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?
Friday, July 1, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Rules Shouldn't Get In The Way
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
It's the end of the World
…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.
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.
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