A Whole Lotta Nothing

IE broken as ever

One downside of Internet Explorer no longer being updated is that its bugs will stick around for some time. A new one I discovered yesterday was that IE's handling of images as form buttons is broken when used as a submit button.

I found a horrible hack was change back to a normal submit type, then set background-image of the button to the graphic, with the appropriate heights and widths, and a border of none. Unfortunately, this would only look exactly the same if I cleared the value out (so text wasn't on top of the graphic), making the buttons appear blank on non-CSS aware browsers.

But it works in IE. Bad IE!

Recently overheard

"Having a teenaged daughter is tough. When I was young, I had go-go boots and miniskirts, but my daughter who just turned 14 is wearing those low riding jeans. Worse yet, some of her friends wear their jeans so low their ass sticks out of the top."

(nods all around from the woman's friends)

"All I want to know is, what comes after ass crack? Where do we go from that?!"

World Cup Photos

A couple photos from yesterday's games (1, 2)

buy buy buy, consume consume consume

I wish I had the energy necessary to run a site like Kevin Kelly's Recomendo, but here's a short list of recent things (mostly media purchases) that I've been loving every bit of:

• Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (can't put it down)
• Macromedia Homesite 5.5 (not a lot of new stuff, just seems tighter)
• Clyde Federal - Please Be Real (Staten Island Ferry makes me wish I made films so I could put the song into a pivotal scene)
• Sloan - Action Pact (very best rock from canadia)
• From Monument to Masses - The Impossible Leap in One Hundred Simple Steps (always a favorite)
• Simpsons Season Three (thanks Jish!)
• Kiehl's Foaming Non-Detergent Washable Cleanser (yeah, I buy girlie things for my face, blame Lance)
• Johnny Cash - American IV (an iTunes store buy)
• Guster - Keep It Together (love it - impulse buy from iTunes)
• Ben Folds - Speed Graphic (nice little EP, another iTunes thing)
• Behr's Inspiration Library flash thing (great use of technology to research design choices at home, hit the "interior" button to play with it)

And for no reason, a list of things I am lusting after (all for the new house -- pathetic what I've become, no?):

• Panasonic TH-42PWD6UY
• Audiosource in-wall speakers
• Room & Board's Hudson club chairs
• stacked slate retaining walls
• Viking dual-fuel range
• bamboo flooring (looks great and ecologically kickass -- only takes 3-4 years to harvest bamboo used for wood flooring)

Signs I'm getting older (aside from the above list -- my 31st birthday is coming up in a couple weeks): five years ago, when I hung out with friends all we talked about was new music and art house movies (and the web). Now all we talk about are mortgage rates and who is trying to conceive (and the web, but just a little).

Just what I always wanted

I'm really happy to see this new focused site at Photographyblog. One of these days I'm going to get a digital SLR, and in the mean time I'll continue following dpreview and this new site.

Grand Central Flash

Macromedia's Central went into beta today, and although I've seen some pretty cool demos at conferences, the beta is fairly crippled. It looks like it has a lot of potential for delivering paid flash content, but it does suffer from the same usability problems that most flash apps do.

Case in point: in the movie demo app, if you put in your zip and select a single theater from the list, then click on a movie title to find out times, when you hit Central's back button, you lose your place and are stuck back on the main theater list. This is the same way macromedia's exchange section works, making their search engine almost useless for going through more than one result at a time (because using the back button clears your place and/or search).

dang

The author of gangstories has decided to shut down the site, just a few weeks into it. I can understand how painful it must be to bring stories back from your youth and have to relive them in public. After reading a few of them, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen when someone featured in a story would someday find it.

It's certainly rough stuff to read and I can't imagine what it's like to write, so I guess I can see why raw, disturbing stories like these are so rare.

Kill the locals

The downside of TiVo is that it relies on pre-published, nationwide data as input, but actual programming is often up to the whims of local affiliates for the big networks. Sunday I was twice disappointed by my local networks.

Instead of showing the defending world champion US women's soccer team play their (winning) opening game, my local ABC station played 2.5 hours of skin care infomercials that got recorded. Yep, instead of playing a worldwide sporting event, "shows" that normally occupy the 2am-6am slot were played on a Sunday morning. I don't understand the reasoning for this, the station can't possibly make much money from infomercials, and the national feed of the game was like three hours of free content ready to go. In the afternoon, instead of seeing the NBC X games knockoff Gravity Games, my local affiliate played NASCAR. I can see the reasons behind this one, as the locals here would definitely go for NASCAR over skateboarding, but it was still disappointing to sit down for an exciting evening of TiVo'd sporting events and end up empty handed.

I can't wait to lose the local cable and go back to DirecTV's national stations.

At least there is a rebroadcast

I contacted my local affiliate about yesterday's oversight and they sent back a kind reply. The game will be rebroadcast Tuesday night during some dead time.

A few people emailed to say that for local affliates, nationwide feeds usually carry national ad space and cause local channels to lose money, which is probably the case here, though I still think it was a very poor decision. I first called the station, and the switch operator sounded like I was just one of many that called to complain about the game not being on. With the women's soccer league on the brink of shutdown, and Title 9 laws under constant attack, women's sports have a tough go of it in this country, so it's good to hear people still care about the games.

Upcoming.org

Andy just launched his new collaborative event site upcoming.org. I've been playing around with it for the last 15 minutes or so and I'm amazed at the possibilities there. The site is pretty sparse, even if you have an account, but I can see the potential and I'm really excited about it. Andy's written one of the first second-generation social software apps I've seen.

What do I mean by second generation? Well, I've been known to bash the hype around social software (even though I've arguably been running a social software application for the past four years), but it was only because I was waiting for the substance that lived up to the hype. Yeah, Friendster is pretty cool now that it has 2 million users, but what does it actually do aside from help my single friends get "hooked up"? I haven't found it any more revolutionary than a massive public vanity mirror so far.

Upcoming ties together a few of the strings that the past couple years of software tinkering has made for us. It's got parts of Craigslist, MetaFilter, Friendster, and weblogs rolled into it. You create an account and post events you're going to, and friends and others in your metro area can find out about them via the site or RSS. Every event is like a blog post that allows comments from others. While I didn't figure out why anyone would syndicate their own events list (the only updates to it will the ones you add so the notification possibilities of RSS ae kind of lost) until I realized that with a package like mt-rss, I could keep an updated list of upcoming events using it. Right now I update by hand my upcoming event in the lower right hand side of this site, but it's often out of date because I'm lazy -- not so once I get mt-rss and my upcoming.org feed to automate it. Andy's told me that more RSS feeds, FOAF, iCal support, and Trackback implementations are on the way.

Just like how Movable Type built upon the first generation work of earlier blogging engines, I think upcoming is the first of a new breed of social software apps that fills a need, and samples the best ideas from a previous generation of applications. I think it's baby steps in the right direction and I can't wait to see what applications look like in 2-3 years when a site like upcoming.org is more the norm.

Stupid Safari

This is a strange CSS bug in safari I found today: you can't use animated gifs as CSS background images.

View this page in Safari, then try it in any other browser. I can only get the first frame to display in safari.

more like Montana Foot-in-mouth Coalition

This is the "reality" that we need to portray- that sex outside of marriage is dangerous for both heterosexuals and homosexuals.

You heard it here first: The Montana Family Coalition endorses gay marriage.

Stupid CSS

I've been wrestling with CSS bugs over the past three days while trying to hone a design, but the strangest one was finding out that two popular image replacement techniques (1, 2) don't work in mac IE 5 if you use anything besides a heading element to hide your text.

So:

<h1 id="logo">logo text</h1>

will hide the "logo text" and replace with an image, but:

<div id="logo">logo text</div>

will not. Makes no sense and prevents me from using it on a public site, since I no longer want to use headers to describe logos.

Try this test page in Mac IE 5 to see the bug.

update: yeah! a fix!

Dangerous spam

I just got a new spam scam that looked exactly like this except with newer dates. It's no doubt a Nigerian 419 scam, where you can only "collect the money" once you give them all your bank account info so they can empty it.

Still, the email is much more convincing than trying to help out the estranged son of Prince Mobutu get his oil money out of hock. I wonder how many people fall for this free money lottery scam.

No mac user left behind

Can anyone tell me why the firebird nightly builds for mac stopped updating almost two months ago while the other versions have chugged along?

update: yay! unofficial builds are available -- I can get my sidebar links again.

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Roadmap for future wikis

Yep, wikis are a total nightmare. I don't know why I went easy on them in my previous posts, as I wanted to share all the things they do poorly when I posted recaps. Might as well do it now.

Overall, people that have had their "light bulb" moment with a wiki love them and would love to see wiki functionality in other kinds of sites. The following suggestions are all geared towards making wikis more easily understood and used by most web authors and readers by reducing the wiki cruft and wiki geek features to act more like a typical website people are accustomed to reading and building.

My first problem was finding any package that could output good html. Only a handful (maybe 3-4) could pass the HTML validator for anything beyond HTML 4.01, but all but one still output terrible markup. They either use line breaks instead of paragraph elements, or they forget to use closing paragraphs. Some packages (it looks like MoinMoin is one of them) output html in CAPS so you'll never get xhtml out of them without doing modifications.

I don't know why this is so difficult for wiki package authors to get, but if you want to build a powerful package, have it output pages that look like this:

...
<h1>Page Title</h1>

<p>first bit of text.</p>

<p>next bit</p>
...

PHPwiki was the only package I found that could do this.

Navigation is always going to be difficult, as wikis are supposed to be flexible enough to grow in any direction. Consequently, this means you often see a link to absolutely everything on the main home page, which is an information nightmare. It'd be nice if you could flag a handful of pages as the major ones, and have navigation bars build up automatically (on my wiki I had to hard code them by hand). Of course before you can have a nice nav bar, you have to dump the ones that ship with wikis, which leads me to:

Wiki package authors need to get over their geeky features. Just because you can do backlink searches, subscribe to pages, and measure file differences on all the previous versions of a page doesn't mean you should display these things for all users. Look at this random page from a MoinMoin-powered wiki. How much actual content is there and how much is geek cruft that only a subset of users would care about or even know how to use? Give all but logged in users a minimum set of functionality that actually improves their experience, not hinders, and stuff the info in the footer, not the header of the site. I know wikis were designed by engineers, for other engineers, but the general public is beaking into the wiki world and not all of them know what CVS is.

As Barry found out, the template systems are fairly arcane, requiring you to modify html around programmic code (perl, php, python, etc, it's usually intermingled in the templates). Approach wiki templates like a powerful blogging system. Templates should be pure html, with calls to functions that include other bits of content and html. Make templates for all those other bits too, so that when you include [$navbar$], you can also modify the html within the navbar include. Also make the main CSS file a template that can be used to control the layout and design of the entire wiki. I know this might mean a wiki could have 20 different templates, but them's the brakes, and people would prefer the flexibility and control over their look and feel. Like blogging engines, most users would start with the main template, and only the industrious few would go into every template to make sure every last line of code was valid and correct.

Blogging tools have done templates this way since 1999, and so far I haven't seen a single wiki adopt this method, though I've only looked at 7 or 8 packages and I know there are dozens now. It's simply a matter of removing as much hard-coded HTML from within the wiki's codebase, and move it out to your template engine. You don't want people to get to the point of saying "boy I hate the way the calendar's HTML is coded by my wiki package and I can't modify any of it." Let page designers sculpt and mold any and all HTML output by your engine, because this is how organizations work. A group has a site, they might have an engineer coding it, and a page designer making it look nice, while others work on content and marketing. Wikis should allow this type of backend collaboration as well as the frontend.

They also need to provide a method for linking beyond CamelCase. Give me a shortcut to make a regular, single word into a new page. Perhaps I could write &&contact and have that become contact?, and build a new page that doesn't have to be called ContactThisSite in the URL and title in order to be easily added to the site.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of things I found out while setting up my wiki, but this would be a good start to building the ultimate wiki package that users and designers would like.

Please release the update patch for the pacific northwest

It's been crazy hot for the past two months. Look at this image and tell me there's no such thing as global warming:

Over 90 in every state? Montana?! What in the hell is Montana doing with temps in the low 90s? Someone broke the weather.

Hard Knocked Life

I can't say I'm 100% positive it's all true stories, but the posts over at Gang Stories are absolutely riveting. I'm glad the author got out of that situation, and I hope he posts many more stories.

Although I'm just another boring kid that grew up in an all-white suburbia, at different times of my life I had some fucked up friends that liked to break shit, start fights, and basically cause havoc for no other reason than boredom. To this day I can't watch the movie Kids, since the characters remind me too much of people I hung out with from time to time. Though my own teenage stories are way, way tamer, I still can't believe some of the stupid destructive shit I did when I was 16.

Of course at my age and moving into my first house, it's only a matter of time before I'll be saying things like "goddammed, good-fer-nuthin teenagers broke my mailbox! Get off my lawn you punk kids!" Ah, just another part of life's cruel comedy.

Behind the Wiki

Several people asked if I could upload my phpwiki changes for review, so here it is: 666kb zip

Keep in mind the following:

- If you want to use my code, install phpwiki 1.3.3 first, not 1.3.4. Then either copy my phpwiki-1.3.3 files over yours or do a diff on them to compare. I changed a lot of little things in all sorts of places I have forgotten.

- I hard-coded a few things like the nav in the upper left in various .tmpl files found in the /phpwiki-1.3.3/themes/default/templates directory, so change accordingly to match your site.

- I included my .htaccess files so you can see how I'm redirecting people at the root of my site over to /matt and how I got the /matt/HomePage wiki default document to switch to /matt/home (I changed the title of the default page in MySQL, but you could create a page called "home" instead).

- I'm providing it as-is to other wiki hackers so don't email me with problems, as I can't offer much help. My changes worked for me, hopefully they work for you or you can adjust accordingly.

Cozying up to JT

For me personally, one mark of a good writer is their ability to describe a world I know nothing about, and do so in a way that is so interesting I want to find out more. Susan Orlean springs to mind as an expert at doing this, and many writers at Harpers and The New Yorker can do similar things.

I've never heard a single Justin Timberlake song (perhaps as background music in a store -- maybe) and had no interest in changing that. He's a boyband superstar that sings mindless pap, right? But after reading Anil's review of his recent NYC show I seeked it out and gave it a listen.

JT's stuff isn't bad at all, in fact I'm amazed how much it sounds like honest to goodness R&B and nothing like what I thought it would sound like. Thanks Anil, I never would have given this a listen otherwise.

CSS wiki zen garden

I've been playing with wikis for the past three years but it was only about a year ago when I started realizing they were a killer app for intranets. Given a protected environment and a small group of users, the ease-of-use for editing and the ability to grow a site organically are the two biggest features in my mind.

A couple months ago I started thinking about how I could get the same easy editing features in other software, or if that wasn't possible, I wondered how far you could take a wiki package's output. I kept thinking about this until I finally sat down and gave it a try. This weekend I had some free time so I sat down to answer the following design challenge:

Is it possible to produce a wiki that offers all the power of a wiki while at the same time looking like a regular website?

"Looking like a regular website" for me also adds additional design parameters. In my eyes, a site has to be valid HTML and use CSS instead of tables for layout. A site also should be semantically correct, and since most wikis produce fairly simple HTML (content is just headings and paragraphs), I intended to take a CSS zen garden approach when coding it, putting all style into a CSS file while leaving the content produced by the wiki (and the content order) alone. The last requirement I put on myself was to produce a site that didn't look like it was limited by the other parameters. Like other projects I have created, I design purely in photoshop. This often produces interesting designs that have to be solved like a rubik's cube when converting them to xhtml/css, but I do my best not to think about XHTML strict vs. transitional when putting colors, fonts, and shapes together in photoshop.

The CSS zen garden site really opened my eyes and demonstrated that almost anything is possible in xhtml. It served as a model and inspiration when I started working on this Friday night. After some initial mockups, I settled upon this clean design and did my best to make the final product match it.

The first big obstacle was finding a wiki package that produced simple, valid HTML that didn't harm semantics. "WikiWiki" means "quick" in hawaiian and after looking at several packages, it seems the engineers that coded them were working quickly too. I could see how most relied on ugly hacks and awful html to display content, which is the nature of fast web application production. Eventually I chose phpwiki due to the simple headers and paragraph tags used for layout, and I spent most all of Saturday hacking away at the template files that control output (I've since heard from others that there are better packages out there).

I removed as much of the wiki cruft as I could, I simplified the URLs used by the application, removed unnecessary items from the navigation, and locked down the system so only I could edit pages (although I'd love to get typo fixes from the community, the specific and personal content doesn't really lend itself well to collaboration).

After a day and a half of hacking at php, xhtml, and css, I spent this evening converting the old content into the new site layout and wrote up some bits of info here and there.

The end result is here. It's valid XHTML 1.0 strict, produces some simple, semantic output that works in any browser, is entirely controlled by a wiki back-end (making editing and adding new pages a cinch), and I achieved the layout of my mockup almost exactly (compare the original mockup to a live portfolio page).

I'm happy with the outcome, though it was a ton of work to achieve my goals even considering my fairly simple content. I believe with further hacking it would be possible to control a fairly robust corporate or personal website with a wiki backend, so here's hoping someone creates that package, or takes the work I've done farther with their own site.