CogBlogged Tagged ‘web dev’

flickr foto Nov_04_I-Ate-This-Squaredavailable on lenny’s flickr (not my meal, but found in the flickr Creative Commons By Attribution collection) Getting back to documenting what’s been sitting on my project plate, is a heaping pile of … well, not the cholesteral special in this Creative Commons flickr photo, but a heaping pile of mySQL, PHP, and some seatr of the pants programming… and the birth of a new thing we call the “Ocotillo Cortex”. We have to start this back to May 2005 for our year end edtech fest, the Ocotillo Retreat. Our theme was related to “Lost in Technology” and sported a GPS metaphor sprinkled everywhere. This had even more database behind the web than previous events, and it was cooking well. We created an online demo session presenter form, so all those details went to a database that fueled the session list of 46 sessions This too was cross [...]

This morning I was browsing the new Drupal fueled look to evolt, a web developer site I’ve been tapping into for so long I cannot remember, and started reading Isaac Forman’s Usable Forms (for an international audience). It’s a good review of some of the pitfalls in web forms when we are not thinking enough about the audience… but the great quote for web designers, especially ones doing Web 2.0 work with sites running on databases: Stop and think about the last contact form that you designed, or consider this the next time you have the opportunity: Are you designing for your users? or Are you designing for your database? That’s a great bold question to ask, and anyone’s experience in shopping online, requesting information via a web form, even some blog comment forms, should be saying, “Yeah! I’m wondering about that too!” I am hoping to keep that in [...]

Previously I described my usual reluctance to be first out of the gate to do an operating system update, so until this afternoon I was still running Jaguar / Mac OSX 10.3. To be honest and repetitive, an operating system is really not something I like to focus on- a good OS should be as transparent and efficient as possible, like I would guess (having no experience) your typical Hollywood British butler is portrayed. I’ve got too much to do than fiddle with the OS- so if it is working and I am working, we are all okay. True to form, I do not upgrade until there is something compelling that requires the upgraded system. The push over the line for me to upgrade to Tiger (10.4) was GoogleTalk… The fact that Apple iChat (10.4 only) would be compatible with audio chat via GoogleTalk/Jabber pushed me over the upgrade edge. [...]

Just found Yet Another Social Bookmark Tool- BlinkList offers site marking and tagging: BlinkList is a tool that allows you to create a mental map of the internet of sites that are important to you. It’s a bookmarking manager designed to work in the same way your brain stores data and thinks about things. When we launch the full version in Oct 2005 BlinkList will be the most powerful bookmark manager in existence. To boldly go where no bookmark manager has gone before! To Infinity and Beyond! Yup, this makes number 17 of the bookmark sites available on the Make Your Own Multipost Bookmarklet Tool. How many are in your wallet?

I am convinced all of my software projects are perpetually in progress, but that never lets me stop from spitting out a new one. As a preface and someone who has worked with them seriously only a few years, I am deeply in techno love with database-driven web sites, notably the object of my affection being mySQL. There seems to be no limit what one can do (well my technical skills can be limiting) and to reshape information in ways not possible in the static pre-life. But enough warbling. This is the latest creation.

I really should be doing other work, but I thought of a quick improvement to the Built In Blogger presentation I did at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference on “More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs”… the hiding and showing of slide notes (using the “+/- notes” button in the top left) displayed a CSS chunk of text by toggling its display properties. What I did not like was that the notes simply showed up at the bottom of a slide, so a full screen slide, the notes would appear out of screen, below the fold line (requiring a scroll down). Well that was an easy fix- just change the positioning properties for the div to be absolute, so now a slide that appears like this: When you click the button in the top right, now the notes appear layered over the slide: And an extra right aligned button under [...]

This might be a sideways version of a screen cast. At Mboffin.com, Dylan created an animated GIF that shows a screen shot captures for each change as a web site was developed. You can watch it evolve from un-formatted semantic HTML through different iterations of font sizes, creation of the page elements, etc. It’s a testament to the organic evolution of a hand hewed design that is kneaded like bread, not popped out of some easy bake oven. It is like watching a stop motion movie of a flower emerging from a bud. It is like… well that’s enough tacky metaphors See “Designline A Design Timeline”: I have often wondered what it would be like to see a web site design progress from start to finish, with each tweak and change being shown as it progresses—a design timeline, if you will. I don’t mean from conceptual start to finish—from blank [...]

A new web technology is tickling my antennae. I hardly know enough about Ajax (bit WikiPedia does) to write about it. In my nutshell, it allows you to create interactive web pages or web pages with navigation that can change content within the page without doing a fresh HTTP request (a.k.a loading a new URL) in the browser. In the webspace, there is an over dominance of web sites (think online shopping, your course management system) that involve a series of web forms that are filled out, submitted, another page of forms appears that must be filled out, submitted, etc. It gets rather tedious for all those server transactions, and on a user experience end, it interrupts the thought process, or we have gotten so used to it, we expect to be interrupted. Something like Ajax and the in page editing tools of flickr can be the signposts for the [...]

I guess the world needs a few more sites to post and share web site bookmarks. The newest flavor that came our way from a reader is Feedmarker, which is the newest blade in my Web Site Submission Multitool bringing the total here to 13. Also, someone asked about adding Wists, the site tool that allows you to pick images to associate with a submitted site. Unfortunately, the JavaScript bookmark tool from wists is rather long and exotic (the other 13 are similar enough to share the same code of parsing the title, URL, description, etc).

Google is good. Google is great. I wish I kept better records of this, but I have vague recollections of finding some of my most favorite web discoveries at perhaps 3 links downstream of a search, or just by following a suggested link to one source and happen-stancing (random clicking) elsewhere. So I use search most often while looking for specific things, but for discovery, it is really just the first layer of yielding primary sources. It is those secondary, tertiary, (quadriary?) exploration links that lead to the hidden gems. So this morning, when I stumbled into something completely useful without it popping in a search result (and the fact I was not even looking for it initially), I am just compulsed to write it up at home before going into work, and will likely late for work. So it started with an item that popped up in a few [...]