vanderwal.net

Remote Usability Testing

Examining remote usability testing, a research paper from IBM. [hat tip WebWord]

Dumbing down of computer and information design books

My trip to bookstores in Florida had me seeing what the person on the street sees as computer books, "Dummies" guides. There were eight shelves of Dummies computer books with a handful of Microsoft publisher books thrown in for color variation.

When I returned home I took a trip to Barnes and Noble and found the computer Web section filled with GUI tool books (Dreamweaver, FrontPage, GoLive, etc.) where there were shelves of HTML, DHTML, CSS, Perl, proper design (by Zeldman and Veen), or Information Architecture books. This trend worried me more than what I saw in Florida. The GUI books did not get into proper markup or understanding of information. The books were concerned with how to make better use of more bandwidth. Not one place in the many books I pulled off the shelf did I see any mention of the user or information use (let alone information reuse). The beauty of learning how to develop properly is knowing when the GUI tools are wrong, but better is knowing what is built properly will work well on broadband and on mobile devices. If the information is important and cared about it should be made available, accessible, and usable.

Ticketstubs launches

Tickstubs is launched by Matt. This site is a story repository based on ticket stubs. I have many ticket stubs that serve as reminders of past events, travels, and adventures. I am glad to see there are others that have the same interest and are sharing them. I look forward to following along.

RSS and interconnections

Since I added the vanderwal.net RSS feed I have been picking up other RSS and RDF feeds. I have been using Ranchero's NetNewsWire Lite to pull many feeds of sites I read on a regular basis. I have become a convert to RSS/RDF extracts. They are a time saver for seeing only updated sites. I have read feeds of many of the news sites from MacReporter for quite sometime, but having personal content and blogs pulled in is quite a timesaver and allows me to get through more information.

I do see a downside of the XML feeds, in the disconnection of the creator from the users. The Web has given us the ability to have digital ghosts that we know come to our sites and possibly read content. This is much like Plato's cave shadow people, in that we do not see the actual people that come to the sites, but we surmise what these visitors are like and what they come to read. Occasionally we receive comments on the site, e-mails from visitors, or best meet folks in person that read/experience your work. It is very much a disconnected work that is built from guesses, for those that try and care (some just build for themselves resources to be used remotely and all others are welcome "free riders", like here). The XML feeds seem to take away another level of the "interaction" between the creator and the users. This relationship is important in communication as the feedback helps shape the message as well as offer paths for both parties to learn and grow.

The XML feeds offer the consumers of the information easier and more efficient means of getting, filtering, and digesting information, but the return path to the creator is diminished. The feeds are a consumer oriented communication channel and not so much an interactive communiction channel. The down side is a lack of true interactive communication, which becomes more of a consuming produced products, much like frozen dinners that get popped in the microwave. The interaction provides the creator with an understanding of how the user consumes the information and what the consumer of the information is finding usable and how the consumer is being drawn to the information. When one cooks their own meals or is being cooked for the meal can be spiced and seasoned appropriately for consumption. The presentation of the food can be modified to enhance pleasure. The live cooking process allows for feedback and modification. Much like the interaction of information in a communication scenario the creator and the consumer have a relationship, as the creator finds the structure and the preferred means of consuming the information the presentation and structure of the information can be altered appropriately.

In a sense the XML feed could be seen as one type of information structure of presentation. There are other options available that can be used to bring back the interaction between the creator and consumer. Relationships and connections are built over this expansive medium of the Web through information and experience. These connections should be respected and provided a place to survive.

NPR finds music gems

Running errands this past weekend I heard a snippet on NPR about the All Songs Considered 2 CD. There were a few songs played and discussed that really intrigued me. This meant Saturday night I spent nearly three hours digging through the All Songs Considered site listening to the archives. I found many obscure bands that I new really want to listen to more. I often have caught bits and pieces of ASC while in the car, but never can remember who it was that piqued my interest.

This site, like many others on NPR really augments the radio experience, bringing it into an explorative medium with memory, which has been my complaint with radio for years. Radio is transitory and fleeting. Remembering a song or discussion while changing lanes, answering the phone, draining the pasta, etc inhibits structured listening that augments aural memory.

I was once embarrassed that I picked up much of my new music finds from NPR, but with much of the commercial radio market serving up untalented pablum (or perhaps misproduced talent) I have an outlet. I have found John Mayer before many others I considered to be well plugged in. There is a depth of music talent and spectrum that is missing in the overly corporate regulated airways.

A few finds from this weekends digging are The Frames who gave up the over produced song and started their own record label. Metaphor, Damien Gough/Badly Drawn Boy reminding me of Prefab Sprout, and Lanterna. Lanterna is a rather unknown band that is from Champaign, Illinois and one of the members works as a sound engineer for an NPR station, unknown to the folks at ASC.

Following this thread to music that I really enjoy from a relatively unknown... It is rumored that The Walkingbirds have received air play on an NPR site in Pennsylvania. This is great news if it is true. I have really enjoyed Scott's music that he contributes to Walkingbirds. It seems that NPR finds the gems in the rough terrain that great music is forced to walk in by the corporations that produce musical mediocrity. I am happy that NPR has blessed the gem of Walkingbirds. This has been a good few days for finding music.

Snowday and lessons on not caching and using static pages

It is a personal snowday as the U.S. Federal Government is open (so far), but on unscheduled leave. Oddly enough the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) status site does not have a no-cache setting in the header. This means you browsers, even your modern browser, will cache the page and require you the user to manually refresh the page. These pages may even be cached locally by ISPs and connectivity providers, meaning the information is not up to date. The page is rather light, with few graphics, but it is not a static page, meaning each page is generated dynamically, which requires more horsepower to serve the page. One days like today every Washington, DC area federal employee and contractor is hitting this page, as well as many DC area private sector employees (most DC companies are open if the Federal Government is open).

I thought most IT folks learned their lesson with the need for "dynamic" pages a year or two ago, but I guess not. Many previously dynamic pages are not dynamic on the back end with content management systems doing the same work they always have done, but building static pages. If the content on the pages is not changing often (this is a subjective term and can roughly defined as content changing ever few hours with heavy site loads are usually candidates for static pages) or are not serving parsable datapoints (tables of data that can have subsets of data selected for viewing). Much of the "dynamic page" hype was generated by marketing folks to non-technical types who made decisions on cool or manly mindsets. Many folks started actually thinking about the need for dynamic pages a couple years ago. Those that decided they did not need dynamic pages for all or even most of their site began to realize they could save on the heavier hardware needed to churn out everypage. These static output folks also found they could withstand much higher hit rates with ease. I have been in meetings with folks that were asking about stress testing site that were static running on boxes that were formerly running dynamic sites. Those of us that understood the processor savings knew this was a foreign concept and they did not understand the server would be able to handle twice to eight times the load previously handled.

GUI vs Hand Coding for HTML

Dori posts a matrix explaining how well GUI Web mark-up tools perform and it is not suprising that most do poorly. Dreamweaver MX does admirably, but the JavaScript is not up to par. The best coding is still hand coding. If you do not know how to hand code your job will never be done, it will not be right either. The tools have come a long way, but they are nto there yet.

Zoom Zoom

Ahhhh.... This past month has been horrible to be with out my own e-mail accounts and or broadband. I have more than a handful of digital friends I keep up with, e-mail, and chat with on-line and not really having access was no fun to say the least. I am behind on e-mail and other things I had taken on, accept heartfelt appologies and know I am doing what I can to catch-up.

I am really not understanding how folks use dial-up, particularly with Yahoo offering a $29 per month offering and Covad offering about the same price or less. I can understand not being DSL accessable, but if you are it is well worth the effort. Trying to read even CNN on line was painful. With broadband I can check local movie listings in Watson and see a clip (oh what a wonderful idea, I have not done this in months).

Apache 2.0 builds for OS X

Hmmm... Yesterday I was looking at Apache and the other two pieces of the triumvirate PHP and MySQL. Today I ran across what could be an improved option, Server Logistics' Apache 2.0 along with Perl, PHP, MySQL, and Postgres. Apache 2.0 provides multithreading and other improvements to the incredibly stable and supreme Web server All of this is set to build and run on Mac OX 10.

Found it in the paper

I learned another thing on vacation, The New York Times is a great paper. Yes, the NYTimes.com offers great news and all the content, but the actual paper is a great asset. I spent this past week reading the paper version of the Times and found great stories that informed and even entertained in each day's paper. I never see this in the digital version as it is not as easy to flip through the digital pages as it is the paper version. The Web version groups the information by like kind, but finding the nuggets is not as easy. I usually read the highlights using AvantGo, which may limit my closeness ot the nuggets I found I really miss. I subscribed to the paper version for years, but thought I found the digital version more streamlined, but now I realize what would make my morning coffee better.

Expat from your sofa

Two good resources to help understand living as an expat in France or an expat in the Netherlands. There is another Paris Expat that I have been reading for a while. These offer a great escape while sitting in the US.

Microsoft embraces Apache Web server

CNet News discusses Microsoft's .Net set to link to Apache, which is a great step as the Microsoft IIS web server is increasingly being dropped as a viable option because of never ending security problems. This would literally doom Microsoft's .Net initiative as it would not be usable on the Internet without their Microsoft Internet server. By moving the ability to run the .Net framework on an Apache server Microsoft not only extends their ability to run their services on a superior Web server with far fewer security problems, but Apache is now recognized as a viable Web server by Microsoft. Apache owns the majority share of the Web server business and those of use that have had the ability to use it prefer it hands down to Microsoft's IIS.

Film Strip Art

Film Strip art provided a great diversion. [hat tip Eric]

Baking versus frying CMS

Aaron discusses baking versus frying with content management and updates bake and fry CMS ideas. The idea is to bake content, which is using your content management system to produce static pages. The alternative is to fry from the CMS by providing truely dynamic content. There are a few reasons why one should choose the frying method:

• Frequent (hourly or semi-daily) updates of informaiton
• Multiple dependancies (information linking to and from many points)
• Unlimited resources
• Many variation of presentation of the data
• Providing user slicing and dicing of informaiton capabilities
• Many external content providers

This list does not capture everything, but also provides maleable guidelines. There are many advantages to baking (publishing static content pages) from a CMS:

• Speed of delivery
• Archievable version
• Ease of troubleshooting and maintenance
• Editable output pages
• Use templates to generate valid mark-up and perfect 508 compliant pages
• Using reusable content pieces that provide consistancy and accuracy of information on all presentation layers
• Keeping various application elements well maintained

Aaron provides good links for further discovery of your own.

Gold Box provides

The Amazon Gold Box provides a goodie to get. After watching the Gold Box for weeks, and wondering where it went for a week or so, the Gold Box had a solid offering. I found Memento on DVD popped up. I did not see the movie in the theater, but have had an interest. The 10 dollar plus price made it less than a movie out for two and the fancy tiles are not available at the rental joints. One thing I did not realize about the Gold Box is that if you select an item to buy before the final item you do not get the opportunity to see the remaining items.