Archive for January, 2008
I spent a good two or three days searching for a good piece of project management software, a few months back. I finally settled with unfuddle. One week after signing up, I was reminded of why I had picked them.
I had been working with on a project and suddenly remembered that I wanted to gripe to them about their user limits, so I went searching for a contact us link … my eyes immediately fell on the link that said “send feedback” … [click on image to see bigger copy]
as soon as I clicked on it, a contact form flew out that allowed me get on with my rant
why is this nifty?
- It was quick and easy: I just typed in what I wanted and went back to what I was doing … not a single page load
- It was easy: notice how they didn’t ask for my name or email? … they have that information already
- It gives you an out: If you click “cancel” the form goes away immediately and you can get back to what you were doing
any complaints?
- Just one the placement of the”send feedback” link might cause it to be overlooked. An understated graphic might help draw more attention to it
what happened afterward?
- I sent the email before I went to bed at 11pm, and before I had woken up, I had a response. Not a brush off by the way … a good detailed email that addressed all the issues raised. While I didn’t agree with their positions on certain things, I felt like they had listened to me, and now I’m writing this blog. CUSTOMER SERVICE IS MARKETING!
So if you want a great web application for project management … give unfuddle a look.
January 31st, 2008
I used to be a big fan of CNN, and I still read their news via RSS. I was on there today when I came across this item …
See the big button that invites you to click on it? What do you think it does?
Go ahead … try it.
Yep, it doesn’t instantly start playing. It takes you to another screen, where you have to sit through a commercial to watch your video.
What do you think users are going to do in an era of a million and one embedded video options like … um .. youtube. If they were only kinda-sorta interested in the video … they’ll close out of it immediately and go to something more interesting.
How should CNN fix this?
- Offer embeddable video players: I understand CNN wants to keep their content on their servers. However, flash players are easy to build and I am sure there are tons of sites that offer free ones. However if you’re hell bent on building one from scratch, I know an awesome Austin web developer that can build one to match your budget :]
- Remove the play button from the picture: If the embedded video is not an option go with something that tells the user that they’ll lose their place and be diverted to another page. I understand that the play button invites you to click on the image, but since sites like youtube and dailymotion have changed the significance of a play button over an image, users might be displeased when the video doesn’t immediately start playing. Something like a simple “Watch this video” link under the article might be a better option. In this era of Ajax and fewer pageloads per click a new user to cnn.com might not be so pleased to sit through a heavy page load, that doesn’t even open in a new tab!
Remember, you want to adhere to the “Don’t make me think” principle whenever possible, and because interface behavior (especially on the web) can change quickly, you have to stay ahead of the curve. Two or three years ago, this would probably have been excellent interface design, because it invited the user to click on the image … not any more.
January 31st, 2008
I spent the whole weekend reading about Rails setup and deployment, discovering Ngnix + mongrels as a new Rails hosting setup option and started getting in depth with Rails with Obie Hernandez’s “The Rails Way“.
I don’t know much about the guts of PHP or Rails (that is something I am working very hard to remedy) but I was fascinated by this google group post “Rails is shitty” … [here is the precursor to it] even though my first thought is that it contains a lot of the same elitist arguments that were aimed against PHP years ago (PHP is still wildly successful) I do think its raises interesting points and things for me to look out in in my exploration of Rails.
I wonder if DHH (aka God) will respond to this.
Here’s a sample
And to stress the first point again, Rails never concerns itself with
the big-picture problem of “writing webapps”. It only thinks as big as
“outputting HTML strings” and “querying the DB for a list of things”.
This means the important, actually hard stuff like handling the stateless
nature of HTTP, or sanitising and escaping the user input is just not
adressed at all, and you only learn about them when one day you discover
84 possible XSS injection points (actual number from a Rails app I’m
somewhat famililar with)
January 21st, 2008
Ian Bickings’s “What PHP Deployment gets right”
This is a wonderfully written article on how PHP works, and the funny thing is that Ian seems to be more of a Python guy than anything. Needless to say, I learned a few things from reading this …
-
What people don’t realize is that PHP is effectively a CGI model of execution. People don’t appreciate this because PHP is implemented with mod_php, an Apache module. There are many other modules like mod_perl (the first of these mod_language modules), mod_python, mod_ruby, etc. None of these other modules are like mod_php. This has led many a commentator astray because they don’t get this. This is because the PHP language was written for mod_php. Perl, Python, Ruby — none of them were written to be used as an Apache module. You can’t take one of these existing languages and just retrofit it to be like PHP or like mod_php.
-
PHP processes can leak memory like crazy. It doesn’t matter because they only leak memory for one request.
- This one helped me understand why Ruby On Rails and its fast-cgi implementation is so slow —->.
Most of the language (PHP) is implemented in C, in a shared library. In comparison Python has “batteries included”, but those batteries are largely written in Python. Python code is not shareable, and can take time to load up. So while a single Python CGI script might be small, it probably imports lots of code which would have to be loaded each request. PHP scripts actually are small. (Stuff like PEAR changes this by adding substantial libraries written in PHP, but also seriously effects PHP performance.)
January 20th, 2008
Although I haven’t done as much work with Rails as I’d like, I follow it very closely because I like the language and the platform, plus I’m sure to write a web application in it in the next month or two.
In the last few weeks, though, there have been some interesting developments in the ROR space. Ace programmer Zed Shaw fired two broadsides against the Rails community a few weeks back titled Rails is a ghetto. [aside: there is this very interesting O'Reilly interview with Zed that might help you understand his accomplishments with Ruby]
Its an interesting read, albeit unprofessional and rather profane. I came away from the two part rant feeling that if Mr. Shaw were as unprofessional as he sounded, then it might be the reason he kept bumping into the types of characters he “railed” against. I also didn’t get enough evidence from the rant to really justify (in my mind at least) that the Rails community was a ghetto. It just seems that the immediate space that Zed seems to work in was a bit crappy but the job postings I see for Rails are an order of magnitude more coherent and well-mannered than the ones I see for php. Anecdotal … I know.
Obie Hernandez, another big time Rails person (author of the book “The Rails way”) posted a very balanced counter point to the ghetto rant … About Rails and Ghettos. I felt this was a better assessment of the community. This is my perspective as a one-foot-in-one-foot-out guy in relation to Rails.
The second episode concerns the mounting concern with Ruby on Rails performance and ease of deployment. In case you don’t know, Ruby is slow and painful to deploy. (I helped a client with a Ruby on Rails application deployment late last year and the experience was not pleasant). Dreamhost offers Ruby on Rails hosting for its shared server accounts, and in this post “How Ruby on Rails could be much better” they outline the problems they have had hosting Ruby on Rails and gives suggestions for making it better.
To this, the creator of Ruby on Rails responded with “The deal with shared hosts” which I think shows a disregard for the importance of shared hosting accounts and a bit of his brashness. In summary.
In exchange, I’ll ask a few, small favors. Don’t treat the current Rails community as your unpaid vendor. Wipe the wah-wah tears off your chin and retract the threats of imminent calamity if we don’t drop everything we’re doing to pursue your needs. Stop assuming that it’s either a “complete lack of understanding of how web hosting works, or an utter disregard for the real world” that we’re not working on issues that would benefit your business.
[aside: I kind of agree with this, Dreamhost should hire someone to actually get under the hood and make Rails work for them, after all they are making money off of it. I just think the tone is a tad arrogant]. To continue, Dreamhost wrote another post “Rails is as Rails does“, softening their tone but still making the excellent point that making Rails easy to deploy can only win it converts. Somehow, I don’t think the Rails folks really care about converts that much (the interesting question is “Do they need to?”). Apple thrives on that air of exclusivity that its products high prices give it, maybe Rails is targeting elite programmers who don’t complain but fix what they don’t like and get on with it.
At at the end of all this though, I am left with a weird taste in my mouth about Ruby on Rails. I’ve always felt that Rails folks are a bit arrogant and condescending. I think there is the feeling that everyone should develop with ROR a certain way and if you don’t, you’re not worth wasting time on. In fact here is the creator’s message to people who have a problem with the way he handles Rails, (with some background so you don’t think I’m being unfair) …
I see where they’re coming from, but I’m not sure I like it. I love Ruby, I have the best Ruby on Rails IDE installed and hope to be knee deep in it soon. It will be interesting to see if the impressions I have formed about the community hold up.
January 20th, 2008
Just happened to stumble across National Public Radio (NPR) music early this morning and initially thought it was a redesign of npr’s webite.
It really is visually stunning … a truly great looking site. [Click on images to enlarge]
However there are a few problems that I’ve noticed with the homepage design
- Busy navigation: there too many navigational elements at the top of the page … (almost four different blocks of navigation) which could easily confuse users,
- Flow: After the main flash box, it is not immediately apparent what next to click on. Each of the elements after that (even in the right column and below it) compete equally for attention
- Busy: My worry with the design is that they seemed to have crammed almost EVERYTHING about the site in on the home page. This is either a sign of design-by-committee or a designer who didn’t make the tough decisions necessary to make a lovely site into a FANTASTIC site. Remember “good is the enemy of great”
Lest you get the impression that we hate the site, that is not correct, their use of color is amazing. Blocks of information are separated out and highlighted so that there is no doubt what each block is about.
We just wish they wouldn’t have left all the decision making to the user.
[Go to npr music]
January 14th, 2008
Everyone who knows me, knows that I think that Facebook is the greatest thing since toasted bread. That is why it is ironic that it is the next subject in my focus on bad UI design.
Facebook has a search box in the upper right corner, where you can try to find long lost friends, interesting groups … etc. However, the textbox has no submit button.
“Why is that a problem?!” I hear you say with alarm … “It looks fine to me.”
The problems is, if you’re on a mobile device, you can’t just hit enter to submit the page. Go ahead … try it.
Its a problem because this critical feature is essentially unusable on mobile devices.I haven’t tried it on an iphone, but I believe you’d get similar results.
The solution? a simple submit button/graphic like on digg.com
January 9th, 2008
I worked as a developer with a Search Engine Optimization firm for some time, where I learned that some shady companies are able to buy domain names that you search for online.
It wasn’t exactly clear to me how this was happening until I chanced across this excellent article on my new favorite blog
How firms steal domain names you research
If you’re too lazy to read the entire thing then here’s a brief summary of how to avoid losing a domain you just searched for.
- Avoid address bar guessing.
- Avoid search engines that don’t make a billion dollars a year in revenue.
- Avoid browser plug-ins that send data back to the Internet.
- Go directly to trusted registrars and whois companies.
PS: I am now up to 80 feeds in my RSS reader 
January 4th, 2008
