Posted by Tom Moertel
Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:29:00 GMT
Author xC0000005
on Kuro5hin.org has been keeping
bees and writing about it in his diary. Today he also posted
a fascinating story about it,
Lessons from the Hive.
Check it out.
If you like the story, you will want to read his diary
entries. In them he
tells how he acquired his honeybee colony and then watched it struggle, grow,
produce, decline, and fail, ultimately to be replaced a few days ago
by a swarming colony that happened upon his failing colony’s hive – a
great stroke of luck.
It’s interesting stuff.
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 26 Oct 2005 20:51:00 GMT
Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for 17 October 2005
is Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. In other words, it’s a top-ten list of things not to do on your blog if you care about usability.
Since I care about usability, I decided to test my own weblog against
Jakob’s top-ten list. How did I fare?
Let’s see:
Top Ten Weblog Usability Mistakes
- No author biography: Fail. Oops, got me there. While I have a bio on
the Community Projects site,
I don’t even link to it from my blog.
- No author photo: Fail. Oops, again. I don’t have a photo of myself on
the blog, nor on any other site (that I know of).
- Nondescript posting titles: Pass. I generally give my posts
informative titles such as
How to change symlinks atomically
and
Simple data formats are not going away.
Only rarely do I use cutesy
titles such as
On the effortless cultivation of humility, where readers are forced
to guess what the post is about.
- Links don’t say where they go: Pass. As a reader, I find “click
here” links to be annoying, and so I avoid the practice in my writing.
- Classic hits are buried: Pass. I link to popular topics in the
Popular Topics sidebar.
- The calendar is the only navigation: Pass. My posts are organized by topic as well as by date. Further, the ever-present live search makes finding posts by content easy.
- Irregular publishing frequency: Fail. I don’t have a regular posting schedule. When work gets heavy, for example, I rarely post.
- Mixing topics: Semi-Pass. I do mix up topics somewhat, but almost all of my topics fall into the category of “stuff programming geeks like” and in that regard are fairly consistent.
- Forgetting that you write for your future boss: Pass. I don’t think there is anything on my blog that a future employer would find troubling or even unprofessional. (Since I am a consultant, I have lots of “employers,” and so far none of them seem to mind what I post. Some – the crazy ones – even enjoy my blog.)
- Having a domain name owned by a weblog service: Pass. Since 1996 I have been keeping it real on moertel.com. My blog’s home is blog.moertel.com, which seems like the natural place for it.
In sum, I made three of Jakob’s top-ten weblog usability mistakes:
- I don’t have an author bio.
- I don’t have an author photo.
- I don’t post regularly.
The first two are easy to fix, and I’ll fix them right away. The
third – posting regularly – is more difficult, owing to the
ever-varying demands of my work load, but I’ll make an effort to pick
up the pace. Hopefully, my blog will 100 percent “Jakob compliant”
in the next day or so.
Do you have a weblog? If so, how many weblog usability mistakes do
you make? Grab Jakob’s top-ten list and find out.
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:12:00 GMT
The good folks at 37signals are once again up
in arms about Google Web
Accelerator (GWA). David
Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), in particular, writes in a recent post to
Signal vs. Noise that “[GWA] was evil
enough the first time around, but this time it’s downright scary.”
The problem, it seems, is that GWA automatically, silently, and
unblockably follows hypertext links to web pages that are linked to by
the pages you visit. It does this in order to cache those pages so
that if you visit them later, it will have cached copies ready in an
instant, thus “accelerating” your web surfing. But some web
developers use hypertext links to trigger potentially unsafe actions,
such as deleting records in a database, and when GWA automatically
follows such links, it triggers the actions.
Oops.
Let’s do the time warp again…
Now, if this story sounds familiar, that’s because half a year
ago, the exact same thing happened. GWA was unveiled to the public.
People started using it. And some of those people started losing data
from their accounts with popular web applications, such as
37signal’s own Backpack. 37signals
publicized the problem in their blog and DHH even
called for a recall on GWA.
And then the community responses came in. For the most part, the
responses could be divided into two camps, based on who was
blamed for the problem. The first camp blamed the web designers who used
links to trigger unsafe actions (in violation of applicable standards),
and the second camp blamed Google for unleashing GWA upon a web where
standards aren’t always followed.
Both viewpoints had some merit, but I was in the first camp and thus
argued for following the standards and against unsafe linking
practices:
What surprised me was that so many people in the second camp argued in
defense of unsafe linking practices, which I had thought indefensible.
I didn’t have any problem with arguments against Google’s unleashing
GWA on an imperfect web, but arguing for the web’s imperfections
seemed like an odd way of making the case. The supportive arguments
boiled down to the following:
- Lots of web sites use action-triggering links, so the practice is de facto acceptable.
- The existing palette of user-interface options is too limited for today’s web applications; thus, designers are justified in breaking the rules.
- The standards don’t actually prohibit the practice (they say “SHOULD NOT,” not “MUST NOT”); thus, the practice is allowable.
None of the arguments seem to withstand scrutiny. The first argument
breaks down like so: That lots of web sites do it only means that
those sites get away with it, not that the practice is acceptable.
Further, as GWA demonstrates, those sites may not get away with the
practice much longer.
The second argument breaks down when one examines the uses of unsafe
linking practices. Most of them could be replaced by safe practices
through modest UI refactoring. Given that safe alternatives exist,
the unsafe practices are not justified by virtue of being the only realistic option.
The third argument breaks down when one actually reads the relevant
standards. Then it becomes clear that one should not use links to
trigger potentially unsafe actions. The wiggle room created
by the use of “SHOULD NOT” instead of “MUST NOT” does not admit
the large problems caused by unsafe linking.
Finally, even if there were some justification for unsafe linking, the
practice would still be a bad idea: its costs and risks outweigh its
benefits. Why hold back the potential of efficient caching
architectures for the web? Why risk data loss for your users? It’s
not worth it.
Back to the Future
So where are we now? Given how little justification there is for
unsafe linking practices, one would hope that we would have abandoned
them by now. But, as the recent cries about the second coming of GWA
suggest, the web-development community is not yet ready to give up those
sexy, action-triggering links.
It’s not that the means aren’t available. Rails, for example, has
plenty of support for sane and safe practices for triggering actions.
Rather, the problem is cultural. Too many influential people,
especially in the Rails community, are unrepentant users of – and, dare
I say it, apologists for – action-triggering links. Until this changes, I
expect many new web developers to pick up dangerous habits from the
very people they respect most.
Fortunately, many other respect-worthy people are pointing toward
a better way:
- Sam Ruby: “I’m on the other side of this debate. While this appears to be a purely philosophical concern, in reality this stuff matters.”
- Bill de hÓra: “The GWA is back and following GET links again… The technology itself is interesting insofar as we are going to see more and more highly automated robots enter the web over the next few years…. Even more interesting is the kind of outrage holding forth in places like Signal v Noise….”
- Joe Gregorio : “And now we begin the next chapter in which Pooh discovers that five months after the first time Google turned on GWA that standards still matter.”
I hope that this time around the web-development community answers
the wake-up call. It’s time to abandon action-triggering links.
Posted in web development
Tags get, gwa, rails, rest, safe, unsafe
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