shiny things in messy little piles

Month: September 2007

del.cio.us link feeds? no thank you.

I’ve had enough of the del.icio.us link feeds that are clut­ter­ing up my rss feed read­er. Peo­ple who used to post once or twice a week because they had some­thing inter­est­ing to say are now drop­ping 2, 3, or more links into my read­er everyday. 

I don’t need to fol­low their wan­der­ings around the web. If they can’t think of some­thing sub­stan­tial to say about some­thing they’ve found on the web then they should keep it to them­selves or at least with­in their del.ico.us (or what­ev­er) network. 

I’m going to miss the occa­sion bit of wis­dom (or cool­ness) from a few of them but the sig­nal to noise ration has gone over the knee and I’m clos­ing the channel. 

Har­rumph

Glut — not at bed time!

I start­ed Alex Wright’s Glut: Mas­ter­ing Infor­ma­tion Through the Ages a cou­ple of days ago. I have a num­ber of oth­er books/learning projects on my plate at the moment but I real­ly want to get to this book while the dis­cus­sions of it are still rag­ing. So I thought I’d put on the bed­side table and read it in chunks at night. It won’t work. 

Bed­side books should be inter­est­ing in a sort of “hmmm… that’s a new idea” way not in a “oh hell yes, that’s what I’ve been think­ing but could­n’t put into words” way. Noth­ing that stirs any pas­sion in your intel­lect, if you see what I mean.

The first six pages of Glut pro­vid­ed two of those “oh hell…” moments. It will have to move back into the the office and wait it’s turn in the big stack. sigh

Acronuym Amnesia — oh lord I meant acronym, ugh

This week­end I was sit­ting with my friend Kathy Gill at a house warm­ing par­ty and we got onto the sub­ject of the evo­lu­tion of markup lan­guages. Aside from mak­ing most of the geeks in the vicin­i­ty cringe at “work talk” on a Sat­ur­day, we were run­ning at top speed through the jun­gle of acronyms that have been spawned by 10+ years of web based markup lan­guages. Until I stum­bled. Kathy men­tioned (I think it was…) XSLT (or was it some­thing else?) and I drew a com­plete blank. More than a blank in fact, I com­plete­ly lost the abil­i­ty to parse any of the acronyms that we had been using and all con­nec­tion between the let­ters and the words that they stood for. 

Sim­ple over­load. I’ve nev­er been able to reli­ably type or say RDF rather than RFD and now it seems that I may some­day (soon) lose the abil­i­ty to cope with any acronym. 

Can’t hap­pen soon enough as far as I’m con­cerned. Per­haps if we (I) lose the abil­i­ty to abbre­vi­ate any ran­dom­ly long obtuse string of words and pre­tend that the result­ing alpha­bet soup is mean­ing­ful we will have to more care­ful­ly con­sid­er what we name things and strive for con­ci­sion and mean­ing in usable packages.

TQR — Denton’s Three Questions and Four Principles and an Observation of My Own.

Recent­ly I wrote about Den­ton’s How to Make a Faceted Clas­si­fi­ca­tion and Put it on the Web. In sec­tion 4 he intro­duces three ques­tions and four prin­ci­ples that pro­vide use­ful guid­ance when imple­ment­ing nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems for infor­ma­tion archi­tec­tures that rely on faceted classification.

The three ques­tions step through some basic ques­tions that you need to answer before you set out to design your nav­i­ga­tion system.

  1. Are you design­ing for free nav­i­ga­tion (aka brows­ing) or nav­i­ga­tion by selec­tion (aka searching)?
  2. What are your facets like?
  3. Will you give the user con­trol over the cita­tion order?

Char­ac­ter­iz­ing your facets in ques­tion 2 is the tricky one. How may facets you have, how they relate to each oth­er, how even­ly the foci are dis­trib­uted, etc. will all inform your deci­sions when design­ing a nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem. Unfor­tu­nate­ly there isn’t a check list that match­es facet char­ac­ter­is­tics to best nav­i­ga­tion design. You’ll have to experiment.

When think­ing about your design deci­sions Den­ton offers the four fol­low­ing principles

  1. Do not allow the user to cre­ate a query with no results.
  2. Show the user where they are.
  3. Make it easy to adjust or refine the query.
  4. Use the URL as the nota­tion for the classification.

I can quib­ble with the details. (A null return is use­ful — if you can show the user which parts of the query have results and which don’t.) But the prin­ci­ples are always valid points to consider.

I par­tic­u­lar­ly love his fourth prin­ci­ple — that the URL should be a human under­stand­able rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the foci loaded into the facets that got the user to the cur­rent loca­tion. Tech­ni­cal­ly a roy­al pain in the ass to cre­ate and some would claim use­ful only to uber-geeks But think on it. How often have you gone to a book­marked page and then chopped of the URL’s tail or altered a word or two to get to some place when you did­n’t fell like typ­ing some big ole URL? How often have you been frus­trat­ed in the attempt?

The par­tic­u­lar cul­prit in most cas­es of incom­pre­hen­si­ble URLs is dynam­ic web pages — AJAX, PHP, and all their data­base gen­er­at­ed con­tent friends.

A recent client was dri­ven nuts by the fact that when she viewed her site sta­tis­tics the page names dis­played as:

www.(somesite.com)/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=116.

ProdID116 was utter­ly mean­ing­less to her. As were 95% of the oth­er page names. There was no easy way to force the use of a rea­son­able fac­sim­i­le of the prod­uct name in the URL. Com­plex kludg­ing ensued; reports were gen­er­at­ed. But not as fre­quent­ly or accu­rate­ly as they should have been. All very unsatisfactory.