2009-08-04
post/155580178
It is worth checking out Blake Fitch’s online portfolio simply because of the superb website design. The fact that within it holds such fantastic work makes it criminal to miss.
What, a browser-resizing full-screen Flash movie? I’m certainly impressed.
I mean, I might be willing to accept good interactive design as a name for this or something, but this patently isn’t of the web.
(I have an entire folder full of screenshots of pages that look like this, because I dare to use clicktoflash. Look forward to an exciting series, coming soon!)
2009-07-04
Ephemerality
[This was an experiment in live note taking. Please see the follow-up, On Taking Notes.]
Gavin Bell at OpenTech
What I want from the web in five years. Self documenting lives. Happy with the idea of throwing away information, like newspapers. Twitter and Flickr disagree- have archives including social data but not real time; Twitter don’t make available past 3500 messages.
Will I want fourteen years of data? Benefits of forgetting. Amusingly forgets the name of a book about someone who can remember years-old data but couldn’t summarise plots. Brains remember significant activities. Stuff that matters. What to forget?
Aggregation is key (meant here as grouping of items onto clusters, not my meaning). iPhoto events. Abstraction services- photos for upcoming, possibly in future grouped by friend. hAtom? Date based URLs. Favouriting etc. Social tools to prune networks and renewal of identity through new networks.
Finding significant enents. Overview of important events. “Abstracting it for you wholesale.” Favouriting and similar single-click methods of approval. Social bleedthrough- Friendfeed likes. Looking at the past. Twitter social atlas? Preserving context around content and favourites.
2009-06-24
post/129589239
At first, I didn’t really care about fixoutlook.org. Then I was slightly annoyed by Dave Cross tilting at the old windmills. Then I actually read Joe Clark’s evisceration of the campaign (via), and I realised I’m an old-timer who can be persuade to tilt at windmills too.
I mean, is it really coincidence that the time that email stopped being useful is the same as the time that hordes of users via Outlook (and Outlook Express, or whatever the cut-down consumer version that Microsoft deign to include in some Windows versions is branded as this year) started using it? Maybe. But it’s fun to think it’s not.
Meanwhile, I looked at the site itself, and as well as noticing that what seemed like half the usericons haven’t got off the last bandwagon yet, it was impossible to miss that it’s JavaScript is written badly enough to make Safari cry (see screenshot). Oh, and any campaign that tries to communicate with Microsoft via the medium of, er, Twitter? Right. OK. Well, I post privately there, so I suppose I’m not allowed to be part of your club. Never mind. Didn’t fancy joining.
(This post was brought to you by the ghost of 2lmc spool past.)
2008-10-23
Fix Yr Tumblr Template Titles
I’m a big fan of meaningful titles. Not only do they make your web browser’s history easier to navigate, but they also give bookmarks - both local and shared - meaningful, and they’re good for IRC and IM conversations too. I’m told they’re important for SEO, but I’m not exactly bothered about that one.
When I first published my custom theme for notes.husk.org, the title was fairly useful:
<title>notes.husk.org.
{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary}{/block:PostSummary}</title>
This gives the index page a title of notes.husk.org (yes, I should be using {Title}, but I don’t care to make this theme public- yet), and if it’s a single post (for example, my previous text post), it also puts the post’s name into the title, so you end up with “notes.husk.org. Irony in Stamps”.
I decided to add a full stop after the PostSummary, but then considered some other cases. For example, what about archive by date pages, like this one? Well, there’s a set of tags for use when you’re on such pages for pagination, and you can (ab)use them like so:
{block:DayPagination} noted on {block:Posts}
{block:NewDayDate}{Year}-{MonthNumberWithZero}-{DayOfMonthWithZero}.
{/block:NewDayDate}{/block:Posts}{/block:DayPagination}
It’s not terribly clean, because you need to loop over the posts to get the day out, but it is there. However, that still leaves the other sort of pagination, the straightforward 10-per-page sort. That’s easy enough to deal with, though:
{block:PreviousPage} archive page {CurrentPage}
of {TotalPages}.{/block:PreviousPage}
Here, PreviousPage is only invoked if you’re not on the newest (ie front) page, so the title there is kept short. Thankfully this is more straightforward than the date archive version, but I might end up tweaking the wording a bit (especially as Tumblr has its own concept of “archives”, which are very pretty but not templatable).
Finally, there’s tag pages, which I don’t expose (edit: now I do, on single-post pages only) but you can still get to anyway. These are pretty straightforward:
{block:TagPage}tagged {Tag}.{/block:TagPage}
So that’s it. All the pages on notes.husk.org now have a unique title, even the ones that don’t have exposed navigation. Nifty, huh? The full block, in case you want to work with it, is as follows. Have fun!
<title>notes.husk.org.
{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary}.{/block:PostSummary}
{block:DayPagination} noted on {block:Posts}
{block:NewDayDate}{Year}-{MonthNumberWithZero}-{DayOfMonthWithZero}.
{/block:NewDayDate}{/block:Posts}
{/block:DayPagination}
{block:PreviousPage} archive page {CurrentPage} of {TotalPages}.
{/block:PreviousPage}
{block:TagPage}tagged {Tag}.{/block:TagPage}</title>
