Mark's Blog

Disruptive Tech, Again

2011-09-21T10:08:00.001-05:00

I had a couple of people come up to me after the page about disruptive technologies and offer up their own examples. Mine were more personal–I have a box of once-expensive cables to hook up peripherals I no longer own to computers I no longer own, either. But all you have to do is look around to see other examples.
The United States Postal Service is in trouble. This was one of Ben Franklin's ideas, for crying out loud, but its usefulness may be coming to an end. My mother loves to talk of a time when she could count on twice-a-day service. As she put it, you could invite someone to dinner that night in the morning mail, and receive word back that afternoon that they were planning on attending. Pretty cool, huh? And this cost a nickel or less.

But it was a time before e-mail. It was a time before "everyone" had a telephone, too. It was the only way we had to do these kinds of things, so it's the way things worked. And generations depended on a system like this. It was a part of their daily life that I suspect went largely unexamined and unquestioned. Of course we people handling paper and bringing it to our homes. How do you communicate with faraway others?

In hindsight, mistakes are always more easily seen. Geeze, maybe first class postage did get kind of out of hand there at the end. Maybe second class postage and third class postage should have been more spendy—that would have cut down on the tonnage of catalogs and sales flyers and saved a forest or two, perhaps. With less "Junk Mail" clogging the system, there would have been less wear-and-tear on all of the equipment, including the letter carriers.

Maybe having to go to a box down the street, instead of to your very own door makes "The Mail" a little less personal and a little less precious. It was a matter of architecture. The Mail was so dependable, so ordinary and so necessary that we put little slots in front doors to keep from having to open a door and retrieve the daily delivery. In an age of increasing precision and accuracy (thanks in large part to computers), can we accept something like approximate mail delivery? A nickel used to bring a handwritten note from your grandmother from Ohio all of the way to your very own front door. Now, fifty cents gets your electric bill only as close as your neighbor's driveway? Really? That's the best we can do?

Netflix put a serious hurt on the mom-and-pop video rental business, and on local cable-TV and satellite franchises. Now, Netflix itself is in danger of becoming redundant as various concerns struggle with the problems of squirting movies and TV shows into our homes. It may be that the electronic side of their business, the "Net" part, eventually takes over everything. Or it may be that someone else will get it right, or get it righter, or offer it cheaper. Maybe one day we'll all watch TV piecemeal via some kind of a super-service like Apple's iTunes. I love HBO, but don't care much for boxing, so if I can get all of HBO's movies and original programming for $9 instead of the $12 my cable company charges, I'll probably go that route.

Economics plays a role in these decisions, but ultimately it seems like the best technologies eventually make it, in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way. If your costs are lower this way than that, or if speeds are faster here than there or if your technology is massively cheaper than someone else's, then you're going to win. If not, then there doesn't seem to be much that you can do, except try to hang on.

In the 1980s we heard magical stories of wizards working on ways to get data from the same wire that gave us Skin-a-max. It was hugely expensive at the time, and not particularly fast by today's standards, but everyone saw it coming. Same with DSL on the phone lines. Where once we had two phone lines, so we could be online and still order pizza at the same time, now you can carry on all kinds of up- and downloading activity while, well, ordering pizza.

There are a lot of dial-up plans available, offering cheap internet access. But time is money, here, too. I know a lot of cheap people, but I don't know anyone with dial-up internet, any more.

Who is In Charge?

2011-09-07T13:23:00.001-05:00

Who's In Charge, Here?

It's not always clear. And the results of uncertainty are sometimes terrible.

Consider for a moment, the case of the Royal Mail Ship TITANIC. The pride of the White Star Line, the ocean liner famously met her fate on the flat-calm moonless morning of April 15th, 1912. Back then, trans-oceanic travel was a severely big deal. Rich clientele would book passage with favorite ships and also with favorite captains. White Star badgered Captain EJ Smith away from retirement for one last turn of the wheel, aboard the giant steamship's maiden voyage.

This was fine, as far as it went. But leading lights of White Star would also share the journey, including Joseph (J Bruce) Ismay, the chairman of the line. These gentlemen had different goals for the journey than perhaps those of Captain Smith.

Flash ahead to that last evening, the weather reports and ice reports and wouldn't it be grand to arrive early in New York and surprise all of the newspapers? It would be easier to sell tickets for a grand ship like TITANIC if it could be seen as opulent and fast, though speed was never a design consideration. A more prudent option may have been to throttle back while traversing the icy area, or to take a more southerly route. Or at least to post more lookouts, and make sure they had the proper optics for their duty.

The White Star brass knew Captain Smith was experienced. They knew he would not place their new ship at undue risk. But while Smith was the boss of the boat, his boss was also aboard. And his boss would like to get to New York ahead of expectation. Smith knew his authority was unchallenged—he was doing this last run as a favor and there was nothing White Star could do to harm him or his retirement. And Ismay knew Smith wouldn't run the ship any faster than was prudent, given prevailing conditions.

The upshot of the whole thing is the majestic ship pointed at a dark mass and unable to steer clear of it without brushing against it for half the length of the ship, popping rivets and bending panels allowing water in. They say that given the weight of the water needed and the time it took, the "Gash" the press talked about amounted to just twelve square feet, spread out over hundreds of feet of the ship's length. A pantry door left open to the sea 2' by 6' for a couple of hours and it was all over.

More recently, consider the case of young Jessica Dubroff. Jessica was only seven years old, in 1996, when she was attempting to become "the youngest person to cross the country in an airplane". This was in its entirety a media stunt. To be a student pilot, you have to be at least sixteen years old. Jessica was not. So Jessica was in no way the pilot, or even a pilot aboard the airplane. For the trip to be legal, though, someone would have to be a pilot, and for Jessica to have any legitimate place, that someone would have to be a certified flight instructor. Enter Joe Reid. For all government and insurance purposes, Reid would be pilot in command for the entire trip. Reid was fifty-two years old, a stockbroker, and the registered owner of the Cessna used for the "record". Her father would also accompany her on the trip.

There had been a few kids who rode along on flights like this over the years. Nobody remembers because they weren't really records, but still, the trend was younger and younger children. Jessica's trip was designed for media coverage. ABC even gave her a camera to record her journey. She was given several minutes of national TV news coverage, appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines and some huge percentage of the country was at least somewhat aware of the little girl that they thought was trying to set a record by flying across the country.

The left California with a big farewell. They traveled west-to-east and finished up the day on TV again. It was all very scripted. Look at how far she's come! What a challenge, yadda-yadda-yadda. A fifty-two year old pilot had flown from Half Moon Bay to Cheyenne, with a little girl at his side, her dad in the back, and somehow it was news.

The next morning the three of them went to the airport. Forecast weather had arrived—a big storm. Normally, pilots wait out weather like this, but it was highly localized over the neighborhood and they had a media schedule to adhere to. They had to be in Lincoln, Nebraska, in time for interviews and editing and getting the taped piece to NewYork for the evening news. So while airliners waited for the weather to clear, Reid took off, nearly a hundred pounds overweight.

They took off, and bobbled under, into and out of clouds as they swung around to the east, going slower and slower. Finally, the aircraft stalled and crashed in someone's front yard. But here again, who was in charge?

Technically, legally, it was Reid. But Reid was being paid as an instructor and/or a charter pilot. And he was being paid by the guy in the back seat, who may or may not have known how dangerous their situation really was. Dad might have thought, people drive through this kind of weather all the time, right? So, let's go. We've got reporters to meet. And if it gets too bad, we can always come back and wait it out. And he's thinking Reid is an experienced pilot and he wouldn't get us into anything he couldn't get us out of.

And Reid is thinking we have to make time, we have to make time. And it's not really-really bad. Let's go up and take a look—it's a small storm and we'll probably be out of it before we have the chance to make too many mistakes, anyway. And little Jessica likely had no idea at all the risks involved.

There are hundreds of sayings in Aviation. Little homilies and platitudes we use to remember important lessons. One of my favorite's says "Pilots who crash in bad weather are almost always buried on nice days". There is no wait that's too long, too inconvenient, when it comes to flying and weather.

Bah-Dee-Yah!

2011-09-02T10:09:00.000-05:00

The great wheel has turned, again. It is now September, the month of Back To School and the month of Football and the month of cooler and drier. It's the month of my birthday and the month when everyone is on the lookout for that first Christmas signage in stores. It's the month of long sleeved shirts and the first sweaters of the season. The soundtrack is the Indigo Girls' All That We Let In. It is the month in which we say "Bah-Dee-Yah!"

It's a good time to take a quick look back, and see if anything is gaining on you. We have a third of a year left. If there are things you were supposed to get done you have 120 days, the work of which is easier than if it were only ninety, or thirty.

Going back the other way, 240 days ago my world was much different. Since then, I have given up teaching HTML and Dreamweaver and Templates, pretty much. From here on out, it will be the UNL installation of Drupal, the UNLcms. I'll also pick up a few other technologies. We've recently put in a new "clicker" system for the classroom. And we are about to switch e-mail systems. There will probably be some opportunities for me, there.

Oh, there'll be much to do with the UNLcms. I've done a bunch of short videos, explaining how to log in, how to create a basic page, how to add images and so on. But I have also scheduled eighteen classes in thirteen weeks, for those who want the hands-on experience, or just want to spend a couple of hours with me. And I suspect that in short order I will be working on a more intermediate course, and an advanced session, too. And then maybe a Best Practices or a Quick Tips session. So there is lots to do.

But yeah, things have changed. Maybe now I don't want to be championing Dreamweaver and HTML and CSS books in my recommendations over there on the right. Maybe I can donate some of the technical books in my library, both here at work and at home.

I was lucky to be born into a service family. My mother and my father were both Marines. We got transferred around a lot, when I was a little guy. I saw the whole country on 25¢ gasoline. September wasn't always such a great time for me, as no matter where I went or what I did, I was always The New Guy. One year I went off to school in new blue jeans, and the kids wanted to know if I was poor. The next year, clear across the country, I started school in dressier pants and all of the kids wanted to know if I was rich! But I have lived on both coasts, in the middle and seen the rest and I can tell you this much: I love it, here. When I was a SysOp for GE and Microsoft and when I was a freelance writer, I could have lived anywhere I had a telephone and a daily FedEx route. I chose to live here. There is nothing in life so great as an eastern Nebraska autumn.

So now let's take a moment and cross off a few things from our ToDo lists. And sure, let's add back a couple of the things we've been meaning to do, but haven't quite gotten around to, yet.

I'm going to commit to passing the Math Placement Exam, and getting back into school, again. I need to get a downspout replaced, a driveway settled and start saving in earnest for a new roof. I'm going to learn all I can about iClickers and Microsoft 365. And continue to learn about Drupal and the UNLcms. I want to learn more about teaching. I would like to do a better job of that, too. And I hope to be able to take a break from it all now and again, and enjoy a nice drive in the country—maybe take my Sweetie to Nebraska City for the apples in a few weeks. Maybe go into Omaha for some comedy. Maybe this is finally the time I decide to do something serious about my weight.

Yesterday, I received a plaque from work, in appreciation of fifteen years of dedicated service. It does not seem like fifteen years, to me. Seven? Eight? Ten, maybe? Sure. But not fifteen. I'm looking forward to a few more turns of the wheel, ahead.

Disruptive Technologies

2011-08-08T13:18:00.000-05:00

We bought a home a year ago and are still moving in. Still wading through the boxes. But every box we open and deal with is its own little triumph Many recent boxes have me thinking about how disruptive technology is.

I've been in this game for years. My first wife managed a RadioShack store when the TRS80 was big news. I had a friend who built his own computer from HeathKit.

As a mainframe computer operator, I used to chat with kids in Europe over a precursor to the modern internet. We'd discuss politics, movies and Formula One autoracing. We sent e-mail to one another. We joined lists of like-minded fans of various movies, computers and technologies. I was on one for Macintosh programmers, for a while. Every day I'd get a digest of all the tips and troubles people had discovered, all over the world, learning to program Macs.

I wanted two things out of owning a computer: I wanted to hook up with people who were earning a living writing, and I wanted access to stock market information. I had no idea what I was looking for, in particular. I just knew if I could download a years' worth of trading data, it might be useful, somehow, in predicting what prices would be tomorrow. The GEnie Writers' RoundTable turned out to be far more valuable, leading to a freelance writing career that spanned almost fifteen years, and an online career that spanned more than a dozen.

I don't remember my first electronic mail. I'm pretty sure it was at HDR in Omaha, running a Control Data CYBER 170. I do remember thinking it was pretty cool, though. Press a button here and *Whoosh!* your thoughts spilled out on someone else's screen a mile or more away. Flash ahead thirty years and the post office is running all kinds of modeling simulations that all point to closing post offices, restricting mail delivery to only part of the week, or both.

I found an old tax return, last week. I'd paid seventeen dollars to have it prepared. Then, somewhere along the way, I started doing it myself on my Macintosh. I prepared and filed our taxes every year for years, until we bought this house. I have copies of all of those returns printed out and sleeping in file cabinets somewhere. I also have copies on floppy disks I cannot read. I don't have a computer that uses 3½″ floppies any more. My tax program, MacInTax, was sold to Intuit somewhere in the middle, there. I switched to Windows computers for a while, and TurboTax, then switched back to the H&R Block program because I was mad at Intuit by then. I can't read any of them, now. And I don't know anyone who could help with that, either.

I have fabulous boxes perfectly designed to store 3½″ floppies, and CD-ROMs, too. Interlocking, heavy-duty plastic drawers and really nice little wooden rolltop boxes. I mean I had a ton of these, back in the day, and apparently I thought this was how we would keep and store data forever, or something.

I have boxes of incredibly complex hardware. How do you hook up a Macintosh printer to a Windows computer, or vice-versa? I've got a pig-tail, somewhere, I'm sure, with the right plug at both ends. Some of these come with stories.

I have nothing to connect these to. I have no hardware that requires or even accepts SCSI, now. I have dozens of cables to hook up alternatives to travel Macs in the era before the Macintosh Portable shipped. I bought a Toshiba T-1000SE laptop and Microsoft Works, as close as I could get to the Macintosh experience. I had a terrific translation program I did a review on (and kept) that would translate between five or six MS-DOS and Windows programs and four or five Mac versions of word processors, spreadsheets and several other formats. Now it's just spaghetti. Colored wires in a box. Lots of colored wires in lots of boxes.

I remember thinking when I bought most of them that this would be the last thing I would need, for a while. As if I actually thought I was through spending technodollars.

Well, before the Next Big Thing arrives, I need to throw this (now) crap away and get the boxes out of my life. Right now, I need the room more than I need the stories and the wires.

Just Like in the Brochure…

2011-07-01T11:49:00.000-05:00

I am so proud of our crew of WebFolk at UNL. Today is our first day in the Big-10 and to celebrate, we shined-up our Template design again. This was much more of an evolutionary change than we have seen previously.

Up to now, changes have been incredibly minor after really radical updates. Most people don't even notice the difference between how the page looked a month ago and how it looks today, and then every three years or so it gets really updated.

The change this time was an update to our navigation.

Navigation on UNL Web pages has been a challenge. We started with just a column of links, for years. The design updated, but the page itself was just a column of links. Then we went with the "UNL Today" model, where things started changing every day, and sometimes several times per day. That was when people really started paying attention to the page, as you can imagine. And that was when the navigation changed to an horizontal orientation.

This served us well until politics and technology caught up with us. And then we rolled out an ingenious biplane horizontal navigation scheme that was a wonder to behold. It was Hell to try to teach, because it was hard to understand, but yeah, depending upon where your mouse had been in the upper deck, you saw other links in the area just below it. Worked in all browsers and was really an inspired bit of programming on someone's part. But, it was very hard to teach people how to deal with navigation that changed like that. And it wasn't a proud moment in accessibility, either. So when the template changed again, the navigation waterfalled down the left side of the page, in what became the first column. When navigation ended, we had a brief word from our sponsor—a rotating image of postage-stamp -sized news or local-interest pieces. And then came the related links.

This was much easier to teach, and much easier to use. Since the page itself scrolled vertically, you could literally have as many menu options as you wanted or needed, and, sadly, there were a few sites that went that route. But there were also sites that didn't have a great many links and those sites looked… odd.

You had, at the top, navigation in the first column and then text and images that you really wanted on the right. But if you had scrolled down a ways and run out of navigation, alerts and related links, you had this huge area of white space in that first column. Images that cried-out to be displayed full-width were constrained within those other columns that were open to editing by the developer. The navigation had to move, again.

We ended up with it on top of the page. Now, it was up and out of the way of all of the content, and the use of digital cameras and HD-video went up dramatically. But the way we'd implemented it was kind of clunky. For most people, navigation is a modal operation. That is, while they are "navigating" they aren't really concerned with anything else. So all of the links went into a giant shelf that popped-down when it was needed. How did we know it was needed? It detected that you had moved your mouse over any of the navigation links in the navigation block. Kewl. Except that we had quite a few pages where you needed to log in (above the nav) and then needed to work with data in forms on the page (below the nav). Crossing the navigation revealed… all of the linkage. We fine-tuned it a little by putting in a timer so that it didn't reveal all of the links unless you had actually stopped moving your mouse for a little more than half a second and that improved things, but it was still kind of clunky.

Last night, the school joined the Big-10 conference, and we celebrated by rolling out a New&Improved navigation. The links themselves were marked-up in countless pages, so we couldn't change that. All we could do was adjust the Cascading StyleSheet and the behavior it used on the navigation area. And that change rolled out last night.

And it went almost perfectly. I have received, as of lunch on the first day, exactly one telephone call about it, and no e-mails. It was fairly easy to walk the user through fixing the problems she was having, having mostly to do with page validation, after all. The whole thing was surprisingly pain-free.

And all it took was a little careful attention to the rules. Huh! Who'd a thunk it?

Rules Shouldn't Get In The Way

2011-06-27T14:55:00.002-05:00

Rules is rules. I appreciate that we would all be nowhere if there weren't any rules. But sometimes rules get in the way of doing meaningful work, and that's when someone, somewhere, should step up instead of just going along because "things have always been this way".

This week, I've been dealing with rules that don't make sense, and with people lying to me about them.

I have been a long time customer of Time-Warner Cable, here in Lincoln. I used to say that my cable-TV money was some of the best money I spent every month. For about the price of a single evening out, I got incredible news and entertainment pumped into my home, without problems. Then they went digital. Lincoln was their beta test site for the new software and we had troubles with the tuner, the connection, and several other issues. And then we moved.

At the new house, we had Time-Warner come in and set things up. They messed up initially, not delivering a HDTV box when said we were switching from old-TV to HDTV, but after that, things ran pretty well. Occasionally there would be a catch or a hiccup in a DVR'd selection, but for the most part things ran fine. We had two boxes, for upstairs and downstairs TVs, two DVRs, a couple of the tiers they insist they have to offer and a couple of remotes, plus high-speed internet. It all worked much better than in our old apartment and I thought we'd put all of the trouble behind us.

At a local street fair, Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln had a booth, and Paul was glad to meet us and ask us if we had service. I announced that we did, we had two boxes of digital HDTV, with DVR and a couple of tiers and HBO and Showtime, plus their RoadRunner internet. His cohort gave us a couple of free Movie On Demand coupons and Paul asked why we didn't have our telephone bundled, too? He went on to explain that for a limited time, he could tune us up with telephone, TV, DVR, remotes, tiers AND internet for about $120 a month. I was interested, because we'd been paying about $185, without the telephone. In fact, we'd just gotten a $175 telephone bill. He was now offering to bundle everything together for less than we paid for either the phone or the TVs and internet. Sweet! "Why wouldn't a guy go along with a deal like that?" I asked, rhetorically, setting up an appointment with Paul.

A couple of days later, he was at our door with a contract. Two years. Yadda-yadda-yadda, $120-something dollars, with taxes and fees and so on it was still comfortably less than we had been paying to either the phone company or to Time-Warner Cable, before. So we were in! He called in and got an appointment to have the guy come out on Wednesday, the 29th.

The next day, Kathie and I each took the afternoon of Wednesday the 29th off as vacation.

Saturday, we got a call from the Time-Warner cable installation technician. He said they could not switch service over until a lock on our account had been lifted. He said to call Windstream and ask them to un-lock our account. And this I did, this morning.

Now, the Time-Warner Cable guy did not say that we would not get our service installed on Wednesday. He did not say that, because of this problem we would have to go back into the queue for another appointment. He did not even say that we should call back to confirm the release of the lock on the old landline account. As far as I knew, everything was still on track for him to come out on Wednesday and install our new telephone service. But I decided to make sure, and so I called Time-Warner Cable in Lincoln to let them know the lock would indeed be lifted by the time of the scheduled appointment.

I was comforted, after negotiating their silly voicemail system, with the news that I had an appointment already scheduled, for Wednesday, the 29th. Was this the appointment I was calling about? Sure! I pressed various keys at various times and eventually got to talk to Sarah. Sarah was happy I was joining the ranks of the Time-Warner Cable telephone customers and happy that my lock had been lifted, but regretfully informed me that it would take another week to get my service switched over. This was just a minute and a half after the robot told me I had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday the 29th.

"Oh, no", I said. "We have an appointment for Wednesday. My wife and I have both taken off of work to be here for the guy". But Sarah would not be moved. No, July the 6th was the soonest they could get there. Why? "It takes a week to get the information from Windstream to the installers". But the information is already winding its way to the installers—in fact, one called me on Saturday and knew everything about me and the job coming up, including the lock on the Windstream account. "Right. Those locks take a week to get lifted" said Sarah. "I was promised it was to be lifted by 7pm tonight I told her.

"Oh. Uh. Hmmm. Did they give you a confirmation number?" It sounded like she had me, there. Uh, no, they did not.

We hung up and I called Windstream back. They gave me the confirmation again that the lock would be lifted by 7pm tonight. And they gave me a confirmation number: C73032. I called Time-Warner Cable in Lincoln back and, once again, was told by the robot that I had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday, the 29th in the afternoon. Was this the appointment I was calling about?" It sure was. Back with a live serviceperson again, I waited for Sarah to finish a call and proudly gave her my new confirmation number. "Okay, so let's set this up then for the afternoon of... July 6th?" "Uh, no. It's already scheduled for the afternoon of the 29th—I just heard about it again on the way back in here." She wouldn't let go of the whole "It takes seven days" thing. Finally I asked to speak with her supervisor. I was put on hold, listening to Muzak and drumming my fingers while, I was sure, she prepped her boss about the unreasonable *&^%$#@! who wanted his phone installed on Wednesday.

A short time later, a sleepy-voiced Tom picked up the phone and asked what the problem was. I explained. We'd had a lock put on our phone service back in the 1980s to prevent people from switching our long distance service. We'd met Paul at Celebrate Lincoln and he convinced us to bundle telephone service with our TV and internet. A technician called Saturday, saying he couldn't make the switch without the lock being lifted. He didn't say the whole deal was off. He didn't say we would have to reschedule. He said call Windstream and have the lock lifted and this we did. I said that I had an appointment for Wednesday afternoon and had already taken vacation to be there for the guy. He said, "Yeah, that's going to take seven days". I asked why? He said they had to confirm the lock was gone and it took Windstream about a week to do those. I told him the Windstream rep told me it would be done by 7pm. Uh, it takes us a while to get the paperwork to the installers, too. The installers already have the paperwork.

Well, we would need a new appointment. Now he just said "That's just the way things are". Well, what happens to my old appointment? Who is going to get their phone on Wednesday the 29th, now that we're not? He didn't know. Why can't we get our old appointment back? If it's still in the system, then that time can't have been free'd up. Who better to lay claim to a newly-free'd appointment time than the people who were supposed to have it to begin with?

Tom sighed, heavily (always appreciated, from a customer service standpoint). He then told me, and this is the kicker: He told me that the earliest time he could get us was now Thursday, the 30th. He wanted me to take another half-day off, the very next day after our already-scheduled appointment, to have the agreed-upon work done. Suddenly, magically, wonderfully, no more seven-day waiting period. He was moving us straight to the head of the line, almost. Because he and I both knew that nobody was in our old appointment time, yet.

I pointed out that I had never been to Macy's. Never even to their Web site. But I could go online and order a freezer and it would be at my door by 10am the next morning and we don't even have a Macy's in town. It being, after all, 2011. He said yeah, but this was different. I said I wasn't after anything other than the deal I'd signed-up for.

I was so pissed-off at Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln that I told him to forget the whole damned thing. The longer I thought about this, the more convinced I was that what we really needed was to drop everything and sign up for the Quit Cable deal offered through Windstream. If we got fewer channels, so be it. We're fat and we spend too much time watching TV, anyway.

Twenty-five or thirty years of goodwill, shot to Hell. All because I wanted to confirm the work would be done on Wednesday, even though nobody had asked me to do that. And when he finally caved, he only caved as far as getting it all done the day after our appointment. It turns out it doesn't take seven days, after all.

I hate stupid rules. I hate being lied to. And I really don't care much for Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln, either. I have Wednesday the 29th off. If a guy does not come and switch our telephone service over, as agreed upon, I'll let our city councilman, Jonathan Cook, know about one more citizen who wants to see some competition for our local Cable-TV dollar. And I hope I have the strength to start quitting Time-Warner Cable.

It's the end of the World

2011-05-11T10:51:00.001-05:00

…as we know it.

First, the Earth cooled. Then the dinosaurs came. Then Man. And then Gutenberg and then newspapers, advertising and, finally the Web.

And we built Web pages. Each page featured a navigation area, a part of the page devoted to getting us to other pages. And headers and footers. And content, even with images. And it was pretty good.

And browsers got better. And access got cheaper. And standards got more rigid and more and more people got online to check this out. Fortunes were made. Not by me, or anybody you know, but fortunes were made. And lost.

And then there were internet appliances all over. You could call up Web pages on your cell phone, on a tablet, from your game system or your car. That InterWeb thing was well and truly taking over. And responding to all of these changes, the developers of Dreamweaver did their best to keep up. Bugs were fixed. Features were added, massaged and deleted over the years.

Templating was added. Code hints. Invalid markup was highlighted. There were improvements to both the Design View and the Code View. Various workspace layouts were developed, and you could even make your own. Dreamweaver became, not just a great way to build Web pages, but Web sites as site management features were added. But still, the focus was on the pages and sites—not the content.

It's a subtle but important difference. People don't buy nails because they own hammers. They buy nails because they have two things they want to be joined together. Last year, Lowe's sold a skillion drill bits. Not because people wanted drill bits, but because they wanted holes. And that's how we ended up looking at a new CMS—a Content Management System.

We are past the point where it should take an army of skilled technicians to post a simple memo online. We shouldn't have to depend upon a few high priests of technology to get material uploaded. The democratization of the Web is nigh. We can use the technology to make itself easier. That leads us to the UNLcms.

Using Drupal, and the Dreamweaver Template model, we can create pages at the push of a button. We can carve up the content area with columns. We can insert images and make links and do a great job of building compliant pages without spending an inordinate amount of time and money (the same thing, often) learning an interfacing program. We needed the program because HTML and CSS was hard. But then the program became hard, too. Templates helped, but there's never been anything really easy about any of this.

Now we can build pages with a Web browser. We're not even tied to a single computer. We can add administrative users to cover vacations and delete them when they return. Right now, today, it doesn't do as much as Dreamweaver and the Templates but it's catching up, fast. I have seen it improve every week for more than a year, now. I look at it sort of like a parent watching a baby learn to roll over, and then sit up, and thinking of a day when the kid will be riding a bike and going off to school and choosing a career and so on. I don't really see the program as it is now—I see what it is becoming, what's possible.

And I love what I see, now.

There's a scene in the movie Other People's Money where Danny deVito talks about buggy whips, and how technology has made entire industries redundant. We don't teach people how to shoe horses, any more. We don't teach folks how to operate slide rules as much as we did just a generation ago. That's what we're up against, here.

I can talk about the differences between Dreamweaver and the UNLcms for a couple of hours. Document-centric modeling, updating Web pages from cell phones, not just Macintosh and Windows PCs. But the biggest difference I see between Dreamweaver and the UNLcms is that the UNLcms has a future.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

2011-05-04T10:05:00.002-05:00

For the last few years, I've tried to teach myself to say "This used to be my dad's birthday". I'm done with that, now. This is the day my dad was born, regardless of whether or not he's still here. Dad was a countdown baby, "Five... Four... Three... Two..." (5/4/1932). He would have been seventy-nine years old, today.

I thought I was a pretty normal kid, growing up. Dad would, from time to time, try to teach me some goofy lesson about patriotism, about getting involved in my community, about civic responsibility. I was much more interested in trying to learn the opening solo of "Reelin' In The Years" and how to convince girls to go with me out to the airport. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good to vote. It's also good to drive a new Camaro. Yesterday was Election Day here in Lincoln. Dad would have been proud of me, for voting.

The way I have dealt with the grief over dad's death is probably a measure of how important he was to me in life. I had no idea. Everyone else who lost a father seemed to be coping so much better so much quicker. I am still about nineteen seconds away from crying—sobbing—if I'm not careful. Friends I grew up with were back at work within a few days, continuing their educations, their careers, their families, their plans. I seemed to hit a wall there, for a long time.

I still have moments. The phone will ring and, for no reason at all, I find myself thinking, "Oh, that'll be Dad! I have to tell him about…". I find myself at Sears, looking at a long row of lawn mowers and thinking to myself, "What in Hell do I know about lawn mowers? I should talk to dad about…". I drive a 1995 Honda with 160,000 miles on it, and sleep under a roof with twenty years on it. How do I decide which one to replace, first? And how do I pay for it? And what do I do about the other one? Dad would know.

House advice, career advice, car advice, fashion advice. How to deal with family and friends and church obligations. How to get a dog. When I was twelve or fifteen, I didn't want any advice. Now, I would give anything to have him lecture me for just an hour.

When I was very small, Dad was super-human. He was a young, fit, Marine. He drove a sports car and had a wife and a dog and a house and… me. As I got older, he became more real. There was a time Dad was never wrong about anything. There was a time when he knew more about everything than I did. But gradually, he became less a Super man and more just a regular guy. We developed different interests. He loved to go fishing. I loved learning the guitar. I liked The Association and The Monkees, he liked Johnny Cash and Floyd Cramer. I found myself depending upon him less and less, as is the natural order of these things.

I feel cheated, somehow. It's funny. I've said this before, but I was much better prepared to lose him when he went to VietNam. Twice. When he came back, he became just "Dad" and on some level it's like I expected he would be with me forever. In VietNam, dad had occasion to ride around in helicopters and transport planes that were used to apply Agent Orange, to defoliate the jungle and make trails and personnel easier to find. They would go out on a spraying mission and come back, take the tanks and booms off of the aircraft, and then Dad would get in and fly to some other base with a bunch of mail, groceries and other supplies. They'd put all of that stuff back on and go back out spraying again and then send one of them back out to get him. He developed a lung condition. He died at seventy-three. He would probably be dead by now, if it weren't for that. But it's still hard. Somehow, I don't see it as an extra thirty-five years. I see it as a lost four, or five, or seven.

Dad would tell me it's fine to honor fallen heroes, but that it's up to us to make our own lives. Dad would tell me to get my nose back inside a Drupal book, because a whole lot of people are going to be depending upon me to know this stuff, soon. Dad would, as usual, be right. So I'm going to spend the rest of this day reading-up on Drupal, in his honor.

Happy birthday, Dad.

A Death in the Family

2011-04-20T09:12:00.003-05:00

The tide may be going out on the Desktop Computer, folks. They are bringing back the old Commodore 64. When people start longing for the nostalgia of a bygone era with slow computers, bad graphics and lousy sound, you have to make a pretty compelling case to get people to turn loose of $1500 or so for a new state-of-the-art appliance that is becoming less and less a part of everyone's life. And nobody, not even Apple, seems to be able to do that, now.

I blame the cell phone industry. Whoever it was that first included a little calculator in their cell phone sent us down this path and today we are awash in mobile alternatives to the big, clunky, desktop computer. If a cell phone can do more than just connect you to the pizza delivery guy, if you can do math on it, then why hand over a bag of cash for a desktop computer to do those things? So the value of a desktop computer is decremented by whatever value you assign to the little calculator app. Add in calendaring, Web browsing and Angry Birds, and why would anyone want a desktop computer? Why, indeed.

Flash ahead a few years and desktop computers haven't changed, much. Oh, they're faster. They're always faster. And they have a little more memory than the last one you bought, sure. But when you're at your word processor, trying to decide whether to use "Start" or "Initiate" you aren't taxing your processor. You could make that decision comfortably with an old '286 or a MacPlus. Screens are nicer, bigger and with richer colors, but the screen on my six year old iMac is big, with nice color, too. And it still boots up, every day.

I can browse the Web (to some extent), on my iPhone. I can browse the Web on my iPad, too. I can get my e-mail on either machine. I can do my banking with either one, too. In fact, as far as day-to-day activity goes, I can do everything I would ever want, except take a day off, with my mobile devices (The software vendor behind the accounting for vacation and sick leave here does not work with the best standards-compliant software.).

Today's Apple iPhone, iPad and their contemporaries from other manufacturers can be loaded up with a month's worth of music, video, books, magazines, movies, television programming and podcasts. You can get the weather, including radar imaging for your location, which of course the hardware already knows about, probably. Press a button and find the nearest shoe store, or coffee house. Check in with friends on Facebook. With content management systems like Drupal, you can even work on Web pages with severely clever features, using only a Web browser.

The value proposition is weakening on the desktop. I'll need one to run my income taxes, next year. It is nice to see photographs in big, wide-screen detail and I do enjoy an hour or two of Civilization now and again. But I could see the "Home computer" becoming little more than a wireless router in many homes, practically unseen. A Mac Mini, up in some closet, somewhere, constantly monitoring the temperature, turning off unused household lights, keeping track of how old the milk is in the fridge, and watching out for and snagging old episodes of TV shows to record for later viewing.

The guy that built that first wheel really started something. We can't get enough Wheels. The guy that built the first telegraph started something, too, but now even Western Union is just a money-transfer store. Fewer and fewer homes have land-line telephones these days—there's a machine that came and went in about a century and a half. Could it be that the desktop PCs time was only half a century or so?

We'll see.

Spring Cleaning

2011-04-13T09:13:00.002-05:00

It's fashionable to engage in the restoration of our various environments at home, at work and even in our cars, this time of year. We are encouraged to clean this and shine that and throw those away. Massive benefits accrue to those who do, including the Finding Of Lost Stuff and the Efficiencies of Not Searching for Things. People report fewer headaches, reduced lethargy and even lottery winnings after this cleaning is done.

Nobody talks about our computers.

If you have had your computer for more than a month, it is probably full of junk. If you have visited more than a dozen Web sites or ever upgraded software, your computer is almost certainly a museum of abandoned files.

This is a good time to go through your computer and see what can be tossed. Every computer manufacturer includes stuff you never use and never will and many publishers do, too.

If you are running NumberCruncher v5 you can be reasonably certain throwing away updaters for NumberCruncher v3.2 and v4 won't hurt you or your computer. It's popular now to send e-mails with links to little stubs of software that then go and get the real item, and start things working. I tend to keep these e-mails, but throw away the little stubs, which are easy for me to find because I always download everything to my Desktop folder. If you're unsure, it is probably a better idea to leave a file where it is and lose the small amount of space it is claiming, than to delete the file and discover it really was necessary, somehow.

I have a Macintosh, and a lot of this stuff is just simpler and easier on a Mac than on other computers, but the general theory is the same. If you install, say, Office, and you know you won't ever be using some component of it, you can reclaim a lot of disk space and make finding things in the future much easier if you can uninstall it or delete it. I don't have much need for Microsoft Messenger, for example. I don't remember being asked about it during installation, but it landed in my Applications folder, briefly. I am pretty much an AIM guy, and rely less and less on that.

Those little stubs of programs? They often mount virtual disk resources used to update or upgrade software. Once you have updated everything, you can un-mount the disk and throw it away. There are any number of README.txt or LICENSE.txt files on a typical hard drive. Trust me. Nobody from Adobe is ever going to knock on your door and ask to see your computer. You can nuke those, too.

As a Web guy, I am constantly building low-feature pages to test this or that concept. If I'm building a page with complicated navigation, for instance, it can be frustrating and distracting to build the navigation in a "real" page with content and so on. I will very often create a new, blank page, save it as bogus.html or something like that, then start hammering away on the nav. When I get the navigation working, I just copy or clip it out of the "bogus" page and paste it into a real page. That leaves me with, over the course of a year, potentially dozens of Web pages named bogus.html, in all of the directories I work in. These take up time and space—and if you work in a Dreamweaver environment, they take up space at least twice, locally on your own computer and remotely, on the Web server.

I have also abandoned whole programs. You know, at one time I thought maybe I would take the time to sit down and learn DigitSlinger. But it turns out I'm more of a NumberCruncher guy, working in a definite NumberCruncher environment. The folks who report to me and the folks I report to are all NumberCruncher users. Why do I want to spend the time and effort to learn new commands and keyboard shortcuts and various Save As… methods to get meaningful reports that everyone can use? It's easier to just join the crowd and put those hours (and dollars) to better use.

So, throw open the actual windows, and take a long, deep breath of pollen, and let's clean up our computers, this week. But first: Remember to make a complete backup of everything, Just In Case.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

2011-03-29T14:49:00.000-05:00

And sometimes, you are better for it.

Do you remember "Datsun" cars? They are called "Nissan" now, but in the early days they were not convinced they were going to be successful. In fact, there is evidence to support the theory that the whole USA beachhead was put in place to bring shame and disgrace to a Nissan executive, Yutaka Katayama, to force him out of the company.

Let's put a minimal framework in place. Let's get the bare minimum of service and support. And let's call the whole operation "Datsun" so when we get our act together and go back to the American market in a few years, nobody will have a bad taste in their mouth over the name of the company. The idea was that in several years they would bring all new models, and new executives and a new will to succeed to the market. Few would associate Datsun with Nissan and 'Mister K' would have long since resigned, in disgrace.

Well, it didn't turn out that way. Datsun hit the USA at a time when people were ready for such cars. Our family had one and loved it—a little 510 sedan. Mom liked it because she could see every corner from the driver's seat, it handled well, got terrific gas mileage and didn't break down.

Mister K put in an order for little trucks. Nissan balked, but eventually sent some over. Mister K chided the factory and told them that he wanted the next batch to have carpeting, radios and other sedan-like "luxury" features. The factory wrote back and told Mister K he was nuts. The people in southern California were misusing their little trucks! These were working vehicles, not family transport! But Mister K had launched the little truck craze and Nissan had to swallow hard and work harder to get back out in front of it all, again. One by one, Mister K went from success to success and by the late 1970s, the cars started to be badged "Datsun by Nissan" and a short while later, the Datsun name, with all of its goodwill, was gone.

Sometimes things don't work out the way we have them planned. And that's not always bad. Sometimes it's terrific. Mister K retired a hero to Nissan and to thousands of American fans.

I had a situation like this, this last. Up until today, my training consisted of booking a classroom and making a dozen or so seats available. Folks juggle their schedules so they have a Tuesday morning free, or a late Wednesday afternoon, or whatever it works out to be, and they travel from wherever they work on campus to the classroom. We wait patiently for a few minutes for any last-minute stragglers who might be struggling with parking or walking all of the way to the West coast of UNL. And then we begin a face-to-face, hands-on training that walks people through the subject. There are opportunities to ask (a few) questions. For the most part, we spend the next two hours listening to me rattle on about whatever the subject is, then waiting for one or two of the students to complete an exercise before moving on.

I thought maybe, in the twenty-first century, there might be a better way to learn this. So I set about the task of building a bunch of videos. These each explained how to do one or two things, on more of a "molecular" level. I literally made videos explaining how to log into the system, and how to log out. There's one on how to edit the page footer. Click on the link and How To Edit The Footer is all you learn. The whole thing takes just a moment or two.

So, from the comfort and convenience of your own office or cubicle, you could learn only as much as you cared. As much as you had time for. As much as you wanted to learn, today. You could come back tomorrow and watch the same videos, or pick new ones. So there would be no waiting for two weeks until training you wanted was offered again. There would be no need to clear the decks of any other engagements and meetings on that day, so you would be able to commit a couple of hours or more to getting over here and going through it all.

I thought I would get the Nobel Training Prize for coming up with that. And I actually have gotten good feedback from it, and suggestions for more little movies. But there are a lot of people who need to actually sit and do something, to learn it. Some people can read something and they know it. Others can hear something and they absorb it best that way. Others have to actually do it, for something to sink in.

I had made no provision for those folks. I'm working on stand-up training, now. Things don't always work out the way we would like for them to. But sometimes, the result is even better than we had originally imagined.

Visit Your Own Site

2011-02-23T08:35:00.001-06:00

When was the last time you visited your own Web site?

I don't mean when was the last time you updated a page, checked it over to make sure it validated and everything was spelled correctly. I mean when was the last time you came to your Web presence the way one of your own users might—especially a new user?

It's a good practice, and it probably should be done several times a year, but at least once per year would be an improvement for many of us. Do you have pages up that explain how your organization is planning to overcome any Y2K issues? Do you have directories filled with How To Use The Exciting New 2003 Version of the E-Mail Software? There is an awful lot of junk, online.

Cleaning it out will help you in several ways. First, it will make maintaining the rest of your site easier, because you won't have to wade through all of the distractions to find things you really want. Secondly, neither will your users. Looking things over and deleting the old stuff makes moving and updating your site structure much easier and that could be real important, real fast, if your site is one that is moving to the new UNL CMS project. Why convert a bunch of pages that are outdated and in the way, anyway?

Some of this is born of inertia. Some of it is just bad habit. In the Olden Days, I would often build a new, simple page with only the element I was working on present. That is, if I was trying to hammer out a new navigation scheme, or tweaking a table of data, I would build a Web page that contained only the new navigation, or only the new table. It was easier to me, it was less distracting. I would grind away at whatever it was and when things were working I would clip out just the relevant markup and paste it into the real page, and move on. Often as not, I would leave that stub, that experimental page, up on the server where it was unnoticed, unlinked and unloved. When I first stumbled across this method, I would name the page new -whatever the real page was. So, index.html became newindex.html. But some time later, I would find it really difficult to delete some of these stubby pages. What if I had linked to one of them, somewhere? About that time, I started naming these experimental pages bogus.html or trashthis.html. But even then, not all of them got deleted, I'm sure.

Web pages are simple text files, of course. Even the biggest are pretty small in the context of modern computing. But images are another thing. I stumbled upon a directory the other day that held about seven different versions of essentially the same image. One was 800x600 pixels. The next was slightly smaller, the next was the same smaller size, but saved at a lower quality, so the colors weren't as vibrant and the file size was much smaller. The rest were all variations on that theme—suck out some more color and trim the edges. This was really wasteful because image files (and movies) can be huge. Some folks do a better job at all of this than others, of course. But I'd bet that the average Web site may hold as much as 20% junk.

Take a look at your Web site. Look in front and behind the curtain. That is, tour your site with a Web browser and make note of links that are broken, links to pages announcing "News" that is now really History. Look for ways you can clean up the content on the page, as well. And then take a look at the file structure of your site. Look for unlinked files, duplicate files (especially images) and Things You Can Do WithOut.

When the time comes to update your site in any meaningful way, you'll be glad to have to do the work on fewer pages and files.

Priorities

2011-02-16T10:10:00.001-06:00

They tell you, "If your house needs painting, and it's on fire, put the fire out, first". And this is supposed to teach you how to prioritize things. Folks nod and stroke their chins and move on as if they've just learned something.

I have a problem with this kind of thing. I always have. In Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon there is a story of a kid who saved his money all year and gave it to a friend who would travel to far-off lands and buy jewels. The guy brought back a few chips of colored glass and the kid lost his money. A few pages later, another guy is stuck outside the walls of the city at night, when a shepherd approaches him and makes a fast deal to sell his flock, which nobody can see because it's so dark. It sounds like a lot of sheep, there are sheep-noises coming from over here and over there and the shepherd seems like a nice enough guy and so the kid makes the deal. When the sun rises, he marches the herd into the city and sells the whole lot at a tremendous profit. I have never been able to figure out what we're supposed to learn from this. The first deal could easily have gone well and the second could easily have yielded five or ten widely spaced, noisy sheep.

At home, we're fresh back from the Home Show, with hundreds of vendors vying for our tiny fistfuls of dollars. What to do? We just bought the damned house last summer, and now we're thinking of changing things? Here's something: It's wearing it's third roof, and this one is nearing the end of its life. The water heater is giving up before the second shower is done. But we wish the bathroom was a little more up to date. We wish it had a dishwasher. We wish the driveway and the patio didn't drain into the basement. We wish the hardwood floors were a little fresher. There are unpleasantries in the yard. I am scared to death I will write a check to have something done, then immediately discover we now need a new water heater, or that new roof. Or something else we weren't even really aware of. It happens.

Prioritizing work is a gift. There are some things you just can't quantify. It's the old "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts" deal working again. Lately, I've been working on creating little videos, tiny little movies showing how to do simple little molecular tasks. Instead of coming to a two-hour session with me going over forty-'leven things the new software can do, you can now download as much or as little help as you need. There's a movie showing how to log into the system. If you have questions about how to log in, they are answered here. Nothing else is, but you will definitely learn how to log in. There's a How To Log Off video, too.

It's been difficult at times, because the system I'm teaching is growing and evolving, at the same time. So it's like trying to a hit a moving target. Sometimes I have found myself half way through an issue, only to find that the developers are tuning-up that part of the machine and things won't work Friday the way they did when I made the movie on Tuesday. At other times, I've stumbled upon things that don't quite work as advertised, only to be met with "Oh yeah, that doesn't work, yet" from the crew. Maybe it'll be done in a week, maybe it'll take a month. Maybe it won't be available until Version 2.00. There is definitely an air of plate-spinning at work, here.

But I am confident that this way is going to be a better tool. Sure, it's hard to schedule a training session that runs two hours and is only offered two or three times per month. And what do you do until that day and time rolls around? But everyone has two or three minutes in their day they could use to learn how to build tables in their pages. And why should they have to wade through twenty minutes of working with images, when all they really want to learn is how to build tables?

Some day this summer I'll look back on all of this and laugh.

Or, cry.

Technology Often... Works.

2011-02-09T15:29:00.000-06:00

Technology is great, except when it stops working.

I've had some experience with this, recently. It's been an interesting exercise in deductive reasoning, and deduct-from-your-checking-account spending.

At work, I connect to the Internet via a network. The speeds are unbelievable, usually. Since I moved to this office last summer, I have had no problems with my MacBook Pro, hooked up to an Apple LED Cinema Display, so it mostly acts as a desktop computer. But I can un-hook a couple of cables and pack it off to meetings quickly and easily. While I'm there, I depend upon Apple's AirPort WiFi to connect to the UNL WiFi network. And again, since I got this machine I have never had any trouble doing so.

Last week, something changed. My hardwired Ethernet wasn't working at all. Now, you might think, as I did, that, absent any wired networking, the WiFi would take over and I'd still be "online" but at a slightly lower speed. But that wasn't the case. When I unplug everything and take the machine to a meeting, WiFi works. But as long as it was cabled-up, it thought the wire ought to take care of things.

I did, too.

It took at least six people and six days to fix this problem. Along the way I was comforted, some, by the knowledge that it wasn't just me that was having the problem. Also, along the way, I discovered a bunch of things I was supposed to have done last summer never got quite finished. I had moved the money-accounting paperwork from my old cubicle to my new office. But I had not moved the network-accounting paperwork over. There were other issues, too.

At home, we awoke Tuesday morning to no Internet. Ours comes through our cable-TV folks, and the machinery was all downstairs. So, I went downstairs and turned everything off, then turned it all back on, one unit at a time... First the cable modem... then the AirPort WiFi hub, then I came back upstairs and started the iMac. This is usually all we've needed to do, but no matter how many times I did it, nothing ever seemed to improve. The telephone guy said he could "see" my cable modem and he could see that it could see the AirPort machinery.

Some weeks back, I'd purchased an Apple TimeCapsule backup machine and it featured Apple's AirPort wireless, too. I bought it so I could literally plug it in anywhere, but if you do the math, it can function as a base station, too. So, over the weekend, I plugged it in (upstairs, this time) and tuned it up to act like WiFi as well as backup. That solved my problem and so now I have Internet at home and at work, just like a month ago.

But it was an awkward week or so, there. It amazes me, how quickly new technology becomes necessary, and how difficult it is, to back down to previous technology. What was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, is barely workable, today. I have no idea where I might even buy a modem, today, if it came to that. I'm glad it didn't.

I saw a news story this week saying there is one, one new car available today as a 2011 model, that comes with a Cassette interface in the radio. Kind of ironically, at least it seems to me, it's a new Lexus. The times they are a changin', huh? One day there will be an even better/cheaper/faster way to network our machinery. And one day we will celebrate, with a sense of nostalgia, the last album to be released on CD.

From the Time Marches On desk: Today is my mother's birthday. This morning, my sister Amy stood, with her store-bought foot. What a present for mom, but mom couldn't quite enjoy it because she was in the emergency room. They've put her in a room at least for overnight, and we'll know more tomorrow, probably. But the wheel keeps turning.

Not-So New Year

2011-01-31T14:33:00.000-06:00

So, how's that whole New Year thing working out for you?

Mine hasn't been so good.

I'm preparing a series of training videos that explain how to use the new Content Management System we are going to be rolling out, soon. I've got a couple dozen done so far, showing how to log in and how to log out. How to create a page and how to delete one. How to edit your page navigation and the various page elements like footers and related links and so on.

The thing is, in order to explain how any of this works, I have to know, myself. So, I'm busy learning the In's and Out's of this new beast, while at the same time keeping an eye on how to distill some of this new-found knowledge in two- and three-minute chunks.

I haven't done anything like this, before. The closest was my radio career, when, after my air shift was done I had to report to Production, and spend however much time was needed to create any new commercials that needed to be done. But even then, I never had to synchronize my audio with anyone's video, before. Play a few records, put them away, walk down the hall and speak glowingly for thirty seconds exactly about Johnson Lawn and Garden. Boom-boom... Boom!

This has been a whole lot of fun, and I think it will eventually be a really good way to pick up how this all works. Instead of having to juggle your schedule to find two hours to come and listen to me talk about it, you can get started right away, catching the how to log on/how to log off series and working your way from there. Later on, if you can't remember how to edit page footers, you don't need to schedule another two-hour session and wait for a week or two... you can just revisit the little movie about page footers and get on with things. Over time, I expect our initial two dozen or thirty movies to expand into three-dozen, or four-dozen or even more. Each one devoted to just a single, molecular aspect of how the greater system works.

I'm learning all kinds of things, this semester. I'm learning a lot about home ownership. This morning, I took the garbage out. Three steps from the garage, I was just hanging on, until the giant receptacle made it down hill to the sidewalk. I wrestled it over into the grassy/snowy area between the curb and the sidewalk and turned around. Two steps later, I was doing one of those cartoon motions where I'm okay from the belt up, but from there down everything is just a blur. I fell onto (mostly) my left hand and wrist. I spent a few minutes there on the ice, in front of maybe thirty cars, trucks and minivans and at least one StarTran bus, when an older gentleman approached on the sidewalk coming from the west.

He had seen me fall and immediately turned north on 38th Street and parked, got out and walked back to make sure I was alright! By the time he got to my house, I was up in a newborn-colt sort of way and making my way up the yard, walking on the traction-rich front lawn. He escorted me back up to the little sidewalk connecting the driveway to the front door. There, he turned, bade me farewell and encouraged me to be more careful.

This old man stopped on his way to work to help me get up and make sure I wasn't hurt. What a sweetheart, right?

I spent about an hour worrying if I'd ever play guitar again, the left hand being rather important in that endeavor, and wondering I'd broken anything. The whole thing took about as long and felt about as bad as when I'd broken my foot, on Hallowe'en. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Hmm... that's going to be—Boom! There I am, flat on the ground, and in front of traffic again, too.

At work, I've spent most of the last week restarting my computer. I can maintain a network connection for only between three and twenty minutes. It's like a giant arm goes across the entire network every, say, twenty minutes, pulling errant networkers offline. If I happen to come on right after it passes, I can get fifteen or twenty minutes of work done, and saved and uploaded. If not, well, so far today alone I have restarted sixteen times, and it's only 2:30pm.

How's your New Year, so far?

The Naming

2011-01-12T16:44:00.003-06:00

Okay, something has to be done about product names in this country. It's getting out of hand. Maybe toward the end here we'll tie this into Web pages, somehow, but even if not, this is important.

When I was a kid, names meant something. You could focus your attention on a Mustang or a Nova and everyone knew what you meant. But we have so many names today that don't mean anything, or mean the wrong things, or mean something different than what's actually going on. It's stupid, it's wasteful and it has to be hurting our general productivity in some way.

Consider the iMac. The iMac is a model of Macintosh. And the Macintosh is a line of computers from Apple. But here's the thing, it's been more than twenty years since Apple offered a computer other than the Macintosh. In the 1980s, if you told someone you were buying "an Apple computer" they didn't know if you were getting an Apple II, a Lisa or a Macintosh. Apple was GM. Apple II and Lisa were Oldsmobile and Pontiac. Macintosh was Chevrolet. Within the Macintosh line there were several models. Macintosh II, Mac SE/30, Macintosh LC/II, etc., roughly corresponding to Camaro, Impala and Malibu, let's say. But today, every computer Apple builds is a Macintosh. So is it helpful, or necessary, to have to indicate Apple Macintosh iMac? Apple themselves noticed less and less of their income comes from Macintosh, in an era of telephones and iTunes and so on. They thought it over and dropped "Computer" from their name. Apple Computer is now just "Apple". It's a start.

A lot of model designations don't mean anything, any more. Again, there was a day when your grandpa could say he was going to buy a new Chevy and everyone knew what kind of car he would have in his driveway. When more and more models were developed, Chevelles and Corvairs and so on, you had to add those names to the first to convey the complete idea.

So it wasn't just a Cadillac, any more. It was a Cadillac El Dorado. But then these designations were fractured, as various trim levels were developed. This wasn't so bad at first. A full-sized Chevrolet could be a Biscayne, an Impala or a Caprice. So now we're up to three names to adequately describe the product. Pontiac Firebird TransAm. And then it all went to Hell.

This morning, on the way to work, I followed a Pontiac. On one side of the trunk lid it said "G6". On the other side, it said "GT". Well, which is it? What does "LE" mean to, say, anyone? And how does it differ from "GLE" or "SE" or "SEL"? And why should anyone care if your car has a V6 or a V8 engine, a 5-speed or an automatic transmission? Sport-tuned suspension? Is there a badge that indicates you bought too much of a radio, too? These started out innocently enough. European brands added "i" to model names to indicate fuel injection, but who is doing the bragging, here, BMW or the new car owner? In the Mercedes-Benz family, "SL" meant Sports Light. But American brands applied these letters to cars that weighed 5000 pounds.

Then marketers noticed something about those numbers and letters. People didn't bond with them the way they did real names.

And, as if it was a Good Thing, the alphabet started to appear all over. The focus wasn't on the minutia any more, it was back on the brand, where the marketers wanted it. You weren't supposed to love a DeVille, you were supposed to love a Cadillac. So today, Cadillac sells CTS and DTS and STS vehicles. Conjure up any images for you? Me, neither.

It's at work at Acura, too. Fancy a new TSX or ZDX or MDX or RDX in your driveway? Uh, no. I miss the old Acura Legend, Integra and Vigor. I knew what those were. This year, the Lincoln catalog is just as confusing. MKZ, MKS, MKX, MKT? I got nothin'.

Adam allegedly spent a while naming all of the animals. Despite similarities and differences, Africa and India both got "Elephant" while one has big ears and the other doesn't. We don't have a Elephant GL and an Elephant GLE.

I guess we can be glad of that.

The New Start

2011-01-05T09:44:00.002-06:00

First things, first. I hope everyone will take a moment or two and update their footer.html documents to reflect the new year for copyright dates (and no, I still haven't done all of mine).

It happens every year.

I spend the first week of every year steeped in awe and wonder and just full of the sheer possibilities every new year affords. It's like being a school kid and heading off for that first day with all of those clean, empty pages in my notebooks. I could write stories in those pages. I could do homework. I could sketch out some new idea for a submarine or a jet fighter. I could write a tentative love letter to The Little Red-Haired Girl. I could do anything.

Of course, the reality is a little less lofty. But here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, version 1.1, I think it's still a Good Idea to spend a few calories at the beginning and ending of any arbitrary period of time and decide what you expect out of it. Think about what actually got done. Think about the difference between the expectation and the reality. And to wonder a little about how to improve the situation in the next arbitrary time period, whether it's a day, a week, a month or a year.

Years ago, I learned HTML. And when HTML v3.2 gelled, I picked up on the changes, there. HTML v4.01 was a snap for me. And I remember thinking I could spend a few dollars and a few calories working-up JavaScript or I could work on Cascading StyleSheets and choosing CSS, because it seemed like everyone was saying JavaScript was on the way out. And for years, I was right. JavaScript was on its way to becoming Web Latin, our first popular "dead" language. And then AJAX happened. And then JQuery happened. And now I'm behind the curve, again. For the last several years, I have vowed that this next one would be the one where I, finally, learned JavaScript. I wouldn't put any money on a bet like that for 2011, though. It may happen, but I think my focus will be more on HTML5 and Adobe's CS5 suite and Drupal, with a smattering of iPad thrown in there, too.

Folks made fun of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he said "…as we know, there are known knowns; there are some things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." But if you parse it out, he was right.

And so this year, I want to focus on the things I know I do not know. Drupal and HTML5 both have a beginning and an end. You can start at <a> and learn all of the tags and how to use them and when you get done, you will have learned all of the unknowns in HTML5. Same with Drupal. That's not to say you'll know everything about how the pieces work together, or all of the best practices and theories behind the best deployment—everyone knows the alphabet, but not everyone can write like Stephen King or Tom Clancy. But you will have a good, complete foundation and you can work from there.

So what about you? What are you working on, this year?

Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T10:21:00.001-06:00

The fastest growing hobby in this country is Being Offended. I know people who spend two or three hours a day looking for things to be pissed off about, now. And with the rise of the Internet, the offended now have access to what we call Community, other like-minded and similarly offended folks who reinforce the idea that Something Must Be Done, as opposed to cautioning one another to Just Get Over It.

The result of the joining of the offended with one another is the backlash. How dare you [enjoy/participate/celebrate] this, that or the other thing, knowing how many [indigenous peoples/innocent animals/children/others] were [exploited/killed/cheated/inconvenienced] in the name of this holiday.

I'm done with that.

Christopher Columbus was on his way to India when he bumped into us. That's why my father's family are called Indians today, when they have lived their entire lives in South Dakota and Nebraska. Sure, Columbus brought the pox and VD and all manner of other ills, and took whatever he wanted to take back. But realistically, I don't see how anyone can make it right, now and why spend all of those calories being worked-up about something nobody can change anyway?

Flash ahead a hundred and twenty-eight years, and the Pilgrims also came aground here. This story has been washed clean of just about all of its truth in the nearly four hundred years since, but I have to admit I like the myth better. The idea that the first Thanksgiving was a feast, that it was the Pilgrims who invited the Indians to join them, that everyone was all clean and shiny in their buckled shoes. Maybe after four hundred years you get a pass. I don't know.

I just don't have much patience with people who sit in the back of the room at the party and say things like, "You know, the millennium doesn't really start tonight..." or "You know, the Pilgrims would have starved if the Indians hadn't shared that day..." or "You know, this used to be a Pagan holiday..."

I come from a place a little different from most people, I'm sure. Peter Mayer said it all for me in his song, Holy Now. I'm not happy giving thanks on only a single day every year, and maybe particularly not this day, but I understand an awful lot of people are too busy to even notice, and so for them having a holiday is probably a good idea. Let's all step back, count our blessings and take a deep breath. And besides, there's turkey and dressing and football and tires at 40% off and we have to rest up for Black Friday shopping.

I am thankful. I have great friends, and great family (except for one guy). I have a great home and a great job and I get to share all of this with my favorite wife. Yeah, I fell and broke my foot on Hallowe'en, but it could have been so much worse.

I have a lot of nice things, and I have a lot of good-enough things. I don't drive a Mercedes, but I have a Honda that has never let me down. I don't have the latest iMac, or iPod or iPhone, but the iMac, iPod and iPhone I do have has been mine for years and still does everything I need to do, online and in the home. I have a lot of nice things, nice guitars, favorite books and big TVs. I have my dad's tools. Our house isn't a palace, but we're not palatial people. We're two-bedroom, brick, people, with attached garages and fireplaces. It's not great but it's good enough, for us. I'm thankful.

I sometimes feel like I swim upstream against technology. About the time I get comfortable with something, history shows it goes away. I was a master of RedRyder and White Knight, telecomm software for the Macintosh, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I knew my way around the XMODEM, YMODEM and ZMODEM file transfer protocols, and the whole "AT" command set for Hayes modems. All of that came and went in the span of about a dozen years.

But I'm thankful I work in a field where every day is subtly different. I'm not working on the same things in the same way I did a decade ago. I'm always mindful that three months from now, six months from now, things are going to be different. And even though this is often scary to me, I'm thankful just the same.

Veteran's Day

2010-11-11T08:50:00.001-06:00

Veteran's Day. From the end of World War One, the only war with enough conceit to bill itself as The Great War. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. We were at war. Tick, tick, tick, we were at peace. The first of the autumnal holidays, celebrated from sea to shining sea with savings on washing machines and wide screen HDTVs. But not at my house.

At my house, the two military holidays, Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, have always been a little more reverential than knocking fifty bucks off the price of a stereo. My mother and father were both Marines. My dad went to war for this country three times. At various times, he was responsible for recruiting, for training and for supplying the Marine Corps. I think about that often. If I screw up a Web page, and don't properly close a <table>, nothing really serious happens. Most browsers today will (correctly) assume that it should have closed after the last was closed. It isn't a big deal. I don't hear from my boss either way. I don't get spanked for not closing the table and I don't get a parade when I do. But my dad went to work every day at the kind of job, like being an airline pilot or a doctor, where everything matters.

If you pick some kid off of the street and fill him full of ideas and sign him up for a job where he loses a foot and can't sleep nights, you are in some way responsible.

If it is your job to teach this kid, in only twelve weeks, how not to lose a foot, and he does it anyway, then you in some way are responsible.

It may come about because you were distracted, tired, or because you were more interested in becoming his friend than in training him. And if your unit needs bullets, batteries or bandages and none are available, you have let them down, too, possibly with disastrous results. You cannot turn this kind of thinking off at the end of the day, can you? Or just walk away from it after twenty years? Maybe that is why Marines may stop getting paid, but they never, ever, stop being Marines.

Thanks to my dad's service, I can now save thirty, forty and even fifty percent on home furnishings this week. Not a bad deal, huh? At least I got my dad back. A whole lot of Marine families were not so lucky.

There are more than fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and fifty names on The Wall, the VietNam Veteran's Memorial, in Washington, DC. That's just for one war. The oldest was sixty-three (and you thought mowing the lawn was hard work at your age—try going to war in your sixties). The youngest was only fifteen. When I was fifteen, "courage" meant trying to touch a boob. A Marine named Bullock was only fifteen when he lost his life in service to his country. There are similar stories representing similar sacrifice in every war and in every military engagement that this country has ever been involved in.

Dads and brothers and friends and sweet hearts don't come home. Ball games go unvisited, lakes and streams go unfished. Kids learn to ride bikes and how to shave from other people. Someone else meets them as they graduate or get married and says "I am proud of you." Old cars go unrestored. Back porches go unpainted. Gardens go unplanted. But those kinds of things go unreported in the news, which focuses on simple, innocent, generic numbers. Three were killed, yesterday. Two, today.

It's okay to enjoy the last of the nice weather. It's okay to take the family out to dinner, this weekend. It's even okay to save money on a new iPod, this week. Just pause for a moment and remember the men and women who bought and paid for this day off with their service, and their lives. And remember all of those empty chairs, at dining rooms and recital halls and schools and churches. The men and women who should be sitting there aren't buying tires this week at any price. The least we can do is to remember them, once a year.

It's Like a Drug

2010-11-03T08:16:00.001-05:00

There is magic in being able to transfer an emotion or a feeling from one person to another.

You're toddling along, thinking about the Big Report due on Thursday, and then you hear That Song. Instantly, you are at the Eighth and Ninth Grade Dance, trying to screw up the courage to ask Doreen to dance this next fast song, because that would mean you'll both be hot and tired (and already on the dance floor) when the band, whose set list you have figured out, will be following this one with a slow song. And you really, really want to slow dance with Doreen. You haven't visited that memory in years but it's recalled instantly with the opening bars of a piece of music from years ago. Close your eyes and you can smell Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific.

You're walking along, feeling kind of grumbly, because the boss didn't like your report. Suddenly a new Smart Car cruises up to the crosswalk and you cannot help but return it's smile. The way the headlights and fenders and grill are all designed, it is a car that just always looks happy. Many current Mazdas are the same. You just can't help but smile, seeing one.

You open up the pages of a newspaper, and there among the doom and despair and tragedy are the comics. Oh, that Dilbert, and his pointy-haired boss. How about that dog, that cat, those kids, huh? Then you read Doonesbury and discover that B.D., an entirely fictional character you have never actually met and never will, who joined the National Guard and was shipped off to war in Iraq, has lost a leg in that war. He's being stretchered back to the hospital by buddies from his unit, who encourage him, saying "Not your time, bro!" and "Not today!" And you shed a tiny little tear for a man that lives only in another man's imagination, but who has been a part of your life for twenty-five or thirty years.

I grew up learning to read with Sally, Dick and Jane. I "met" them in first grade, they helped me a lot and then we went on vacation. When we came back in the fall for second grade, everyone was a little taller, a little more developed, including Sally, Dick and Jane. When we were told at the end of second grade that we would not use that series of textbooks next year, I cried for the loss of my friends.

You click on a Web site link and are whisked away to that site, and before you even read anything posted there, you already feel the juices flowing. You are alive with the possibilities of the things you are about to read and see. Just responding to the colors and shapes.

The very best of this seems to come when describing a sense without being able to actually use it. Think of a music review, or a food, wine or cigar review. How do you explain to someone, in words, how a guitar sounds? You have to lean hard on words most people don't see every day. It's resonant. It's got a deep, rich middle with very bright highs. The wine has a finish of chocolate. The cigar has a flavor of leather and spices.

There's a little neuron deep in your brain that knows what happy is and one right next to it that knows what sad is and one nearby that understands how gramma's cooking tasted. And at any given moment, a sight, a sound, a smell can tickle one of those guys in very powerful ways. When Miranda Lambert sings "under that live oak, my favorite dog is buried in the yard" it conjures up hours of stories for anyone whose ever loved a dog and lost it.

I have always been fascinated by this. Good music, good art, good design is in many ways like a drug. You are pointed in one direction, you encounter this new input and it deflects you in some way. You're happier or sadder, more confident and inspired or hungrier. Someone has hand carried a feeling, an emotion, from across time and space and plugged it into your brain. You may tap your feet, or chuckle or whatever but the point is that it affects you in some way.

People who can do that consistently are richly rewarded in our culture. Singers, songwriters, chefs, actors and Jony Ive, CBE. I wish I could do it, too. I wish I was good at it.

Is It Cold In Here, or Is It Just Me?

2010-10-27T08:19:00.003-05:00

If you were scheduled for surgery a couple of weeks ago, or if you're a Chilean miner, you may have missed the whole story. A skillion-dollar retail chain decided what they needed to do was update their tired old logo.

Sounds like someone ascended to a new position, doesn't it? Everything was fine, and then Jerry was elevated to Grand High Communications Pooh-Baah. And how are you going to keep a job like that, if you can't point to something You Have Done? So the gears were engaged that resulted in a new, hip, groovy logo for the Gap. This kind of thing happens fairly often in Biddness, and it scares me.

I took a Marketing class a couple of years ago and it was full of these kinds of misadventures. Volkswagen, sixty years of dependable, economical, modest transportation, a brand that clearly communicated its products. Someone sitting in the Big Chair there decided they would move up-market to take on mighty Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi. They brought to market a Volkswagen that cost as much as two. These are much prized on the used-car market, today. The original 2004 sold modestly, but you have to give these things a chance. After 2006, it was clear that people who wanted to spend Mercedes money on cars wanted… Mercedes. You cannot today buy a new Volkswagen Phaeton.

The New Coke story was interesting. Pepsi was kicking their hiney on TV urging people to "Take the Pepsi Challenge!" Most people who did found they preferred the taste of Pepsi to the taste of Coke. They were buying Coke more out of habit. So, Coke developed a formula that tasted great a paper cup mouthful at a time. In test after test, it beat Pepsi and it beat Coca-Cola. But in 12oz quantities it was almost awful. Coke beat a hasty retreat from the formula after weeks, in those pre-internet days.

So it made me wonder about Marketing. How valid a field of study is it, if you can get so much so wrong? It's hard to imagine Coke or Gap or Volkswagen really deciding to change a logo, to enter a new market or to burn down the secret recipe that had brought it so much success on a whim. There must have been studies, there must have been spreadsheets that comforted people and led them to believe that what they were doing was A Good Thing.

Sure, there may have been problems with the methodology. Our most-recent Web site was tested in several settings, including an audience of tractor buyers and quilt judgers at the state fair, and a great hue and cry went up when some percentage could not locate the huge "Enroll Now!" button at the top of the screen, which led to the enrollment Web page, of course. The case they made was that we were losing enrollment, I guess. Based on the actions of their parents, college kids were thought to be unable to figure out how to sign-up and sign-on and become future alumni and send Large Checks to the school for years to come. I was mildly worried, at first. And then I remembered: Enrollment was up, this year and last. Hmm….

Gap had a box that identified the store and the clothing, everywhere except on the radio. A darkish medium-blue field, square, with all capitals spelling G A P in the center, in a tall, skinny, serifed font ( Spire Regular ) cast in white. Beautiful? Maybe not, but certainly elegant.

As things happened, the Gap folks backed down almost immediately, and abandoned the Helvetica capital-G, lower-cased a and p, dark against an indistinct white background, with an odd smudge of dark blue gradient offset behind and above the p. Helvetica is great for signage, and there was a wonderful movie about it a few years ago. But it's not the visible face of the Gap.

But shouldn't someone have known this? Shouldn't someone have stopped them?

It Won't Always Be Like This

2010-10-20T10:42:00.001-05:00

"It won't always be like it is, now". That's what a teacher once told me was the First Rule of Money. He said you could apply this to any area of study with a dollar sign in front of it. Business, finance, economics, investing. It didn't matter. The first thing you have to know is that it won't always be like it is, now.

This was some comfort to me, because things at the time were pretty awful. Unemployment was up. Inflation was up. The general mood in the country was bad for the first time in many peoples' lives. Kids born in the early '50s grew up in a world where things got better every year and people just accepted that the American Way was the best. But nothing lasts forever.

If you still handle your money today the way it was popular in 1974 or 1982 you don't have much money left. Back then, interest rates were high and you could lock-in a great return, risk-free, by buying a CD. Stocks? They were cheap for a reason, though nobody could agree on what the reason was. And then one day in 1982 The Market took off. And nobody saw it coming, and nobody could agree on why, but nobody wanted to miss out on it, either. The same thing happened with real estate.

Political polling is slipping because they depend almost entirely upon land-line telephones. This was fine for a hundred years, but today a lot of households have cell phones only. Today there are noticeably fewer young people and low-income people around to pick up a wired phone and answer questions. This tends to overstate some advantages and understate others.

So here we are, building Web pages, with HTML. For a while, they told us we were using the last version of HTML we would ever have to learn. We could learn it all, at last. Once you figured out the nuances of the data definition tag, you were done and could go out and play. And build Web pages. And so we did.

Cascading Style Sheets came along, got better for a while and then stalled, similar to the path HTML had been on. So "this" was how HTML worked, and "that" is how CSS worked. Kewl. We got down to having only to learn the subtle differences between releases of Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver MX 2004 to Dreamweaver 8? Take a week or so and you'll be golden. Creative Suite 3? Sure! Creative Suite 4? You bet!

After a while it starts to look like these are the tools you're going to use for the rest of your career. People ask "Should I upgrade?" They never seem to ask "Should I buy Dreamweaver at all?" Maybe it's time to start asking.

Look, this is a priesthood that not everyone is interested in joining. And in truth, not everyone needs this much horsepower, anyway. You could run a small or even a medium-sized business quite easily with Dreamweaver. But if your needs are simple you don't require the kinds of features and benefits Dreamweaver is packed with. You don't need the support for various scripting interfaces, you don't need the programmy features. What you need is about where Dreamweaver was at Version 5ive! But all of those Dreamweaver developers still have jobs and the odds are good we will one day have shelves full of Dreamweaver CS9.

Is this a Good Idea? Is it necessary? In these troubled economic times (drink), should we just blindly upgrade every several months or could that money be better used in some other way, like getting you an extra cable channel or two, or maybe putting you into the V6 model, instead of the four-cylinder?

Computers were supposed to make our lives easier. We were supposed to be better off, for having them and mastering them. Can't we use some of their horsepower and intelligence and apply it to the task of building Web pages?

Well, yeah. As it turns out, we can. And it may signal the end of the need for Dreamweaver, for most people. There will still be some folks who have to have the kinds of gee-whiz features that are part of the baked-in goodness in every box. And they will still need training (I hope) in HTML and CSS and Dreamweaver, itself.

But there may be a tool that will be Good Enough for most others. A tool that's free, except for the frictional expense of training.

Learning. Or, Not.

2010-10-13T15:08:00.000-05:00

It's been said often enough there must be some truth to it: You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks. I may be proof of this, myself.

I'm taking a math class, this semester. Math for Dummies, I call it. Math 095 isn't even in the catalog. That's how elemental it is. This is basic Algebra. The kind most of us learned in high school. Hi, I'm the kid in the back of the class who drew pictures of airplanes and wondered what a boob felt like.

I know the feeling of frustration that comes when you struggle with learning. That's what motivates me to find different ways to illustrate an issue, and to keep asking during class if everyone is getting this or not. Some respond well to theory. Others need a more practical example. Some can hear it and know it forever, while others need to see it before they can believe it. I try to do whatever it takes to get that germ of an idea to take hold and there is no better thrill than seeing that "lightbulb moment" when someone's eyes light up and their facial expression changes and you know—they get it.

I don't get it. I have never been friendly with math. I can fly airplanes and I've done my taxes for thirty years. But I don't get a lot of math. When I started back to school to finish my degree, I knew I would need a few math classes and the Math department cheerfully provided a Math Placement Exam, to find out where my level was. I think I got my name right. Some of the equations they sketched out made no sense at all to me, but I remember some were kind of pretty, design-wise. Brackets and parenthesis and lines here and there. The kid who graded me told me I'd tested-out at Forrest Gump levels, meaning I could not even start with their 100-level classes, I would have to take Math 095 to get myself tuned-up for even Math 100.

This I did, in fulfillment of a promise I made to my father that I would finish my degree. And you know what? I did pretty well in that class, scoring enough points to not even need to take the final exam. I was ready to move on, except I had Things To Do that next semester and the one after that, and, well, it seems this class "expires" after a year. They may or may not have said something about that, I don't remember.

At any rate, I'm back. Going over the same ground I covered two years ago. Only this time I am struggling. I sit in the front row of class, just like last time. And I pay attention and I ask questions and I nod. But when I get home and crack open the books, they may as well be written in hieroglyphics. I am actually, provably, stupider this October than I was in October of 2008. Same teacher, same book, same chair. The only difference is me.

One of the things we learn in pilot training is to never give up. We listen to a recording of an air traffic controller as he deals with a young pilot who has screwed up, but somehow can't bring himself to do anything but scream into the microphone "MayDay! MayDay!" over and over as if that was going to save him. It didn't. We watch videotape that a thoughtful pilot provided of his own demise with a little video camera bracketed into the cockpit to record flights. You can actually feel the energy drain from a roomful of pilots as the guy on tape says "Hey, watch this!" and proceeds to ride it in.

Compare and contrast that with airline Captains Sully and Haynes. Sully put his gleaming jet down in the river next to one of the biggest cities in the world and lost not a single life. Haynes experienced an in-flight engine failure that took out his hydraulic system. "What's the procedure for loss of hydraulics?" he asked his flight engineer. "There isn't one" came the reply. But Al Haynes didn't give up. And though some didn't make it as his giant jet cartwheeled across the Sioux City airport, an awful lot of people lived through that crash. He kept trying things the whole time, and managed to keep the airplane away from the city and any buildings, steering it onto a closed runway.

My hat is off to those guys. I have never wanted to give up on anything so much as Math 095 in my life. This week.

Help!

2010-10-06T08:17:00.002-05:00

When do you know when you have crossed the line from a problem you can handle yourself to a problem you need assistance with?

This comes up often, or at least I hope it does, as we are all constantly bumping up against the limits of our comfort zones. Maybe the issue is with something you have read about, or remember hearing of in some blog or meeting, somewhere. But maybe it's something you just have no experience with at all. What do you do, then? No, I mean after the crying?

There is a deep and wide river of testosterone that runs through the middle of this. Two or three times in any given year, someone will tell me about the time they took a problem, threw it to the ground and beat it senseless, wrestling with it for seven hours before they finally figured out a solution. This is a point of pride for many people, but it always makes me shake my head. You blew a whole day on this? When you could have gotten an answer by calling or writing anyone in the Web Developer Network and ended up five or six hours ahead, productivity-wise? And you're proud of this?

But there is something to the Do It Yourself aspect. It's a great help in learning your craft. In a former life as a mainframe computer operator, I would encounter various situations where the computer would stop, issue some cryptic message and require some assurance or comforting before it would continue. The first week or so, it went like this: The computer would crash. I would call the Systems Analyst on duty, who would then guide me step-by-step to some resolution. But about a week into my new job, all of the Systems guys were away on vacation and I had to call their boss.

"Hi, it's Mark. The Cyber crashed again" I told a frustrated manager. "What does the error message say?" he replied. I dutifully read it off, over the phone. Now, understand that these big machines don't just stop and throw up a little box on the screen with an "Okay" and "Reset" button. You would get error messages that themselves were clues as to what kind of problem you were having. Every conceivable error was cataloged and cross-referenced in huge manuals kept in a cart near the main console. CO411 might be a core, or memory problem—the programmer was asking a program to think about more than he had given it room to comfortably work in. Or it might be IO234, a problem with the Input/Output area of the big machine. Some trouble with a tape drive or a printer. Before, when I would call, the programmer would walk me through fixing the problem and I would move on, thinking my involvement was done. I was just a clerk, running a big machine.

But with their boss taught me how to learn about the machine, and what it was expecting. He wanted to teach me how to learn (what he really wanted was to get back to watching M*A*S*H on TV), so I would be less likely to call back. Soon enough, I was calling analysts with one of the giant manuals opened in my lap, my finger already on the reference for the error message I'd gotten. I would suggest a way to fix things and they would approve it and we'd move on. Within a few weeks, I wasn't calling people and interrupting their evenings, I was sending them e-mails explaining what had gone wrong and how I had fixed things. That's about the time they started bringing in pizza for me, in the evenings.

Many things in life seem to work in three's and this is where I draw the line, myself. If I discover a problem I will try three ways to fix it myself but at that point it's probably easier, cheaper and faster to call in an expert opinion. This has served me well in technology and even working on things around the house. I'll fiddle with it, I'll monkey with it and then I'll futz with it. But if it's not fixed after my fiddling, monkeying and futzing, then damnit, it's time to call a plumber.

Know what you know, and learn what you don't. And don't be afraid to ask for help.

Make It a Habit

2010-09-29T10:00:00.001-05:00

I am fascinated by little things. My wife and I enjoy travel by car and whenever we are on the road more than an hour, one of us will start in wondering why we do things the way we do. Habits interest me. Not the traditional uniform of the Nun—that's a different interest. I am interested in how we learn to do things, why we keep doing them, and of course in how difficult it is to stop doing them, once you have started.

It's been said if you do something two-dozen times, it can become a habit. Others say it has to do with a number of times over number of days equation. If you have a can of Mountain Dew per day, every day, you may develop a habit, a behavior gives you the continued regular consumption of Mountain Dew without your having to remind yourself to do it all of the time. In fact, you will do it without any attention at all. This is especially true if you can somehow ritualize something. Have that Mountain Dew every morning when you first come in and turn on the lights.

So a month down the road, you come in to work, turn on the lights, sit down to start tearing through your day and you will reach almost automatically for that can of Mountain Dew. And at some point, if you reach out and it's not there, it can seriously mess up the rhythm of your day.

For some reason, it is universally recognized that it is much easier to begin a Bad Habit, like smoking, overeating or surfing the Internet, than it is to begin a Good Habit, like exercising or spell checking a document when you think you're done. And it's awful, trying to break a habit of any kind, once it's engrained in your daily ritual.

And so we keep doing things long after they are actually good for us. This is what I did, today. This is what I did yesterday. This is what I did last week. A friend once mentioned she was doing X "because of all of that inflation" with an appropriate Yucky Face expression. But this was in 1998, during a time when inflation wasn't a problem. But it was easier for her to continue the behaviors she had learned in the 1980s than to learn and adopt new behaviors as things changed.

I read. I mean, I read a lot. I got interested in reading about money about a week after I learned that I didn't know anything about money. But I always get two or three sources. So at any given time, I have two or three computer magazines coming to my house. I have two or three guitar magazines, now. It's rare that I get a single Web technology book on a subject. I have quite a collection of HTML books, CSS books, MySQL books, PHP books, JavaScript books, Design books and so on. I have only JQuery book, so far.

I need to make a change to a Web page. I fire up Dreamweaver. Why? Because that's how I edit Web pages. It's what I have used since about 2001 when I gave up HomeSite. And every couple of years I have upgraded, because, well, that's becoming a habit now, too. But should I upgrade to the next version? Should I be doing pages in Dreamweaver at all, now?

It's interesting, sometimes, to challenge yourself like this. Why do we do the things we do? Are there other, better alternatives? Beyond "comfort" is there some benefit to doing things the way we have "always" done them? I was impressed by Dreamweaver, when I finally stepped away from HomeSite. What am I missing out on, now, by continuing to use Dreamweaver to build pages? And how will it take me to break my Dreamweaver habit, now that it is so engrained?

Starting in September, I have taken to climbing the stairs of The Link, here at work, at least once per day. When I have been gone a day, I make it up. I have now done this quite a few times. Have I made it a habit? No, not yet. I know it's good for me and all of that, but I still have to force myself.

Habits are funny things.

I Have Seen The Future

2010-09-22T10:07:00.002-05:00

It may take a few years but I have been to the mountain top and see no reason to change my oft-stated viewpoint that The Future Is Going To Be A Great Place To Live.

In 1993, I worked on my first Web page from the front-page portal of my GEnie RoundTable. It was awkward, but familiar. I had worked with SGML some in the middle 1980s and many of the tags were familiar. But the state of the browser art, in those long ago, pre-Netscape days, was pretty dismal. Everyone who saw the Web saw it in sixteen colors of text characters. Only. No images. No fonts. Just text on the screen, text from all over the world.

In 1995 I got a call from Microsoft. They wanted to know if I was interested in working on their new online network, hosting their aviation forum. I hung up the phone and drove to OfficeMax to buy my first Windows PC, a Compaq, and await my FedEx delivery of the new Windows 95 software.

In 1996, the mother ship called us all home and I traveled to Seattle for a convention of hundreds of forum managers. There, as in most conventions of this sort, the real action took place in the hallways and at the after- parties. I heard then that one day we would see machine-made Web pages that were "just as good" as anything we were building then. This today would be seen as damning with faint praise. But it was enough to send a shiver down my spine. What would I do for a living, on the day after that day?

In the intervening decade and a half, we have made progress toward the machine-made page, if that's how you wish to see it. But I still think we will see agencies building one-off sites for small businesses and individuals doing their own pages for years to come. I don't know that I will retire from teaching HTML when I retire, but I suspect the odds are pretty good that I'll still be retiring from some form of building Web pages.

The latest threat, if you are so inclined, comes from Drupal. Drupal is an open sourced Content Management System. Think of Lego® blocks and you won't be far wrong. Drupal calls them Nodes, and you build little systems, one block at a time, using other nodes already out there or constructing your own. Using this technique, you can quickly model the behavior of, say, an online appointment calendar, or a little weather gizmo that gets the temperature and forecast for a given ZIP-code.

We've started a pilot program using Drupal. It's good. It's been up and running for less than a year, but we can already cruise through an entire Dreamweaver-built site and convert it easily into a more Drupal-friendly format. Point-point, click-click and you can edit your pages without sending Large Checks to Adobe or to Microsoft or to anyone, really. It's a very compelling case, especially for colleges and departments with tiny budgets, which is to say, all of us, now.

Drupal is out there, being tended-to by hundreds of developers the world over. Currently in Version 6 release, we are aiming for Drupal 7 deployment. Those developers are still going to be busy, and there will probably be a Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 some day. We can decide that we are interested in upgrading or we can decide that we like what we have, when the time comes. We need only respond to the needs of the campus Web developer community, not the needs of Adobe shareholders.

There are lots of advantages Drupal affords us over the current Dreamweaver model. Not least of which is that you can edit Web pages from anywhere you can send G-Mail from, with just a Web browser and an internet connection. We can include features as they become ready, not according to some arbitrary release schedule. One day we may schedule content changes and content expirations.

But, someone will still have to provide that content. Drupal isn't a Web page editor, it's a Content Management System, and someone will still need to provide the content that needs managing. And as beautiful and elegant as it appears today, like an exotic Italian sports car, it's going to break. And on that day, they are going to need someone who knows a little HTML….

Motivation, Again

2010-09-15T08:10:00.001-05:00

Remember that bit about bookstores? There are lots of books on motivation, and some are going to be better than others. I'm not going to try to top that here in 750 words. But let's spend another moment with this before we leave it entirely.

Some things we need to do. Some we want to do. Some things will improve our lives, our careers, our homes or our families. Others are just ordinary duties that come up on some regular basis.

Some tools I have used, to keep me on track and get the work done, include treating myself for reaching some milestone, secluding myself from distractions, focusing on the future, when the goal will presumably be reached, and the nuclear option: walking away from it all for a time.

None of these work all the time, but they all work some of the time. I make no promises, but I'm reminded of the Hunter Thompson quote, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

It's a rare task that can't be broken down into manageable chunks. You don't sit down to write a novel. You write a word, and that becomes a sentence. You re-read that sentence, editing until you are happy, and you write another. Eventually it becomes a paragraph, a chapter and then a book. Most work is like that.

Sometimes I'm able to get a work done if I allow myself a little pleasure after passing some milestone. I will get myself a soda, when I finish making these phone calls. I will see what everyone is laughing about down the hall, when I finish this outline. I will sneak a peek at Amazon.com or Facebook after I get this Web page validated.

That kind of thing can work for a lot of people, but it depends upon having enough discipline to forgo that reward until the work gets done. Now we're in Chicken-Or-Egg country. If you have the discipline to delay gratification, you probably have the discipline to get the work done anyway.

I can get a lot done in the middle of a room, with conversations and music going on all around me. In fact, some of my best work has been done in busy coffeehouses with a constant distracting din as people drifted in and out, clinked cups with spoons, laughed about that guy in the office and whatever else. But, sometimes, you need to be able to shut everything out and just focus on the task at hand.

Maybe half the time these days, I close my office door. And now and then I'll even turn off the lights, so all I can see is my monitor. With class in session, people use my office hallway as a conduit from Where They Were to Where They Need To Be. And it's a hallway with not a stitch of fabric, so every sound from their start to their finish, the width of the building, echoes around and, I swear, amplifies as it makes its way to my door. When a class empties out, there may be twenty conversations, forty feet shuffling, doors creaking and slamming and so on. So where in summer my door was mostly open, these days, it's mostly closed.

I have a small selection of jazz guitar (no lyrics, no vocals) that I play on iTunes while I'm working on something. Often, though, I'll listen to a selection of podcasts. Some about Web design, others about technology, news and even comedy. Each requires various levels of attention. I don't want to replace the distraction of the mobile crowd with an interview with a comedian I like, so I'm careful with what I select to listen to and when. Still, I can't control things like the Band practicing outside my window. It can be hard to write JavaScript with the drumline ten yards away working on Boom-chacka-lacka boom-boom-Boom!

Sometimes, just imagining how great it's going to feel to be done with something is enough to keep you working toward that end. Man, I'm going to put my feet up and enjoy a cold one, tonight!

Sometimes you just burn out. That's what vacation days are for. I find that a day or two off often helps clear my head and get me back in the groove, again.

What works for you?

Motivation

2010-09-08T08:49:00.003-05:00

There are fewer good bookstores in this country, but if you can find one, the odds are good they will about a yard of self-help books, many dealing with motivation.

Motivation is interesting. Sometimes, it's like a spark. It can cause events to escalate and cascade and before you know it, nations are at war or economies are in crisis or people are in love.

Most of the job of an athletic coach is motivation. And that's illustrative, I think—I hope. There's some reinforcement of fundamentals, some critique of style or performance, sure. But mostly, the job involves convincing people to perform at a high level.

Fans of any sport go nuts when you reduce their passion to its essence. "It's a just a couple of guys, swatting a ball back and forth" sets tennis fans' teeth on edge. I get cranky when people tell me auto racing is "just a bunch of guys driving fast and turning left".

But, here we go. A coach's job is to tell athletes, who are very good at whatever it is they do, to go out there and do that thing, very well, for a tremendous pile of money, fame and other benefits, which you might be forgiven for thinking would be enough motivation, right there. And yet, coaches are some of the highest paid people on the team. So there must be more to it than that.

I know I should get "X" done, done quickly, and done well, and even that I should crow about it a little when it's finished. But for some reason, even though it may mean something from I-Get-To-Keep-My-Job all of the way up to I-Get-A-Raise, and all I have to do is just to do my job and do it well, there are any number of un-done "X" -jobs on my spindle. Everyone is like that, to one degree or another (I hope). Please, god, it isn't just me.

What is it that keeps us from doing things? Things we know we need to do, and often at our benefit?

Sometimes, it's just daily clutter and distraction. I need to clear out fourteen other ToDo items, before I can start work on the Really Big Task. I'm going to need a lot of room on my desk, so I'd better finish this little page, and do something about that receipt, and put away a few of these pens and other office supplies.

Sometimes it's a feeling of unpreparedness. I can't possibly do this now, without the proper training and tools and staffing and so on. So I need to schedule training, and get a hold of a good book, and maybe try one of those webinar things, but I can't afford a book right now and there are so many hoops to jump through, to get the office to buy one. And even then, it won't be like I really know this stuff, I'll just be the guy who read the book!

What I treasure are those moments when you end up "in the zone" and work seems to take over about 95% of your brain. You look up and it's 1:10pm. You start in, and the next time you look up, it's 4:52pm. It's like you've been working with a tailwind all day. It's the closest thing a fat man like myself can probably come to a Runner's High.

But I've been at work on a Web page or a report I really enjoy, doing a part of it I really enjoy doing, and left at five thinking tomorrow would be a breeze… and been disappointed in the morning. The spark is gone. It's the difference between hearing a comic tell a joke and hearing someone who saw that comic tell you about the joke. Comics telling jokes are very often funny. Telling about a joke never is.

Motivation is strange. Here's a team of world-class athletes, each one only here because they demonstrated they were better than a thousand others at their task. And yet they need a guy to point out to them that they are not operating at a hundred percent?

What hope do any of the rest of us have?

Ten Thousand Hours

2010-09-01T08:09:00.003-05:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about how mastering, well, anything, takes ten thousand hours. It comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success. I'm wondering how true that may be in our case?

I got my pilot's license in less than fifty hours. I had demonstrated by that point the proper skills and to a sufficient level to be deemed safe enough to fly unwitting people off to faraway adventures, with a high probability of getting us all back home, again. Fifty hours. But I can tell you that I was a much, much better pilot at 200hrs.

I was easily better than four times the flier, with four times the hours. I am sure that if I was able to continue racking up time, by the time I got to ten thousand hours, I'd be pretty damned good. It's not linear—I wouldn't be fifty times better, but I would bet that I would notice the difference, if nobody else did.

I've mentioned before that when I play guitar, I can hear the seventeen year old me laughing at the fifty year old me. But I figured out the seventeen year old me practiced and played about five hours per day, nearly every day, for a period of about two years, and about two hours per day nearly every day for about a year before that. So that's about twenty-five hundred hours of guitar playing, or a quarter of the way there. No wonder I was good. Had I stuck with it through the 1980s and 1990s, you might have heard of me by now.

But I wonder if this is transferable to the Web? How can anyone become an expert at building Web pages, if you need ten thousand hours? Is there really anything to learn from the umpty-millionth <p> tag you put on a page?

There are only a limited number of tags we use every day. There are only a few tags that we use maybe once a month or three or four times per year (I don't think I have ever used the <dd> tag, for instance, and I've been doing this since 1993). Once you have mastered HTML to some degree, you probably move on to Cascading Style Sheets.

There, you have several dozen property-value pairs to learn for several dozen selectors (basically the most-often used HTML tags). That is all quite a hill to climb. But here's where it falls apart, for me.

Ten thousand hours of eight-hour days is twelve hundred and fifty days. Given a typical working year of 2000hrs (8x5x50), that's five years of heads-down markup and design, with no sick days, no all-day meetings and no staring absently at the tree outside the window—and especially with no accounting for shopping on eBay, searching Facebook for old sweeties or looking up things in Wikipedia.

And here's my problem. In any random five years there are huge changes in the Web, the way we work, the tools we use and so on. How much of that transfers over? How much of the work I did in HTML v3.2 counted, when HTML 4.01 became the choice? How much of what I did in HomeSite was I really able to carry over into Dreamweaver? And how much of what I learned of Dreamweaver MX 2000 am I still using, today?

At some point, I stopped laying out pages in tables. At some point, I quit using <font> tags. Somewhere along the line, I learned to include title attributes on links, and alt text in images.

Realistically, the way I work today, this week or this month is how I have worked for only a couple of hundred hours. Some parts of it stretch back to the 1990s, sure, but not many, and fewer with every passing year. HTML becomes XHTML and probably soon will become HTML5. CSS is moving into CSS3, now. Browsers are still rolling out about a once a year, but there are only three or four that matter so it's a new one only every so many months. JavaScript improves and so do the libraries that techniques like JQuery depend upon.

It's all still in a great deal of flux.

So, according to Outliers, will any of us ever be any good?

The Lost

2010-08-25T08:17:00.002-05:00

I lost a favorite book bag, last week. Actually, that's when I noticed it was missing. I actually lost it months ago during our recent move. I brought it to the new house, another damned Thing from the apartment, and casually, absently, placed it on top of a pile of boxes near the front of a closet.

If we had done a better job of un-packing, we would have had fewer boxes in front of, well, in front of everything, and I probably would have found it.

My first thought was that it was probably in "this" room. Then probably somewhere in "that" room. Then maybe it was out in the garage. I tried to place it within the apartment, and locate boxes of flotsam and jetsam from that strata, but didn't find it.

My first solution was to order another. It was a Lands' End Square-Rigger Canvas Attache Case, in Green, trimmed in leather. Beautifully made, sturdy, rugged. It was featured in full-page ads in Lands' End's catalogs for more than twenty years. I went to their Web site, but could not find it anywhere. I Googled "Lands' End Canvas Attache" which got me a skillion hits, most of which were product reviews saying how great the little case was. Finally, I found one article that talked about it in the past tense, saying Lands' End no longer offered it.

Well, that's just awful.

That would be like Dairy Queen deciding they could save money by not putting that little curl at the top of their ice cream cones. It would be like Gibson Guitars deciding they didn't need to make their Les Paul models, any more. It would be like Chevrolet deciding they could do without their Corvette. For a generation, the Land's End catalog talked about how great their knit golf shirts were, what made their Oxford office shirts so great, and how wonderful their Square-Rigger canvas attache cases were. In the early 1980s, they even modified the attache case so it could be used as a computer case, in a pinch.

I was crushed. I found one in Black, on eBay, and bid on it. A couple of hours later I had won it and it is now on its way to my house. So, of course, this morning I found my original Green one, the one I've owned for ten years, jammed between a couple of boxes near the closet in a room full of boxes.

There are lessons here.

Probably the first is that we've lived in this house for weeks, now and we should be done un-packing! The second is that we should be more deliberate in where we put things. Don't name a word processing document full of Web design ideas something that doesn't include the words "Web", "Design" and "Ideas" in the document name. And don't place it in a Folder named "General Stuff" or "Ideas to Work On" or something like that. That Folder should be named "Web Design Ideas".

I should have put my bag in a closet, or near my desk, where I could see it and remember it.

Oh, for Google, and for Spotlight on the Macintosh, which seemingly find anything, anywhere. Until there's a Google for the household, be more careful and plan accordingly.

At Least There Will Be Cool

2010-08-16T10:28:00.003-05:00

What a nice little vacation, huh?

Sorry, I got caught up in a whole bunch of little things. And some of them really were very little, but still distracting, and in one way or another the time spent in blogging was sucked away. There were a few big things, too. We bought a house and moved. My little sister had her tonsils out, got a huge infection which turned into sepsis and ended up losing a foot to amputation. And always, it was hot. How was your summer?

So, now it's late summer and the media is full of Back To School. I always get a sense of nostalgia, and a sense of hope, as the days start to pick up speed in their getting shorter. I love that sense of possibility I get from looking at a brand new, clean, totally blank notebook. All of those empty pages, soon to be filled with all kinds of new knowledge. Notes on classroom lectures, page numbers to be read or other assignments, little back-of-the-envelope budgets to see if I can spring for a hot coffee. It's all good.

Most of my associations with Fall are good ones. I have a birthday coming up the end of September. There's a British Car Show held every year around that time. Continuing to take classes makes me feel like I am making progress through Life, however bogus that may actually be. One Day, the promise holds, I'll Be Smart! And I'll have a receipt! I'll be able to prove it! Then, they will have to throw money at me! We'll see.

New movies come out in the Fall. A lot of really good shows that don't fit into the Summer Blockbuster mold, but can't wait for the holidays, will be released soon. Television used to roll out all new seasons the way the car companies did, but both now seem content to release product as it becomes available. Pity. I remember we used to stay home in the evenings for a whole week, to check out all of the new shows on ABC or NBC or CBS (all we had, back then) and pass judgement on whether or not they deserved our further scrutiny. But I am looking forward to a few TV shows.
I used to get new clothes at the end of every summer. That's gone, now. We used to move in the mid-to-late summer. That's over, too.

What do you hope to accomplish, in the last third of the year? Are you looking into new technologies? Or maybe picking up a new job? Paying off a credit card, or planning on a Big Deal for next year?

Over the last several weeks, I've gotten a new office, so I've gotten new coworkers. I've built out some new training and I'll be delivering that for the next year or so. And I've sat in on meetings about The Future… ("oocher… oocher… oocher…). I remain convinced that The Future is going to be a great place to live, even as I become more uncertain of my own place within it.

Our current model of communication, Templates supported by the Dreamweaver interface, may be coming to an end. Doubtless there were scribes, very good scribes, who shed tears at the end of the papyrus era. But there are some compelling technical and economic reasons behind the change, and I anticipate that we will be doing much less with Dreamweaver in the next version of the Template design, and in those going forward, than we have in the past. Change is a mother, huh? All of those keyboard shortcuts? They will eventually evaporate through disuse. I don't think I could debug a RedRyder communications script today the way I could in 1989, either, though.

There are all kinds of advances in established technologies. And we have seen many of them organized in ways they haven't been, before, to good effect. The iPhone continues to be popular and the iPad is still coming on strong. Why would the incoming Freshman of 2015 seriously consider loading herself down with 40lbs of books with pencil and pen markings and highlighted passages—books the bookstore won't accept for return at the end of the semester—when she can download all of her books, and more, to her iPad, and carry that around in her purse?

New challenges, new opportunities, new economics and always new weather. It's all coming. Are you going to be ready for it?

The Backup Plan

2010-04-21T09:30:00.001-05:00

Do you have a backup plan? A Plan "B" you can fall back on if your first attempt fails? I'm a pilot. Backup plans are part of our DNA.

As we take to the runway and I advance the throttle, you're thinking, "It sure is loud in here!" I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll just stop on the remaining runway". As I lift the nose and we take to the air, you're thinking, "Here we go!" I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll just land straight ahead". At some point you'll be able to pick out familiar landmarks in the city and you think "They look like doll houses!" while I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll land on the freeway". An airplane may disappoint a good pilot, but it will never surprise him.

This week I stand in the eye of a storm of demands upon my time, talents and technology the like of which I have not seen in years. At home, my wife and I are trying to buy a house. We have arranged financing pre-approval and scouted about a dozen neighborhoods. We have reluctantly increased our budget by another ten percent or so and, finally, found a house we both like. We wrote an offer and it was accepted and now we need to move ahead and secure our financing (4.75%!) and start down the road of un-plugging everything from hovel-A and installing it into hovel-B at the appointed day and time.

At church, I have recently become president of our board of trustees. We're staring down a bunch of repairs and enhancements to our building and looking at a capital campaign of about a million dollars. Also, the fourth and fifth grade Sunday school kids would like to put on a little play. I'm going to be spending a lot of evenings at home on the telephone and in e-mail, rounding up support for this and that and making our case.

And here at work we are about to jump into a whole new paradigm on the Web. We are going to move away from a primarily HTML-based and Dreamweaver-based template program to leaning more on Drupal. Training for the older technologies and some of the gee-whiz features people have added over the last year and more will be moving more to a video on demand model. Here's how to install the Templates files. Here's how to install the image-swapper. That sort of thing.

So into this storm comes the first indication of just how brittle a lot of technology is, today. I have my computer wake up for me about five minutes before I arrive, every morning. Our Chancellor is all about saving money these days, and while it won't probably save a single job or graduate a single kid, I turn my computer off overnight since I was told to. Well, yesterday I came in to find that Things Were Not Quite Right. I had access to my Web browser, but couldn't open up my hard drive and edit a document there. I had access to any application in my Dock, but everything else was locked away from me. I could not even restart from the menu, because the menu was gone.

Last month I signed-up for our incremental backup service. It works hand-in-glove with the Apple TimeMachine backup service. Except when it doesn't. Since I have had my trouble, I have asked around and not found a single user who was happy with the integration of our scripts and Apple's software. When challenged, the script author admitted that there were problems when a Mac tried to go to sleep in the middle of a backup, etc.

So now, when I need to be able to guarantee access to my files, I may not always be able to. And I may not know it isn't working until I actually need it all to work.

So I'm spending this week re-thinking the whole process and working on bringing up reliability a few percent.

What is your Plan B, if what you're doing today fails?

The Fifth Creative Suite

2010-04-14T07:59:00.001-05:00

Monday morning, Adobe unleashed upon a grateful nation Creative Suite 5, forcing Web professionals the world over to ponder once again whether or not they needed to upgrade.

Adobe, of course, actually released five versions of Creative Suite, for the many and various needs of the thinker-upper set. Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium and the Master Collection, which I have always thought should be pronounced "Mahhh•stuh" in the style of the late John Houseman.

For our purposes, we are really only concerned with three of those boxes, the Design Premium, Web Premium and Master Collection are the only ones with the new Dreamweaver CS5 included. Design Premium also includes Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CSS, InDesign CSS, Flash Catalyst, Flash Professional CSS, Dreamweaver CSS and Fireworks CSS. This is nice for a couple of reasons. Adobe used to devilishly carve up the market so Web professionals couldn't easily buy Dreamweaver and Photoshop or Dreamweaver and Flash without going to the high-bucks box. And also, early money said that Fireworks would not live long after the sale of Macromedia to Adobe, which would kill the program in favor of their own in-house Photoshop. So, yay.

The Web Premium box includes all that and Flash Builder 4 and Adobe Contribute. That's it.

Flash is having a tough time in the media, as Steve Jobs and Apple have once again passed it by with the new iPad, causing a bunch of Very Public Questions to be raised in the media, followed by some Very Public Answers and much chin-stroking. Some sites have very publicly abandoned Flash for other techniques (notably HTML5) that will work on iPhones and iPads. So you may wonder why and how Adobe have now filled out three product lines with Flash?

Flash Catalyst is Flash with another user interface. You can build (simple) Flash apps now, without knowing how to code or a lot of the in's and out's of the full program. You can more easily start with a Photoshop or Fireworks document and turn its constituent elements into buttons or scrollbars. The resulting output can then be handed off to real, hairy-chested Flash developers for further enhancing, or used as-is. Flash Catalyst is probably Adobe's way of making it harder for developers to decide to use HTML5 or JQuery.

Photoshop CSS is tuned-up again. CS4 brought content-aware resizing, where you could designate areas on the image that would keep their aspect ratios (wheels on a bus, for example, that was being stretched, would not appear egg-shaped). Content-aware Fill comes to Photoshop CSS. Select a background and paint-over page elements like trees, parking meters or power lines and Photoshop will stitch together a background intelligently, based on what it thinks you're looking for. You can remove tree branches and still keep that sky gradient behind them. Clip out an irregular sky from another image and square it up before placing it behind the foreground. Complex selections are made easier, too. Guy in red flannel standing in front of red brick wall? Lots of reds, lots of blacks, lots of lines. Photoshop can select just this lumberjack, or grunge singer, and paste him wherever you need, without fear of leaving sleeves behind, or packing along extra bricks. Puppet Warp lets you bend arms and legs around user-defined elbows and knees and a new Lens Correction Filter lets you compensate more easily for the effects of bending light through glass—an awful lot of attention has been paid to the needs of electronic photographers in the new Photoshop.

Dreamweaver gets new CSS layout templates, simplified Site setup (yay!) and support for php-based Content Management Systems. Code Hints can now be customized, beyond selecting which tips you want to see. CSS support is improved and BrowserLab approximates the view of your page in various browsers on various operating systems.

No, it's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of the line. The crew that brings us Adobe Creative Suite CS5? They still have jobs. I would bet we see a Creative Suite CS6 in a couple of years. It's now up to each of us to look into these updates, and decide if they are worth the price and the learning curve. Good luck!

The Persistence

2010-04-07T14:21:00.002-05:00

Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do. We're not into it. We don't feel we have the expertise. Maybe it's just boring, drudge work. The best way to handle something like this? Not to sell any shoes or anything, but Just do it. Make a start and get into it.

Years ago, I used to work with a lot of writers, online. Some published, others dreamers. I got quite a bit of work through a few of them and ended up as a freelance writer, myself, for about a dozen years. One of the most frequently asked questions we got was "How do you sit down and write a book?" And the answer to that is in the question, itself. You sit down and write a book.

But there's more to it than that, of course. We used to have techno-thriller author Tom Clancy in pretty regularly and if someone asked him that question, he'd respond "I just sat down and wrote the son-of-a-bitch!" which I always thought was a disservice to the questioner.

But he's right, in a way. You do have to do it, eventually. But nobody, not even the mighty Tom Clancy at the height of his powers, could sit down and knock out a whole book at a single setting. But what you can do is to split the project up, reduce it to a whole bunch of little, easily-accomplished, tasks. Make a giant list for yourself if you need to, put everything on it—then just cruise through the list, crossing things off as you go.

Name the hero? Check. Name his nemesis? Check. Sketch out a plot outline? Check. Research the geography of the setting? Check. Gather historical facts? Check. Figure out how many characters you'll need to tell the story? Check. Flesh out the details for everyone in the book, including details that inform the character that may not actually even make it into the book. Check. On and on it goes. Then just move through it all, one at a time, building on what's come before.

You cannot write a whole book. But you can write a word. And you can string a few words together and make a sentence. And with enough sentences you have a paragraph, and with enough paragraphs, you have a chapter. And at some point you will have told your story, and you'll have enough chapters. And there's your book.

You may have a bunch of things to do for your next Web project. Find some way to validate forms data before sending it along to a database. Store the information in the database in a way that's not-so-easily hackable. Find a way to get the data out of the database, again, with at least some security. And finally formatting the data. You look at a site like Amazon.com and it's intimidating because there is so much there, there. But it wasn't always like that. Check out the WayBack Machine some time and see how Amazon has grown and changed, sometimes in subtle ways. I'd hate to start from here, designing and building Amazon.com. But you could do it. There's nothing magical about it at all. You could make a list, and then just put one pixel in front of another. Eventually, you'd have a e-commerce site.

There are a lot of problems with an approach like this. One of the main ones is probably that you will quickly run into things you don't understand. Progress slows to a halt while you read a book, or work out an issue on a scratch page. But eventually, you'll get it.

Grandpa had it right, I think. "Yard by yard, it's mighty hard. But inch by inch, Life's a cinch!"

The End of the World

2010-04-01T14:30:00.000-05:00

I hope everything is okay with you, where ever you happen to be and what ever you happen to be doing. We have had several events in the last several days that many folks have hyped to the point that there must be people out there who are surprised to see that the sun came up, this morning.

Health care reform was one of the tenets of president Obama's candidacy. An awful lot of money was spent trying to keep it from happening. When it looked like that wasn't going to work, they just flat-out started telling lies about it, trying to confuse people, because when you are selling something, the confused mind always says "No".

I've never understood that kind of win-at-all-costs politics. If you have to steal an election, what does that say for your ideas and everyone's confidence in them? If you have to lie about reform in order to put people off, isn't it something that really ought to pass? But there you go….

Health care reform passed. And the sun came up the next morning.

A new version of Opera was released. That didn't even scare up the birds. Damnit, I wish that group had that special "It!" -factor that would bring them solidly into double-digits of market share. They are good people, doing good work on a good browser and they deserve better than they have gotten, for it. We are still waiting to see if Apple releases the Opera App for the iPhone and iPad, now.

Which of course brings us to the Apple iPad, which as this is being written is agonizingly only a few teasing hours from its official release. That said, it's already been on Tosh.0 on Comedy Central (they destroyed theirs) and an episode of ABC's Modern Family, last night. It's either going to be the missing link or the world's most expensive drink coaster. Either way, I am betting that the sun will rise again on Sunday, April 4th.

And in the harsh light of this new day, it may be well to look into the pages we have created to make sure that they are iPad ready. This shouldn't take a lot of work, of course, because we have been working on "Future-Proof" pages for a few years now, and the Apple iPad is precisely the kind of future technology we were planning on, even back then.

So the first thing to do is to make sure that your pages validate. The standard hasn't changed appreciably in more than a dozen years, so write to the standard and there should never be any question about how your pages will render in any browser. But there are other concerns.

Apple offer developers an iPad simulator, but Safari on the Apple iPad uses the familiar WebKit engine and displays in a screen just slightly bigger than that of the first Macintosh, back in 1984. Make sure you are using the real estate you have to best effect.

Be wary of plug-ins. Safari has always had limited support, which is why so much of the desktop alternative browser market now belongs to Mozilla Firefox. But Safari on the iPad (just like the iPhone) launches with no support for plug-ins, including the almighty Adobe Flash. If you need to embed audio or video, use the new HTML5 techniques, rather than depending upon plug-ins. On your desktop machine, un-check the Preference in the Security panel to Enable plug-ins and you can simulate the Safari-on-iPad/iPhone experience from a functionality standpoint.

If you have positioned page elements with CSS you may want to adjust those values.

Probably the biggest issue for most of us, though, is that iPad is yet another touch interfaced device. There is no pen involved in using an iPad. There is no keyboard. You drive this machine by means of pointing and touching things with your fingers. So, be mindful of hover-state CSS over links. These aren't going to work, since just like with the iPhone, there is no cursor to boss around with a mouse or keypad. Nothing is going to change, because nothing is recognized as a correct hover state. Also, keep in mind that closely situation links may be trouble for the differently-abled or for the overly-caffeinated. Don't stack links too closely, in other words. iPad does a great job with accessibility, so be sure to use alt= text and title= text when you can.

Apple have wrapped up all of these considerations and others in a Tech Note you will probably want to look over, just to make sure.

Unless you're thinking the sun won't rise, tomorrow.

The Speech

2010-03-24T08:38:00.001-05:00

I had to give a speech in church last weekend, asking the congregation for volunteers for service in three-year terms on the board of trustees. I laid out the challenges that face us in the year and years ahead. I spoke of the problems with our building and how we would need to update much of it, soon. And I told how serving on the board had enriched my own life, and how it might be a good thing for others, too. After the service, during the social "Coffee Hour" more than a dozen people came up to me to say how much they had enjoyed my speech. Backs were slapped. Elbows were squeezed. I made it a point to ask each of them if they might consider volunteering their own time to serve on the board. And in every case, I was turned down.

This kind of thing can easily be a recurring theme in our lives.

We have all run up against overly-designed or unnecessarily-designed Web sites in our travels, I'm sure. You know the situation, where all you want is a new printer driver, or a .pdf of your local bike trails network or the office hours of the place you get a dog license. And instead of a simple page with high-contrast text and colors, lots of white space, headings and an eye toward what you really want or need, you are met with more than half a dozen fonts, usually in at least that many colors, and text of all sizes. Layout will be either constrained into a corner of your wide-screen monitor, or it will be stretched horizontally so wide that the entire page's content is only two or three lines deep on the page, the page header and footer only an inch or two apart because you don't have your browser sized in the same proportions as the original Web developer/designer did.

I tried to explain to a woman once that Web pages serve a purpose. They exist to pass along information. But some information really cries out to be passed along with a minimum of small-f flash and fancy. Imagine two small businesses in your town, a used musical instrument store and… a funeral home. Of the two, which site should present high-contrast acid-colored obscure fonts, animated imagery and even music that starts automatically when the page loads? If you said "The Funeral Store!" give yourself minus-twenty points. If you said "The used-guitar store!" give yourself five points. If you said "Animated graphics? Really? Like it was still 1998?", give yourself one hundred points.

Business folk refer to the Conversion Factor. How many impressions do you have to send out, to get how many sales? That fraction tells you how hard you have to work, to make a skillion dollars. If you only convince two people out of every hundred to do something, you're at two percent. If you want to make more money, all you have to do is see more people. That really is it. If you see a hundred in a day, you need to find a way to see two hundred people and, with no work on your technique, with no improvement in your rap, you will on average make twice as much as before. You can of course work on the other side of the equation, too. People who use prospect's names in their conversation close 25% more sales. People who are good listeners close 25% more sales. People with good grooming and hygiene close 25% more sales. People who hand-write follow-up letters close 25% more sales… at some point, you raise yourself from closing two out of a hundred, to closing three out of a hundred. Now, even without seeing any more people, you're making half-again as much. And if you can manage to do both, you end up making not twice as much, but three times as much.

I was very effective as an entertainer, as a comedian, maybe. But I wasn't very effective as a speaker. My task was not to show people how clever I was, or give them inspiring things to think about for the week ahead. My job was to shake the trees and scare up candidates for the board of trustees, and at that job I feel like I failed, that day.

You may have Web pages that are not as effective as you'd like. The task before you is similar to my own. You can either get more people to view your page, or you can make your page better.

We'll talk about this in the next couple of weeks. If you have any questions, this would be a good time to get them in.

The Limits

2010-03-17T08:43:00.001-05:00

It happened again, last week: Someone asked if they had to "learn it all" or if there weren't some areas they could shortcut and leave to others?

We are kind of lucky, here at UNL, in that there are just so many of us, in many ways. If you don't have the time or the talent for something, there is probably someone, somewhere, who can help to take up the slack.

If you were interested in opening up your own Web design shop, I would say "Yes", you probably should get as deep into every aspect of the business, including Business, as you possibly can. But even there, a lot of people would make the case that you should not probably try to do your own taxes and business accounting. They would advocate leaving that stuff to the professionals. It's a busy world, and keeping up with technology and tax law may be more than most people should try to handle.

Photoshop is a wonderful tool, but it is intimidating, and a great many of the features and tools in Photoshop are difficult to even explain, let alone learning them. And in its way, Photoshop is like Microsoft Word. You get a skillion features and tools, each designed to accommodate professionals working in their particular field. But learning how to set up your page margins and inter-paragraph spacing isn't going to turn you into Stephen King. You still need to bring some talent to bear on the task of editing your graphics or images, to get the most from Adobe Photoshop.

Thankfully, most of our image-editing needs are pretty simple. We resize images, we crop them, maybe we change a color to better match something already on our pages. From time to time you may want to take power lines out of a sky or clean up some RedEye flashbulb issues. That's about it.

But even getting that far in Photoshop requires a bit of time and talent, and someone to explain it in a book, on a Web site or in person. Then, after a little practice, you've got it down.

We deal in HTML, which has not changed appreciably since Bill Clinton was president. Those days are over, and a lot of Web professionals are looking forward to HTML5, now. We will see a continuance of most of what we knew in HTML 4.01 (the paragraph tag isn't about to change) but there will be new ways of doing old things, and there will be new things we can finally do, in HTML5.

Cascading Stylesheets have been around since Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4, but support really wasn't there until Internet Explorer 6. Today we're hearing things about IE9, and how it will make our lives easier. We'll see. Along the way, we have seen support advance as the standards moved from CSS to CSS3 specification. Talk to anyone who did this for a living ten years ago and they will speak with a mixture of both pride and relief that they learned all of the hacks to make CSS work in more than one or two browsers, and they don't have to do this, any more.

Dreamweaver has grown and changed. Dreamweaver 1, 2 and 3 were honestly just cheap ways for me to upgrade my real favorite Web editor, HomeSite. But starting with Dreamweaver MX 2000 the program offered some compelling reasons to learn its new features and workflows and to keep using it through Dreamweaver MX 2004, Dreamweaver 8, Dreamweaver CS3 and CS4. There's no reason to believe they are about to muck it up with Dreamweaver CS5, either.

Still, if you can sketch out a Web design in Photoshop, and you have a lot of Webby friends, there may be little reason for you to ever spend the calories learning HTML and CSS, though doing so would inform many of your design decisions, I'm sure. If you are great at HTML and CSS but do not understand Layers and gradients or why you would use .gif or .jpeg formats or how to switch between the two in Photoshop, you can probably lean on someone who can turn out the work you need in half the time, or less, that it would take you to do it alone.

My dad was always one of those who thought that learning to change your own oil and learning to change your own flat tires would make you a better driver. I am my father's son. I know it will take longer, but I really think you should try to learn it all, and to learn as much as you can about everything, because it all works together, now.

The Learning

2010-03-10T11:39:00.000-06:00

I get asked all of the time some variation of What’s the best way to learn all of this Web Stuff?

It’s an interesting question, because to me it always presupposes that one can learn it all. But the questioner is always more interested in the learning-y part than the all-part of their question, so I usually let it slide.

We are all individuals (Just like everyone else! I love that joke).

But it’s true. Someone like me is going to do well reading about something, most days. I can back up a page or a paragraph or two and take another run at it, if I don’t quite get something. I can take a book or a magazine with me to the doctor’s waiting room, or the laundromat. I don’t need a plug, or an appointment. I just need light.

Other people are more do-ers. They can watch something, they can read about it, they can listen to someone describe it dozens of times, but until they actually do something, it is all just theory to them.

I never know who of these types is going to attend my training sessions. I know the names of the people, but I don’t get a handle on whether this one is a reader, that one is a listener, or these two both have to do something, in order to get it. So I have tried to design my training so it incorporates a little of all of them.

There are a lot of words on the screen at any time, probably too many for some. But I’d rather have people skip over something than not have it there for them. I know the panic of needing an answer late at night and not knowing where to get it. And each course is designed to stand alone. You can come in at two in the morning and click through how to install Dreamweaver and probably get it done, in other words. If you have a few moments and want to learn about Templates, or refresh your knowledge of Templates, then have at it. It’s all there. If you have questions we can cover them in e-mail.

But I try not to read everything on screen. That would be awful. The information is there for the readers. For the listeners, I try to tell a slightly different version, and it’s probably slightly different from class to class, too. I may leave this or that part out, or focus more on something that someone asked about earlier. And at the end of each page or so I try to have a moment of, essentially, “Now, YOU do it!”

People get done earlier than others. People struggle with this or that part. I try to talk them through it, or we spend that time going over questions anyone might have about anything we have covered. When we are done, we move on to the next thing.

The nice thing is that this has all been going on for a while, now. The first HTML books and seminars weren’t all that great. Elizabeth Castro’s Visual QuickStart Guide to HTML is in its Sixth Edition, today. And a lot of that is repeat business, I’m sure. A whole lot of Idjit’s Manuals and Learn It All In An Hour titles are gone, by now. So if you learn best by reading, you have some terrific options out there.

In the same vein, A List Apart crosses the country with terrific in-person training and seminars. All of the stars of Web Development show up for these.

I love that everyone is different, responds differently to differing inputs and yet still arrives at the same destination, somehow. What works best, for you?

The Teaching

2010-03-03T08:08:00.001-06:00

I love teaching. I really do.

In my cubicle, I have four pictures of people. There’s a photo of me hugging my wife. Her long hair hangs in streams across her face and we both have huge, happy smiles. I have a pair of photos of two pilots I admire, Charles Lindbergh, standing next to his Spirit of St. Louis, and Amelia Earhart.

The last photo is of a writer I admire, who was also a teacher. His last book, in fact, was called Teacher Man. Francis “Frank” McCourt is probably best known for his Angela’s Ashes and less so for ‘Tis. But to me, he was first a teacher.

There is something wonderful to me in the act of imparting knowledge to someone. Teaching. People come in the room and sit down and an hour or so later they leave and they look the same, but they’re different. They walk out of the room carrying some new morsel of wisdom they didn’t have when they walked in.

I love what I call the Lightbulb Moment. In cartoons, when they need to indicate that someone has just had an idea, they illustrate this by putting a lit lightbulb above the head of the thinker. There occasionally is a moment when you can see in someone’s face that Now, They Get It! Maybe one time out of a dozen it happens but when it does, it’s all worth it, for me.

I have been a teacher all my life. I can remember showing neighbor kids how to ride a bike. I can remember showing classmates how to color. In High School I made gas money by giving guitar lessons in peoples’ homes. I’d walk in and sit with you and your guitar and point out a different voicing of a chord or some new technique and answer a few questions and then leave with a few extra bucks, but leaving that knowledge behind.

I taught people how to Write. On the old GEnie network, I helped people with query letters, plot outlines, or suggested markets they might sell their stories to. Shortly after this, I started teaching people how to use GEnie, itself. They learned how to read their e-mail and how to download files and how to participate in online conversations. I have been teaching people how to go online and get things done since 1987.

I taught aviation ground school, after a fashion. It was online, in the Aviation Forum of The Microsoft Network. Someone would post a question about the regulations that were in effect at the time, or mention they were having trouble perfecting their short-field landing technique or something like that. We’d work it out. And people would come back and announce they had soloed or they had received their Private Pilot certificate at long last and we all would celebrate, because we all had a part in it.

And so today, there are people out there enjoying making music, being paid to write or just enjoying the writing process, spending time online and even flying airplanes, in some small part because of something that I said or did or wrote. That’s a really great feeling.

I used to complain because of the temporary nature of so much of technology. Those Intel commercials aside, nobody much celebrates the folks who brought us the 3½″ floppy disc, any more. Or the old ZMODEM file transfer protocol. When was the last time you marveled at the efficiency of your local bank-in-a-box ATM? Someone wrote the code for that. Someone stressed about it. Someone wondered half-way through it all if it wouldn't have been better to do that routine this way instead of that way, and even though it meant tearing out a week’s worth of code, they did it—knowing that not one person in a hundred would know or care. They did it because it was the Right Thing.

I used to complain because my first Web page is gone, now. It doesn’t even exist on the WayBack Machine at the Internet archive. In fact, the first couple hundred Web pages I built are gone, now. I used to think if I had it to do all over again I’d come back as an Architect. How cool would it be to drive by an entire building, maybe one that people recognized, one that defined a city skyline, and know that it was once just an idea of yours? That has to be a really satisfying feeling.

But then I realized that I have that, here and now. Saturday mornings, in the summer of 1995, Molly Holzschlag sat with us on the other end of a modem and taught us all HTML. I have asked Molly before, “How many seeds are in an apple? And how many apples are in a seed?” The fruit, pardon the expression, of her labors fifteen years ago is still renewing itself. Three or four times a month, I teach an introductory HTML class. Three or four times a month, I teach a more advanced version. The same goes for Dreamweaver, and so on. And those people wander out of the classroom a little better prepared to handle the challenges of their jobs. And some of them, I know, have already taught others. And so from Molly, though me to them, to others... it continues.

I don’t know what you did, today. But I taught someone something. And you’re right: It’s a great feeling.

The Drupal

2010-02-24T08:00:00.001-06:00

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.

The Funny

2010-02-17T08:05:00.005-06:00

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.

The Photoshop

2010-02-10T13:29:00.003-06:00

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.

The Jargon

2010-02-03T09:31:00.001-06:00

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”.

The Referencing

2010-01-28T08:28:00.000-06:00

How many books do you typically pick up for a new (ad)venture like learning some new technology? I get too many, myself. I always have. It’s a habit I am trying to break.

When I learned all of this Web stuff, I was a freelance writer, and contracted with both General Electric and Microsoft to run a couple of their online forums. I could do this from anywhere, at any time, along with my writing, so it worked great for a few years. But when it came to learning something new, like this new-fangled markup language HTML, it was hard for me because when I most-often had questions, it was at about 2:30am. And remember, I lived not in Silicon Valley, but in Nebraska. So if I didn’t understand something, I was well and truly hosed until someone woke up and logged-on, who also happened to know more about it than me and was willing to help. Those are tiny odds. That kind of environment will just naturally slow a fella down.

And so I came to be a fan of Buying Too Many Books. If I didn’t understand the way material was presented in Learn HTML in 24Hrs, maybe I could make something of the same section in Teach Yourself HTML in 24Hrs or HTML for Dummies or The QuickStart Guide to HTML or HTML in a Nutshell or one of the other titles. When I started this, most books were at or under $20, and I would gladly have paid that much to have someone to ask in the tiny hours of the morning, so to me it made sense.

I recommend you buy only two books, however. At the most. Mark Twain said “The man with a watch always knows what time it is; The man with two watches is never quite sure”. This holds for books, as well.

If all you have is Ain’t We Got HTML? you can get a very good grasp of the issues at hand by reading and understanding it. But when you toss in HTML for Days you start carving up a very different pie. One slice will be Things You Already Knew. Some huge percentage of this new second book is going to be review, in other words. I would place those pages just slightly above the level of Wasted Money. Another slice is going to be Things You Didn’t Know. This is the real value in any second book, things it may have taken you years to pick up on your own, or things you may have just missed entirely. But there’s another final slice: Things You Thought You Knew That Are Wrong. See, one book is going to tell you to always do something, and the other book is going to tell you to never do it. It is then up to you to determine which book is right, and why.

As you add more books, those slices change size relative to one another, even as you continue to “make the pie higher”. Stir in three or four books, and you quickly get to the point of diminishing returns as far as new information goes. But there will be ways that another author explains things that might resonate with you. Still, there is even more opportunity for conflicting information.

I have had the advantage of having writerly relationships with various publishers and so I got a lot of my books free or at greatly reduced cost. And here at work there is a tiny little line-item in the budget devoted to increasing Mark’s technical kuh-nowledge, so I have the job pick up a book now and again.

The last book I personally bought was one of the learning JavaScript titles. Right now, though, I have only a single book for JQuery. And I have only a single book about Drupal. We’ll have to see how long that lasts.

The Coloring

2010-01-20T10:07:00.002-06:00

Jamie sang “You should have seen it in color” last year. Good song, and a good lesson for Web Developer -types the world over. Using color, wisely, can be one of the best things you can do on any Web page. But how do you get the colors you want or need? And how can you be sure that what you have indicated is going to be what page visitors will actually see?

The answer to that last question, first: You cannot. There are differences in the way Mac and PC monitors display colors. Things are just naturally going to look brighter or darker as you move from one machine type to another. And there is no telling with laptops. We must have sixteen different display technologies today for traveling computers and no two seem to be on the same page there—even when they are on the same page. And don’t forget the handheld market. Smart phones and iPods and such will all have a different view on things, too. Remember, too, that users can adjust the brightness and contrast of their monitors at will.

Given that there are about a skillion colors in nature and millions of colors in computering, how do you know that the “Red” you want is the “Red” you will get? If your needs are simple, and you don’t particularly care about which Red you get, you can actually use the name Red. This is supported in all browsers, along with fifteen other colors: Aqua, Black, Blue, Fuchsia, Gray, Green, Lime, Maroon, Navy, Olive, Purple, Silver, Teal, White and Yellow. These are the color names specified in the, well, specification, for HTML 4.

In addition to these, most browsers now also support the CSS named colors, with names like Bisque, BlanchedAlmond, FloralWhite and Snow, each subtly different from one of the originals. If you use a named color like WhiteSmoke, it will look the same on each area of the page you have indicated, though again it may look different when viewed on PCs and Macs, or laptops and handhelds.

But what if you need to (I can say this, I’m Lakota) go completely off the reservation? Then you get into the various ways of indicating which colors you want on your page. Some will indicate the Red, Green and Blue values, as rgb(184,0,0) but the most popular way is to use the Hexadecimal triplets.

With a leading octothorp, #, six digits indicate the Hexadecimal values for Red, Green and Blue. The first pair indicates the Red value, the second the Green and the final two digits are the value of the Green channel. So, #081F0C means we need “08” of Red, “1F” of the Green and “0C” of the Blue. This gives you a very dark green, maybe one of the hundreds of colors sold as “British Racing Green” over the years.

If the two digits in the pair are the same, then you can use shorthand and only indicate three numbers. #FC0 stands-in for #FFCC00, then, giving you the same golden-yellow. In Hex, 0 is none, 1 is very little and F is all there is. #000000 then, is Black, while #FFF is White. Here’s a tip from your old Unca Mark: Any time the triplets are equal, you are moving along the Black-to-White line, representing some shade of Gray. #303030, then, with all channels reporting “30” as their value, is a darker Gray than, say, #CDCDCD, which is very pale. Thirty is close to zero, while C and D are nearer to F.

The Scripting

2010-01-13T08:04:00.001-06:00

One of the things I’m going to try to do better this year is starting these things. I never know when to begin a story, you know? Some people like that, some are annoyed by it. The first time I met my wife, we talked of course about What We Did and when she found out I was involved in computers, she asked how they worked? I stumbled around through Herman Hollerith and Blaise Pascal and eventually all of the way back to the abacus. She came back, and we have been together more than twenty years, now. Is it any wonder I love her so? But I need to do a better job at making beginnings.

So… the Earth cooled and the dinosaurs came. Flash ahead a few years and the Pioneers started putting up Web pages. These were terrific! They offered all kinds of information on all kinds of topics. And they provided links to even more information. You could start out looking up information on where the Holiday Inn is, in Rockville, Maryland and end up learning about how many different kinds of marsupials we have discovered.

But, as with most technologies, we were more adapting than adopting. We were taking the familiar, the books, magazines and newspapers we had all grown up with, and we were putting that kind of information online. Is that progress? We were using $2500 computers to absorb information we used to get for 25¢ from a newspaper. It’s hard to say we were really better off, though the colors were brighter.

We had all of this brain power just sitting there, warming our offices. Couldn’t some of that be harnessed for Good? A computer is fundamentally different from a book, magazine or newspaper. Couldn’t those differences actually be made into advantages?

We developed two kinds of ways to make our pages more thinky. Depending upon what a user was doing with a mouse or keyboard, the look of the page and the information it displayed could be very different, very quickly. And these differences were brought about by using either the Web server, or by using the page visitor’s own computer. We say the technologies are either server-side or client-side today.

Static Web servers work like this: A user calls up a Web page and the server ships it off. That’s it. You get the same page everyone else gets, with the same information on it. If that information ever needs to change, someone has to edit that particular Web page and make those changes. Then everyone will once again get the same, new, information.

Server-side scripting works like this. A user calls up a Web page and the server ships it off. But this time, before it puts the page on the train to your computer, the server goes through the page, line-by-line, looking for little instructions. “Go ask the computer what day and time it is, and put that information here”. “Go ask the computer how much this guy owes, and put that little piece of data there. The changey aspects of the page are all handled by the machine that shipped the information to you in the first place.

Client-side scripting works a little differently. This time, a user calls up a Web page and the server ships it off to them. The page still has little instructions in it, but this time they are for the user’s computer. The computer that displays the page will in some ways be controlling how it looks and works to the viewer.

Imagine a tiny little shoe store. Imagine Amazon.com. The little shoe store probably has a server under the cash register, and may get dozens of hits per day. Amazon gets tons of traffic every minute. The shoe store folks may, in fact, build a new Web page for every shoe they sell. But a store like Amazon.com could never operate that way. They have pages that include various routines to call upon databases and aggregate information in ways nobody could imagine a hundred years ago. The page you see at Amazon.com is probably unique to you and your computer. Nobody else is seeing the same thing in the same way. That kind of variety just isn’t economical if every page has to be marked up individually because they are static. Dynamic pages are the future, and if you’re interested, you should maybe spend a calorie or two looking into JavaScript, PHP and MySQL, ASP and other technologies to make your pages sing and dance.

The Planning

2010-01-07T10:38:00.000-06:00

The last month or so may be what is now commonly called, “A Teaching Moment”. Or maybe we can summarize it with the old Yiddish proverb, Man Plans, God Laughs. So let’s talk about plans, this week. A lot of us are involved in planning, at this time of the year especially. What are we going to do this year? What are the key things we have to get accomplished this year, in order to be invited back next year?

A lot of what we do here is based in the calendar. Schools starts here and it ends here. If you are doing anything that may affect either the students or the faculty or the facilities, it is probably most convenient to do it during a time when school is not actually in session. During Spring Break or at the end of the semester or during the annual holiday close-down.

If you are working on something dealing with the administrative arm or the staff, then there really isn’t a convenient time, but again, because of the product and service we provide, a lot of things will still turn out to be easier if they are done over the various breaks in the actual teaching and learning.

And then we have this last month. Filled with a bad economic news, awful travel news and more than our usual complement of awful weather. Stir in a little illness and maybe a family crisis of one kind or another and you have the makings of a perfect storm of broken plans.

We postponed most of our holiday plans. This was nice because we could. It wasn’t like a space launch where we get one chance today at 4:30 and then don’t get another for six weeks. There was nothing about us all getting together that couldn’t wait.

But there are other events that do have strict timetables. The first day back at work is going to arrive, whether our walks and driveways are good enough to get out and get there or not. Maybe you have a little vacation time banked. Maybe you have to take the bus, a cab or even walk to work if your car won’t start.

I have always been overly cautious. It’s one of the reasons I could promise my wife I would not die in an airplane crash. Nearly every lesson in aviation is backed up by some kind of platitude. One of my favorites: A good pilot may be disappointed in an airplane, but he will never be surprised by one. As I apply full power and gain speed down the runway, you’re looking out the window wondering what your house will look like, from above. I’m thinking “If the engine quits now, I’ll do… X. If the engine quits now, I’ll do… Y. If the engine quits now, I’ll do… Z”. I nearly always have a backup plan or two. What movie do we want to see tonight? What restaurant do we want to visit tonight? On and on….

We got snowed-in and spent three days in the same rooms together. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful, either. We had plenty to keep us occupied. In my little circle, I know people who camped out and worked on major software system upgrades, because they had to get things up and running before that first day back. I know people who had holidays ruined because of illness and because of car trouble. The best of them were able to solider on and at least accomplish something, because they had also sketched out a few alternatives.

So, what is it that you hope to do in the year ahead? Learn a new language? Learn a new program? Learn a new technology? Add something spiffy to all of your Web pages, or take something awful out of all of them? How detailed are your plans, and how detailed are your backups; your Plan-B, Plan-C and so on?

Good luck to you in the year ahead. But remember that things will always go wrong in ways large and small and often in ways we didn’t think we could foresee. I have always maintained that the mark of a true professional is not how they operate when everything is going their way, but how they work when nearly nothing seems to be going right.

It’s a new year. Let’s make the most of it.

The Talking

2009-12-16T08:03:00.003-06:00

Communication is a strange and wondrous thing. I’m amazed at the ways it works and the ways it fails. Some days, I’m amazed it works at all. We seem to have a handle on the basics, but it’s when we stray from some accepted vocabulary that we start to have trouble. Idiomatic speech is interesting--a guy can talk about a hot car and another guy can talk about a cool car and they’re both talking about the same car.

My first holiday dinner with my wife’s family amazed me. All of the sisters talking at once, saying “Oh! Remember that time…?” “With the…?” “No, the other time.” “Oh, at the place with…?” “Yeah!”

It kind of untidied my understanding of discourse, and what I knew of subjects and predicates and adverbs and so on. These people were sparking-off ideas and sending memories around the table without any of that stuff. I still marvel at it, twenty years on, every time all of the sisters get together.

Every group seems to develop its own language. That’s probably be one of the definitions of Group. Surfers have difficulty talking with networking geeks, who can’t understand musicians who can’t discuss Big Ideas with MBA types. All of us born here in the Big PX. All of us products of the public schools system. All of us, nominally, speaking English.

I was in conversation with a friend a few weeks ago when we were interrupted by someone with a Web problem. This happens to me a lot. Everyone in my little corner of the world knows I am The Web Guy, wise in the ways of HTML, Dreamweaver and so on. He had a problem with a .pdf file he was trying to get into a Web page. But he wanted to be seen as a cut above the great unwashed. He told me he was trying to hook it up on the page, inline.

Constant Lurker will know there are two types of HTML tags that display elements in the body of any page; block-level tags, and inline tags. Block level tags include headers and paragraphs, which start new lines and extend from sea-to-shining-sea across the entire available area, or across the entire restricted area if a page has been divided into, say, columns. Inline tags affect only a subset of the entire block. <em> turns on emphasis for some fraction of the greater paragraph. Link text is set off by <a> tags, anchor tags, but it’s very rare that an entire paragraph is clickable text.

Now, stir into this the idea that we have recently added a class for anchor tags that displays the Adobe Acrobat icon after a clickable link to a .pdf file, and confusion starts. As we have just covered, Anchor Tags are inline tags. “You mean you want the pdf link inline, with the new little icon?” “Uh, yeah” comes the reply. So I (quickly) showed him how to create an anchor tag that pointed not to a Web page, but to a .pdf file, and how to indicate this to the page visitor by means of this new application-pdf class in the style sheet for anchor tags. Kewl, right?

“No, I wanted it to display inline”.

“It is inline. All anchor tags are inline.”

What he wanted, it turned out, was a way to turn the information on the .pdf file into something someone would see when they came to that page. I suggested he make a screenshot of the .pdf, trim it a little with Photoshop, and put that up. “But then they wouldn’t be able to select parts of the text, right?” Right.

It was never made clear to me why the information was a .pdf in the first place, but eventually we got him hooked up.

I ended up showing him Dreamweaver’s Table wizard, and how to create a table with as many rows and columns as he needed, and then transcribed the .pdf information into the various cells, matching as best I could the fonts and colors used, and so forth.

It ended up being about an hour’s job, instead of about three minutes. But it could have gone much better if he hadn’t insisted on using the word inline the way he did.

Imagine how life must be at the UN, huh?

The Healthy

2009-12-02T13:50:00.002-06:00

If you seek Web-osity this week, look elsewhere. I’m all about the health, today. Just a couple of hours ago, my wife and I were in the presence of an orthopedic surgeon, as he said the words nobody wants to hear, “You’ll likely have this the rest of your life”.

There was no comfort in him saying this to Kathie, and not me. We are in this together, after all. This was almost as much my ankle, as hers. There is a high degree of finality to this one, I fear. We could continue to work out in some fashion and lose weight. That would help. It would take a great deal of strain off of her ankle, which has basically been ground down to sawdust. But it won’t get better. We are used to seeing and hearing that kind of resolution, generally just before the last commercial. And every week someone has built an artificial chin or elbow or something and we see reporters talking with folks in lab coats while wounded vets relearn walking skills in the background. But there will be no new ankle.

Twenty years ago, Kathie used to walk nearly everywhere. She lived close to her job, and walked there-and-back every day, sometimes twice a day if she came home for lunch. I used to catch her on one or another trip from time to time, with a stately gait full of poise and posture, generally with a hat.

In the early-middle ‘90s, Kathie fell in the bathroom of a motel. We had gone to Omaha, to go to the zoo and see the big new exhibit of the day. She slipped coming out of the shower and was never the same. We had an HMO back then, and they were famous for not wanting to see you unless you were bloody or on fire. They told her it was “a bad sprain” and gave her some pain killers. Over time she became almost accustomed to it and would only occasionally bring it up. They would nod and say that yeah, oftentimes those bad sprains heal slower than a broken bone. We motored on.

And over time, she slowed down. She lost that poise and precision, the dignity and the grace in her stride. We stopped walking downtown to dinner and movies and attractions, which was once one of the drawing cards of our apartment. Over time we both started gaining weight, which only makes matters worse. They told us today that forces and stresses in the feet are routinely three to four times our body weight, so every pound meant three or four in the sneakers. Things got worse.

The spiral continued for several years and honestly, I stopped hearing the little grunts and complaints getting into and out of chairs and cars after a while. But in the last year it has gotten much worse and we found ourselves finally thinking of taking the New Home money and using it to get a car she could get into and out of easier.

I really enjoy this time of year, from the standpoint of measuring progress on goals. This year we joined a health club when it finally became obvious even to us that we were out of control. But it became easy to skip going when every time we went it hurt. Now she’s looking at mostly swimming for a while, and we both wonder about the stairs at home.

This isn’t a death sentence. There isn’t any cornball homily stitched above our sofa about how we are living with devastated joint pain instead of dying from it. We have a lot of years ahead of us, and most of them promise to be good ones. But this is probably the day we changed from being “the kids” to being Old People. It should be noted that this is way different from being grown ups.

Neither of us have had anything like this in our lives, before. You get a cold on the third, it’s better by the seventh of the month. You wake up with a headache, it’s usually gone by the afternoon. I have seasonal allergies, but I have some really good days in July and November and March. Even Kathie’s diabetes is controlled through medication, and we have seen any number of stories of people who lost weight and became active enough that they needed no medication whatsoever. But this is the first thing either of us have had that will never go away.

I don’t know what the future brings, but I suspect there’ll be more salads in it.

The Thanking

2009-11-25T08:15:00.001-06:00

It almost seems cruel, but the wheel has turned and it is once again Thanksgiving. A time to inventory our blessings, show a little gratitude, meet family we haven’t seen for a year, eat to excess and then gird our loins for battle in the morning, as dawn breaks over Black Friday.

I say cruel because a lot of us are worried about our jobs, again. This has become a regular feature of employment. We get dental and eye care and the constant question of Am I Going Have A Job Here Next Year?

In a lot of businesses you can see this kind of thing coming. I sold $X last year, but only $Y this year, and I don’t think they are going to be happy with that. Maybe you could have worked the angles a little better, been a little more clever, managed your time differently and made some difference. But it’s not a surprise—here’s the line, and this is you down here, under it.

Our situation is different. Money comes in, gets divvied-up however it does, by whoever does that sort of thing, and it turns out that we have come up short. The TV news announces we are a skillion dollars behind last years’ numbers.

Wow. That’s more than I make in a whole year. It’s more than I will make in a lifetime. Hell, I don’t know—it could be more than all of the Hiatts have ever earned.

After that dryness in the mouth goes away, someone comes up with some context. Yeah, it’s a skillion dollars, but that turns out to be less than two percent of year-ago fundage. Well, okay… that’s a lot, still. But it isn’t an insurmountable problem, right? Well, here’s where it gets interesting.

Some would say let’s take something out of reserve, give everyone a two percent haircut and wait for the Good Times to roll, again. News stories now tend to indicate the economic storm is over in many parts of the nation or in some key parts of the economy. See? Things will be better soon. We can all hold our breath for twenty-six weeks, if we know that’s as long as it will be.

But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, here, historically, the cap’n will throw someone out of the lifeboat, to make things better and easier for those who remain. We’ll motor along, Doing What We Do until the word comes down and then we will just decide that we don’t need to teach Principles of Elevator Operation any more, and that entire program is cut.

There are all manner of solutions to this. We could all take a tiny pay cut. We could all take a free day off every so often. We could use our current chairs and computers and copiers for an extra year, or two. We could cut back on travel. But for some reason it has been seen in the past as better to do it this way. Instead of everyone suffering a little, a few will suffer a lot.

From a strictly numbers point of view, I’m in good shape. So is my wife. The two of us together make a much wider target, but still, we are only two of hundreds and hundreds. So numerically the risk is probably greater walking to lunch or driving downtown. I teach people how to put information on the Internet. The Internet is more popular now than it was when you started reading this, and more information is moving from printed page to online, with a corresponding need for more people to know how to do that. It isn’t like I am teaching people how to operate an elevator.

But I have friends here, who work in shaky fields of shaky departments, doing work that probably won’t be missed the way, say, teaching Calculus or History would be. I hate the thought of missing them almost as much as the thought that the bullet hits me.

It doesn’t matter how good a job you do, this way. It isn’t about how long you’ve done it. If it is seen as a surplus line, the whole crew goes away. *Poof!* Like fish swimming in a school, with a fisherman overhead. What happened to Bob? Don’t ask, just keep swimming.

So yeah, I am thankful that I have a job. But I already wonder what next years’ Thanksgiving may be like.

Ping!

2009-11-18T14:29:00.001-06:00

Shortly after the Earth cooled, and the waters receded, dinosaurs roamed the land. After an interval, the Internet and World Wide Web were developed and we came to need a way to display images online.

The old, dead, CompuServe network had already trod this path, and arrived at a marvelously clever solution for its day, the .gif file. Say “Jiff” or “Giff”, it doesn’t matter. The Graphics Interchange Format allowed for 256 colors—and one of them could even be “Invisible”. Transparency and interlacing were two of .gif’s best features, animation a powerful third reason to use it on your next page. The file format quickly became a favorite of anyone with only a few colors to display, anyone who needed to have a background image shine through around whatever was being displayed, or anyone who needed a very little motion on their page. The format was a perfect fit for most logos and graphics needs, not great at portraiture or landscape photography, though.

For that kind of richly textured image, you needed to use the other format, .jpg, from the Joint Photographic Experts Group. “Jay-Peg” files could feature as many colors as anyone needed, with correspondingly larger file sizes. But these could be slimmed-down quite a bit by means of lossy compression, by rounding-off sixteen hundred different kinds of Green to only a dozen or so. Most people don’t notice any difference at lower levels, and even when cranked up quite a bit the result is very often still Good Enough.

And, truthfully, it was a Good Enough kind of time back then. Most machines were connected, if that’s the word, via a none-too-fast modem. And quite a bit of computer output was limited to 256 colors back then, too. To see richer color required an extra expenditure for a state of the art video card, and even then the results were squirted onto only a 13” or 14” color monitor, probably. So yeah, Good Enough was good enough, for most of us.

A recurring theme of this blog is that Things Will Not Always Be Like This. And so it was in the graphics world. Video cards improved, monitors improved and online transmission speeds improved. But .gif and .jpg stayed the same. This happens in business until there is a compelling reason to move and in the middle 1990s it started to look like we might get that, when patents and lawsuits and confusion shared the world stage with rumors and no small amount of fear. The online subscription model was in trouble (I had two networks shot out from under me within a year or so, General Electric’s GEnie and Microsoft’s The Microsoft Network). Why would anyone think the people who owned the wasting asset of CompuServe would be willing to sit by and watch everyone continue to use their image format, for free?

This being the Internet, most people got most of the story wrong, of course. Unisys owned the patent for the creation of .gif, but stories floated out every week or so that one day we would all have to send a nickel to someone to display our animated Under Construction graphics. Work began on a replacement.

The fruit of that labor was the Portable Network Graphics format, .png (“Ping!”). .png files can be even smaller than .gif format files, they offer various levels of transparency and don’t suffer from generational losses the way .jpg files do. Save 20% of file size with every edit and you quickly get below 50% of the original .jpg image quality. Animating .png is not as easy as with .gif, but .png files don’t cloud up with artifacts when sharp color differences are present, as with high-contrast colors or text appearing in an image.

The .png file might be king today but for its missing the shipping deadline for the most-popular Web browser of the day, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 for the PC. A lot of the gee-whizziness of .png was lost in IE6, so developers and designers had to ask themselves if it was worth going that extra mile for a file only twenty percent of visitors might even appreciate. For most, the answer was no, and so .gif and .jpg reigned supreme through another browser cycle.

Today, we even more need of high-quality images and graphics than ever before, and today we have the technology to back it up. If you are working in High Definition levels of image detail, consider breaking the old .gif or .jpg habit and trying a .png file for the task. You might surprise yourself—and your page visitors, too.

The Right Tool for the Job

2009-11-11T11:31:00.002-06:00

Everywhere in Life, we struggle with the difference between what we can do, and what we should do.

In many cases, there is settled Law to help guide us. No matter how much an individual needs killin’, it isn’t up to us to carry out that obligation. Most often, there isn’t quite as much Black and White involved in the equation, though.

As it pertains to the Web, there seems to be no end of people who just bought a selection of fonts and are bound and determined to use them all, to get back the maximum value, I guess. Where two or three would be perfect, they need to sprinkle in six or seven. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then nineteen pictures would make a Web page worth a novella, right?

Two Olde Sayings come to mind, here. There is no accounting for Taste. And, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

You can write a bestselling novel in Microsoft Excel. It wouldn’t be fun, or easy, but you could do it. And just because you just learned JavaScript, you can animate your form buttons, have images slide across pages and trail a flock of geese behind every page visitor’s cursor. But that doesn’t mean that’s a good idea, either.

I always try to keep in mind the purpose of a Web page, and ask how this or that change or technology or feature might or might not fit in, given that choice.

I cannot imagine a need for Flash on a Web page for, say, a mortuary. If they are having a sale, should animated angels fly across the screen, carrying a banner saying Twenty Percent Off Cremations in January! or something similar? Maybe that’s too easy. Can I shop for caskets online—Do I really need to do that? But, if so, should the images be animated so clicking on the lid opens it up to reveal the fabrics on the inside? Should a site like that play mournful music at low volume by default?

I’ve been involved in sites where people had some idea of something they had seen elsewhere and wanted incorporated into their new site. The site they had seen was trying to sell something and was full of all kinds of razzle-dazzle effects. But their site was actually more of an informative page, barely even a brochure. Any of that would have gotten in the way of their customers finding the information they wanted.

It’s not like anyone would come back, just because the page navigation flew out from the side, tore itself off of the main menu and danced around the screen before artfully transforming itself into the newly-selected page. The people just want to know how big the gizmo is and if they can get a green one. They’re not going to tell their friends to come and check out this new Web site and even if they did, those friends aren’t interested in a new gizmo and wouldn’t come back later, either.

It’s early days, yet. A great many people making Really Important Decisions are not the ones who actually use the technology, still. Or care much about what it is and what it does. Somehow a rule is needed so one gets implemented. I was four years from my first Web page when I sat on my first committee. There, I was the most-experienced Web Guy on the panel—many people had no Web experience at all beyond clicking on the latest viral link of the day. But I was told that “Our logo needs to be somewhere on every page” and “Everything on our site needs to be accessible in three clicks or less” and several other chestnuts. Sometimes we still have to do things the way The Boss wants them done. Damnit.

Sure, you can. But should you? Is it really the best use of the time and talent and resources? Maybe step back a bit and try to see the bigger picture, and how your site fits into someone’s Webby day. Not every page needs to be Euro-design, spare and featuring acres of White space. And not every page needs to have a row of dancing piglets in ballet tutus high-kicking across the screen carrying a “Welcome!” banner to some Souza march. Choose the right tool for the job, please.

The Bigger Picture

2009-11-04T09:06:00.001-06:00

Have you ever stopped to think about what it is that you’re actually doing, when you mark up a new Web page? And what’s all this about markup, anyway?

Whenever there is a new technology that is similar to something current, we see a massive adoption of the terminology, even the jargon, of the Olde Ways. Even customs and lore seem to transfer over. When Man learned to fly a hundred and six years ago, the closest thing we had to describe and govern this behavior was shipboard navigation, and so a lot of nautical stuff was quickly adopted and adapted for use in aviation.

The original idea behind the Web was that we would be laying out online documents… hmm… kind of like setting type. Sure it was much easier to add color or edit words, but the basic ideas seemed to fit almost perfectly. And since the language of typesetters was called markup, we took to marking up our Web pages. We don’t have any of the cool editing symbols, though I still remember a few of them. But the basic idea is the same. You start with a document, sometimes typed but sometimes handwritten, and you start putting little symbols into it to describe how you want it to look to the typesetter, who loads everything onto a giant plate, from which you print as many copies of the document as you need. Trust me, in Mark Twain’s day, this was heady stuff, indeed.

So from all of this we get the basic structure of HTML, today. All of our tags begin with “<“ and end with “>” and most sort of describe or remind us of their action. We put a slash in front of the same symbol to indicate we are done with its behavior, whatever it was. That is, a “p-tag” (<p>) begins a paragraph, while a “slash-li-tag” (</li>) indicates the ending of a list item. We start at the very top and the very bottom, with <html> and </html>, turning on and turning off the HTML-ness of our document. “Here is where our HTML begins, and here is where our HTML ends”. HTML being, let’s remember, the HyperText Markup Language. So we have a start and an end, and everything in between is (wait for it) HTML.

A section of our document has been set aside to help describe and control the rest of it. <head> begins the head of our page, and this is where we link to any external stylesheets or JavaScript pages and put any meta data we want to include and so on. Only the <title is actually visible to our page visitors here, unless something has gone horribly wrong. The rest of it is really only useful to Web servers, Web browsers and search engines. But we describe that area, too. <head> and </head>.

The part below the head is the body, so <body> and </body> come next. Every visible thing except for the page title appears here, so the body of your document is crucial. We place a tag under the </head> to indicate the body is starting, and one right before the final </html> tag to indicate we are done with the body, in a non-forensic doctor kind of way.

The elements inside the body tags are very close to actual nineteenth-century page markup. We place paragraph tags around the text we want to be paragraphs. We place heading tags around the text we want to be headings. We build complex tag structures to describe tables and lists. In those cases we need more than just an “it-begins-here” tag and an “it-ends-here” tag. We need to indicate the beginning and the ending of a table or a list, sure. But we also need to markup the various elements within it, too. With tables, we next describe the start and end of our table rows, and then inside those we even describe the beginning and ending of each individual table data cell. For lists, we must indicate the start and end of each list item.

I’m sure that back in the day there were people renowned for their markup skills just as there are, today. I’m sure there were pages that were structurally awful, but looked okay on the page just as we suffer today from bad markup with good-enough results.

We are probably lucky things turned out this way. The dominant model for computer communication of that era was a high-level programming language that translated the ideas of the programer into the machine language that the computer understands. We could easily have ended up with a markup model that involved either compiling or interpreting machine instructions. That would have led us down a whole different path.

Fixin's

2009-10-28T10:54:00.000-05:00

You spill out all of your creative talent on a new Web page and after a while you just cannot stand not knowing any more. And so, with just a hint of trepidation, you hit your [F12] key to show the results in a real browser on the real Internet... and it looks awful. What do you do, at that point?

This is a question I seem to get the most. Well, this or some variation of it. How do you fix things? Okay, I took the training. I read the Google links. I looked it up in the book. Then I put down my best first effort and gave it a shot and came up short. Now what?

Validate your page first, of course. But suppose it’s not a syntax error you are hunting, but some weakness in your understanding of, say, Cascading StyleSheets?

When I was learning to fly, I had a Hell of a time learning to land, which is one of the skills you really want to become good at. I had a wonderfully patient flight instructor, though and he gave me the key: Try, as much as is possible, to always do the same things, and do them at the same time. I used to take off at 90 miles per hour the first time, and 110 miles per hour the next. Sometimes, I would climb to eight hundred feet before turning, other times, I would climb up to twelve hundred feet. Sometimes, I would turn toward the runway when I was a quarter mile from the end and other times, I would find myself half a mile away. And when I would turn onto my final approach, sometimes I would fly at 85 miles per hour and other times at 75 miles per hour. Sometimes I’d have the engine at idle and other times I’d be turning 1500rpm.

Every landing was different for me, because every landing was different. I never did the same thing the same way twice in a row, so who is surprised that each landing was a new adventure? Once I learned to always take off at 90mph and to always climb out at the same speed and always make my first turn at the same altitude and always reduce my speed abeam the same location on the runway, and so on, everything came together for me. You reduce your workload and get everything done early so you can more easily manage the fewer variables that have changed since the last time. You end up on Final approach with more or less the same “picture” out the window every time because you’re always more or less at the same place with the same airplane as you had last time. You’re not suddenly having to slow down, or account for a changing cross wind. And if you do have to account for those changes, those are the only changes you have to deal with.

Manage your variables is the lesson. Don’t change seven things and then check your pages, change one thing and check your pages. Work it out in your mind… what is it, specifically, you expect to see? And what are the differences between what you expect and what you get? Change one thing and you can immediately see the results of that change. But if you change nine things you may have a more difficult time seeing the effects of an individual adjustment. This is especially true when you are dealing with margins and paddings in CSS.

I am a big fan of putting a box around it, whatever “it” is that you’re working on, to help you to see what is actually happening on a page. Quite often there is a big difference between what you expect, what you think is happening and what is actually going on. You want to adjust the space between “this” and “that”? Draw a box around either element and then start making adjustments—just remember the border itself needs to be accounted for in that space. If you don’t declare a border, there won’t be one, of course. But if you do declare even a one-pixel border around an element, you will be placing two pixels in either the horizontal or vertical space you are working in. Remember that.

Work slowly, deliberately. Make a change, anticipate what it will do, and then check the results. Once you have the effect you wanted to achieve, or are happy with an accidental discovery, then move on to make other changes. And keep learning. Eventually, you will find that what you expect to see and what you actually get are more and more often the same. Then maybe you can back off a notch or two and only check every two or three changes. But if you’re surprised again, go back to the last time you weren’t and do the single-change thing again, stepping through the process until it all works.

I'm on the Beach

2009-10-21T10:22:00.000-05:00

Well, at least I'm on vacation. Check back next week, please.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5?

2009-10-15T10:24:00.000-05:00

It came up last week, during training. “When will the next version of Dreamweaver arrive, and what kinds of differences can we expect?”

It seems like only yesterday since the upgrade from CS3 to CS4, but the big wheel keeps on turning. As I tell people in my Introductory class, “The people who brought you Dreamweaver CS4 still have jobs!” There will be another new version of Dreamweaver one day, probably (but by no means guaranteed to be) named “CS5”. A new version, however it’s named, may be with us as soon as the summer of 2010.

Remember, Dreamweavers so far have been called Dreamweaver, -2, -3, -4, -5 and then Dreamweaver MX2000 and Dreamweaver MX2004, then Dreamweaver 8, -CS3 and -CS4. So, really, it’s anyone’s guess.

What kinds of changes can we expect? The developers at Macromedia and Adobe both spent some major coin pumping up the support of Web standards and Cascading Stylesheets, since the MX releases. Every version has been better than the previous one, in that regard. It is now easier to twiddle with CSS, and the twiddling results in much better markup.

The user interface has been cleaned-up a bunch. Remember we lost a whole menu in the move from CS3 to CS4 (“Text”). I would expect a few improvements here, again. I would expect a little more modernization. Dreamweaver CS4 no longer includes the Netscape Navigator “Resize Fix” JavaScript code. I expect one day soon some cub developer will be tasked with shining-up the Snippets section, improving the default dates in the drop-down menu options and maybe adding a few new ones--it’s been a good long while we saw anything happening, here.

The Mobile Web is not getting any smaller, and I would not be surprised to see more support for that in the next version. Maybe a simpler, easier way to approximate your latest page in two or three handheld devices.

Dreamweaver’s Design View now runs on the same WebKit engine behind popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. It would be nice if we could get some kind of a real-world way to view our pages, independent of platform. Suppose I work on a Macintosh. Why should I have to boot up even a virtual Windows machine to check a Web page? Why couldn’t Dreamweaver provide me with some kind of Windows Internet Explorer emulation as part of the program?

One feature I have always disliked, that is probably unlikely to change, is the way you cannot move your cursor up a line in the column one of Text View. Click on a line of text in your markup and right-arrow to the end of the line. One more right-arrow gets you to the very beginning of the next line. Now, up-arrow to get back into the line you just left, and Dreamweaver thoughtfully moves you over about five or six characters into the line. Left-arrow as many times as you need to get back to that first column and up-arrow again and you will once again be in column four or five or six. Whatever it is, it’s annoying to me.

One area where Macromedia and Adobe have always fallen short is in the support and training and even the marketing of features and benefits in the Creative Suite. Can you tell me what “Spry” is and does and how it works and why we should care? Sprinkled throughout the Dreamweaver interface are little references to Spry, but you have to really want to learn what it is and does to get any value or benefit out of it.

What would you like to see, in the next version of Dreamweaver?

I'm on vacation, next week. Keep the lid on it!

Run Google Chrome in Internet Explorer?

2009-10-07T09:57:00.002-05:00

Through the magic of browser augmentation, you can now run a good WebKit browser from within your copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Some notes for those of you scoring this one at home:

Internet Explorer is far and away the internet’s most used Web browser.

Internet Explorer 6 was born in August of 2001, and last updated in April of 2008.

For many years, IE6’s share was something around ninety percent of the market.

Internet Explorer 6 does not understand HTML5 tagging.

Internet Explorer 6 features old-style (slow) JavaScript performance.

The Web community has been asking for a better browser since long before IE6 showed up, and many responded by drifting away to Firefox, Safari and the Google Chrome browsers.

Some IT departments thought it was cute to tie Web applications not to the underlying standard technologies of the Web, the HTML, the CSS and the JavaScript, but to the underlying technologies of Internet Explorer, including ActiveX, despite the security risks involved.

That’s pretty much it, for Internet Explorer and especially Internet Explorer 6. Comes now the Google Chrome plug-in, which shines up IE in ways that Microsoft couldn’t, or wouldn’t, for all of those years.

Google Chrome Frame is an open-sourced Google plug-in featuring one-click installation that brings Internet Explorer up to par with other WebKit browsers. You can use it with IE6 if you have to, IE7 if you’re still using that, or IE8, and take advantage of JavaScript improvement approaching ten times better JavaScript performance, plus new support for HTML5. All of your old IE applications still work, because you are still using IE.

This comes to you from your friends at Google, remember. Not your... developers, at Microsoft. Take a deep breath, here, kids. Chrome now runs inside Internet Explorer. Just imagine if you could get Honda or Toyota quality and performance in a new Pontia—uh, Satur—uh, Buick. To all outward appearances, you’re a Good American, buying a Good American Car. But now it runs forever and doesn’t fall apart on you and doesn’t depreciate as fast. This is going to be an interesting ride, folks. Google does not destroy anything about IE6, IE7 or IE8. It does not change the browser in ways that it identifies as Google Chrome on server logs. It adds functionality to IE, just like any other plug-in.

Web developers cannot afford to ignore Internet Explorer, it’s just too big. But this new plug-in allows authors to include a single line of markup in their pages that flips the rendering of a page from Internet Explorer’s “Trident” engine to the increasingly-popular WebKit engine. Suddenly, HTML5 works, and JavaScript works much faster.

Now, quite often in life when you mix manufacturers, authors, artists, if you will, you run into troubles. The whole car is English but the engine is now Metric. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Google Chrome Frame. Internet Explorer now runs the ACID-3 test and scores… 100 out of 100. It’s amazing.

Now Microsoft, predictably, doesn’t think much of this idea. They remind people that now, you have two lines of vulnerability online, the bag of IE problems and the bag of Chome’s troubles, too. That’s certainly valid, but I suspect that Google is going to be doing whatever it can to shine up Chrome Frame.

Add-In and Add-On, Why Doncha?

2009-09-30T09:37:00.001-05:00

Things are getting better out there. Browsers today are still not fully in agreement as to how any particular page should look, but it’s a whole lot better than it was. I think we all owe a tremendous debt to the Firefox people at Mozilla. They have done more than anyone else to shame Microsoft into fixing their Internet Explorer, who had more to fix than anyone. IE’s still not perfect, but it’s much better than it was. And that’s upped the game for everyone.

There was a Web Standards Group who railed against substandard browsers, but they never did a particularly good job of explaining who they were, how to join them, or why anyone would want to listen. For a time they maintained a redirect page you could send people to that encouraged people to upgrade their Web browsers, but they grew timid and withdrew from that. The guys from A List Apart drew a line in the sand back at Issue 99 and said “No More!” and started making a lot of noise about how Things Should Be Better Than This By Now. That was great and it did a lot to bring a brighter light to The Cause. But Mozilla actually went about solving the problem by creating a wonderful browser with features people had been asking for that, wait for it, actually worked! And they gave it away for free.

One of the best things Mozilla did, early on, was to realize that they could not think of everything, and that they could not provide everything, that the market might want. It seems self evident, now. Nobody could imagine the Two Steves trying to write all of the programs that would ever run on the Apple II, or on the Macintosh. A big reason the Apple iPhone is so popular is not because the audio is so much better than any other telephone or that the AT&T plan is just so much better than what you can get from Verizon--it’s a wildly popular telephone because everything on it works and, “There’s an App for that!”

Mozilla Firefox has terrific support for add-ons. These range from very simple to incredibly complex. They span the range from whimsy to serious research. As you might imagine, there is a pretty comprehensive collection of Web Developer tools available at a click that will help to make your page-building better, faster and easier.

CodeBurner is an extended reference for anyone working HTML and CSS. Originally, this was itself an add-on to the Firebug extension, but now it is available as a standalone tool. Very nice, though you may prefer the books and documentation that ships with every copy of Dreamweaver (Window => Results => Reference leads you to the O’Reilly library of reference materials for HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and more ).

One of my favorite extensions is HTML Validator. It generates a continuously updated report in the bottom status bar of Firefox, showing the number of validation errors found on the page you are viewing almost instantly. Click on this number and the Page Source displays, with the errors highlighted. From the Firefox add-on site, there is a warning saying that there is no Mac OSX version, but if you visit the developer’s Web site, you can download a Macintosh version there. It’s the one I depend upon, every day.

Chris Pederick’s wonderful Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar full of tools you probably didn’t even know you needed. Toggle CSS on or off. Quickly re-size your browser to approximate various screen resolutions. Outline block-level elements, or deprecated elements you are still using on your pages. Disable JavaScript, Images or even Cookies on a page to see how each affects the outcome. Even validate your markup or code. It’s a nice piece of work, and so far Chris only suggests that you pay him for his efforts.

The charmingly-named ColorSuckr is not a color picker tool (there are several of those, too, though). ColorSuckr studies an image and then suggest the dozen colors represented in that image that would look best when used on your page. Kind of nice.

There are extensions entirely devoted to JavaScript, the DOM and all of those Black Arts. Similarly, there are downloads catering to the PHP developer, or ASP developer, who wants all of his or her tools in one place.

I’m finding more and more that I develop in Firefox, now, and merely check my pages in other browsers. Try a few extensions out this week, and you might begin to work that way, too.

HTML 5ive?

2009-09-23T13:36:00.001-05:00

HTML 5 is coming. Maybe. Is there any reason to care? To worry? To rejoice?

One of the things that I enjoyed the most about teaching HTML over the last several years is the look in peoples’ eyes when I would explain that in all of techdom, there was at least one thing that you could learn all of and then be forever current in: HTML was done.

You spent a lot of time learning Windows 95 when it first came out. And damned if they didn’t follow it up with Windows 98. But that was okay, it was only a few new features, really. And most of it looked and worked like Windows 95 did, or tried to, so it wasn’t really a burden. Flash ahead through Windows 98SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. Now, Windows 7 is again hewing to the basic baked-in goodness of Windows 95. From one release to the next you have very few surprises, but there are changes. Still, you only had to absorb a dozen or so new details every several years. It was manageable, but it was still a burden.

We didn’t have that in HTML. The committee slapped one another on the back and promised to keep in touch and turned out the lights years ago, secure in the knowledge that the future belonged to some variant of XML and/or XHTML. Work on HTML had finally stopped. You could finally spend a few quiet moments every day learning One New Thing and you would eventually learn all of HTML. What a wonderful place to be, huh? Think of the guy or gal out there who knows more about HTML than any of us. You could know as much as they knew. You could know it all.

Well, those days may be drawing to a close. And, maybe, that’s not such a bad thing. Every Web page I have built in the last four or five years has had some common elements with every other Web page I have built in the last four or five years. They have all had a “header” of some kind—not the HTML document <head> area, but a visible header area of the page. They have all had some form of page navigation. They have had some kind of footer. And I have had to sketch out these areas on the page using division tags, assigning classes and IDs as necessary, then styling these divisions as needed.

Since HTML 4.01 was chiseled into stone back in the Olden Days we have seen the rise of several new technologies, many of which look like they’re going to be Keepers. It’s a multimedia world out there and we need more and better ways to accommodate that. But how about all of that vague and indistinct markup? If every page needs divisions for headers, footers and navigation then shouldn’t there be some taggage to support that? In the front-running candidate for Next New Markup Language, there is.

Now, these things have a way of taking a lot of time. The committee is working, albeit slowly, on codifying every little nuance of every new descriptor and we can probably look forward to at least one Name Brand browser ignoring some meaningful fraction of their work. We will need to learn new hacks and workarounds and we should expect a transitional period where some of it all works great in one or two obscure browsers, but no browsers gets it all right. In a way we are already there, with some spotty support for HTML 5 in several current browsers, but nobody yet handling it all.

There is a chance that this will finally be it; the end of the line. But I suspect that now that we have finally gotten away from the idea that HTML might one day find itself a dead language, we probably will see point-releases and maybe even an HTML 6 one day. And so our markup language will join the ranks of our Web page editors and our operating systems as an ongoing project that continually refreshes itself to the demands of the marketplace, and one that we must devote continuing resources to mastering.

Troubleshooting III: Return of the Bugs!

2009-09-09T13:25:00.001-05:00

Is It Me?

It’s a question I don’t often ask myself, these days. Since somewhere around high school, I have pretty much expected it was me. That’s just the way I ended up wired, I guess. But I do have a few core competencies and within these circles, I am pretty much not worried that, if something goes wrong, it’s because of something I have done.

I made very sure I knew how to fly. I was terribly anxious when I had three flight instructors in four hours of instruction. How do they keep it all straight? What are the odds that each of them is going to think that one of the others taught me how to, say, Land A Plane? So I did a lot of reading and studying, hung out with pilots and listened to what they had to say and I made sure that I was fully in the moment, whenever I bought “an hour of dual” and actually went up to learn something. People have died doing this. I was going to make damned sure that I was not one of them.

I am slowly regaining that kind of feeling with my guitar. For thirty years I didn’t play at all and lost almost all of my musical mojo. A year ago, I assumed that if something went wrong in the band, it was something that I had done wrong. Now I am getting back to that confident place where I love playing. Wanna change tempo? I’m okay with that. Wanna change key? Let’s give it a shot. I’m good.

But for years now, I have been really confident of my markup skills. I embarked upon the journey of learning all I could about HTML years ago and the powers that be blessed me with a stagnant technology that hasn’t changed in meaningful ways for a dozen years. You can start today and learn a tag a day and how to use them and still learn as much HTML as anyone in the world knows, within a year. A month or so and I was good with XHTML, too. CSS came hard, but by biting off manageable hunks and really wailing on them I have picked up most of it by now, too. When and if a new standard of CSS or HTML is announced, I’m probably not going to have much trouble moving into it because I know the current stuff so well. Someone coming in new would have to learn everything. I’ll only have to learn the changes.

But this week, a couple of things happened and in each case, for some reason I lost half a day to self doubt.

In the first, I had been applying the new Template to my web application that does the scheduling for the various training we give at work. It used to have “this” kind of a shell around it, and now it has “that” kind of look to it. On some level, I knew that the only thing that changed was the shell. It’s like if Frank Sinatra came out in a dark blue tuxedo and sang for half an hour and then took a break and returned to the stage in a dark gray tuxedo and sang some more. In both cases, you’re listening to the same guy, only the clothes have changed. That’s how the Templates update should have worked.

But I applied the new Template to a page that adds people to a class on Thursday morning. And Thursday afternoon, someone called saying they couldn’t get logged-in. If it had happened last week, I would have gone down the Do-You-Have-The-Right-User-Name-And-Password tack, not the Oh-My-God-What-Have-I-Done tack. But because my changing the page and the complaint came so close together, I assumed one had something to do with the other. I still don’t know what caused me to see if I could add myself to the class, which worked like a champ and reset my thinking back to the account name and password, which is where the problem really was. Once I found the right information, I was able to get the guy loaded into the class quite easily, just like always.

This morning, I was working on styling a Table and could not get rules to work. I had put all of my page styles into the head of the page, and no matter how specific I made them, nothing seemed to register on the page. I could do only inline styles, where you apply a whole long list of properties and values to individual tags. I even sought help, asking what I was doing wrong and nobody could find anything, until it was noticed that the Templates files on the server were wrong. It wasn’t me, it was my server administrator! But I immediately folded-up and spent most of a morning questioning just how much of this stuff I really did know?

I wonder how long it will take me to regain my former confidence? And I wonder how doing so might one day end up biting me in the hiney?

Troubleshooting II: Son of Troubleshooting

2009-09-02T08:52:00.000-05:00

More thoughts on What To Do When It Isn’t Working.

Those of you who have had a little experience with Cascading Stylesheets will probably already know this one, but it’s one of my favorites. You can style just about any tag to act like just about any other tag, of course. You can make all of your strong text italic, or all of your emphasized text look like H4 headings. But you can also draw a border around any visible element on your page.

This is really where CSS has it all over Tables, when it comes to design. You can add a border to your table, of course, but it places a border around everything that sketches out the table. Headings, rows, columns, cells and the outer edge of the table, itself. With CSS, you can style borders around only the fourth cell in a row.

So, td td td td { border: 1px solid green; } will place a one-pixel border around any cell that is fourth in a sequence, so remember that if your row has five boxes, it may have two “fourth boxes”, the 1-2-3-fourth box and also the 2-3-4-fifth fourth box. You have even more control. td td td td { border-bottom: 1px dotted red; } places a dotted red line at the bottom of that third box. Pretty neat, huh?

So, how does any of this help you when it comes to Stuff Not Looking Right? You can easily lose track of spans and divisions and columns and paragraphs and all of their various margins and paddings and so on. So, when it doubt, put a border around it!

I cannot begin to count the number of times I was not sure why something was not getting better as I tweaked this or that element, only to draw a box around something and discover I wasn’t even working on the right area of the page! With today’s pages full of zenboxes and columns and so on it can be easy to get off into an area where you think you are working in one part of the page, only to find that you are actually adjusting some other page element.

Again, table borders go around everything in the table. Adding { border: 1px solid blue; } to a table in CSS, however, just draws a box around the outer edges.

Where this is all really useful is in figuring out how various spatial adjustments will affect our pages. The two most-common CSS rules are probably going to be margin and padding. We remember from our HTML training that we have an image, a portrait. Surrounding that, we have padding, like the matte. Then comes the border, similar to the frame of the portrait, and finally we have the space outside of the border, like the room outside of the frame, which we call margin.

You have an image that you want flush-right against the right column of your page. If you apply padding of 1 em-unit all of the way around that image ( padding: 1em; ), you will be creating an air space equal to the size of the M character over the top, down the right side, across under the bottom and up the left side. Get used to traveling clockwise around the box. If you need help, remember that “Margins and Padding are TRouBLe”. T-R-B-L, Top, Right, Bottom and Left. Those are the order we specify margin and padding limits.

After adding some space around your photo, you may now be unhappy because all of the text on your page lines up at the edge of its container, but the right-most edge of the picture itself is back to the right a character or two, and its apparent top isn’t aligned with the first line of text, but aligns closer to the second line. The way to fix this would be to assign no padding at all to the top and the right, but keeping it in effect for the bottom and the left-side of the photo. Padding: 0 0 1em 1em; will do that for you. Remember TRouBLe. We are assigning a value of zero to the top padding, zero again to the right-side padding, 1em to the bottom and another 1em to the left side.

Some of these adjustments can be pretty subtle and depending upon the vagaries of servers and connections, you may not be able to simply refresh your browser quickly enough to see the difference. But if you draw a box around your image, it will be much clearer. In your stylesheet, img { border: 1px solid orange; } will place a one-pixel line around your image. Some people also like to color a background when using padding. Background-color: #353535; will place a dark gray background color anywhere you have visible padding.

Three things are important here. Choose a color that contrasts easily with the rest of the material on your page. If your page includes a lot of browns and greens, choose a bright yellow or pink for your border color or background-color. Secondly, if things are really tight, you may find that adding a 1-pixel border around elements destroys some of the design. Imagine a full-width container of 800 pixels for your page. Now you fill that with three boxes, one 350-pixels wide, one that’s 150-pixels wide and one that’s 300-pixels wide. There’s your 800, right? What do you suppose will happen, if you add a 1-pixel border around that middle box? Remember, you have a pixel on the left, and a pixel on the right to contend with.

Finally, remember to delete these little tricks before you walk away from your page. It may confuse your visitors if they happen upon a page with little lines drawn around various elements for no apparent reason.

Troubleshooting

2009-08-26T09:27:00.001-05:00

Troubleshooting always sounded like a Good Idea, to me. Got a problem? Take it out back and shoot it! Who could argue against that, right?

But how do you go about figuring out why a page doesn’t work the way it should? How do you find a validation error or a missing tag that’s causing everything to load up one column over from where you need it?

Let’s break it down into two cases. New Stuff and Old Stuff.

New Stuff

If you’re building page from scratch, the task is in many ways more difficult. You have nothing to go on and you have no fond memories of it ever actually working. Start with a deep breath. It’s highly unlikely that anyone is going to die as a result of your page not working right, today. First thing’s first: Validate your page. Let the validator look through it, line-by-line, scouting for simple errors in your markup. It’s easy to miss a closing double-quote or leave off a Table Row ending tag. The validator will catch things like that.

Once you have valid markup, you may find you have solved your problem. If not, work slowly and methodically, from the outside-in. Start with the framework of your page. If your divisions and tables and images aren’t where they are supposed to be, try to build a page where they are, without all of the text and linkage and so on.

The thing you don’t want to do is to start a slash-and-burn program of markup deletion. You have a lot of calories invested in your page, and there may be some Good Ideas in there that you can rescue. It is much easier to copy-and-paste than it is to think up All New Markup, after all, so comment out entire sections of your page and work with what is left. Add-back things one at a time and measure the differences. Remember that Web browsers will ignore anything between the  characters, including text, media tags and even markup. Select the range of text you want to “delete” from your page and comment it out, instead, using the little cartoon voice bubble icon in your Code View Toolbar. Select the Apply HTML Comment option.

From here, don’t change two things. Change one thing, and then check it. Change the next and look over those results. Change a third thing, and so on. It is much easier to find the offending markup or code this way, and then much easier to seek out a solution.

Old Stuff

Working on current pages is a little easier, but totally ego-blasting. If the page works and you monkey it up, then there is no one to blame but yourself. Before modifying a working, current page, I like to make a copy of it for safekeeping. I may have a better idea, but if I can’t bring it to life, I can always at least go back to the way it was this morning, when it maybe wasn’t pretty but at least it worked.

But the basic process is the same, even including that deep breath at first. Validate your page, first. Then, work slowly, making only a change at a time, and see how these changes affect the outcome. Don’t delete anything, comment it out and then un-comment the various sections until you have a page that is complete. In this way, as above, you will be able to instantly see what markup is breaking your page, and hopefully be able to quickly and easily change it.

Remember, though, there is no glory in spending all day in a project like this. If you have spent eight hours on a page and it still doesn’t work, you have lost a whole day. ASK someone for help in a situation like that. Spending all day on a problem doesn’t make you a hero. Nobody is going to give you a medal for something like that and it’s very possible that someone in the WDN can get you an answer quickly and easily that will speed you on your way.

It's Over; It Begins Anew…

2009-08-19T08:21:00.000-05:00

Or at least it has finally begun. The big Template move of 2009 is underway and pages all over the site are being renewed and reinvigorated with the New And Improved Template.

It might be worthwhile to take a moment here and actually go over what this represents. The work of Monday morning actually started about a year ago, with a regular meeting of the UNL Web Developers Network. We started thinking back then about what the new pages might end up looking like, and considering what features we wanted to have added or removed or improved and so on.

The key thing in all of this, I think, was that we had plenty of time, and we approached the whole project as a series of manageable tasks.

Tom Clancy was once asked how anyone could possibly sit down and write a novel? He allowed as how it was definitely a daunting task, and wondered himself how anyone could do it. What he did, he said, was to approach the whole book as a series of steps. Write a first sentence. Get it all shined-up and then move on to the next one. Stand up. Walk around. Get used to the idea of how these two sentences work and play together, and then add a third. At some point, you have an opening paragraph. Then, you have some idea, some guidance, as to what your next paragraph has to be, so start in on it. Two or three paragraphs and you have yourself a page. String a few pages together and you have built a serviceable chapter. Lather, rinse, repeat; and the chapters become… a book!

We did not sit down around a big table one day and decide the navigation was supposed to sit atop the page. We actually spent one a couple of days coming together with upward of a dozen navigation schemes. Some were from higher education sites. Others were from online shopping sites. Others were news outlets, government sites and more. We didn’t care where the Next Big Idea came from, we just cared about the idea. Once we settled on a top-nav situation, work began on how to make that all work, and—and this is important—how to make it all work within our current situation, with the relatedlinks and navigation and footer information we already have living in the sharedcode folder. Our navigation, remember, was (is) built from two levels of nested unordered lists. So whatever we did, it had to work with anyone’s current biplane navigation file.

We talked about color. We talked about shapes. We talked about White Space. We talked about what language to use, in marking up the pages. Remember, we were working on a design that would probably welcome the incoming class of 2017 or so. We tried to shoot current trends out into the future and make a page for the technology of summer, 2009 and the technology and the marketplace of 2012 as well. At the time, we considered HTML 5 and XHTML 2 briefly and discarded both. And that was good, because the XHTML working group imploded a short time later. We are holding with XHTML 1 for the time being, and will reexamine the situation for the next redesign.

We got a lot of input from a lot of people. Not every idea was incorporated into the site—some ideas actually conflicted with one another and we couldn’t do both. Not everyone is entirely happy with every aspect of the page today, but the general feeling I get from the feedback I have received has so far been very positive. I am interested in hearing from people today, of course, but also in hearing how people think about the pages in a year or so. Having lived with them for a year, I suspect people’s opinions may change some.

Time is your buddy in a project like this one. The more you have, the better job you can do. The big stuff comes together quickly, or can. But I always wish I had more time to shine up the little details in a project like this one. I am hoping that we will have more time for the next one.

I am already looking forward to it.

Keeping Up

2009-08-12T09:15:00.000-05:00

I was talking with someone the other day about how I had spent my afternoon, describing editing screen shots and writing copy and double-checking everything and they asked me something I hadn’t considered much, lately, “How do you keep up with everything?”

There is a lot. HTML hasn’t changed much, but that itself may be changing, soon. Cascading Style Sheets have not changed much recently, but that may be about to end, too. Dreamweaver changes at regular intervals, but after Dreamweaver MX2000 only incrementally, and I am still catching up there.

The Templates we use have changed quite a bit over the summer, with tiny little changes as recently as, well, yesterday. But I have been in most of those meetings, and even had a hand in a few of the changes, so that hasn’t been difficult, aside from the communications issues.

So there’s the situation with the tools and the languages. There are (or were) lots of conferences, seminars and books and magazines and newspapers available, too.

The Computer Press has been ravaged in the last four to six years. I used to be a part of it, having been a writer for Ziff-Davis’ Computer Shopper magazine, the MacHome Journal and others. There was a time not long ago when you would walk into a B.Dalton bookstore and see several bays of computer books. At one time there were thirty titles devoted to WordPerfect, alone.

In the Macintosh slice of the pie, we had four or five monthly magazines, Macworld, MacUser, MACazine and the programmy MacTech, along with a weekly newspaper/magazine, MacWEEK. We had two trade shows every year, plus the mighty Comdex show, and various Mac user groups all dishing out How-To-Mac details, news, tips and so on. The PC side of things was even worse, of course. Just PC World, from IDG, was like getting a Sears Christmas catalog every month.

As far as I know, there are only three Web magazines, and only two you should consider. Both are from England, which makes them a little expensive, but I recommend Web Designer and .Net, if you can get them. A caution: .Net used to be available here in the USA as Practical Web Design. Elsewhere in the world it was called .Net (Dot-Net). That never quite caught on here, because everyone with a PC hears that and thinks of the Microsoft development architecture of a few years ago. There are ads enticing you to subscribe to Practical Web Design, but when you do, .Net is what shows up in your mailbox.

Today, of course, we have the Web and you need a computer to even get there, so it stands that the Computer Press would suffer first and hardest. Reading paper products is down across the board. Newspapers have folded and are struggling to reinvent themselves, bookstores have closed leaving only Barnes and Noble and Borders in many towns and the local magazine rack is about a third the size it was just a few years ago. The acre of computer books has shrunk down to about the same size as the cookbook section in my favorite book store. So, apparently, nobody has time, any more, to just sit and read. So, that leaves us Web sites and podcasts. And I use… both.

I try to check in with A List Apart at least once every couple of weeks. They generally feature three big stories and cover a lot of real, nuts-and-bolts markup and styling. These are the guys who led the charge for standards adherence and better browsers, starting with Issue 99. They are Good People.

I also listen to podcasts. I work in one of those cubicle farms that are made fun of in Dilbert comics and cheap movies. I don’t enjoy hearing my neighbors arguing with their wives, spouting the latest political propaganda or catching Hell from the boss. So, I plug my headphones or earbuds in and listen and learn throughout the day.

Paul Boag (BOW·agg) has one of the best podcasts for anyone wanting to know more about their craft. Boagworld is a weekly podcast for those who “Design, Develop or Run Web sites”. As with print magazines, both Boag and my next podcast come from the UK. The Rissington Podcast answers the question “What would a Web podcast be like if it had been done by Monty Python, just following World War II?” If you have never asked that question, perhaps you should give a listen.

One of the best ways to keep up, of course, remains the monthly meeting of the Web Developers Network. Sitting in on one of those gets you rubbing shoulders with people who are using other tools to keep up, and some of that knowledge is bound to rub off on you. And it’s the best way to find out how all of this new technology, or all of these new techniques, might find use here.

The Best Laid Plans…

2009-08-05T09:39:00.001-05:00

Burns said it, more or less. “The best laid plans of mice and men oft times go astray”. So it has been, with the move to the new Templates.

This move hasn’t been as certain as previous updates. At least in my memory, we had a very definite point at which everything stopped and we all just worked and waited and watched… and at the appointed hour we updated our pages and we went on with our lives.

This time it’s different. Economists warn that these are the most dangerous words in the English language. People are getting mortgages for $500,000 houses without even having to prove they have a job, let alone proving how much they actually earn? It’s okay, a year from now they will sell the house for $550,000 to a bigger chump with a better mortgage and everything will be fine. This time, it’s different. Right.

But the path of this month’s Template change has been different. Last month, I gave a talk, an overview, of the new design and what changes had been made and how they would affect everyone. At that meeting, it was announced that we had reached a deadline, that the Template markup Would Not Change from here on (for a while), and so we were now all safe to download the latest archive and get to work on our pages. I should point out that at that meeting, I was told that something had changed just that very morning, and a feature I had put into my presentation “would not ship” as we say. Changes were happening right up until the very end, but they were done, now.

I made a joke about it. At some point during the discussion of What Was New, I offered to bet anyone in the room that we would have at least one update before our August 17th kick-off. Sadly, there were no takers.

Since that day, I have completed Template training based on the markup I was able to get in early July. Since that day, I have given the New&Improved Templates training five times. And each time it has been new and different from the last.

So, there are changes. And these sometimes cause a cascade of other changes. Because “this” is different, now “that” needs to change, as well.

I’m trying to keep up, but the communication between the guys doing the work and myself isn’t constant, and the pages are in a state of near constant change, it seems. A piece I didn’t quite understand was removed, so good. A piece I don’t quite understand was added, and that’s bad. If I don’t understand it, I can’t teach it, effectively.

Included files that used to be a dozen lines long are now much smaller. Files we used to discuss have been removed. And the last two times we have done the training, three of the students have had their computers lock-up on them, causing them to lose all of their work. That’s frustrating, because it has happened toward the end of the class, when I have people build a new page which incorporates all of the changes made to their navigation, their footer, etc. If you don’t actually see that happen with your own eyes, then the entire exercise is little more than… theory, almost.

We are getting closer to being finished. There isn’t much left that the coders can change. Did you just hear God laughing? Maybe that was someone in the next cubicle… Anyway, things are probably approaching a stability we haven’t seen in a while. I am looking forward to the first time I give the same training, twice.

And the great wheel turns.

Big, major events have schedules that fill an entire calendar. That music festival you love? That giant, week-long airshow? That gathering of car enthusiasts that takes place every year in August? The planning for that single week is ongoing throughout the entire year. It may be time to adopt that kind of model, here. Maybe we should start working on the 2012 package in September, taking careful note of all of the responses we get to the rollout in August. If we had three years, instead of three months, I suspect we could turn out a damned fine Web page. And maybe even one that wouldn’t need to change, for a while.

I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

2009-07-29T08:27:00.000-05:00

I love it when a plan comes together. The Templates are about to deployed here at work, the product of a lot of people spending a lot of hours working on a lot of solutions, and then choosing one and making it the best.

Early-on, we started this knowing that whatever we ended up with, it would be the page we looked at for at least three years—maybe even longer. So, like a car designer, we had to try to peer into the future a little ways and figure out what kind of a market we would be selling into. It takes about three years to design a new car, too.

Today, the language we use to mark up our pages is XHTML. Would that be the best choice for 2012, though? We use version 1.0, Transitional. Would there be any advantage in moving to another definition, such as Strict at this point? There were two working groups when we started, one was at work on building a new XHTML, XHTML 2. The other—wonder of wonders—was hard at work building a proposed new HTML 5. If you have ever taken my HTML training, you know that for years now I have been dancing around telling people that they can learn all of HTML, because there wouldn’t be another one. HTML 4.01 was supposed to be the last.

So, how would you have bet? We hashed it out for a while and decided to stick with XHTML 1.0, Transitional. It’s been good to us, so far. People seem comfortable using it. It has good fidelity between platforms and browsers. And just a week after we made that decision, the XHTML 2 committee came apart at the seams. So it may be a long, long time before we get any new markup languages. When that day comes, we will probably examine things again, surveying the then-current landscape and trying to puzzle-out the future.

We are learning as we go, in this process. Things won’t always be as they are now, the second rule of investing, applies here. Just as we cannot know about inflation, unemployment, advances in technologies or disruptions in supply lines years ahead we don’t really know who will be building the Template of 2020, or how. I’m reminded of that every time we talk about the heading area of the page, today. The editable area is still named “titlegraphic” from the days years ago when it actually was an image file. If we only knew, then, what we know today, we could have done a much better job all along.

Still, we expect transmission speeds inside the buildings to stay about the same or improve slightly. We expect the normative screen size to stay about the same or increase, slightly. We expect that handheld devices are not going to suddenly become less popular in the years ahead and so we will soon begin looking at ways to better include them in our design considerations.

And we expect to again lead the way in validated pages and accessible design. That’s something I am really proud of. We lead the league in Good Pages, something I point out at every training session.

I’m talking here like we are done with everything for this next cycle. We are not. The work continues, fleshing out this or that deficiency and smoothing over this or that awkward feature. That kind of thing continues right up until deployment of the next Template. But for now, even though we aren’t done we have come to most visible checkpoint in the process, the one with the most rapid and convincing change. And now, looking back, it’s really amazing at what all we did. I love it when a plan comes together.

Lazy Days of Summer

2009-07-22T09:13:00.000-05:00

I have always been a weird kind of lazy. I love that feeling of accomplishment that comes from finishing a job that’s been hanging over you for a while. Love It! And I will work like a dog to get that feeling, again. But then, damnit, I want a little time to actually relax and enjoy that moment for a while.

I have found, again and again, that there is nothing like a Big Project to get me to finish a bunch of little projects. Efficiency experts discuss this kind of thing in terms like avoidance techniques. I never feel like I’m actually avoiding anything, or even really putting anything off. I mean, just spend a few minutes thinking about it and I am sure that you can draw a straight line connecting emptying out the recycling trash in my cubicle and putting together a new presentation on Web templates, right?

I need to accomplish “X” today. I would like to accomplish “Y” and it would be great if I could get around to working on “Z”, too.

So I sit down and start thinking about “X”. How long will it take me? How many people will be seeing it and who are they? Do they understand all of the various cogs and gears that go into “X” or will I have to explain that to them, too? Hmm… I wonder how other people have explained “X” before this? Wasn’t there a version of “X” a few years ago that had no calories? Do they even deal with “X” any more in the leading… “Ooooh! I need to empty out the recycling!” Okay, I can work on “X” all day, but that recycling isn’t going to empty itself. And while I’m up and on my way down the hall, I should probably stop and see if there is any inter-office mail in my inbox.

So I dump out the newsletters from the credit union and all of the stuff about upcoming concerts and speeches and source listings from pages I have already forgotten, and on my way back, I stop and check the box for any more paper that will probably go straight into the newly-empty recycling. But the whole time I am doing this stuff, I am thinking about “X”.

I cannot just sit idle. And not just because it looks bad—that is always the moment the boss walks by. I have to be doing something, and I usually am. Quite often while I am doing one thing, I am thinking about another. This can be a huge distraction and I don’t recommend it for everyone, but I have learned to build lists and to prioritize the entries there and always have something in the bag for the next big project that is a little more thinky than the kind of thing you can just sit down and crank out.

Right now, in the back of my mind, I am mulling over options for how to discuss something in the new Template training which is just going together now. I could sit down and crank out a page showing how it’s done, and then end up deleting everything and trying again after lunch. Or I could stop and bang out this week’s blog update and keep tossing the Templates training over and over in my mind until I get it all worked out, and then commit it all to hot phosphor.

As these things go, I have in fact just figured out how best to do the Next Big Thing in the Templates training, so I must close this out, for now.

And once again, I have filled what might otherwise have been time spent staring off into space with accomplishing something else that needed to get done. If anyone had walked by and seen me, it would have looked exactly like I was updating my blog. But this evening, when my wife asks me what I did this morning, I’ll tell her I was working on my Templates training.

But I’ll tell you one thing: When I get home at 5pm, it all stops and I get to relax, until it all starts up again in the morning.

New Templates; New Troubles.

2009-07-15T14:30:00.001-05:00

I try to keep most of these posts rather generic, discussing my job and various aspects of it only as they apply to the discussion at hand. But this week, I probably should spend a few calories discussing the new Templates we are rolling out at work, and how that is going to affect a lot of people.

I really had high hopes, after checking out the Web site and reading the book that David Shea and Molly Holzschlag put together some years ago. One day, this is how all design changes would happen, right? I mean, as a proof-of-concept vehicle, the Web site proved it was not only possible, but made it look easy!

Well, of course, there’s easy and there’s easy. The task we are about to embark upon is easier than it might have been back in the Olden Days of font tags and tables. But it falls short of the dream of the one-button update by a ways.

There are things we should all be doing, now, to make our lives easier in the immediate future. First, validate page markup and CSS and get that out of the way. This is difficult enough when the markup is correct. Asking for a clean update when you start with poor markup is just asking for trouble.

I really like the idea of building a shadow site, a kind of a test site, and working on getting your pages updated in there. You can name this directory /beta2009/ or /beta/ or /incubator/ or whatever you’d like, then copy all of your page files into this new directory.

You need to point at this new directory with Dreamweaver. I copied my original site in the Manage Site box, then opened it up and changed the name and the URL strings for the Local, Remote and Testing servers. Go slowly here, and take your time and don’t do anything that you don’t fully understand, first. The goal is to end up with a site you can click on to open http://www.unl.edu/yoursite/ and one to open up http://www.unl.edu/yoursite/beta2009/. This new location features what we used to call “Security Through Obscurity”. Nobody should be visiting the pages here, because nobody will know they are there. They all reside within the unlinked directory /beta2009/ within your “real” site.

Having made the changes, consider making an archive of your site as it exists today. Name it site.zip and place this on your desktop, outside of the Dreamweaver environment. If you ever need to return to a current-template page, it will be in here.

Start slowly and deliberately and work your way through your new /beta2009/ site, document-by-document, folder-by-folder. From your Modify menu, you want to select Templates down at the bottom. Apply Template to Page... is the selection you want to make. We use the fixed-width Template, so select that one. There are elements we do not use this time, such as the college navigation area. You will want to map those to “Nowhere” and click “Use for all” and then “OK”. Your page should update into the new look. Save it and check it, remembering its new address in the /beta2009/ folder.

Remember you want to keep your own navigation and related links and footer information, so be careful when you un-pack your new Templates folder and sharedcode folder into your /beta2009/ site. Again, point and click and type slowly and make sure you understand what is expected to come up, at every point. Save often. Put often. Check your pages in a Web browser often. Check your old pages often, too, to make sure you aren’t working on the live pages.

Make whatever edits you need and consider how the extra room is going to be used in the new Template design. Maybe you have lists that could go in their own columns. Maybe you have styled certain page elements based on percentages and these are now not quite optimal, because the size of the container is bigger, now. Work your way through all of the pages in a folder before going on to the next one, starting at the documents at your root (top) level. When you are done, give yourself a day or two if you can and then come back and see how the pages look in the new design.

On the day of the rollout, drag your pages out of the /beta2009/ folder to make them live, replacing the information that is already there (and which you have safely copied into your .zip file). Then just wait for the accolades to roll in.

I suspect we will all meet somewhere the evening of the 17th and toss back a few, raising toasts to the valiant crew of the Web Developer Network. I suspect that some of us will want a few drinks by then. And some of us will probably need them.

Good luck!

Sure, You CAN, but Should You?

2009-07-08T15:27:00.000-05:00

Promise me this much: When I die, please don’t hold my memorial in the Staples Center?

Let’s talk a little about perspective and what is appropriate, and all the while, let’s dance around the issue of good taste.

You can do all kinds of things with a Web page. You can use seventeen fonts, or more, on a single page. You can use thirty colors for type and background and so on. You can have nine vertical columns, or you can have only one.

You can make all of the mistakes in Web Pages That Suck, either the book or the Web site (or both). Or you can learn from the mistakes of others.

You can argue that you prefer a single column, 24” across, of 9pt text. But deep inside, in your heart of hearts, you have to know that most people would rather have that horizontal space broken up into more manageable column sizes. That’s why we have columns in our newspapers and even in our magazines—and in our better Web pages, too.

Maybe you love Blue. You enjoy light blue text against a dark blue background, with varying shades of blue in the page headers and image borders and so on. Monochromatic sites have their place, but it may not be the way to go if you are trying to reach, and keep, a wide audience. In their way, staying entirely within a single color family can be as awful as dealing with dozens of colors in a busy, frantic page.

I can do things when I build a Web site for a band that I would never do if I was working on a page for, say, an attorney. Grunge fonts, dark shadowy images, Flash treatment of various links providing scary rollover effects? Is that what you want when you are looking for some entertainment on a Saturday night? Or is that what you look for when your dog gets loose and bites the neighbor kid and you have to go to court? Likewise, do you want solid, conservative, gravitas-laden images, graphics and design when you are deciding what band to go and see? Is there a band anywhere that tours in Grey Flannel? The early Beatles were the last band I remember performing in suits, and even those were collarless.

Even once you have settled on major themes there are still a great many other design properties that need to be settled dealing with the purpose of a page. Are you trying to provide reference material online? Are you trying to build an online brochure? You need to use a whole different toolbox if you are just presenting information than you would use if you were trying to convince someone of something, or trying to showcase what features and benefits accrue to satisfied customers of your work.

Special menu effects are interesting and fun when they don’t get in the way, but they aren’t going to help boost your traffic if your page explains how to do something. If I land on your page from a Google search because I want to lean how to set my computer to automatically wake up and go to sleep at different times every day, I’m not going to probably ever come back just to marvel at the way your navigation grows, shrinks and evolves. Money, time and other resources spent building glamorous navigation is going to be lost on that kind of a page, where again, if the page was more of a brochure, that kind of thing might be much more appropriate.

If you are building pages for a retirement community, are eight- and nine-point text sizes the best you can choose? Sure, a user should be able to adjust their browser or their computer to compensate for whatever shortcomings a designer may have left them, but older people are most likely to have problem seeing smaller text, and least likely to know how to make changes.

You have a lot of power, when you sit down to build a Web page. With great power comes great responsibility. Be sure you use it wisely.

What Can You Do With 1¢ and 5ive Minutes?

2009-07-01T13:53:00.010-05:00

From time to time, someone comes to me in a panic because their Web site has, after careful application of time and talent, suddenly started showing up in Korean. Or the neat columns of deeply meaningful text now suddenly scroll behind the images, or appear three times their normal size.

I usually sit with them and point and click and explain, “See this? This is why we don’t do this…” and “See that? I wouldn’t recommend doing it like that” and so on. After an interval, or since I’m reading a lot of turn-of-the-last-century books lately, after a fullness of time, we get it worked out. Pages and jobs and careers are saved. Bands play, parades are organized and someone promises to name all of their children “Mark” in my honor. This gives me a nice, fuzzy, warm feeling. Really, it does. But come on—it’s not rocket science and it really isn’t all that difficult once you know what you are doing.

But that’s just it. They don’t know what they are doing. Or they are terribly unsure. They hand out the platitudes like candy—one gal used to call me an “HTML God” in an overly-exaggerated and not-cute insincere way. Rather than say something like that to me, I would have preferred she dedicate thirty minutes a week to learning. That’s really all it takes. It doesn’t even have to be thirty minutes all in one day.

At the height of the dot-bomb, there were quite a few computer book series with deceptive names like Learn ABC in 24 Hours. The hook was that most people think they will learn it all in a day, but the book was basically divided up into twenty-four hour-long lessons, each of which nearly always took me longer than an hour to complete. But the germ of the idea is perfect: Carve up the difficult task at hand into dozens of smaller portions that you can handle.

Maybe for you that means an afternoon every week; maybe it’s only an hour. Maybe, it’s only ten minutes, today. The point is that it all adds up. If there are, in fact, 4287 things to learn, and you knock off ten minutes and pick up two things, then you only have 4285 things left to learn.

Sure, it requires an investment. You have to spend, at least, some time. You probably have to spend some money, but the amount is surprisingly little. Most of my training sessions run $40 as this is written, and at least one is free! You can find very good reference and learning material at giveaway prices. For a penny, you could afford to place copies of the HTML book I recommend most often in your car, in your cubicle, in your lunchbox, in your living room and at your bedside and even get a copy for your, uh, Reading Room. You know, the one with the really great acoustics. You can’t even get gum from machines any more for a penny, but you can learn HTML to the level of the best experts out there. Such a deal!

I know a lot, sure. I have been doing this since 1993. Start today and you can learn it all, too. Remember, I didn’t learn it all in an afternoon, or over a weekend. And I didn’t learn it all from books, either. Most of it comes from building some truly awful pages, laughing, crying and starting over. Make a mistake. Try to fix it. Read-up on it and ask around, see if you can solve the problem on your own and then move on.

I am, I keep reminding people, a sweetie. But I am not a deity and I was nor born with the knowledge I have today. Look in the newspaper every day, I like to point out, and you’ll see birth announcements for little boys and little girls. I have been reading these for years and have never seen a eight-pound, four-ounce Web Designer born. Web Designers are made. Make yourself into one. Start today.

New Machine; New Way of Looking At Things

2009-06-24T11:04:00.002-05:00

We have talked before about how we are so susceptible to falling into the trap of thinking "everyone" lives, works, acts and reacts as we do. The most common manifestation of this in Web work happens when a developer gets a new wide screen monitor, or a faster connection, or learns some new technology like Flash.

Suddenly their Web pages only look good when displayed at a skillion-pixels by another skillion-pixels. Or suddenly every page has some Flash content (or JavaScript, or whatever). The thing to take away from this is that it is rarely a conscious decision to do this. It is rare that someone says "Well, I was the last person stuck with a 15" monitor at 800x600, so now the sky is the limit!" Rather, it is a matter of doing what they have always done: Making pages look good (to them, and at the time). As good as they can, in most cases.

But this is of course why we check our pages in other browsers. It's why we re-size browsers to see how content flows around the various fixed page elements, images and graphics, scrolls into and out of columns and so forth. Not everyone uses Firefox, no matter how cool it is. Not everyone uses Safari, no matter how impressive it's new features. Not everyone uses Internet Explorer, even though it ships as the default Web browser for most computers sold these days.

There are other more insidious examples. Not everyone knows all of the Secret Handshake jargon, abbreviations and acronyms that so many of us use every day. Does your navigation actually tell people where they end up if they click on those links? Title attributes can go a long way toward easing some of this burden, but even then we still have to depend upon the users to know or expect this feature and hover over links they are unsure of. Where does SHPS go? Student Housing and Parking Services? Student Housing and Pet Surveillance? Solstice Homeopathic Plant Scheduling? Student Health and Popular Science? Some Help Poor Senators?

Jargon and abbreviations are fine within the walls of whatever group uses and understands them, though I would still recommend using Title attributes and spelling-out the full name on first use, just for the new people. But any time you are dealing with civilians you should not just assume that because you have been online for years, "everyone" has been online for years, and will "just know" how something works. Just because you have a nice new monitor that overlaps your desk doesn't mean "everyone" can see a fixed-width wide-screen display, any more than just because you are on Twitter and understand RTs and @-signs, it doesn't mean anyone else can figure out your 140-character shorthand.

I just got new hardware. And in only a week I have already found myself unthinkingly operating as though "everyone" had at least as much display area. It is a beautiful 24" of gleaming, glossy pixels. It reminds me of the 9" screen of my first computer, and just how far we have come. But yeah, I have had to remember to download new copies of my favorite browsers, just to have them available, and re-size them (within all of that room!) to see how it affects the content. I have had to check pages on my iPhone, to see how they work there, without Flash and with only a few-dozen pixels to work with.

It can be hard to try to see your site with new eyes. But the experience can be valuable. If you can find someone who does not work in your field, someone who has never visited your pages before, and watch them try to accomplish some simple tasks, it can be very rewarding.

Renewal, and Like That.

2009-06-17T16:38:00.001-05:00

I am back into it, again, after a little vacation, and hitting the ground running these last couple of weeks, doing much that is New&Improved.

Foremost is probably the work being done on the new Templates. The UNL Web Developers' Network has been at work on a new page since last fall. Seth, Roger, Eric, Vishal, Aaron, Brett, Bob and a host of others have been hammering out details concerning navigation, color and content, but the most important thing anyone has done so far has been in service to answering the question Why?.

Why redesign our pages? Why now? Why did we place navigation here, here and there instead of putting it all here? Why would someone point at this and click instead of pointing at that and clicking? Why isn't this or that area of the page getting more traffic or interest? On and on and on, one of the most refreshing things about this redesign has been the willingness of all of the various participants to challenge one another by asking that simple question. Why?

Why, indeed. And the best part of the exercise for me has been watching it all unfold. These are very creative people, and most of them are very adept at the technical workings of not just a Web browser as we are familiar with them on desktop and laptop computers, but also with the new cell phones and other Internet Appliances appearing with some regularity. The dozen or so neurons responsible for creativity must live very close in our brains to the ones responsible for the concept of ownership, or family, because in my experience it is very difficult to challenge someone's work, someone's concept, someone's vision, without them taking it a little personally. And yet there has been almost none of that, in this entire process.

Back me up against a wall and make me defend my position and I can tell you why I made the design choices that I made. But I have a hard time doing it without getting defensive, or moody if the collective decides to go another way. It has been an inspiration, watching this group of professionals working with only one goal, producing the best Web site we can for the community we serve, wrestling with the various choices involved in going about attaining that goal. We all want the same thing; we just sometimes all want the same thing differently. But we are all still friends. It has been amazing.

I am also about knee-deep in renewing the training that I do here. And again, the question of Why keeps me on track. Why did I introduce this concept here, instead of doing it later? Why would we need to continue discussing this, when that trend kind of burned itself out about 2002? Why mention workarounds for Web browsers that have miniscule representation in our user logs these days?

So I have been going through each course, page-by-page, and making various edits and cuts and embellishments. We have new software in the Creative Suite 4 release from Adobe. That means new Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and we are deploying these on the also-new laptops in the training theater this week, so it is time that our training materials reflected the various changes in moving from CS3 to CS4, as well as all we have come to learn in the years since the original pages were set down. Again and again, I have asked myself Why and I think the new courses are going to be much better for it.

Why has led me to change the way I work quite a bit, too. I am going to cut down on the number of computers I work on, which should mean that more often than not I have the latest files with me at any given time. And I'm near finishing about a skillion different time-sinks that should mean I have time to work on some training I have had to put off for weeks.

I hope you have a good summer, too.

Anglais, por Favor!

2009-06-03T11:25:00.002-05:00

Are you overly infatuated with jargon? Do you say things like "We need to reboot this project?" when you mean "start over"? Do you give directions with "Port!" and "Starboard!" or something similar? Are your handwritten notes filled with BCNU and @-sign declarations?

It may be time to back off of this a notch, friends.

I love the shorthand of jargon, and have embraced it in every field I have ever entered, from sales to writing to radio announcing to Web development, but come on, people, as ubiquitous as texting and the Web are, not everyone is everywhere—or wants to be.

We are just coming through a period of about three months where The Media discovered Twitter. By summer they'll be on to the Next Big Thing, but right now we are seeing the service mentioned several times per day, in several contexts and in several outlets. Once limited to technical blogs and Web sites, Twitter exploded in late February and early March and suddenly there were stories about Twitter in specialty magazines and mainstream magazines alike. It was on TV news stories and in TV episodes and commercial advertising even bought into it, literally, paying people to tweet about products.

The backlash will be here in about a week; ten days, tops.

Until then, it might be well to remember the first rule of Web Design: Not Everyone Uses The Web The Way We Do. Just as not everyone has a wide-screen monitor attached to a mighty network, just as not everyone has had the benefit of years and years of Doing This, whatever "this" might actually mean, just as not everyone has JavaScript enabled, not everyone is hip to the grooviness that is Twitter.

People use jargon as shorthand. When I say to a fellow pilot I was afraid I might stall the airplane, I'm talking about an aerodynamic stall, having nothing to do with the engine. But every year some Cub Reporter will ask someone at an airport why a plane crashed, get the reply "He stalled, coming in for a landing" and dutifully report on the news that night that the engine quit. That's not an effective use of the language. You have not effectively communicated what happened to the airplane if someone goes away thinking it was an engine problem.

My grandmother used to pepper our Christmas and birthday cards with medical jargon. She worked at a hospital and understood that et meant and, but nobody at our home did and we came away not nearly as impressed with Gramma's greetings as she might have thought we were.

The whole point of communication is the transfer of an idea from one person to (at least) one other. You're supposed to be richer for having received the message, not confused or left wondering what the author might have had for lunch that would cause them to send such a cryptic, confusing message.

You may know what a re-Tweet is. You may know the meaning of @ in a top-level domain and the meaning of @ in Twitter, but don't assume that anyone else does. Within the Twitter community it's perfectly acceptable, but be careful using that kind of thing elsewhere, because an awful lot of people aren't going to bother looking up what it is you meant, they will just judge you poorly for not having said what you mean.

We don't all have modems. We don't all have skillion-color wide-screen monitors. We don't all have Flash. We don't all have every flavor of Web browser. And we don't all hang out on Twitter, so we don't all know what it is that you're trying to say.

The Years Ahead…

2009-05-20T13:44:00.004-05:00

I cannot tell you for sure how the economy will do in the weeks and months ahead of us. I have no idea who might prevail in Afghanistan or Iraq or even Canada. We may lose an automaker and we may lose a few newspapers before all of this gets behind us, but this much I know:

The Twenty-First Century Will Happen Online.

If you and your people are not already starting to think about the Web as your primary media for reaching your customers and your potential customers, you had better start soon.

I love driving with my wife. We have the best conversations. And I can still remember that time, not too long ago, when we would start talking about some new technology, some old product or company or some historical event and one of us would say, "I wonder if there is a Web site about that?" or "I wonder if there is anything online, about that?" After two or three years, we finally stopped being surprised when we got back home and discovered that very often was plenty online about "that".

Today, we are surprised when we cannot find anything about something, online.

When I sold radio commercials, it was a time between technologies. More and more people were spending their time with electronic media like TV and radio than with print media like newspapers and billboards. But people easily believe that "everyone" acts the way they do. I visited business after business who was satisfied with their current ad budget and placement because "everyone reads the newspaper". I would point out that great masses of people did not subscribe to the paper and did not even buy so much as a single copy in a week, comparing the population of the town with the published sales figures for the paper, but a lot of folks stayed with the paper because it was substantial.

I was selling air and echoes, to them. A newspaper could be read, set aside and read again. A newspaper could be passed around. My commercials might play while someone was walking from the house to the car, on their way to a competitor, and if it did its value evaporated instantly, in their eyes.

I visited that town for the first time in twenty years and was surprised that all—all—of those old-line businesses are gone, now. I'm sure it's just coincidence in many cases. But I'm also sure it was a factor in some of them, too.

With a few of my clients, I was able to talk them out of four-color ads in the Sunday paper, going for two or three colors and giving me the money they would have spent for another color, to run ads all week long, not just on Sunday. Three out of five of those businesses were still in business, twenty-one years later. I'm sure that is coincidence, too but again, I'm also sure it was a factor.

An awful lot of decisions get made, or more properly don't get made, because "We've always done it like this". In an economy like ours today, it may be well to look over everything and ask yourself if you're maybe backing a very tired old horse? Newsletters, flyers, pamphlets and brochures and now even radio and TV press releases have all had their day in the sun, but increasingly it's the aptly-named World-Wide Web that is holding sway.

The kids coming up today with their netbooks and smart phones have an expectation of finding what they want and need, online. They will never, ever, be newspaper readers.

The Twenty-First Century Will Happen Online. Make sure you're a part of it.

The Web Designer Muscle

2009-05-13T07:56:00.001-05:00

I don't consider myself much of a Web designer. Maybe I am, and I just don't know. I don't get many opportunities to work out that particular muscle of my brain very often. There are people who do this kind of thing all day, every day, designing dozens and dozens of pages and sites over the course of a year. I am not one of them. So maybe in the sense that Napoleon Bonaparte may have been a great racing driver I might be a passable Web designer, but I don't do enough to feel comfortable or confident, most of the time.

My world is one of Dreamweaver Templates. We come up with a new design every few years, hammering on the sharp edges of various new technologies and… then that's pretty much it. File ⇒ New gets you, instantly, a fresh, clean copy of the design's blank page, with all of the baked-in goodness, well, baked-in.

The great wheel turns and three summers have come and gone and it is once again time to do it all over. I am really enjoying this redesign process and once again wishing I did a little more of this kind of thing. Not that I am ready to bag it all and work full-time at a Web agency or anything like that. There is a lot of comfort in a good Template. I can whip a typical student worker or staff secretary into a Web frenzy in about an hour and a half and create another soldier in the Standards Compliance Army who can then create a wonderful new page in only about ten minutes. I enjoy that.

But it's nice to wonder, "What if we moved this little bit over here?" now and then. I have to justify my existence to my Director every year—why shouldn't the Search Window or QuickLinks bar have to, right? Inertia is a strange and wonderful thing but I wonder if it isn't responsible for more bad in the world than good. "Because we have always done it this way" is the bane of many a modern business process, not just in Web design, I'm sure.

The last several weeks I have spent quite a few hours in this design process. This is many more than I do outside of the six months or so every three years when we are actually building a new template. It is fascinating to see the process at work. Mark Twain once said that there are two things you never want to see being made, "Law, and sausages". I suspect he may have said as much about Web design, but I find it compelling. Here's a guy (or just as often, a gal) with a favorite aspect of their candidate for Next Design, advocating for their way of doing things over someone else's ideas.

Some of these are great ideas, really. Some of them are, well, kind of average. Some are things we could and maybe should do immediately and quite often someone will come up with an idea that works wonderfully on every computer on the planet, but not on, say, the new smart cell phones. Remember, we are building a page today for the Web world of next year, the year beyond and the year beyond that, as well. It's likely that some huge percentage of our usage will be coming from these little appliances in the years ahead. They are a not-inconsequential portion of the market today, but they may be the majority by 2011.

We get a bunch of this kind of thing. Here's a wonderful navigation scheme, but it is almost unworkable without JavaScript, or Flash? That's useless, to us. A great new way to do this or that, but something that doesn't function in screen-readers? Again, great for someone else, but not us. It is challenging, building a page that is easy to learn and easy to use. It's a challenge building a page that can hold a simple photo and brief message as well as multiple columns of text with illustrations.

I'm glad to be a part of it. I wish I did a little more of it. But make no mistake, I am glad that it only rolls around once every few years, too.

The Future is Coming

2009-05-06T08:21:00.004-05:00

I have been telling people in my HTML classes for years that one of the cool things about HTML was that it was about the only thing in computerdom that you could learn all of. The reason was that HTML v4.01 was supposed to be the last, final, ultimate edition of the storied language that build the Web. You don't probably use the same word processor, spreadsheet or operating system you used ten years ago, but we are enjoying the same version of HTML and there are no plans for another.

And then someone started making plans.

It never was as true as I was making out, I'll own that. But I was trying to build hope and confidence amongst the beginners. There would be plenty of time to learn about XHTML's development path, later, I figured. Technically, what I was telling them was true: There would be no further developments to HTML. You could start today, learning only one thing a day, and after a year or so you would know as much as anybody could about HTML. The guys who wrote your word processor? They still have jobs and they're hard at work at the next version, but the HTML shop has closed down and everyone has gone home. I used to imagine tumbleweeds blowing through the scene, myself.

Well, about a year and a half ago, word started seeping out that the XHTML2 crew was a dysfunctional family. Lots of arguing, and over some pretty petty differences, really. And it seemed, from what we'd heard of what they were doing, that some of them had kind of lost their way. The whole reason for XHTML was forcing a stricter adherence to standards, with a simpler rule set. A lot of that kind of spirit wasn't making the jump to XHTML2.

About the same time, wouldn't you know, a group got together to discuss HTML5. "No problem", I thought to myself. "The way these things go, this could end up being tied-up for years and years." It turns out I'm not very good at this prognostication business—you should see my stock portfolio—and we could very well have an HTML5 before we have an XHTML2.

So, you're building a Web page template today that will go into widespread use in three months, and remain in active service for at least three years, probably. Three long years. What do you markup your template with? The old workhorse, HTML? You could shine it up a little by adhering to the HTML v4.01 Strict conventions. Or do you go with XHTML because it's been what you've used for the last few years and we just now got everyone used to self-closing tags like <hr />? Or do you peek inside HTML5 and take advantage of the surprising number of elements that modern browsers already know and understand?

Nearly every Web page ever built has had a header area, or a footer, or a navigation block. The last few years, we have designed these with <div> tags, artificial block-level land-grabs that map out an area for a specific use or treatment. But if every page has a structure including headers and footers and navigation, why isn't there a structural element of HTML that does that for us? There is, in HTML5.

Just what we needed this summer, huh? More interesting days.

The Internet's Explorer

2009-04-29T09:28:00.001-05:00

And so, here we are. The final browser we will be discussing is Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

It is hard to imagine, now, but there was a time before "IE" owned the world. Back then it was difficult to get on the internet, and there wasn't much to recommend trying, to be honest. You had to install a host of plug-in's, add-on's and doo-dad's and then get yourself a program called a "browser" to see and do anything. When Netscape took off, and everyone saw the future, Microsoft went after Spyglass to get into the game.

Spyglass was quickly rewritten and re-released as Internet Explorer and… nobody cared. I was working for Microsoft at the time and many of us were using Netscape back then, a browser we had actually paid for. People bought software, back then. Nobody knew any different.

But just as in the Old Testament, IE begat IE2 and IE3 and things got better with each release. There were point-releases, too, to fix a few bugs and we all got used to the Browser Wars, just as we did the battles for tennis shoes, cola drinks and long distance service.

These last two paragraphs are, to me, the heart of the old, dead, Microsoft-as-monopoly lawsuit. Yeah, Microsoft gave away their Web browser back then, and they still do. But nobody gave a damn, until it became a good Web browser.

IE (almost nobody actually says Internet Explorer if they can avoid it) became the browser to have on both PCs and Macintosh computers about this time. They were there at the beginning of CSS support and ultimately got more right than Netscape had at the time. Along the way they were very ambitious with new versions. IE4 became IE5 and then IE5.5 (where things stopped, on the Mac) and IE6. Each one better than the last, with more features and more features that worked better than anyone else had at the time.

But when Netscape crumbled, things ground to a halt in IE development. This is where a lot of us lost the respect and goodwill that Microsoft had built-up during the Browser Wars. Okay, things didn't grind to a halt, but they sure as Hell slowed down a ton. If you look at development since Microsoft bought Spyglass, the release of Windows95 and subsequent releases, we should be on about Internet Explorer 23, by now. That we went so many years with Internet Explorer 6 did seem like there were tumbleweeds blowing through the IE part of the Microsoft campus.

And then came the big fix. Microsoft was shamed by Firefox, Safari, Opera and the Web standards community into resuming development of good browsers. But they were about to change the way the world's favorite browser worked and acted and that would mean some sites might break. A lot of sites. Hundreds of thousands of sites. The Microsoft answer at first was that we who had been doing things right all along would have to change our ways of working, to accommodate the great many lazy folks who had designed for a specific browser. For a time, it looked like the Good Guys would have to add a tricky meta tag to their pages saying, essentially, "Look, I know this tag isn't actually a part of any standard or any training that anyone has had in the fifteen years we've been doing this, but by my placing this here I am indicating that I want you to treat this page like one that's been correctly marked-up". The echoes from the Web development community are just now reaching what we used to know as the planet Pluto.

Microsoft relented, the Internet did not break, and we have all managed to get along. Their new IE8, again only for Windows PCs, is by all marks a terrific Web browser, seems to have none of the stink associated with IE7 and is much closer to worthy of its assumed market share. So, there's that.

The biggest advantage IE has in the marketplace today is that it is Good Enough for a huge percentage of people who choose Windows computers. It comes preinstalled on more laptop and desktop computers than anything else and for most people it works well enough that they are not interesting in jumping through the various hoops to get some other browser installed and start re-learning everything they know about the Web.

As they say in the government specification business, "If the minimum wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum!"

A Night at the Opera

2009-04-22T15:29:00.001-05:00

A continuing theme of Opera, in my life, is that it is something I have always wanted to know more about. Relative to the general population, there is a small community of people who rave about the musical theater and the Web browser, and I have always wondered what those people knew that I did not. But, as I wander through the course of a day, careening from inspiration to distraction, from obligation to moments of quiet nothing-to-do-ness, I never seem to find the time to really experience Opera in any meaningful sense in either of its incarnations.

You are probably like me. Your life is filled with the movie of the week, and situation comedies like My Name Is Earl and game shows like Who's Got An Elbow? Throw in a special or two on how the world would look a hundred years after Man's extinction and, of course, Shark Week, and who has time for Dvorak or Wagner? And you point, you click, you get information and it all seems to be working, so why take the time and trouble to learn a new Web browser?

Well, you would do it because the experience was rewarding. It enriches you, either emotionally or productivity-wise. Maybe you have been a perfect fit for years and just never known. I was like that with Lamb Korma.

Opera was there when nobody else was, in the darkest days of Internet Explorer. Opera began in the middle 1990s as an alternative to IE, and was made available on Linux, Macintosh and Windows PCs and eventually handhelds and other mobile devices. Starting around 2000, these were all made into more or less equivalent versions, the way Dreamweaver looks and acts the same on PCs and Macs. Opera was one of the first browsers to offer a tabbed interface. But what it was most famous for was its speed, and… its advertising.

Yeah, probably the biggest reason you haven't been absorbed into the Operaverse is that for many years, development was funded in part by advertising which appeared within the otherwise free browser environment. So everyone could click on a link to your blog and there would be a photo of your kitty. And you could click on a link to your blog in Opera and there would be a photo of your kitty, and above everything on the page an ad for ibuprofen or some vacation Web site. If you sent a tiny pile of money to Opera, they would then send you back a key that would turn off the ads. But yeah, it was fast.

I feel like we all owe Opera a debt of gratitude for hanging in there, even though it never has managed to capture the imagination the way, say, Firefox has. The powers that be, behind the Opera browser, are the same minds that brought us so much of the baked-in goodness of CSS, and one of the first good CSS books, too.

Opera was always different. We didn't realize how important that alone was, back in the day. Lately, it hasn't just been different for difference sake, but innovative. Opera features a QuickFind functionality now that not only remembers what Web pages you have surfed to recently—every browser does that, now—but also remembers the content on that page. So if you are shopping for Hawaiian shirts now that the weather is nice and remember that the place you liked the most was actually in Colorado [!] you could search within Opera and find the page you visited.

Opera offers all of the standard features most people take for granted in any third-millennium browser, history, synching, search engine customization and so on, and a few that we may come to expect in the years ahead, like Mouse Gestures, where certain mouse movements will trigger certain behaviors in the browser, such as moving you forward or backward through a site.

I am really happy with Marc Cohn and Rickie Lee Jones. And I am really happy with Firefox and Safari, too. But I understand why people are impressed with Aida, too. And maybe one day I'll be one of them….

Apple's Safari Browser

2009-04-15T11:34:00.002-05:00

So, we're talking Web browsers. Let's talk about Apple's….

There once was a day when your shiny new Apple Macintosh shipped with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. There was a day before that one when the browser you got came from Netscape. But Microsoft won the day and then sort of abandoned Internet Explorer development on the Macintosh. Microsoft famously puts little effort into the Mac world, beyond their Office suite, today, and so it was with Internet Explorer. The Mac version always lagged behind the PC version. But at least it was there.

But Apple, then Apple Computer, is always mindful of their Mac baby and didn't like the buzz that "Mac browsers aren't as good as PC browsers. So they set about remedying the situation. There seemed to be no way to interest Microsoft in committing to developing IE to the same standards the rest of the world enjoyed, so they decided, in early 2003, to go it alone. As soon as Apple announced their new browser, Microsoft announced they were abandoning IE for the Mac.

Apple's Safari is becoming a terrific Web experience. It was the first browser to pass the Acid2 tests. It featured tabbed browsing, an extension-ready interface, and was remarkably fast right out of the gate. Being primarily a Macintosh browser, development of add-on's has lagged what's available on Firefox, but just as when comparing Mac software titles to PC software titles, it's easy to notice that numbers alone do not mean quality, and easy to see that Safari has all of the important bases covered, with more gadgets and doo-dad's being released all the time. Still, there are a lot more customizations you can do to Safari than, say, Internet Explorer on the PC.

Over the years, Safari has been updated, re-thought, updated again and deployed on other platforms. There is now a Safari for Windows users, and it's scrappy enough to be earning new adherents every week. And of course Safari is the Web browser for the Apple iPhone. The iPhone version isn't quite as complete as the Windows and Mac versions, in part owing to the differences in using a machine with a mouse versus with your fingertip. But it's very good, and getting better.

The Webkit engine used to render pages in Safari is incorporated in the new Adobe CS4 suite. So, Dreamweaver's new Design View is how your pages look and work in a real browser. This allows you to see things like fly-out menues and other JavaScript tricks without having to load your page in a real browser, which saves a lot of time.

I love looking into new browsers from time to time. It's interesting to jolt your expectations from time to time about how things are supposed to work. There is a lot to like, in Safari. And I expect it will be around, and will continue to improve, for a long time to come.

The Browser Market

2009-04-08T08:37:00.001-05:00

It's becoming fashionable to kick Microsoft's Internet Explorer, if you're a Web professional. There is a certain kind of pack-behavior that on some level frightens me, and there's an element of that in this. But yeah, if this was a 1930s horror movie, we would be seeing The Villagers massing with pitchforks and torches, about now.

The problem with IE6 is the same as the problem with Netscape's Navigator 4: It got too popular and then it stopped growing and evolving.

Way back in the Dark Ages of Web work, Netscape and Microsoft were locked in a brutal duel, with each one it seemed releasing new Web browsers on a more or less annual basis, about six months apart. So the Red Browser appeared with New Feature X, and then a few months later, the Blue Browser appeared, with New Feature X and New Feature Z. Lather, rinse, repeat. Oh, and throw in a few tags like <blink> and <marquee>. ::Shudder!:: See? I told you it was like a 1930's horror movie. ::Thunder and Lightning!::

So, at some point the weight of all of the "improvement" and the crush of internal politics and the tyranny of the installed base and the hassle of dealing with legacy code caused Netscape's Navigator 5 to essentially implode. And while we were waiting, Microsoft took the lead it hasn't given back since. By the time Netscape 6 came along, nobody much cared but in the mean time, a lot of people had developed internal systems that required Netscape Navigator 4, even though it was in many serious ways broken.

For years, we had to struggle with NN4 and it's peculiar set of problems. And today, the browser shoe is on the other foot. We are coming out of a time when Microsoft back-burnered support and development for Internet Explorer 6, which lived for more than five years as the browser. When it came out, it was good. It was an improvement over almost anything else available at the time. But Microsoft abandoned it, and for years we had to deal with workarounds and hacks because as bad as it was, it was the browser nine out of ten people used.

As Firefox continued to grow and improve, and as Safari continued to grow and improve, and especially with the first rumors of what was to become Google's Chrome browser, Microsoft went back to work on Internet Explorer. And feeling responsible for what they had (not) done and not wanting to "break the Web" for everyone by fixing everything all at once, they set about the task of improving Internet Explorer in stages, while disrupting the dozens of millions of Web sites built essentially for IE6 the least. And, being Microsoft, they got it wrong.

There are published standards that explain what a browser should do when it encounters, say, an H1 tag, or a Paragraph tag. Microsoft has always taken these more as suggestions, and we've ended up in a world where every other browser developer gets it right and Microsoft, with all of the market share, remember, gets it wrong. They could release a standards-compliant browser, sure. But doing so would make a lot of sites look weird if they were coded for IE6's peculiar shortcomings. So, Microsoft said, we'll create a new IE7 and teach it to look for a particular line of markup that every developer would add to their pages from now on, explaining how to work out the page design. Let me say that again: Every Web developer in the world must now revisit every Web page they have built in the last six years and, even though they had followed all of the rules, they must now include a special tag in order for their pages to render correctly. Otherwise, IE7 would act just like IE6 had for all of these years and all of their work would be for naught. Cheeky, huh?

Microsoft was finally convinced of the error of their ways, and Internet Explorer 7 looks like it will be a good browser, today. And there is evidence of an upcoming IE8, as well, with further enhanced support for the standards everyone else met years ago. But all of this has frustrated a lot of people who are shopping around for other browser options.

In the weeks ahead, we'll look over some of these and explore the plusses and minuses involved.

You Can't Learn It All (Today).

2009-04-01T09:44:00.002-05:00

I think we did ourselves a disservice a few years back, with a series of How-To book titles like of Learn HTML in a Week! and Build Web Pages in 24 Hours! and so on. The gimmick here was that "everything" you would need to know was presented in little bite-sized packages.

This was well and good, but it did kind of trivialize the process. Geeze, why should we throw bags of money at you for knowing this stuff when any idjit can learn it all in a week, or in twenty-four hours?

But this really is the best way to go about learning the craft. Pick an area where you recognize you are a little weak. Maybe it's HTML, or CSS or some aspect of Dreamweaver you need work on. Okay, start there.

Then, divide and conquer. There is no way you can learn all of this stuff in a single day, but yeah, you can pick up quite a bit in twenty-four hours, if you go about the task in a systematic way.

How to decide to proceed, then, is really up to you. Maybe you will want to learn everything in the File menu, first, then move through the other menus. Maybe you will want to learn as many keyboard shortcuts as you can, first. Maybe you want to pick up everything you can regarding text, type and fonts—the words on the pages, how they get there and how they are formatted and so on.

Some chunks of Web work lend themselves to this approach quite readily. CSS in particular seems well suited to learning all of the text and graphics, first, and then the positioning stuff. It may take only a short while to get your brain around font-size: .9em; but quite a bit more mental calories to digest position: absolute;.

In just a short time you should find yourself knowing a good deal more about whatever area you were focused on. And then a marvelous thing starts to happen—you start to gain confidence in your abilities. Not only your ability to control the size of text on a page, but quickly in your ability to learn everything else you don't already know about text. And when you ultimately know all there is to know about formatting text, and move on, you start to develop that terrific Web developer swagger that drives the chicks wild. You know what I'm talking about.

You can't sit down and write a novel. But you can string a few words together and build a sentence. And you can make another sentence and another and build a paragraph, a page, a chapter and, ultimately, a whole book.

Learning to build Web pages is the same way. Start small, and make a goal of learning two-dozen HTML tags, and then move on to CSS or whatever else you need help with.

You can't really learn everything in a day. But you can learn an awful lot in just a single hour, and you can apply that to what you already know and, ultimately learn it all. Even if you make a vow to only learn a single new thing every day, at the end of a year, you'd be three hundred and sixty-five things smarter than you are, now.

Let's get started, huh?

A Little Knowledge…

2009-03-25T11:01:00.001-05:00

I don't believe there is any such thing as wasted knowledge, but I do believe in the old saying "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". This is especially true when dealing with Cascading Stylesheets, CSS.

The last book has probably already been written showing CSS as an afterthought. When the specifications were first gelled, back in the Clinton administration, I could see why authors of the HTML books of the day just tacked on a new chapter dealing with the new rules. Usually, this was at the back of the book, the clean part of any well-thumbed tome that indicates most people never quite got around to reading it, or reading it to any degree, anyway. This was understandable, and I would have probably done the same thing, but it still wasn't a good idea.

CSS needs to be taught on the same level and at the same time as HTML. I know dozens of people who have never finished a book on computer technology. You start at the beginning, 'You are about to embark upon a wonderful journey…' and cruise through the early examples, "Hello, World!", and then you pretty much put them aside at some point after that. CSS deserves better.

We all lead busy lives. Especially now, we are all trying to do more, trying to increase our productivity so as to keep our names off of The List. We can't be bothered to pick up every detail, and especially not the details of things we may never need to actually use in real life. I need to know how to get these words on these pages in this order, about "here" on the page. Show me how. You can learn all of that between pages 32 and 47 and it just doesn't occur to most people to then also go to the back of the book to find out how to adjust the text, color it, shade it, move it around, constrain it or otherwise style it. If the information was really important, it would be at the front of the book, right? Who has time for all of that?

CSS is finally coming out of that kind of attitude. As more and more developers pick up more and more of the simple rules, we are seeing fewer and fewer tables used for page layout, fewer <font> tags, fewer <p></p> tag pairings
and fewer multiple–<br />'s used to adjust on-screen placement.

I'm encouraged. I have fallen victim to this kind of thinking, myself. I teach HTML in one workshop and CSS in another. And so once again, if you don't take the CSS training, you don't know what you don't know. That may be doing a disservice to anyone looking to learn about how to mark up a page. Maybe CSS should be included in that very first introductory class, to reinforce the idea that This Is Important.

I applaud anyone who wants to learn anything. I just know that the Web of 2012 and 2015 will be a much nicer place as support for Internet Explorer 6, tables-for-layout and the endless parade of <font> tags recedes into the middle distance. We need to do a better job of "building value" in CSS, and in teaching it as an important part of building Web pages, not an afterthought.

A New Template

2009-03-18T09:49:00.001-05:00

A new Template is coming. This isn't probably news to anyone. It was probably a smart bet that work began on the next one as soon as the last one was officially published. And while there may have been a self-congratulatory weekend taken off, that's pretty much how I remember things.

People expect change, on the Web. It's built into the promise of linking documents from all around the world. And that change extends not only to content, but also to the design of the content, the presentation of the content and even how we work and interact with the content.

Even if Web technology was fully mature and never changed again, there are still many good reasons to change things every now and then. Retailers routinely move the coffee and cereal aisles in grocery stores, or the power tools and the nuts and bolts in hardware stores. People have this amazing capacity to discount things that don't change.

Apparently it's buried deep within our Lizard Brains and has been there for centuries. Remember the scene in Jurassic Park when everyone stood still so the Velociraptor wouldn't see them? 'Raptors visual processing greatly discounted anything that wasn't moving, that wasn't new, in a way of thinking. If an animal moved, its relative position changed, something was new, and so those signals went straight to the brain. But rocks and trees were more or less motionless and could easily be discounted in a day spent almost entirely looking for food.

Similarly, it's been said that most people cannot draw an accurate representation of either their wristwatch or their car dash board. Isn't that interesting? They see these displays sometimes dozens of times per day, so often that what starts to register is the un-changing-ness of most of it. Sure, the hour and minute hands move from glance to glance, and you note the passing of time that way, but are your numbers Arabic, Roman, or just dots in the position of 3, 6, 9 and 12? Are you sure? We notice our speed changing as we get out on the highway, but how high does your speedometer read? 85 miles per hour? 100 miles per hour? More? What about your gas gauge? Does just sweep from "E" to "F" or does it have factions of a tank marked off, somehow? See what we mean? We're lucky we recognize members of our own families, I guess.

So after a time, it's common to change things. And change provides a great chance to introduce new technologies and/or new ideas into the mix. When our first Web page showed up, there wasn't much need of JavaScript. Then there was, and then there wasn't, again. Now it's back again with a lot of light shining on AJAX. This is one of those things that we can plug into the page now and get real benefit from. We used to spend a lot of calories wrestling with differences between different Web browsers. We have to do much less of that kind of thing, now.

Kids coming in today have grown up in a world that has always had an Internet. Web pages have always added new features and new technologies have come along at irregular intervals that needed to be reckoned with. The Web page we show him should be at least as cool as the one his high school had, shouldn't it? He just spent a bag of money on a new laptop and a new smart cell phone. Our pages should work on those, too, right? Wouldn't you be expecting that much?

So we are coming down to the wire on a new Template design. As before, several groups have been working on several designs. Within each, the battle for supremacy has been raging since last fall (not to sound too WWE or anything). Should the new navigation menu be over here? Or over there? Are people still using QuickLinks, or should we move everyone into the Search box? And what about that Search box? Do we really need to explain that we want to search for people or pages? If we took that question away we could present both and maybe speed things up for people. Hmm….

We expect to have three good candidates, soon. You'll be able to see them and comment about them, and then there'll be… one. And then we'll deploy the new design, suffer the abuse from detractors and bask in the glow of the praisers and… start the whole process over, again. You've been warned.

Obituary

2009-03-11T15:53:00.002-05:00

We are sad today to note the passing of Tables for Layout.

Tables for Layout was born in David Raggett's late–1993 draft of HTML markup formats. This paper was adapted and adopted into the May, 1996 RFC and, ultimately became a part of the specification for HTML v3.2 in January, of 1997.

Tables for Layout really came into its own with the release of Netscape's Navigator 3 and especially Navigator 4 browsers, along with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, in version 3 and again especially in version 4 release.

Tables for Layout was the tool of choice for professional Web designers and developers throughout the late 1990s and into 2000. As the Web became more commercial, large corporations with sometimes millions of dollars invested in logos, colors and other branding identity had little patience for a Web where they could not control the precise positioning of various elements on a page.

While never designed specifically for Layout (Tables were originally meant only for tabular data), Tables were drafted into the role of constraining various content elements on Web pages with more precision than was otherwise available at the time. Tables seemed especially well-suited to this task by most at the time, and it is conceded by even the most ardent detractors that the Web of today would never have happened without the contribution of Tables for Layout during the second term of the Clinton administration.

These were heady days in the evolution of the Web and of Web design and development, and many tags briefly developed a non-standard usage during this period. Mostly, this practice has fallen away with the appearance of the "Internet Appliance" style of thinking, and the realization that content may now appear in massive monitors or on handheld devices like cell phones or anything in between, or indeed in other media.

Tables for Layout will probably be best remembered for its stubborn tenacity in a role it was never designed to fill, only finally yielding its commanding position to Cascading Stylesheets when the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close. Until then, it was storied in Web pages throughout the world detailing Web development technique and in a great many well-considered books on "Good Design Practice". Even many of the popular Web editing environments of the day, NetObjects' Fusion, Microsoft's FrontPage and Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver, supported and celebrated Tables for Layout for a number of years.

Ultimately, the evolution of the very standards that gave rise to Tables for Layout served to weaken and finally kill it. The rise of Cascading Stylesheets and the improved support of popular Web browsers gave designers even more control, and at lower cost, than Tables for Layout could ever provide. As fidelity to the Designer's idea became more and more important, Tables for Layout simply could no longer compete in an area it was never designed to work in.

Tables for Layout is preceded in death by the <blink> tag and spacer .gif, and is survived by the <font> tag, the serial <br /> tag and the empty <p>

pairing, both still in wide use for visual alignment. Visitation is available at any little-maintained Web site from the middle-late 1990s, or sites for firms with little or no Web budget. The family has asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the WorldWide Web Consortium in support of their HTML and CSS validators, and ask that friends of Tables for Layout finally spend a few moments in quiet meditation with Eric Meyer's excellent CSS: The Definitive Guide.

Quiet the Echo

2009-03-04T09:58:00.006-06:00

If you have ever printed a UNL Templated Web page, you have doubtless noticed a few differences between the page as presented online, in a Web browser, and as it comes out of your printer.

The biggest difference, the one that gets the most positive comment, is that Navigation does not print. Since you cannot click on a link on a piece of paper, that whole block disappears from the page, leaving more room for the #maincontent area that, presumably, people really wanted anyway.

This is a terrific example of targeting your styles to their expected media. We spend a lot of effort making our page easier to navigate online, by including things like title attributes to flash little tool-tip messages and so on, but this technology is lost on the printed page, too. You cannot "hover" your finger over a printed link and get a message saying where it goes.

So to restore some of that lost utility to the printed page, it was decided to echo the URL string on the printed page, just behind the linked text.

This:

Becomes:

...will take you to a New Page (newPage.html).

...when this page is printed.

But not everyone is happy with this implementation. Some people want to turn off links in some areas of the page, while others would prefer not to echo the URL at all--especially if it is a particularly long strong, common in database and eCommerce pages.

The CSS entry that controls this echo is in the print.css page, which is linked to from UCOMM in the head of every document. Since we cannot comment-out the rule on that page, we need to write a rule locally that un-do what it is doing.

Let's look at the print.css file, available at:
http://www.unl.edu/ucomm/templatedependents/templatecss/layouts/print.css

As you read this file, you are seeing only those rules that go into effect when the presentation media is a printer. We are looking for a rule dealing with links, or anchor tags, here.

There's one in the sixth line! But, as we read it, we see it just underlines the link text and removes any background attached to it. So, that's not our rule, and we'll have to find ours somewhere else in the page.

We are probably looking for either a Class rule, or an ID rule, or some kind of contextual rule. Since this URL will echo on the printed page for any link, we can probably discount Classes and ID s. Recall that Classes can be anything, and ID s are limited to just one per page. Since even a simple link with no Class or ID attributes at all will still echo the URL, we must be looking for a contextual rule because the effect works with every class and every ID and even in the case of links with neither a class nor an id.

As we remember from the Introduction to Cascading Stylesheets training, these are rules built with multiple selectors, separated not by commas, but by only spaces.

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { color: Red; } will turn all headings Red.

h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 { color: Red; } will only turn Red any H6 heading, but only if it follows an H5 heading, which follows an H4 heading, which follows an H3, an H2 and an H1 heading.

So we are definitely looking for one of these on our print.css page.

We find it, about three-quarters of the way down the page:

#maincontent a[href]:after {content: " (" attr(href) ") "; font-size: 90%; }

What this is saying is "Any time you find, within the main content area of the page, an anchor tag (a "Link") that includes an http-reference, place the content of that link after the Linked Text, displaying it at nine-tenths the size of the linked text.

Now, if this rule was on our local style sheet, we could just comment-out that rule, with /* and */ characters, and go on. But since it has been linked to the page and already been read by our browser, we have to un-do it, somehow.

We can do that by writing our own page rule having to do with printed media, using the @media. If you already have a local or page style sheet atop your page, you can include this rule there, otherwise, include everything here, including the <style> tags, in the head of your document.

<style type="text/css">

@media print {

#maincontent a[href]:after { display: none }

}

</style>

Again, if you already have page styles in effect, just copy lines 2, 3 and 4, above and place them before the </style tag in your page. Otherwise, copy all five lines.

Now, this rule is a little trickier than most typical CSS rules. For one thing, the whole package is contained within the @media rule's own curly brackets. This rule will only go into effect if the media used is identified as a printer. Remember, the information is already at the browser that it should display the destination after the linked text at 90% of regular size and within parenthesis. We had to find a way to turn that off, and the simplest way is using the display: none; property-value pair.

So now, your browser downloads the print style sheet, with its instruction to echo the link, and then it reads your page style instruction which says "No matter what you may have read or heard elsewhere, on this page, if you are printing, and you encounter an anchor tag within the #maincontent area, do not echo the link destination after the linked text".

Since all of our anchor tags are within the #maincontent area, that's all of our links.

If you need to turn off echoing to just certain links, create a class in your page style.

<style type="text/css">

@media print {

#maincontent a.classname[href]:after { display: none }

}

</style>

Remember that whatever class you assign to .classname, it needs to appear within your link as a class attribute, now.

<style type="text/css">

@media print {

#maincontent a.noprint[href]:after { display: none }

}

</style>

<a href="newpage.html" class="noprint" title="Links to new page">New Page</a>.

The result of all of this is a link that prints, but without echoing out the destination URL.

Molly at Opera

2009-02-25T08:55:00.005-06:00

Here's a bit of good news I came across last week. Molly Holzschlag has joined the Opera team.

Molly and I go way back. She worked for me briefly on the old GEnie network, the General Electric Network for Information Exchange. She ran the disABILITIES forum, and this is was the spark of my passion for equal access and for Molly herself. When Microsoft got into the game, we each had forums over there, as well. The next time anyone heard from Molly, she had written a book about some new language everyone was talking about, HTML. Molly, overnight, literally became the girl who wrote the book on HTML. Speaking engagements followed, magazine gigs, and of course, ever more books.

Before long, Molly had staked out an entire bookshelf. She had written books on HTML, on Web design, on the use of color, on how to work with various Web-related software, and more. Lots more. Over the last decade, she has ceased to be merely molly holzschlag, and has become Molly Holzschlag, in the Web world.

In recent years, Molly has put some muscle behind the move toward standards-based Web pages, even while pointing out that in many cases, no real standards exist. And I credit her with a great deal of the work that went into making Micrsoft's Internet Explorer a much better browser, finally. And now, she works at Opera.

You may not have heard of Opera, but I suspect you will, soon. It's been around for a long time, now. Opera was spun out of a telecom research project in 1995. They released their first browser in 1996 and started really gaining a reputation as the twentieth century came to its close. They built a reputation for a lightweight, very fast Web browser that had amazing fidelity to the published standards. This was back when nobody gave a damn about standards. If anything held Opera back it was that during this time they were charging for their software.

Oh, a free browser was available, but it featured advertising that could not be turned off, unless you paid for the software. This had the effect of causing downloads for new ads while you were browsing for new pages, slowing things down—and did I mention nobody cared that Opera was one of very browsers that actually did what it was supposed to do? Opera is now free, again.

Over the years, they have really forced the hand of other browser developers. I have no doubt that Firefox is a better browser today because Opera was on the scene. Even Microsoft was finally embarrassed that this little company, and it is a little company, could create a Web browser that played by the rules while they could not get Internet Explorer to get out of its own way. Opera is avialable on Macintosh and Windows PCs, on Linux computers, on the popular game playing machinery and a host of Smart Phone hardware.

Molly has worked with the WorldWide Web Consortium, with the Web Standards Project, with a host of publishers, and with me. She may leave Opera one day—there seems to be little permanence anywhere in this industry. But I suspect she will leave Opera a much better company, and browser, than we see today. It might not turn out that way, but that's the way to bet.

Just please, if that day ever comes, no jokes about the Fat Lady singing, huh?

Budgets

2009-02-18T11:44:00.000-06:00

So we are all, once again, worrying about budgets.

A few years ago, we went through all of this. We lost a few programs and a few friends, and then everything got better. Talk to enough old-timers and you will probably hear plenty of these stories, from every several years.

I wish I had the answer, but I'm not sure I completely understand the question, myself. It may be that we will skate through this with just a few stern warnings to turn out lights, or have to keep our computers for an additional year or two before we can upgrade them. It may be that entire programs will again be flushed, and some good people along with them.

In the How To Cope With Stress books, they tell you not to spend a lot of calories on things you have no control over. But it's difficult, when the lead story on the news every night is another piece about some unimaginable multiple of hundreds of people have suddenly found themselves without work. It's on the front page of every paper. It comes to us in e-mails and Web links and now here I am bringing it up, too.

There are a lot of ways this could shake out. All of the real decision-making happens several pay grades above my position. I have no control. That's not to say that I don't have any influence though. There is plenty that you or I can do to make sure we're the last name on the list to be crossed-out.

I'm not talking (only) about coming in a few minutes early, and leaving a few minutes late, and all of that nose-to-the-grindstone stuff, here. Our focus has always been on learning to build good Web pages better and faster and so that's the hook, here. If you are concerned with your future, consider doubling-up on your efforts to learn Dreamweaver, to learn HTML and CSS, or to learn some additional technologies like the content management in Adobe Contribute, or server administration or programming in JavaScript, PHP and My SQL.

Learn as much as you can about any of these—or all of these—and you will be just that much more valuable to your boss. Taken to an extreme, if you are doing the work of four or five WebFolks, then it would take four or five people to replace you, right? That makes keeping you the biggest bargain in your offices. They'll get rid of the coffee maker before they let you go.

Or, not. Maybe there just isn't the money to keep you, no matter how much your output improves. If that's the case, then you enter the population of workforce candidates with a new skillset that puts you ahead of some huge percentage of people competing for the next job. Larry, Curly and Moe all know HTML and Dreamweaver. But you know HTML, Cascading Stylesheets and the Templates. That pretty much makes it your offer to accept or decline.

We're doing all of the normal Fiscal Responsibility things at our house, like turning off lights, casting an eagle-eye on the cable-TV bill and trying not to spend so many (wonderful!) evenings in restaurants, banking savings in anticipation of maybe being able to only make minimum payments for a while. There are any number of books, magazines and Web sites with great tips on how to handle your money, when it's still coming in.

But if you're like me, and worried about the axe that may or may not be falling, this may be a great time to start learning, relearning or even just applying the things you already know, but haven't gotten around to using, yet. It's got to be much easier to learn 500 things over six months, than over six weeks.

Good luck in the weeks and months ahead. And if things don't turn out our way, maybe we can carpool to an interview?

I'm Taking the Afternoon Off

2009-02-11T13:14:00.001-06:00

Yeah, I had a bunch of things I wanted to talk about this week, but you know what? The weather is nice and I have a bag of vacation time banked and the Web will surely be here in another week.

So I'm going home to put my feet up, maybe play a little guitar and catch up on some TV and reading.

How Do You Keep Up?

2009-02-04T11:29:00.004-06:00

The other side of How Do You Learn All Of This? is probably How Do You Keep Up?

On balance, I would say that this might even be more important than learning things in the first place. We are in a rapidly-changing field here, kids. Even though HTML itself has not changed since December of 1999, how we use it, and how we use Cascading Stylesheets and JavaScript and a host of other technologies has changed quite a bit.

The problem with books, and you don't know anyone who loves books more than I do, is that they don't change. Whatever was printed on that particular day is the information you have. So when styles, best practices or even standards change, how do you know? How do you keep up?

Books are static. The Web is dynamic. For news and updates and all manner of help, get thee to the Web. Here are a few of my favorite Web sites:

I rarely visit the WorldWide Web Consortium, the W3C, except to validate pages. They are a big academic exercise and can spend days and days navel-gazing and deciding where a comma goes in a sentence. If have a lived a faithless life, I will find myself in the W3C conference room as my Reward. But there is a lot of good information, here. In fact, this is the source material for probably every book on Web Design you find on the shelf. But source material isn't always pretty.

Here's the W3C on ID and Class attributes: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.2

Not thrilling, huh? Almost any book on HTML does a better job of teaching you HTML. But that's not really what the W3C site is for. It's more of a reference, the final arbiter of How The Web Works.

I spend much more time with A List Apart (http://www.AListApart.com). ALA, the kewl-kids say, tackles much more of the leading-edge stuff. Several years ago, they spearheaded a campaign to do away with browser-specific markup and whip browser developers into shape building software that adhered to the standards (as published at the W3C). If you have ever wanted to Zebra-stripe a table and wondered how, or even wondered if it was worth it when it comes to usability, ALA probably has an article or two covering it. Need to style your <form> inputs, buttons and text boxes? I check ALA, first.

Molly Holzschlag is one of my Web Heroes. She is the one who (patiently) taught me HTML, back in the days of the 56kbps modem and the Steam-Powered Computer. Her site isn't only about Web standards, but also about whatever happens to be taking up space in her life at the moment. http://www.Molly.com is on my daily Web hike.

Eric Meyer is another of my Web Heroes. Eric literally wrote the book on CSS, again translating all of the arcana of the W3C site into a how-to guide that was there first with the most readable information and how-to help. I visit http://www.MeyerWeb.com once a week or so, on average.

There are probably several good mailing lists out there. People post questions and others post answers and, at the end of the day, a digest of all of these transactions is compiled and e-mailed straight into your mailbox. I enjoyed seven or eight years of the WebDesign-L mailing list (http://www.WebDesign-L.com/) but finally ran out of time and got tired of the repetition. You can imagine that over the course of a decade or so, you will see questions like "How do I make my ordered lists start with Roman Numerals instead of Arabic Numbers?" comes up quite often.

Next up: An amazing phenomenon I have noticed in the Web World.

I am a big fan of Paul Boag, and his BoagWorld podcast ( http://www.BoagWorld.com/ ) from England. Some of the language is a little tricky (if something is awful, it's pants!) but the accents are charming, the humor is refreshing and the information is spot-on. I subscribe to the podcast and listen via iTunes.

There are at least two really good magazines on Web work, both from the UK. The first, Web Designer, comes with detailed tutorials color-coded and with links to available help-files. Turn to the green pages and there is some whiz-bang new trick you can perform in Dreamweaver, in about an hour. They do a great job of keeping up with the trends and the news, as well. It's pricey here in the Big PX, but it is well worth the time and money for the news and information. http://www.WebDesignerMag.co.uk/

The other magazine is a little trickier. It's available everywhere in the world as .Net, which of course was the name of a whole suite of technologies Microsoft developed years ago only peripherally involved with Web design. Here in the States, the magazine was known as Practical Web Design for years, but it merged with .Net a few years ago and is now available here as both the .Net Magazine and Practical Web Design, depending upon your news vendor's distributor or something. It's all very confusing. If you Google "Practical Web Design Magazine" the first hit that comes up is a link to .Net but the magazine is available here with both titles, so be careful. Again, this one's expensive but worth it if you can afford it (see if your boss will buy you a subscription!). http://www.NetMag.co.uk/

The last source I lean on is our own Web Developers' Network. Whenever you have a question, check WebDevNet first, to see if someone else hasn't already encountered and maybe even solved your problem. http://wdn.unl.edu/

How do you keep up? That's how I do it.