Your Ad Here

Monthly Archive for November, 2007

Destroy The Web 2.0 Look

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 15, 2007
in Design and www
. 4 Comments

Dovetailing nicely with my appeal for some new cliches, Elliot Jay Stocks of Carsonified recently did a talk called “Destroy The Web 2.0 Look.”

Thank you, Mr. Stocks! Excellent presentation. That presentation is suitable for a ChangeThis manifesto, if you ask me.

Personally, I think some of the elements of typical “web 2.0″ design wouldn’t be that bad… if they were not slavishly applied to Every Single New Web Site/Application/doohickey that we see fly off the shelf. But since they are, I think a backlash is long overdue. Vive la revolution! Let’s not reflect a logo, for a change.

Of course, this means that people will need designers to actually design again, rather than just going through all the “2.0″-ish Photoshop tutorials they found on Smashing Magazine or Mashable. Good!

The slide show:

Triggit

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 15, 2007
in Blogging and www
. 5 Comments

I’m trying to be objective. I love startups, and I like seeing all the new ideas, and sometimes the ideas that seems silly to me at first (Twitter was one) really take off. So, I’m trying out something called Triggit.

The elevator pitch is, Triggit is a new way to add images, embed videos, and place Amazon affiliate links on your blog. Technically, I suppose it could be used with any website, but the target is definitely bloggers.

I pretty much dismissed it at first. I mean… putting an image or a YouTube video in a blog post? I need a tool for this?
Continue reading ‘Triggit’

Webdesign: We Need Some New Cliches

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 14, 2007
in Asides and Design
. 1 Comment

This is a bit hypocritical, as I’ve got my share of design cliches on this very site… but here goes anyways.

Let’s have some new cliches.
- Samuel Goldwyn

Can we come up with some new ideas?

Can more than one style of design be prevalent at any given time?

Does every Web 2.0 app need shiny, glossy, reflecting, drop-shadowed, glowing logos/icons/images?

Is that gradient really necessary? (I love gradients, don’t get me wrong… but… does every design need one?)

Do those corners need to be round? I mean, if all corners are round, it stops being distinctive, doesn’t it?

————————

Now, all this being said, there are many, stunning examples of creative web design out there. I know it, you know it. And, there is something to be said for a reliable, familiar design. Nobody complains that most newspapers look alike, because the important thing is that the information on the pages is communicated legibly — form follows function.

So, I don’t know. Maybe this is just a rant; there’s nothing new under the sun, everyone’s design will be derivative of something, etc., etc. Maybe so.

Can we at least try to come up with some new cliches?

Do Something Creative

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 13, 2007
in Asides
. 2 Comments

Make a website. A web application. Learn Flash (you can download the full version and use it free for 30 days — that’s enough time to learn it). Draw something. Write a story. Write an add. Make a podcast. Make a short video. Take some pictures. Make a collage. Write a mini app. Make a script to automate a boring administrative task. Learn a new programming language. Learn CSS. Try a different web browser. Try a new social network. Learn JavaScript. Learn Ajax. Make something with them. Make a database. Write a blog post. Review your favorite book(s)/album(s)/film(s)/tv show(s)/web site(s). Make a zine. Make a magazine. Start a cult. Start an online community. Learn an instrument. Write a song. Sing a song. Build something. Get a new tool, and use it for something. Create a business plan, for whatever your dream business would be; don’t think about it too hard, just write the fun parts. Make a logo. An Icon. A letterhead. A desktop background. Write a ‘how-to’. Take a class. Get organized. Talk to someone. Try something new. Do something creative.

To some people, some of the suggestions won’t sound fun. Ignore those ones.

Rethinking The Twitter Shoe

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 12, 2007
in Asides, Shoes and www
. Comments

Some changes to my approach:

  • I think I’m going to use the twitter gem, rather than twitter4r. The only reason; it just seems a bit simpler. I may change my mind again. Or you may change your mind.
  • Alternatively, I may just use Net::HTTP — the twitter api seems straight forward, and this would eliminate a dependency.
  • I don’t think this will be a mass consumption tool at any time in the near future. It simply won’t be a 1 or 2 click install, like an AIR application. And really, that’s ok; maybe a Shoes application is supposed to require you to roll up your sleeves and muck about a little bit. Get your hands dirty. Open a command line. Edit a file or two.

So, basically, then, all the shoe has to do is get or post messages to twitter. It will also need to parse XML or JSON, so I suppose I’ll be looking for a gem to make that easier, as well. I’m a big fan of Not Reinventing The Wheel. Stay tuned, padwan.

The Paradox Of LinkedIn At Work

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 9, 2007
in Asides and www
. 6 Comments

There’s an odd thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn. As it gets more and more ubiquitous, I have more and more connections to people who I work with. Well, this makes sense — that’s part of the purpose, connecting (and therefore, staying connected in the future) with the people you know, and who know you. Being connected to those who’ve worked with you just makes sense.

What’s odd is, as this occurs, people are invariably connected to their supervisors, and to their supervisor’s supervisor, and so on. I know, that’s still not odd, except:

I think I have yet to see a LinkedIn profile that doesn’t have one or more of:

  • career opportunities
  • consulting offers
  • new ventures
  • job inquiries

listed in the “interested In” category.

Just find this strange because usually, at least in North America, one does not advertise to one’s managers that one is interested in leaving the company.

Granted, it’s also assumed in North America that people will take the best opportunity available, so there is the unspoken assumption that everyone is open to a better offer, if it comes along. Also, since basically everyone includes those points, they eventually become unremarkable.

Has anyone else ever found this strange?

Some Twittering With Ruby And Shoes

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 9, 2007
in www
. 8 Comments

Now that I’ve become more or less hooked on Twitter, I’ve found that using a client, rather than the actual website, generally works a bit better for me. I’ve tried several; Twitterific is cool, but after I tried Snitter I found I couldn’t go back to using Twitterific, I missed Snitter’s extra features.

However, I started having trouble with Snitter crashing or seeming to become very slow; this may just be Adobe AIR, not Snitter, but either way, it got annoying enough that I quit using it. Now I normally use the web interface.

Since I started getting into Shoes, the project that keeps crossing my mind is building a Twitter client with Shoes. Shoes programs are basically Ruby programs, so it seems very doable. Now, such a client will not receive widespread use; shoes apps still need to be started from the command line, with the command `shoes yourapp.rb`. One option would be to create a shell script or batch file which contained this line, but this would still require shoes to be in the path (not guaranteed).

I’m willing to solve that problem later, and for now people would just need to take a few baby steps with Shoes (oh, how this project lends itself to puns) in order to run the twitter-shoes client.

Assuming I finish it. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meanwhile, I did find a few other problems and solve at least one:

  • I started developing on my laptop, which is an Ubuntu machine. There, I decided to try one of the Twitter API libraries that already exists (why reinvent the wheel? No thanks), one twitter4r. However, ran into errors when trying to run `gem install twitter4r`, an error that looked something like 

    extconf.rb:8:in `require’: no such file to load — mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:8
ERROR: While executing gem … (RuntimeError)
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    A search led me to one Al Hoang, who discovered that upgrading to ruby1.8-dev would resolve this — apparently mkmf.rb is not present otherwise, as strange as this seems (to me). So, an `apt-get install ruby1.8-dev` later, my gem issues were resolved.

  • Before trying Twitter4r, I did try just using Ruby’s own Net::HTTP and the Twitter API. Doing this, I kept getting the error “Can’t make more than 70 requests per hour”, which is meant to restrict API usage, but which (as far as I can tell) shouldn’t have been happening. Garrick Van Buren suggested not using my main account, which I intend to test — but since I want to create a client, eventually I’ll need to find a way to make this work with my primary account. Possibly Twitter4r will be a good solution, although that does create Yet Another Dependency for the client.
  • So far, that’s it. Haven’t tried plugging this into Shoes, yet, first I’ve been playing with the Twitter API in irb just to make sure I’ve got that part down.

So, if you’re interested in Twitter clients and/or Shoes, stay tuned, I suppose.

Also, if you’re using Shoes — you can create an edit_line that will mask a password: use @password = edit_line :secret => true.

Tags: , , ,

Giving Flock 1.0 Another Chance

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 8, 2007
in www
. 4 Comments

I recently gave Flock a review of “Why Bother?” Someone from the Flock team commented quite graciously, and I’ve eventually got around to fulfilling my promise to try Flock 1.0 and give it another chance.

In the spirit of this, I’m going to try to use Flock exclusively for 2 weeks. I was going to say a month but I’m not sure I want to do that. This means I’ll be installing Flock 1.0 at work and home, which in turn means I’ll be using it on all 3 major platforms: Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

In fact, I’m writing this from the blog editor with Flock right now (not sure how much I’ll use this; I like the default editor in Wordpress much better). We’ll see. I’m probably not going to be blogging about Flock much, per se, until at or near the end of the 2 week trial. If that interests you, be sure to drop by in a couple weeks to see my summary of the experience.

Tags: ,

Can the Del.icio.us Preview Become Reality Any Sooner?

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 7, 2007
in Asides, Design and www
. 2 Comments

I recently got a look at the new del.icio.us interface.

It can’t come soon enough. The warning that any new bookmarks I made in the preview would be lost more or less dissuaded me from using it, but… dang it. When, please? Anyone?

Too much work? Can I help? ;-)

Greasemonkey, Gmail, And More On the Ad-driven Business Model

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on November 7, 2007
in Advertising, Business, Google and www
. Comments

From the Gmail Greasemonkey 1.0 API page, emphasis added:

Greasemonkey is an integral part of the web experience for many experienced users. Google acknowledges that some people are going to change their own experience of our web applications regardless of what we do. Resistance, as they say, is futile. It would also be somewhat hypocritical. After all, a Google employee wrote Greasemonkey in the first place, another wrote these scripts to add functionality to Gmail, and a third wrote two books on the subject (and these docs).

The news about Gmail and Greasemonkey is cool and interesting, but what I found most interesting was the emphasized statement above.

When I wrote a week or two ago that I didn’t think an Ad-driven business model could last forever, I think a lot of people probably thought that was crazy. After all, don’t we read articles about blogs, sites, and businesses making hundreds of thousands of dollars, per month, with online advertising?

Absolutely; and I think those sites and business models will continue to work. Probably they’ll even do so for the next few years, even the next decade (maybe). But Google’s acknowledgment above is at the heart of what I was trying to say:

We, the web publisher, have NO CONTROL over how the browser views our site.

It’s conceivable that anyone, via their browser, plugins like Greasemonkey, other addons, or yet other technologies and methods unforeseen, can ignore or over-ride our CSS, our carefully tested layouts, any and all widgets on the page, anything.

Yes, right now it’s a very small percentage of rather geeky folks who are using Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey, etc, to do this, but we have no reason to suppose that it will remain this esoteric in the future. It could become easy as one-click, in many more browsers, to remove ads from web pages. What then?

Again, the sky is not falling, no one is going to stop making money, and this business model isn’t going to fall apart overnight. I’m just not sure it’s The One True Business Model that will continue to work in perpetuity…

—

Back to Gmail & Greasemonkey. Again, this is cool. Anyone found or created greasemonkey scripts for this yet?