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Blogs » Archive for May, 2008
Figure out how the monkey ticks and win $10,000
I have previously blogged about the new Yahoo! search platform called SearchMonkey. It is a major step in the right direction. It brings a whole heap of control back into the developers lap by allowing you to represent your search results that way you want. Good idea huh?
If that wasn’t enticing enough on its own Yahoo! has sweetened the deal by creating a developers challenge offering multiple prizes worth a bit of dough.
There are 4 prizes worth $2,500 each:
- Best Enhanced Result
- Best Infobar
- Most Innovative Use of Structured Data
- Best Data Service
and one grand prize for best overall worth $10,000.
So go on, I know you want to. Eat some bananas (you’ll need the energy) and enter the challenge.
Oh, by the way. To help you (and myself) along on this, I will be posting a three (maybe four) part series walking through step-by-step how to develop for the next generation Web. Stay tuned…
Are You User Experienced?
Last Friday I was lucky enough to spent an entire day at a web conference without seeing one line of HTML or single CSS declaration. In fact, I can’t even remember hearing the word “Ajax” once.
I learned a lot though!
There’s no argument that the Web is a relatively technical medium, so it’s with good reason that we all spend a lot of time thinking about, discussing and practicing the technical skills of the Web.
Nevertheless, when you boil it all down, the Web is really just one big, overly-complicated pipe that humans use to shout information back and forward to each other.
A cursory look at the millions of pages written on code, standards and other technical matters suggests we may be spending a little too much time thinking about how our shouting gets through, and not nearly enough time thinking about how we’re shouting.
The theories behind what makes good shouting are broadly referred to as the soft skills of the web — areas such as user experience design, information architecture, usability testing and research design — and that is exactly what Web Directions: User Experience was all about.
Two Hidden Features New in Firefox 3
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 was revealed to the world last week, which means the final release is only about a month away. If you haven’t yet checked that your site works smoothly in the new browser, now’s the time!
The Week In ColdFusion: 14-20 May: Keep on growing the community
Conference season update
The WebManiacs conference is on in Washington DC at the moment, so I’ll do a full report on that next week. The week after will be Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh (June 4-6) before CFUnited (June 18-21). Excitement is building - part 2 of Speakers getting ready for CFUnited has been posted.
At last week’s Adobe Community Summit, much of the interesting information was under NDA - and annoyingly, none of those user group managers or community experts are leaking anything! Aaron West posted some wrap-ups of the stuff he was allowed to tell us: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.
It’s all about the code
Some quick nuggets of coding gold this week:
- Raymond Camden shows us how to shrink an image, but not the canvas, using CF8’s image processing functions
- There’s been no new CFGRID tricks for a while (Dan Vega, where are you?) but this week Ray also has instructions for how to add an edit button to a grid
- Jason Dean continues his series of posts on security with a simple password strength function (hat tip to Steve Bryant’s CF_BlogPicks)
- Steve Bryant has posted instructions for integrating SpamFilter.cfc with Raymond Camden’s BlogCFC
- Adam Howitt talks about how to handle undeliverable CFMAIL …
How Digg Users Got It Wrong And Missed Out
This is the story of how a few digg users got it wrong, and the rest of the digg community missed out as a result.
As a Marketing Manager it’s not often you get the chance to genuinely give something worth $29.95 away for free to as many people as you can. That’s exactly what I was asked to do when told that 99designs were officially sponsoring a 30 day giveaway of our Photoshop Anthology.
This unique way of giving our high quality book content away for free has always appealed to me, so off to build our campaign I went.
- Landing page — check
- Download process — done
- Site promotion — ready
- Email campaign — loaded
Just before we hit that big green GO button, a colleague suggested that we should place a digg button on the landing page — digg users will go nuts! A sound theory… or so we thought.
With our “digg this” button at the ready, the campaign kicked into life. Our servers initially groaned “Oh no, not again!” but thankfully we had the page hosted on Amazon’s S3 servers, which grew as traffic increased, and held …
Web Directions UX Wrap-up: Andy Budd and Steve Baty
I’ve just published the transcript of an interview I did with Andy Budd at Web Directions UX last week. It’s quite long, but well worth the read — we cover all sorts of topics such as careers in web design, the future of CSS, IE8, HTML 5, the role of usability testing in the design process, CSS frameworks, CSS gallery sites and more!
Sifting through the notes I took last Friday, here are some snippets that I jotted down from another speaker whose talk I got a lot out of — Steve Baty, who spoke about Analysing User Research Data.
Steve managed to introduce a number of quite scary and complex looking statistical formulae, without having his audience drift off to sleep or turn and run for the exit. Being passionate about his chosen field and a charismatic presenter certainly helped matters. Perhaps it’s just because, with his glasses off, he looks like Charlie (David Krumholtz) from Numb3rs, which probably reinforced his credibility in my mind.
The takeaway that I got from Steve’s talk is that user research data is useless unless you do something with it, and that “something” needs to be well-defined before you collect it. He …
Web Directions Gov: Making eGovernment Reality
Nathanael Boehm is reporting for SitePoint from Web Directions Government 2008, in Canberra Australia.
It was a chilly start to the day with the temperature hovering just above zero degrees as we waited in the dining area of Old Parliament House, cups of coffee in hand, listening to people who’d attended the breakfast session tell us how good Jason Ryan’s presentation had been. Jason is currently Communications Manager at the State Services Commission in New Zealand and presented on “Government 2.0: The public management challenge”. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to meet Jason however I did talk with one of his colleagues at the State Services Commission Rowan Smith who is involved with the New Zealand Government Web Standards project.
At 9:00am John Allsopp opened the conference and talked about how the focus of these conferences has expanded and is no longer about accessibility and other technical low-level issues. Although these are still as relevant and important now as 5 years ago the adoption and integration of best practice in those areas has reached a point where can move onto the next big thing, which for this conference was eGovernment: how …
Thanks for what?
With a bee in my bonnet, I did a Google site search of our forums today, to reveal more than 15,000 results containing the phrase thanks in advance.
I hate that expression, it totally winds me up — because it isn’t really thanks at all. At best it’s an empty platitude; at worst it’s emotional blackmail.
To me, the phrase says one or all of these things:
- This is just what people say (meaningless)
- I’m assuming that you’re going to help me, therefore I’m thanking you now (presumptuous)
- I’m thanking you now so as soon as I get an answer I can forget about this thread (lazy, ungrateful)
- I’m not sure if you’re going to help me, so saying thanks now will encourage you to do so, because I’ve already thanked you (emotional blackmail)
Even worse, I occasionally see this phrase in txt msg speak, written as TIA or thx, and that’s even more of a wind-up — it’s not just presumptuous pseudo-gratitude, it’s lazy and illiterate. Doesn’t inspire me to help.
The proper time to thank someone is after they’ve helped you, because that’s when it actually means something. The fact that you had to be conscious enough to step outside your immediate concern, at a point …
The Web Is For Four-year-olds
If you are reading this blog you are probably at least reasonably web savvy and use or know of services like Twitter and Flickr. You probably know what RSS is and how and why you might want to use it. Sometimes we forget that not everyone is as cool and knowledgeable as us. There are a large number of people who are completely at sea on the Internet and even think Google is the Internet. These are the sort of people who search for web addresses, (even their own site) via Google rather than typing them into the address bar.
We do however share one thing in common — we all tend to surf the web like we are four years old.
If it doesn’t load fast, instantly engage us and keep us engaged, then we get bored and move on — a trait that has been exacerbated by tabbed browsing.
With the shear enormity of the web and all the cool, quirky and interesting things we could be finding, we don’t tend to spend the time finding out about what a web site can offer us. If it’s not slap-you-in-the-face obvious then, Next, off we go — unlikely ever …
Semantic tagging with Calais and Drupal
Gosh. It just can’t get any easier than this. Automatically and (pretty) intelligently tagging your content is a very powerful thing. Especially if those tags are structured tags and not just text strings. This used to be a fairly painful proposition, manual tagging — do I use folksonomy or do I create meaningful taxonomies. And will this scale??? Well fret no more. Let someone (or something else) do it for you.
I have been using the Drupal Calais tagging module for the past month and have been pleasantly surprised at how effective it has been. I have thrown emails, blog posts, random text from the Web. It all comes back with at least one decent tag (and that was a pretty murky test sample).
Today, Thomson Reuters has released version 2.0 of their Calais webservice. This is cool in many ways:
- They now tag many more non-news items (EntertainmentAwardEvent, MedicalCondition, Movie, MusicAlbum, MusicGroup, PublishedMedium, SportsEvent, SportsGame and TVShow). Previously their focus was on news events so most non-news posts received few tags.
- Tools to allow embedding of metadata for Yahoo! SearchMonkey
- Wordpress tagging plugin
- Previously mentioned Drupal module
Installing the module is simple and only requires a few …
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