Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The Drupal

It is starting to look like another sea-change may be upon us, we who toil in the Web trenches of UNL. Drupal is coming.

We started with a need to communicate our spoken language after the fact. Kewl! A few glyphs later we had a nice little written language we were quite proud of. We used it to print catalogs and schedules and letters and memos until we were crushed by the weight of all of that paper.

Then came the Internet, and with it the Web. And the Web was built of HTML.

Well, that’s all fine, but nobody knew HTML. To those not schooled in its ways, HTML was hard. HTML was tricky, like English. Always do this, except when you do that. That kind of thing. And the most popular Web browsers of the day didn’t agree on much. So you could spend $20 on a book that would teach you HTML, but by following along with the examples in the book you end up with... something else. So we had to make our Web pages even trickier to get pages that looked the same, or nearly so, in either browser.

So into this world there came to be Dreamweaver. And Dreamweaver remembered all of the arcane rules and situations for you. Dreamweaver took a lot of the drudgery out of building Web pages. And with each passing iteration, Dreamweaver got better and better at what it did, adding features no one could have dreamed of in Version 1.

But along the way, Dreamweaver became difficult. “I just want to change Friday to Thursday. Why should that be so hard?” Why, indeed?

One of the features of Dreamweaver was Templating. And Templates made a lot of things easier still. Entire areas of the page were locked down so that you could not edit them; you could not break your page. We went for Templates in a Big Way here, building page Templates for all kinds of situations, and offering training for anyone who came near a Web editor. But in their own simple way, the Templates were hard, too.

The Web is built of HTML. But HTML was too hard. So we got Dreamweaver. But then Dreamweaver was too hard (and to get the most of it, you really had to learn at least some HTML, too). So then Templates happened. Templates weren’t really hard, but you still had to know some Dreamweaver in order to get the most out of them, too.

Now it looks like we may be on to something. Drupal is a content management system that can work quite well with all of the constituent parts of a Dreamweaver Template file, building a page that looks exactly like it should, built of entirely valid markup and without error. And built through an interface not unlike what we have come to know and love in every word processor since the middle 1980s.

Point. Click. Sign-in. Point. Click. In a framework no harder to learn than 1984’s MacWrite, you can build and publish a Web page. Make it available in the navigation menu. Have it include photos, video, even. And it all works, and it all works well and for the most part it all seems to stay out of your way.

There is a tiny team at work today on bringing Drupal to bear on the task of publishing here at UNL. If their work is successful, we may no longer need to know anything of Templates, or Dreamweaver, or HTML. Or cost-object numbers, because the Drupal package is free. How cool might that be? At least, until something goes wrong. Then someone, somewhere, is still going to have to know something of Templates and Dreamweaver and HTML.

The future is going to be a great place to live. Probably.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

The Funny

This is probably my least favorite part of the year. It’s cold. We have storms, sometimes storms that interfere with our carefully laid out plans. It’s rainy and windy when it isn’t snowing and icing. It’s dark when I come to work and it’s dark when I leave for home at night. You can’t stand to be near even people you love, because of the hacking coughs and the sneezing.

It’s hard to even get dressed in the morning. Do you layer-up for the 20°s of dawn or do you leave the heavy coat at home and just wear a jacket because the afternoon is supposed to be around 50°?

Everyone who isn’t worried about getting their income taxes done is worried about their department budget, or their upcoming performance reviews at work. We are in that long lull between days-off holidays and even in my own family, it seems nobody has a birthday worth celebrating until later on when it finally gets warmer. It’s an ugly time.

So these are maybe good days to remind ourselves that everything goes better with a chuckle. Even the funerals I have been to have been easier to take when someone told the story of the time....

So what can we do, to keep things lighter?

I have yet to find the HTML joke that’s actually funny. Some years ago I searched Google for “HTML Jokes” thinking I might find something I could use in my training. Public speaking manuals always say it’s good to start off with a joke to break the tension in the room, but I turned up... nothing. I was amazed by that. I mean, you would think someone would have published a page somewhere of “How many FrontPage developers does it take to change a light bulb?” jokes, or something similar. Don’t the Adobe developers make jokes about the Microsoft guys? Well, apparently not. I couldn’t find anything, anywhere. Probably the best we can do today is the photo of the Tower of Pisa, in Italy, with the old italic tags on either side of the actual Tower. See? Italic? Italy? Slanty? Okay, maybe not. I could actually show you the image except that Blogger has recently improved the way they handle images, which means you can no longer post anything and get it the way you want it, and you very often can't post anything at all. It probably wouldn't have helped the joke much, anyway.

Listen, people. Physicists tell molecular jokes at their conventions. Doctors and airline pilots have jokes. Even Accountants have their funnies. There isn’t anything funny about this Web business? I’m asking; I don’t any answers here, but it seems like there should be something we can all do to avoid opening our veins.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Photoshop

It seems that one of the hardest things anyone can do is to try to place themselves in time. We tend to remember new technology as better than it was, earlier than it was. Crack open a box of Photoshop today and you might think we have been editing images with a program like this for years. Well, we have. Sort of.

Sit down. Photoshop is twenty years old, today. February 10th, 2010 marks twenty years for the venerable image editor. It wasn’t the first. It wasn’t always the best. But over time it solved more problems than it created for more people and so it’s here today, while ImageReady and PhotoPaint and many others have receded into the middle distance, somewhere.

As a Web professional, it’s hard for me to imagine life without Photoshop. I have nearly always worked collaboratively with others—even in the early days. So I didn’t actually need to join the Photoshop parade until v3 came about. Originally, it was just scanner software, and I didn’t own a scanner. Store-bought versions of Photoshop were always expensive, and even un-bundled from scanner hardware I had a hard time justifying it with my humble needs. I was scrambling to learn the newness baked into HTML v3.2 and the differences between various Web browsers and was probably dabbling a little in JavaScript or Flash. I had friends I could lean on for scans and edits, so it took me a few years to get involved. I finally picked up my own copy in 1995, as Photoshop v3.0.

Photoshop v3 shipped in a big, heavy Cube of Value, the way all of the good software came back in those days. It was loaded with manuals I never understood and shipped on too many floppy disks. I don’t even remember, now, installing it on my Macintosh LC/II. It had to have taken an hour, though. Maybe more. The Big Thing back then was layers. Like the old Disney animators, we could now work on images built from several composite cells, stacking them as necessary and even building humble animations just as they did in the 1930s. Pretty cool stuff, for its day. There was a lot to learn, but I really only needed to know .gif and .jpg files and maybe how to edit-out lamp posts or clouds or people in the background.

When v4 shipped, I bought it in the new-fangled CD-ROM format. That whole cube of floppies now shipped on just a single CD. Man, the future was going to be sooo cool! It was a tremendous time-saver, or would have been if I had not upgraded. See, when my Mac crashed and I had to rebuild everything, I had to first go through the process of loading up all of those floppies, and only then was able to upgrade v3 to v4 specification. A call to a sympathetic Adobe rep got me a new-install key instead of an upgrade key for the same CD and I that I used from then on.

Over the years, Photoshop has suffered its share of feature bloat, but unlike, say, Microsoft Word, Photoshop features have almost always been at least somewhat relevant to me and to my work. As the 1990s drew to a close, v5 came with some terrific advances in type handling. It was now easier to place and edit words on an image. v5.5 came out soon after with its Save For Web feature. Now you could quickly fine-tune images in either popular Web format, and see what the results would be on-screen, before you committed to either.

I’m now in that comfortable saddle of the learning curve, where you know a base of umpteen features and options and only have to learn the new things, the differences, in each new version of Photoshop. I suspect it will always be a daunting project, learning the program. Adobe even recognized this some time ago, releasing a de-contented version for people who just need to crop snapshots, edit “Red Eye” and a few other details.

Like the end of a movie, Photoshop has always had credits. Adobe have always been proud of their developers. You got to spend quite a bit of time with the splash screen, while listening to your disk drive grinding, wondering who all those folks were. Some have come and gone, but the core is a single family. I don’t know of any other software like that. We owe the Knolls a lot.

Twenty years. Photoshop. It doesn’t seem possible, to me.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

The Jargon

Bill Gates has a blog, now. I don’t care that he calls it “GatesNotes”. It’s a blog.

We have talked about jargon before, here. But come on! What is the deal with Microsoft and their having to re-name everything?

You want to save a Web page so you can come back to it later? In Firefox, that’s called a Bookmark. In Safari, it’s known as a Bookmark. Google, in their new Chrome browser, refers to this technology as a Bookmark. Microsoft? Well, Microsoft still thinks these things are called Favorites.

I’m sorry, the IRS Web site is not one of my Favorites. It’s just a site that I may need again.

For years, the most popular computer language was BASIC. The Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC. B-A-S-I-C. It was included, free, with new PCs and new Apple-II’s and pretty much everything in the 1970s and 1980s. Microsoft again couldn’t leave well enough alone and developed versions of their own. Granted, these came with features and supported technologies the “real” language did not for a while. But mostly this was done to sell boxes. We saw this played out again and again, with the popular “C” language, the Java language and so on.

There is always going to be someone out there who can do it cheaper. Or someone who can add just a little small-f flash and sizzle, for only a few dollars more. But when you step away from the standards, you really are venturing out into uncharted territory. What good is it, really, to call your Web site “GatesNotes” if you then have to explain, every time that it really has nothing to do with Lotus’ awful e-mail/calendar/collaborative program? Or that it is a collection of His Gatesness’ random thoughts and photos from his many travels and adventures in the technology world for the last thirty years or so?

Wouldn’t it be so much easier to just say “Bill Gates now has a blog?”

This isn’t like the Twitter culture seeping into Facebook, with it’s @updates and #subjects as though everyone who is on Facebook will know, understand and appreciate these things. It’s misappropriation of the language for no real gain. Factor in the loss of productivity of a skillion people all explaining, “It’s like a blog...” and we’re probably in negative contributions to Society, aren’t we?

A couple of months ago, a guy came to me and asked that I put an image “inline” on his page. I did this and he wasn’t happy. He wanted it, you know, inline. He had the wrong word for a Web Guy. If he had used any other, I would have questioned him, asking just what it was he expected. This is worse. We have language to describe the idea of what Bill is doing--let’s use that. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn’t any better just because we call it a Visual Legume-and-Jelly-dot-net-sandwich-plus-plus.

Parents tell frustrated children to “Use your words”. That’s wrong. They should be saying “Use everyone’s words”.