iGoogle goes yahoo (or went)

Talk about late to the party.

In 2005 I was involved in a project using the Google front end API to power a portal site (talk to me off list for gory details).

Long story short: the Google code was such a disaster at the time that I never looked at my own Google homepage again for ages.

Until today at work.

We were talking about various approaches to handling screen real estate and the iGoogle interface came up in the discussion. I figured I knew all there was to know, but took a quick peek under the hood later to notice it being powered by the YUI grids and some other yahoo goodness.

So then in preparation for this post, I did a quick search only to find out this happened in 2007 (!) and got some nice write ups on various Dev blogs.

So not that I’m championing one solution over another, but just great to see one company using examples and work offered by another one. Even if one is big bad Google (I’m pretty sympathetic to both).

So I was going to wax on about this and that, but obviously I’m pretty slow on the uptake here. I’ll try to dig around come up with some points of discussion, but found an interesting thread on Zach Leatherman’s blog covering the issue along with another tangent in the whole story.

So if this is old news to you, sorry for wasting the bandwidth, but maybe there’s some thing of value in here regardless (or irregardless)

Cheers

#sxsw Another Year Yet Again Passes Me By

SXSW going on this week and I’m not there.

SXSW has is pluses and minuses, but I do want to attend the Media part of the Conference (as an ex-NYC musician, I don’t feel the need to get involved in the music side. Not to dismiss it, but its just that I’ve played the fest and it just feels like “a day at the office”). I think its good to at least make a show of face, hand out some cards, evangelize for what ever organization I’m currently involved with, and get some face/drink time with fellow members of my profession.

The ideal world is that all of my fellow practitioners get a chance to “come up for air” and attend the conference. This is usually a time when project life cycles are at their peak, so it’s hard to say to my “team of the day” that I’m going to go off and geek hob knob.

But hopefully one year I actually can. It’s always good to hear new perspectives, be challenged, learn new best practices and generally engage.

If you happened to attend feel free to comment with any highlights, or if you’re old and jaded, comment about that too! Its all fair game here.

Fingers crossed for 2010. (I’ve been crossing my fingers since 2003 or so!)

BTW: starting to read up on IE8. Enjoy this random link, courtesy Nate Koechley’s blog

Addition: Khoi’s take on the recent fest, glad it ended on a positive note

Adding Mojo To My Dojo

Recently, as I stated before, I’ve signed up fro a new full time gig. This is a bit different than my usual roles in my career as a consultant, or in certain cases, “hired gun”. In the project we are working on, we have been using an in house JS framework called “mojo” that essentially adds a layer of modularity onto the top of the various JS solutions floating around out there.

As maybe not the most gifted javascripter (something I’m working to improve as I speak!) I usually rely on jQuery to add in any UI effects or ajax type functionality. But in this case, the underlying framework is the Dojo Library.

I’ve used mootools and prototype/scriptaculous in the past with mixed results. I found the proprietary (for lack of a better term) additions one needs to employ in order to attach events using Prototype/scriptaculous were pretty cumbersome and not very well documented. In order to remove inline even handles, the whole “Event.observe” notion just took me forever to pick up for some reason.

I think the thing that has made jQuery such a “hit”, and made it so widely adopted, is its fantastic documentation and the ease by which one can get up and running and start instantly producing results. I like the way it attaches events based on classes or IDs.

“Go find this element and add this to it.”

Prototype in some ways does this too, but the documentation was so lacking and the wiki full of examples of onClicks, it just made the whole process incredibly frustrating. I resorted to using some loops I had written from scratch, with the help of someone who actually knew what they were doing on an older project (!) and ended up skipping Proto/Scripty all together. Sucessful? Not really.

So we’ll see how Dojo with our layering of mojo likes to play. Right now, I’m finding it very modular to the point of verbose. We can’t quickly get up to speed with it due to the sheer amount of configurating it requires and large number of files it relies on. Also the framework seems to rely on being built via ant in order to be activated. I don’t know if this is all mojo/dojo dependent or just a feature that was developed on the project in order to compile quite a number of CSS pages (I thought we had alot on the nytimes site!..)

I will try to report back as we get more familiar with it and i get more up to speed with mojo/dojo in general. I wish we were simply using jQuery, but my bed has been made in this case!

To _filter or not to _filter. PNG8 To the rescue

Comparison of PNG8 in IE7 and IE6

We’ve been working on a number of projects here in the office which use liberal amounts of transparent PNGs.

Since IE6 is still in our browser matrix for a number of our clients, this forces us to come up with a number of approaches for supporting PNGs in IE6.

There are a number of approaches out there ranging from IE6PNG.htc to a recent discovery from a contractor in our office about a JS based solution called Belated PNG

There is also the widely known _filter approach.

As with all of these approches, there are pluses and minuses.

But recently I’ve been looking at PNG 8 to work around the PNG greyness mess that is IE6 PNG support.

Ideally, a designer would take into account the browser matrix before designing an over all look and feel for a web project. I am certainly not a designer not do I want to be one, but I would humbly suggest that if there is to be a gradient background, the design not employ shadows on the rounded corner modules.

One can look at twitter or nutrisystem.com to see how rounded corners on a gradient background can be successful. These corners are simply employed by using the radius in CSS3. When fed to ie6, they simply render as square corners.

Progressive Enhancement at its finest!

Ok, so back to the real world. The world where this term is sometimes not fully understood (sigh).

Its seems to me that the PNG approach, even with all of its caveats, seems to be a sorta uhh… “winner”. One can get all of the goodness in capable browsers and not have to bloat out the CSS and kill ie6s poor memory with multiple _filter calls.

On our current project, IE6 use is at 20%. So the end is near. But that’s still more than FF at 15%.

So we’re here in this IE6/PNG “hell” for a while longer it seems.

If anyone is using any of these approaches and has some feedback or experiences they’d like to share, feel free to add you input in the comments.

I Pledge Allegience to #nsotu

Senator John McCain, meet Senator Jim DeMint.
Senator Jim DeMint meet Senator John McCain.

You must both be noble and smart men as you both follow me on Twitter.

The literal explosion of Twitter over the past 6-8 months or so I think has been one of the most interesting online phenomenons I’ve witnessed in a while. From Rick Sanchez to soccer moms, the jury is definitely in and Twitter wins on the People’s Court. Great blog here James, telling people something everyone knows.

But why has this fairly esoteric, early adopter platform taken off where things like Orkut failed miserably? Hard to tell. I think the instant gratification factor certainly has helped, but as another tech writer summized (don’t have the link handy and don’t mean to imply that I am a “tech writer” too..I’m simply a Monday Morning Quarterback) I think the key to Twitters success is the follow concept.

One can be followed but not follow back. I’ve noticed that the Twitter cool factor is simply being followed by more ppl than you are following.

Wierd how that works. But that’s just it. Someone can latch onto you and there is no requirement to “re-follow”. That gives Twitter a sense of detachment that is sometimes lacking from other social platforms such as Facebook or early adopter name check Friendster.

Friendster failed at the very things Twitter is now doing very well. Letting people put up fake profiles and personas. I personally feel that if Friendster simply hadn’t yanked all of the fake users in early 2003 (my heart still is heavy remembering the day “Williamsburg” and the 30th “Jesus” were removed from my friends list) I think they would stlll be relevant.

It will be interesting to see how things pan out. There have already been a few Twitter revolts due to the TOS so I think Twitter is being wise to let sleeping dogs lie.

But how does this translate to US Senators Tweeting from the floor of the US Congress during a Joint Session? Good question. And one I’m note smart enough to answer. Sure, there’s the obvious CNN coverage and cnet type buzz, but that’s been there for a while now.

This really is an interesting development. I wish I could say something more intelligent that that, but as you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m not that smart. But I am grateful to get a quick look into the various thoughts and “modus operandi”‘s of some people whose time and thinking are things I’m not usually able to interface with or directly reference.

When I first started following some of the Representatives and Senators, I initially figured that these profiles and updates would be largely done by staff, as seems to be the case on MySpace and Facebook to a degree. But no, these seem to be the “real deal”, unless Senate Staff Members enjoy speculating that their boss, Sen John McCain in this case, has indeed gone to his mother’s for “supper”.

Refreshingly candid indeed. As with so many things, 2009 is shaping up to be a very interesting year. We’ll see how the tweets go and by Sept we should have a sense if this is fad or now part of the daily routine.

Now if I could just get the Huffington Post to settle down a bit! And the real Howard Dean to sign up. Enjoying the @FakeHowardDean none the less though!

New Label website up in beta

Just a quick post to say I’ve finally set up a blog/site again for my record label at lesysteme.org

Right now very loose, and the grid is waaay to big. But this is the only chance Ive had. These work default wordpress css files are such a nightmare. I’ll try and look around for a cleaner one to update and customize. Theres some links to either myspace or our EU Digital distributor WhatWePlay if you’d like to hear some music samples.

Enjoy!

Times Open

(from all around good guy Clint Fisher’s Flickr shots of the event http://www.flickr.com/photos/timesopen/)

As someone who worked at the NY Times from mid 04 to mid 06 and who loves the both paper and the website (I helped develop the CSS approaches and code base itself for the 06 redesign way back when..don’t worry, you’ll never get tired of hearing me reference this) I’ve been following a lot of the chatter and buzz surrounding the recent Times Open event.

It looks like it was a great event and a smashing success. It also makes it clear how to generate Final Four type buzz in this post-Friendster, web 2.5 world of now:

Release an API.

Facebook has built it’s success on the heels of Google and Yahoo and DIgg way back doing this in someways and now twitter and others have followed suit (As I only have “nerf tendancies”, forgive me for missing all of the other big APIs released during what I will now refer to as the API Gold Rush Era, ie 2007-2008). Now enter the NYTimes.

Will be interesting to see where this all goes. From these seats, it speaks well of the Times to enter into this new world of guns blazing and coders chomping on cigars, just waiting to build wordpress plug ins and scrolling tweets galore.

I think the paper is really doing a lot of things “right” these days. At the end of the day, I’m just a CSS coder trying to make sites fast and more enjoyable for the ppl who use them. In the geek spectrum, it’s pretty banal stuff. We can try to make our mark by writing a CSS reset or something I guess, but we get the most pride in the realization of our craft, if any of it ever makes it through various rounds on implementation.

But release an API and one gets, as an organization, instant status these days it seems. You can have a conference and have geeks on laptops twittering all over the place. I mean its the Web 2.0 equivalent of direct marketing.

My first project at the Times was TimesSelect. My how things have changed. There has been some chatter that the NY Times should open the books, so to speak, on the sign up rates for TimesSelect, now that the industry is going into the tailspin that that product spoke to and foresaw. But I think Times Open is a much more nuanced approach to the problem. Instead of removing and blocking content, the concept allows NY Times content to be even more squarely injected into yet another conversation on the web. Sure, that old problem of how to make money on said conversation is still an open question. And not one that I don’t mean to take lightly, but one for another post perhaps.

So nothing more out a “shout out” as a lot of this is out of the focus on my domain. I’d rather try to discuss how to make really fast large scale site and watch some more YUI Theatre videos. Who says I can’t have a good time?

Keep an eye out on the Times “Open” blog for new stuff. Thanks for checking in.

PS: One more thing that I will add to all of this: No matter what era or context and no matter what we do to try and kill ourselves as a species, is seems mankind’s allure with the “Access Tag/Badge” will never disappear. I think Dance Music conferences like the WMC in Miami can been quietly credited for updating its lowly status, given the depths it had sunk to being so tightly intertwined with Acid Washed jeans wearing Roadies and Axe Rose swooning groupies. So nice to see it rising from the ashes like a phoneix with the likes of SXSW et al. Top job Access Badge!

State of my (web)Life

My second post here. Only 3 years later.

I’ve finally taken on a full time job again and I’m learning alot.

I haven’t kept a web dev blog going in ages and wanted to have somewhere to wax on a bit about current web trends and web dev.

I think its key for an organization to not only be aware of the many ongoing conversations happening on the web, but be contributing to them. Maybe this is some small step is starting that effort for where I am now currently working.

I wanted to point to the YUI Blog and a few posts in particular. As a terrible Javascripter (who has been trying to get better for the past few years! But career path options keep me from being able to focus solely on that), but pretty good CSS “thinker”, there is a really great video by jQuery creator John Resig available for view here: http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/02/02/video-resig-2/

As I’ve gone through the HTML code I will be using on a new project, there are some great articles on the YUI blog concerning performance now that we are pushing the limits of what some of the browsers can handle http://yuiblog.com/blog/category/performance

At some point I’ll set up a dedicated URL for this but for now, wordpress will have to do.

James

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