Luckily up until this point of my web development career, I have never used a wysiwyg or visual editor to build HTML and CSS. I literally haven't even installed one on my computer until last week.
However, I'm currently working on a fairly simple project for a client where they'd like to manage the site afterwards using such a program. No problem, I thought, the big guys like Adobe's GoLive and Macromedia's Dreamweaver tout their adoption of CSS and web standards — surely I can handcraft the templates and then let the client manage things from there, right? Not so fast. Both of these products use the antiquated Opera 6 rendering engine, which dates back to early 2002! The site I'm working on isn't exactly complicated. Flexible-width columns and a few absolutely positioned things are about as complex as it gets, but it gets horribly mangled in the "view" mode of either of these programs. Remember, I'm not looking for anything too complex here, just some simple functionality to edit pages and copy pre-existing code on the site. Neither of these behemoths even comes close to being able to do that for this site.
The other obvious choice is Nvu, a product based on the old Netscape Composer and later Mozilla Composer. It uses the Gecko rendering engine (the same thing Firefox uses) and does render the page correctly. It also works on Linux, Windows, and OSX and as a side bonus is entirely free and open source. However, it's already crashed my Windows machine twice and it doesn't offer the same functionality as its more powerful brethren. The lack of full templating tools and the half-implementation of the lockable template areas are important omissions in the current 1.0 version, as far as I can tell. But, it looks like the only tool that might even possibly work.
As I mentioned in the beginning, I'm blissfully innocent when it comes to these tools, so maybe I'm missing something. Is there another product I should be trying or are there some settings I should switch? It's hard to believe that this is the best the wysiwyg world has to offer.
Over the past couple of months, I've been working with Kevin Rose on his enormously successful new venture Digg.com — a news aggregation website with a twist. Digg is sort of social bookmarking mixed with peer reviewing, so someone submits a link to a technology story they thought was cool and, if enough other people at Digg think it's cool too it gets displayed on the homepage. In essence it's a pretty simple idea and it's been very popular and is growing rapidly.
Kevin brought us in to work on the visual interface side of things. As we're frequently doing on design projects, we've been working on design concepts and then handing over CSS, HTML, and images to a programmer to implement. Silverorange still does tons of programming and database work, but we also do a bunch of purely design stuff on the side. On Digg, I've been working with Owen Byrne, a talented programmer who coincidentally hails from Nova Scotia.
- Step 1: Gather the Pieces
- Although most people who left comments about the Digg redesign in the feedback forum missed or downplayed it, the biggest part of the redesign was to analyze the content on the site and reconsider how things should be fundamentally layed out. Although of course the visual appearance of the site was important, stepping back to the basics and making sure the foundation was laid was key here. This meant reorganizing the navigation more logically and restructuring the content on the page.
- Step 2: Divide and Conquer
- The very first thing we did was to single out one of the most important parts of the page, a front page news story, and deconstruct it. Rather than trying to tackle a dozen things right out of the gate, we chose one small self-contained section and gave it a lot of attention. What's unique about the site? Digging for stories. So, make those more prominent and show people items they can take action on to get them into the site as participants. Differentiate the titles and try to give some indication that you'll be taken elsewhere when you select a title link. Etcetera... Although contained in a single element, all of these ideas percolated throughout the rest of the redesign.
- Step 3: Lay Down Some Style
- This is the one part of any redesign that everyone has an immediate opinion on. We tried to come up with a friendlier looking interface that was welcoming to first-time visitors but balanced the needs of regular readers who are vital to keeping the system breathing with new content. Some of the inspiration for this design came from photoblog templates, which I think do a good job of keeping the template out of the way of the content. The tight-to-the-top compact header is especially indicative of this.
- The one thing you can always count on with a redesign of this nature is that not everyone is going to love it right away. Some people thought it didn't look enough like Slashdot, some people thought it looked too much like Slashdot, and so on and so on. Don't get me wrong, most of the feedback was helpful and well-considered, but some of the feedback wasn't exactly constrcutive. Some really great comments included:
I have to admit, I have never seen so much Truly hate full [sic] comments towards a design before, its as if people would have the guy who designed it hung in the town square for even thinking of it...
Allow me to paraphrase about 50% of the comments so far: "I'm a changeaphobic techy who wishes pictures and computers had never met. I experience the world one text line at a time, and I'll be damned if anyone tries to appeal to anyone besides me by including graphical elements that might not be 100% necessary. Everything is too big and flashy-- I like things minimal and bland, like my wardrobe." OK, a bit harsh, but there do seem to be a lot of whiners here. There are also many comments that thankfully point out valid, objective bugs.
If Firefox and Flickr had an offspring, they would have Digg 2.0" (this one is actually kind of accurate once I stepped back and looked at the design again)
- Seriously, thanks for the feedback from everyone. Some comments have already resulted in changes to the site and there are more changes on the way.
- Step 4, Step 5, Step 6... Revise and Rework
- This site is really flexible and is changing all of the time. One quick lesson I learned was not to paint yourself into a corner with code or design. We're already working on revisions and the interface concepts for new features that are in the pipes.
Congrats to silverorange alumnus and all-round talented designer Geoff Gibson for winning the latest snowboard design contest put on by GNU snowboards. The horror-themed contest had some great entries, so Geoff's design was in good company. I think he wins a new snowboard that he can strap to his new snowbike*. Not bad.
At the moment, I don't have a television so I've been following the Tour de France entirely online. Surprisingly, the experience of reading about bike racing is almost as good as watching the highlights on television.
Pre-race, the T-Mobile team site had a great little series of diary entries from Jan Ullrich, which if they weren't written by Ullrich himself had the good graces to competantly sound like they might have been. Now, during the Tour, the official site has some fanstastic recaps of stages, which are informative, witty, and effectively capture the intensity of the racing. The following excerpt describes the race strategy in the mountains for Lance Armstrong's Discovery Channel team:
The scene was reminiscent of what has happened on the major mountains since the beginning of the Armstrong Era. It’s a formula which requires phenomenal legs and perfect timing. The policy is simple: ignore the early escapes, don’t panic on the first mountain, get to the final challenge with a complete team setting a pace that’s high enough to ward off any dangerous attacks, let the 'domestique's go into overdrive to sort the pretenders from the contenders, and then give Lance the chance to dance.
All that said about good sports writing, I still need to time a trip to Europe in the middle of July to catch the Tour in person sometime soon. Seeing the peloton fly past or watching the riders tackle the grueling mountain climbs in person must be incredible. Next year? We'll see.
Everyone's favorite dog, Tokkii, is now selling fantastic t-shirts for the ladies. Well, Tokkii's friend and provider of food and shelter, the lovely and talented Iva Olah, has started a small business making custom shirts.
Iva's making all of the shirts herself starting with American Apparel shirts as a base and then screenprinting and hand-beading with French beads. Her designs are based on Asian and European tapestries she photographed in Parisian museums. Anyhow, they're really stylish and the one-fare shipping is a nice touch too. Check out the three original designs at Tokkii Tees.
The title for this post has nothing to do with the band and everything to do with the heat. The only thing lamer than a weblog post explaining why one hasn't been posting on one's weblog is when the key excuse for such tardiness is the blinding heat. It's been over thirty degrees centrigrade now for over a week and looks like it's just going to keep on...
All that said, I've also been super busy working on the interface for a site that just launched yesterday (more on that soon) and a site for a software company in Ohio of all places. My cohort Steven Garrity is also getting married in a few short days so I've been tying up loose ends before leaving for a couple of weeks.
All lame excuses for not posting for such a long time I'm sure, but did I mention how hot it was?
Almost a month ago, a mysterious pair of skis showed up padlocked to a bike post at the end of my street. They appear to be 1980s vintage alpine skis and have so far astoundingly survived unstolen through the hottest weeks of the year. So... I'm totally confounded. What the hell are these relics doing out there? Ideas anyone? The evidence:
A kind visitor to this site brought it to my attention that the email address on the about page was returning all mail. I talked to our sysadmin today and low and behold someone had goofed up and one of the settings was incorrect. I'm not sure how long this has been the case, but I wouldn't be surprised to know it's been that way for quite some time. So, if you have emailed me to the deltatangobravo address and haven't heard back from me, perhaps this is why. Sorry. It should be fixed now. Thanks Mathias for notifying me.
There's a hilarious CNN story today about a kid who figured out that he could trick his school-issued Texas Instruments calculator into converting decimals to fractions despite the fact that the function was meant to be disabled. Apparently the discovery has led to a massive recall to keep kids from cheating on standardized tests. The response from a school official sounds like it was ripped from an Onion story:
"His fellow students were so proud of him and congratulatory. They thought it was really, really cool. They didn't call him a nerd or anything," said Michael Bolling, a school official in Chesterfield County. The county had more than 11,000 of the calculators recalled.
This all reminds me of a certain twin brother of mine who used to waste away the boredom of highschool math by figuring out ways to trick his very own Texas Instruments calculator into giving slightly incorrect responses by using extreme exponential multiplication or something. I'm sure he remembers every keystroke required. But... oh no, he's not a nerd...
