cazmockett.com

Building on the Shoulders of Giants

Jonathan Snook

Culture
We come from a culture where developers tend to like to reinvent the wheel, whereas designers like to reuse. If, as developers, we want to use components of others’ work (under GPL or whatever), this provides us with some distinct advantages. Look how many times the Linux distribution has forked!

Tools
There are loads of PHP frameworks out there, and also for other languages. We dont’ have to write everything from scratch, but make use of pre-existing libraries and functions.

Flash - now has built in sockets support. Useful for charts in pages (if you need them)

Types of Data
Location, Time, Relationships etc

Pitfalls
Dynamic APIs can foul up your application; service availability; you are middleman – if something goes down people blame you, not the service provider.

Benefits
Dealing with well-tested code. Speeds up development. Solve problems outside original solution.

Ideas
Enables you to get stuff out fast. Iterate fast and often. Eg Overheard RSS feed built really quickly (using library elements from Cake PHP). You can see what works. You can put stuff out in hours, rather than days or weeks.

Jonathan’s presentation: slides (blog+links) | audio (mp3)

Content Management Without the Killing

Drew McLellan

Intro
Tools should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Don’t overcomplicate things! CMS required if you need to repurpose content (eg for RSS) and have a lot of aggregated content. Need to take control over editing process.  You don’t always need to use a CMS all the time – to all parts of the site. No. Use it for the bits that they need now.

What type of CMS?

• Offline - eg Dreamweaver with Contribute. Can be very good for existing large static sites, which weren’t already built with a CMS. Won’t let you publish to schedules, multiple languages etc.
• Online - web app which runs site. Content edited with web-based forms, content stored in databases. Custom-built to off-the-shelf.
• Off the shelf - will generally let you build anything. Methods to manage pages; custom functionality can be added with plugins. eg Blog sites. But anything out of the ordinary – often falls over.
• Bespoke – custom-built, designed specifically for running your site.

Everyone hates their CMS! And CMSs aren’t forever!

Common Features

• /shiny/happy/urls
  Use readable, reliable and hackable URLs
  Readable – users should have a good idea of what a page is about from looking at the URLs. Search engines will index things better.
  Reliable – should be a URL forever (or as long as possible).
  Hackable – users can intuitively change a URL to get to other content.
• Data feeds
  Can your CMS let you publish RSS etc.
• Data stored in an open format
  CMS isn’t forever – but if you want to change it, can you get the content out if you need to – to port it to another system. Also the need to get the data in in the first place.
• Customisable and accessible admin interface
  Works without Javascript; can be branded
• Search
  Difficult to get right – does search return sensible things – are they relevent to the user
• Multi-site support
  Can it administer more than one site? Perhaps reuse some content on another site.
• Multi-language support
  Think about it now even if it might not seem like you need it right away. Should be OK if you’re using unicode.
• Caching
  Does it cache the results or generate it each time? Performance issues might bite you on the ass later.
• Web 2.0 features
  Are your users going to want to tag content? Use of microformats
• Bi-Directional Content
  Trouble really starts when users can update the system too – need user accounts, possibly moderation, business rules for deletion of data. Can of worms! Also think about future features – eg for user forum later on.

Off The Shelf
cmsmatrix.org has data on 915 CMSs!
Start at the bottom – WordPress, Moveable Type, TextPattern, Chip etc.
Beware the pimped out blog software – don’t launch a new site with a weblog cms already creaking.
If you are going to customise things – avoid getting into an unsupportable configuration at all costs.

Medium scale
see photos – beware, don’t be tempted to overdo things – do you really need all these features?

Enterprise Level
Documentum, LiveLink, Joomla etc

Build your own! [I have!]
Libraries, Django, rails, cake, symphony.
Goal – reuse core functions as much as possible.

Planning for the future
Know your plugins, be aware of licensing issues, plan for future but don’t buy now. know your limits, know your design constraints, speak with existing customers, don’t get charged per users, know your exit route!

Drew’s presentation: slides (slideshare) | audio (mp3)

It’s that time of year again, and the Adobe Live roadshow has been to town. The two-day event was held at the Business Design Centre in Islington, and I went along to see demos of the latest versions of Photoshop, Dreamweaver and all the other goodies in the CS3 Suite.

As well as the product demos, there were also other seminars covering design topics. One by a guy from Avenue A/Razorfish was entitled Web Design With Emotion

This was quite thought provoking, saying users are starting to expect more and more from things like eCommerce applications, and there are more ways of presenting results that just boring old lists of stuff. Two examples he gave were:

Amaznode
Great way of querying Amazon – I ran a search for rugby books on the UK site, and got the following interconnectedness results back:

[Amaznode search results show a web of connectedness for the items]

It’s fun watching the network to build up. You can pick up an item and drag it about (the blue knot). Double-clicking the centre book will bring up the item detail panel, which lets you Add to Cart or Go to Amazon. I liked the way it presents related stuff – could be good if you’re looking for recommendations based on what you have already. Not sure how reliable they are though!

Etsy’s Shop By Colour
Etsy is a site where folks who hand make craft items can sell to individuals. There’s the usual way of browsing boring old categories, but the Shop By Colour feature is fun – especially if you are trying to co-ordinate stuff for an outfit or room.

[Etsy shop by colour display]

Swirl your mouse round to stir up the colour trail, and click one you like the look of. The database will bring back a cluster of stuff that matches. It’s great fun – go and have a play!

So, just two bits of food for thought which show search results don’t have to be boring. Users are getting smarter and prefer interaction to passivity, so whilst this kind of interface would have been unheard of even a couple of years ago, things are changing fast.

Upgrades, gotta love ‘em.

As it turned out, I foolishly accepted the offer of an upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 a couple of days ago. It all looked to have gone smoothly to begin with, and in fact I like the look of it – seems easier to find things and is a much nicer interface, all in all.

So I ripped a couple of CD’s I’d been meaning to put on my PC for a while, then connected my MP3 player. And… nada. Well, the helpful error message said words to the effect that my player was using an old USB driver which was no longer supported, and I should go get a new one. Great! It was getting very late, so I decided not to wrestle with it and left it til the next day.

The player in question is a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX (nice and snappy that, ha), so I hopped over to Creative Europe’s website and downloaded the latest USB driver and installed that. Still the same error message.

A bit of Googling later, and I found that WMP11 has “known issues” with Zen portable devices. It would have been nice to have been told this before I did the upgrade, Microsoft! The suggested bodge fix is to roll back to WMP10, upgrade the firmware on the Jukebox and reinstall WMP11.

OK, I’ll give that a go. Except that, having trawled around Creative’s support site (again) and found the supposedly correct firmware upgrade, I get this lovely little error message when trying to run it:
Brilliant! So I send off an email to Creative’s Support asking just which file I should be using, and sit back to wait for a reply.

Meanwhile, there’s a troubleshooting bit on Creative’s site which suggests another possible bodge fix if the device is seen in Device Manager (it is) but not recognised by WMP10 (it isn’t). I follow the instructions which get me to mess about with the registry! And it still does nada.

Last resort is the section of Microsoft’s Readme for WMP11 which says your player might have problems after rolling back to v10; uninstall the USB device in Device Mangler™, disconnect device and reconnect, forcing Windows to reinstall. Still five parts of you know what.

So now I’ve got the (un)shiny Media Player 10 back on my system but I’m not even back to square one as the Jukebox is still not being recognised.

Thank you Creative Labs, and Microsoft, for wasting at least three hours of my time. And I’m still not done. You need your collective heads banging together. I don’t care who’s problem it is, but it shouldn’t be mine.

As well as problems generating my own RSS feeds, I’ve been banging my head against the Adobe brick wall as far as consuming RSS is concerned.

Dreamweaver8 is my weapon of choice for development (so shoot me), and I tried a few months ago to get the BBC’s Rugby Union RSS feed added to my rugbypix.com page. Adobe have a tutorial which explains a lot. Trouble was, I did everything they said, and on my localhost test environment, I kept getting an error message:

MM_XSLTransform error:
“http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/rugby_union/rss.xml” is not a valid XML document.
The underlying connection was closed: Unable to connect to the remote server.

The claim that it wasn’t a valid XML document was obviously rubbish, since the BBC’s feed works in all the feed readers I’ve tried! Googling for the error didn’t produce anything sensible, so I shelved the project and put it on the back burner for a while.

Returning to it this afternoon, I tried uploading the XSL fragment (which does the data repeat for the feed) and the page in which the transformation is called, onto my live server. I got a different message – the MM_XSLTransform.cs file was missing – progress! I knew that on my previous attempts, the only transform I could find available was the MM_XSLTransform.vb file, which was the wrong server model for my site.

Another quick google for the C# transform got me to this page. And, voilà! a link to download the missing MM_XSLTransform.cs. Bung it in the includes/MM_XSLTransform/ folder and upload it to the site, and Bob’s your uncle… BBC Sport Rugby Union feed at rugbypix.com

Great, another niggling problem ticked off my list!