wrong with my web presence?
  • What did I need my web presence to do?
  • How would I address the imbalance between how things were and how I wanted them to be?
  • How did I choose the tools I’d use?
  • What’s the new & improved web presence like?

Of course, the odd other entry may get in the way. But that’s the web for ya! So stay tuned for more.

2008
09/21
CATEGORY
design
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Welcome!

Hi there. I’m investigating whether blogger will be sufficient for my purposes. So this may just be a very short trial. Please stay tuned for more soon.

2008
09/21
CATEGORY
design
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