Conversations with the presenters

Due to the relatively small size of the conference (~400 people), and the friendliness of the various speakers, I was able to have 1-on-1 chats with several of the folks I was most interested in talking to.

Molly Holzschlag spoke about “Why Web Standards Aren’t”, and how the original vision of the Web Standards Project (“anyone, anywhere, any platform, any user agent”) has run aground. She argues that what we should be aiming for isn’t this kind of universal standard, but interoperability, and that what we are really talking about are Best Practices, not Standards. I spoke with her about IE’s non-cooperation with such practices, and Microsoft’s relationship to the web dev community. Molly has already discussed the politics of these issues on her blog (how sweet is her URL: molly.com!). I asked her whether she thought that we as an industry have the opportunity/responsibility to educate users why they are better off using a standards-based browser, rather than pleading with Microsoft (in vain) to get their products up to date with their competitors in this area. The most tedious aspect of web development is browser compatibility testing. My experience is that catering to IE6 takes up hours and hours on every project, not to mention that it bloats your CSS and markup. She didn’t have a clear answer (nobody does), but after chatting for a while she suggested that a set of real tests to demonstrate the loss of time (and consequently, profit) caused by Internet Explorer’s lack of standards support would go a long way toward convincing institutions and companies to make the switch. After all, I’d be willing to bet that the greater proportion of those 1/2 billion IE installs are on corporate or institutional intranets.

Liz Danzico, of Happy Cog and A Brief Message, gave an interesting talk about “The Framework Age”, and how we can help users to ‘perform’ the interfaces we build by helping them detect patterns and organize them into frameworks for interaction and improvisation. I actually thought I was going to a talk on development frameworks (should have read the programme more carefully!), but it turned out to be quite an interesting discussion anyway. Liz definitely has the experience to back up her arguments that we need to focus more on use, interpretation, and evolution of interfaces rather than the traditional paradigm which puts all the emphasis on their (initial) design and composition. During her presentation, Liz used a few examples of the soon-to-be-launched redesign of the WordPress Admin interface, which she worked alongside Matt Mullenweg and Automattic to develop. After the failed Shuttle Project, Happy Cog stepped in to assist with the redesign. I liked the look of the redesign which Liz briefly displayed, but as an avid WordPress user and open source developer, I was curious to what extent the WP and open source community was involved with the redesign.

I asked her about this during the after party. She explained that the community had been involved to some extent throughout the process, but that it had been very tricky to balance the needs of all parties. She related that there had been a serious backlash when Matt delivered a prototype of the redesign in a nightly build without explaining the changes. WordPress 2.5 (scheduled to be released in the coming weeks/months) will have the new design embedded, and will be included with both the hosted and non-hosted versions of WordPress. I discussed the surrounding issues with another developer I met (François from Catalyst), and I am as yet unresolved on the question which the WP situation raises for me: can open-source communities (in their current form primarily made up of programmers) successfully deliver high-quality, progressive design solutions to match the quality of their code? François argued they could, given the right tools, and he may be right. I believe strongly in the open source philosophy, but I wonder if the same structures can support good design. Is design (and here I am more concerned with simple aesthetics than the tangled question of usability) an intrinsically different beast than code? Would open source designs suffer from the dreaded flaws of design-by-committee? I need to develop these ideas more and get others’ input to work through the connected concerns.

I also spoke briefly with Craig Nevill-Manning, director of Google New York, and Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager at Google. Craig gave a fascinating talk on “Why scale makes things interesting and useful”, about the opportunities offered by the staggering scale of data which Google has access to. For example, the Google spellchecker which notices your mistyped queries and asks “Did you mean: _____?”, is incredibly accurate because it relies not on the Oxford English Dictionary or some other top-down, centralized source, but on the 100,000 other people who have misspelt or mistyped the same query into that omnipresent search box. And thanks to this mass of data, it also knows that different misspellings indicate a search for different content (see photo above).

Chris DiBona compressed his existing “History of Open Source” talk from its 3 hours down to a speedy 46 minutes, covering the beginnings of UNIX, GNU, Linux, and everything else along the way right up to today’s open-source web frameworks and tools. It was interesting to hear Chris’ take, as he has been involved with these projects for the entirety of his professional (and amateur) career. After his presentation, I asked him about the potential for open source communities to contribute meaningfully to humanitarian projects such as One Laptop Per Child and the social aspects of the Ubuntu project. He said that he believes that the idealism embodied in open source is a natural match for social projects, but that it’s really hard for open source devs alone to make dramatic change. He pointed to Google’s investment in OLPC and other projects as a good combination of big business and open source know-how.

Microsoft Resentment

Despite being one of the primary sponsors (along with Provoke and Google), and having a well designed booth in the lobby (running a 24″ iMac, nonetheless), the resentment toward Microsoft amongst the presenters and attendees was tangible and vocal. I can’t count the number of speakers who made insults toward or bitter jokes about MS during their presentations. It’s true that they’re an easy target, but the anger at the company’s lack of regard for an open dialogue with the people using their products to develop and deliver web content was evident throughout the conference.

Sigurd Magnusson, an organizer of Webstock and Chief Marketing Officer of SilverStripe (a Wellington-based company building an impressive open-source CMS and accompanying web dev framework called Sapphire), indicated the frustration at this lack of dialogue in his recent blog post, The Internet Explorer 8 Doctype Smackdown. A List Apart also recently released a discussion of the issue, criticizing Microsoft for their heavy-handed approach to browser standards: The Shoot Browsers, Don’t They?. An excerpt:

The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of “breaking the web” in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches. In its current state, version targeting is a cure that will kill the patient. Version targeting could have been an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate innovation. Instead, the proposed default behavior demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the World Wide Web, a place that according to its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, will always be “a little bit broken.”

The rest

The conference was absolutely packed with activity and information. A high-resolution experience if there ever was one! Simon Willison gave great presentations on OpenID and Django, Tom Coates shared his insights on ‘designing for a web of data’ (as opposed to a web of pages), Damian Conway had the audience in stitches during his sarcastic “26 Ways to keep the Morlocks from using your website” (hint: use tiny type, inconsistent navigation, bright clashing colours, and lots of JavaScript and Flash), and Kathy Sierra gave a really useful talk on creating passionate users (I’m very glad she’s back doing speaking engagements after her ordeal last year). And of course, I met and had interesting conversations with dozens of other attendees, and got to know a good number of people in the Wellington (and NZ) web industry, including the great guys at SilverStripe. I’m skipping over so much, but have exhausted the limits of my tiny brain to regurgitate everything it was fed. In short, a fantastic experience, and one I will repeat at every opportunity!

I did a couple new things this time around. I’m a big fan of Google Maps and thought it would be cool to embed a map of the various locations we visit in the sidebar of the blog (the long skinny shape of New Zealand helped make this fit!). It was very easy to do. After creating the map, I grabbed the Paste HTML to embed in website iframe source from Google and dropped it into the sidebar.php file of the WordPress Sandbox theme that I had built for the blog. Piece of cake! Check out the map or see it embedded on the blog. It’s a simple thing, but I think it helps to make the country and places more tangible to readers of the blog back home in Canada. I think this is a tiny pointer toward the need for a more cohesive web service for travel blogging. Writing travelogues was my introduction to the blogosphere, and it’s still what I primarily use blogs for. A service that could easily integrate travel data (maps, photos, stories) into a blog would be very useful! The public API’s of Flickr and Google Maps make this just a matter of programming and time, but as such a service doesn’t exist yet (to my knowledge), I have to mark my map in Google, post my photos to Flickr, post my entry in WordPress, then path my entry photos to Flickr. Also, I have to modify the WordPress theme files by hand to embed the results in the sidebar. Kind of a lumpy process.

Speaking of Flickr, the other new thing I did (after adding a similar feature to my website) was add a randomized Flickr badge to the sidebar of the blog, which pulls 10 random photos with the tag newzealand on each page load. This too was a very simple task. Simply use the wizard to generate your badge (HTML or Flash), select whether you would like your photos limited to a specific set or tag, select layout and color options (or none so you can write your own CSS), and you’re done! I dumped all the junk that the generator spits out (ugly HTML tables and verbose CSS selectors) and just grabbed the one line of JavaScript responsible for the communication with Flickr. All the parameters selected in the wizard are appended as a query string to the script URL, and can be edited inline. I embedded the script and tried to edit it to select more than 10 photos, but Flickr doesn’t respond to requests over this limit. No bother – 10′s enough, and the badge adds a little bit of random Flickrness to the blog! Now I just hope Microsoft doesn’t end up buying Yahoo, rebranding Flickr as Windows Live Photo Sharing Utility for Vista Internet Service Pack 2 and breaking the badge

I had fun with the theme. The underlying architecture supplied by Sandbox avoids a lot of the CSS headaches that can go along with blog theming, and allowed me to focus on a minimal, content-oriented theme that complements my recent site redesign. Where the Creative Creature site is dark and rich, Recursive Loop is light and airy, but both maintain the same colour scheme and typography choices. The developers of recent versions of WordPress have implemented a fairly flexible Widget system that allowed me to easily add Tag Cloud and Calendar widgets to the sidebar, both of which I find to be really useful navigation tools.

Let me know what you think! Anything not working quite right? Any posts showing up strangely within the new structure? I already had to tweak entries with Flash embedded in them, but I may have missed other little errors. I’ve got a batch of entries to post that I’ve been writing during a recent trip to the beautiful but internet-sparse South Island of New Zealand, so keep an eye out for them!

So, rather than a rant about the issue, I’ve decided to restrict myself to a list of the things I feel I’m doing right for the environment in my everyday business, and those that I need to improve upon. The latter are combined with a commitment on my part to actively pursue those improvements. Since this blog is dedicated primarily to my business, I will focus on those activities to do with Creative Creature.

The things I’m doing right

• I work from home, eliminating the need to commute.
• I turn off my monitors and speakers when I’m going to be away from my desk for more than a couple of minutes, helping to conserve energy. I also unplug my computer overnight (though I do leave it sleeping).
• I bike to all meetings, reducing the noise and pollution caused by car traffic. Thanks to the climate in Hamilton, I can do this throughout the year (though it gets chilly sometimes!).
• I use recycled paper for all printing, and use both sides of the page most of the time. I also recycle all fine paper waste that my activities generate.
• I donate 1% of my sales to environmental organizations through 1% For The Planet.

The things I can improve on

• I leave my routers, hubs, and telephones plugged in and running when I leave the house for days at a time, consuming unnecessary energy.
• I have not converted to CFL bulbs in my home. I have doubts about the Mercury in the bulbs, but this is debatable based on the method used for generating electricity in your area (ie. the method of energy production (coal plants) may produce more Mercury to power an incandescent bulb than a CFL would use in production and use combined). The energy mixture in Hamilton is primarily hydroelectric (Niagara Falls) and nuclear, so I’m still not sure about this.
• I use a wide variety of electronics loaded with plastics and heavy metals, every one of them manufactured under loose environmental guidelines in Asia and shipped overseas. The seemingly low environmental impact of the web industry (“It’s all digital! It’s all so perfect and clean!”) hides a lot of toxic waste. Not sure what my options are for this right now.
• I’m sure there are many more. Any suggestions?

Save Our Forests!

Finally, as a little goody for those interested in making the small changes, I’ve put together a little “No Junk Mail” 2.5″ x 3.5″ badge that you can download, print out, and put on your mailbox. I printed mine on sticker paper, but regular (recycled!) paper and some tape would work as well. If you’d like, you can download the artwork in Illustrator format and rework to your needs (maybe a skinny mailbox door?). Enjoy! I’d love to hear if you use it.

Download Formats

• 150dpi PNG
• 300dpi PNG
• Adobe Illustrator CS Format

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain License.

Yesterday I came across a banner ad for Blog Action Day while traversing the web. Interested by the title and graphic design, I followed the link to discover a pretty cool initiative started by a handful of (hippy, vegan, Baha’i) bloggers. The idea is this:

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?

One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

The issue for the inaugural Blog Action Day is The Environment. I like the idea of focussing a wide variety of blogs on a single (multifaceted) issue, especially when it’s the central concern of our time. So far, around 3600 blog(ger)s have signed up for the event. The initiative seems to be relatively nonpartisan, which will hopefully increase its impact across perspectives (as opposed to ‘preaching to the choir’). In their FAQ, they state the following:

2. Does Blog Action Day have a specific agenda?

As much as is possible we are aiming not to push any particular agenda. Aside from the choice of theme each year, we encourage bloggers to write their own opinions, give weight to what they think is important and to be themselves.

We believe in unity in diversity, not uniformity.

3. Why the environment?

We have selected the environment as the 2007 theme both for the clarity of its importance and the undeniable urgency that issues like global warming and pollution have. It is an issue that can relate to virtually any subject, any blog and anybody.

The organizers have suggested several options for participants to help make the day a success. The first is to post on the environment on October 15th. They suggest writing about how the issue is important to you, how you go about decreasing your environmental impact, and what you think should be done to promote environmental protection. The second is to donate your day’s earnings to the environmental charity of your choice (four of the big ones are officially associated with the initiative – Greenpeace, the National Wildlife Federation, The Sierra Club, and The Conservation Fund). Finally, they suggest helping to spread the word about the day, as I’m doing here! As I devote 1% of my earnings to 1% for the Planet, I’m not sure whether I will be donating my day’s earnings (*most days $0! But I guess my monthly average divided by thirty) to one of the charities.

I’m also not sure exactly what elements of the issue I’m going to write about yet, but I’m excited to contribute to the day. I’m interested to see what others write, whether Blog Action Day is covered in the mainstream media, and how the concept of collaboratively focussing on a single topic flies in the blogosphere. I think it’s an idea with a lot of positive energy behind it. It’s really easy to register, so if this is something that interests you, add your voice to the chorus. See you October 15th!