bitdepth — web

Technorati Tags

One of the signs that things are maturing with information on the Web is that things are becoming much more closely linked together. A few days ago I was thinking that Technorati‘s watchlists were cool and today they unleashed their tags. I’m very impressed. One of the things that I’ve been wanting for a little while is a way to tag blog entries. Categories are good, but after using del.icio.us and Flickr I’ve started to realize that having more than one way to classify is a good thing. But having multiple tags doesn’t really do a lot for you unless you can do something with it and now you can. I’m sure that blogging systems will quickly evolve and you’ll choose tags and categories (there are already plugins), but it’s fascinating to watch the development of folksonomy happen so rapidly. It was neat when I was able to see my Flickr photos show up beside my things on 43 things. But that’s nothing compared to looking at Flickr photos, blog entries and del.icio.us links all together on the same page. I really fell in love with tags when I looked at the view of tags on Flickr where the font size of the tags reflect their popularity. Technorati has the same thing and as more people tag stuff it will be a great way to visualize what people are talking about. It’s developing so rapidly that Technorati Tags have rolled out before it was completely done, so there aren’t RSS feeds yet.
Another example of how fast things happen now: from the time the first notice I saw in my feeds (on Joho) to the afternoon, Matt from Oddiophile whipped up a bookmarklet to create tags (and I have to change my stylesheet to incorporate this new class). I used it for my first tagged post over at bitdepth digest and I’ll use it to paste the code in this entry as well (which I’m writing in BBEdit). Tags and Technorati – this rocks so hard.
technorati: tags, folksonomy, web, blog, technorati

January 14, 2005 43things, blog, del.icio.us, flickr, folksonomy, tags, technorati, web

Bye Bye Browser

I’ve been using the browser less and less since I started using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds. It’s one the best shareware investments that I’ve made. It’s simple, well-designed and works well. Most of the time I can quickly get a lot of information via the feeds and NNW lets me check out things that I’m really interested in. When I used to click on a link it would open in my browser which is usually Safari, but I’m using Firefox a bit now. Now I’m using the latest beta which makes a good thing even better. Support has been added for Atom feeds and the weblog editor has been broken out into a new application called MarsEdit. The thing that has changed the way I look at things the most is that now (thanks to WebCore) I view pages within a tab that pops up in NNW. It’s a great idea and now I’m going outside to the browser less when I want to check something out. Simplifying things is always good.
MarsEdit is something that I wasn’t sure I’d use that much. But I’ve been using it a bit and I think that I’ll use it more. I’m not using Movable Type as much now which is what I used the weblog editor for before, but I am using Blogger and I can post to Blogger using MarsEdit with the quirk of not being able to set the title, but that’s on the way. I’m also thinking of using it a bit with this blog which is Blosxom-based with me editing the posts in BBEdit. The change in the interface of MarsEdit is that it now works and looks a bit more like email, which makes a lot of sense. The email workflow is closer to how blogging works intellectually. That being said, why am I writing longer posts now?

October 17, 2004 atom, bbedit, blogger, blosxom, firefox, marsedit, movabletype, netnewswire, rss, safari, software, web

Remembering the Web That Was

About a week ago my son asked me for some help with redoing his Web site. He’s seven years old and he likes to do things that everyone else in the family does and since most of us make Web sites that’s what he wants to do. He already has some locally hosted stuff. He wanted to blog so I set him up with Movable Type which he used a bit and then he saw me working on this site and he wanted to use what I used, which is Blosxom, so I set him up with Blosxom which kept him for a while longer. Then he wanted to change the look of the site and he asked me how I did it. He wanted to use HTML, like me, but I didn’t have time to teach him so I started thinking about the books in the computer bookcase and thought of Jennifer Niederst‘s Learning Web Design. I gave it to my son and he started reading and coding with BBEdit. Then he wanted more control over the look and layout of the site and asked me how I did that. I told him about CSS and then he wanted to learn about that and I discovered the CSS palette in BBEdit that makes things a bit simpler.

This got me thinking about how things were when I started making Web pages and how wonderful it was when I found out how to do things. The first book that made things easy and understandable was the now out-of-print Designing for the Web. I still have the book and it actually holds up pretty well. It was my constant companion when I first started teaching Web design to people. Then I moved on to Web Design in a Nutshell which is still my favourite printed reference.

Now I don’t read a lot of books about basic stuff since I’m trying to do more with CSS and focussing on the content and less on the presentation since sometimes working on the look is a great way to delay writing. It was neat in the old days because there weren’t as many Web sites and many of the questions weren’t “how” to do something, but “if” something was possible to do. It was fun because everyone was learning and trying things out. There was the constant push to cut things down and to wrap your head around a different way of thinking to code stuff. Now I code stuff by hand with BBEdit’s help and I really like it. I’m closer to the code and by trying to code stuff cleanly and to standards it isn’t as big a deal to do a redesign in terms of needing to redo lots of pages.

I’m also realizing how many design and coding principles that I’ve assimilated into my own practice. I don’t look a lot of stuff up and firmly separate out the content from the presentation. In a funny way I think that many of the practices that I follow are all aligning… the same for thinking about teaching, editing, writing and creating almost anything. I think about what to say, how to say it and then playing around with the presentation. The simple version is “think, plan, make it work, and make it pretty.” When I don’t follow that process is when I get off topic and spend more time exploring a technique and less time exploring ideas.

Seeing my son build his pages made me remember how wonderful it is to see something appear in a browser after you code it. The sense of wonder that made the Web so special. The amazing feeling of seeing a new page and figuring out how it was done and checking out the code to confirm what you thought. In some ways it is a bit of magic – seeing behind the curtain at the machinery inside. I’d forgotten about a lot of that and now I’ve got a little bit of it back thanks to my son asking a few questions.

November 30, 2003 bbedit, css, history, jenniferniederst, john, learningwebdesign, web, webdesigninanutshell

ALA is Back

I haven’t done much Web design or coding in the last while. I haven’t been teaching it either. But I still keep up with things and always at the back of my mind is the desire to redo my sites to look and do things better. One of the (still) frustrating things about putting a Web site together is making it look good and having it work in various browsers. It’s amazing how the Web has been around a relatively long time and many of us take it for granted, but it’s still hard to depend on everyone seeing everything the same way on a site. The standards haven’t changed that dramatically, but the adherence to the standards still isn’t completely there. One of the major resources that I’ve relied upon in the last few years has been A List Apart which is filled with great articles about Web design.

ALA just launched version 3 and it’s still a great resource. The look of this site grew out of an article on ALA and my desire to follow the standards and really separate content and presentation. But that’s another rant (but you really should be using CSS). The driving force behind ALA is Jeffrey Zeldman who is one cool standards-based Web designer who also wrote Designing With Web Standards and was one fo the people behind the Web Standards Project. Zeldman drives home the point and exemplifies the maxim that it is the content that is most important in what we produce.

One of the three articles in the new issue of ALA is a neat examination of some of the neat things you can do with CSS called Sliding Doors of CSS. Douglas Bowman explains how to use CSS to create a tabbed interface. It’s one of those articles that makes me start thinking about redesiging things. Even though I recently redid this site, this article makes me think that there is a better way to do some of the things that I’ve done with it.

If you not that geeky about HTML, CSS, and standards as I am… well, you probably won’t be that excited about ALA 3.0 firing up.

October 25, 2003 ala, alistapart, css, howto, html, web

Kleenex of the Internet

Just about the only place that you hear people say “tissue” is in a film. The word “Kleenex®” which is Kimberly-Clark’s facial tissue product has become the generic term…it’s used so often that you don’t really think about it. The same thing has happened with Web searching and Google, which is 5 today.

Back in the early days of the Web you didn’t really need a search engine as it was possible to look through a lot of pages. The other thing was that most Web pages or “home pages” as many called them then was that a lot of them consisted of links to the other sites out there. It was a nice time that is easy to mythologize…you could know most of the people on the WWW.

Yahoo! started the popularity contest with their guide and search. Then I remember using AltaVista to find stuff. But then Google came along and it worked very well. What was striking about Google is the simplicity of the front page. One text-entry box and two buttons. When you got the results (if you weren’t “Feeling Lucky”) the multicolored logo added a repeated letter “o” to spread out the page results.

It still works well and now it’s a verb… you “Google” something. The coolness of the verb was driven home to me driven home by William Gibson in his novel Pattern Recognition where it was used to refer to what you would find when you Google two of the characters.

Life before Google will be a story we tell our kids, just like explaining a rotary phone, old “pocket calculator”, or floppy disks. But Google, as you proabably know isn’t infallible as it indexes what’s out there and doesn’t always distinguish what’s actually true, but that’s what we’re supposed to do for ourselves. William Gibson’s bio mentions that if you Google him you’ll find out that he writes it all on a manual typewriter, which he hasn’t done for a while.

Google now is branching out with news, cool stuff from Google Labs, and my favourite, Google Zeitgeist which gives you a glimpse into what people are looking for. Happy Birthday Google!

September 9, 2003 altavista, google, googlelabs, googlezeitgeist, search, web, yahoo

Another Reason to Use Mozilla

If you don’t know about Mozilla, you should. It’s the child of Netscape, born back in the days when there was competition for Web browsers and standards and all that. It’s also the basis of the current release of Netscape Navigator…or is it just Netscape now? You can find out more news about Mozilla and related stuff at Mozillazine. Now it’s at Release Candidate 2, which means that it’s very close to release. The other reason to use it, aside from it being fast and cool is that you can turn off unrequested pop-up windows…and that includes the annoying pop-under ads as well. Lovely!

May 11, 2002 browsers, mozilla, software, web

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