w3c goes south

  • 2005-10-09

...so to speak. The Australian W3C office has moved to the CSIRO in Canberra. I'm slightly ashamed to admit that the office used to be at the DSTC in Brisbane and I'd forgotten.

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why blogger?

  • Sunday, October 09, 2005

I've had some passing comments and discussions lately about why I'm not running Wordpress (or Textpattern, or Movable Type, or something). Some people find it a bit odd that despite having my own domain and the opportunity to install whatever I want, I am still running with Blogger. Well, I do have reasons and I think they highlight some of the issues with choosing a blogging tool.

I will admit that I periodically think about switching to something else; particularly due to things like the poor feed handling and lack of category/tagging features. That said, I really don't have the time to maintain an application. I'm not interested in maintaining an application even if I did have the time :) So realistically before I'll switch I'll have to get really annoyed with Blogger, or really impressed with something else.

So anyway, why am I using Blogger?

why blogger?

I'm not claiming any of this is unique to Blogger, but here are the reasons.

  • Free (albeit with the blogger bar if you host on Blogspot)
  • 100% template control with simple tags.
  • There is some evidence of standards buy-in for the default template options (although Blogger is still far from perfect in terms of standards/accessibility).
  • The application is remote hosted:
    • I don't have to maintain it or worry about security patches.
    • The output can still be hosted on my own domain

    • NOTE: in 2010, Blogger abruptly announced the end of publish-by-FTP support. This means you can no longer host a Blogger-powered blog on your own server, you can only delegate your domain or subdomain to Google to host it for you.

  • Habit - I'll be honest, I've been using Blogger since 2001 and habit plays a fair part in these things.
  • Now owned by Google, so relatively unlikely to disappear overnight.
  • Pretty good uptime and performance - outages are fairly rare and speed is usually fine.
  • Can update with a bookmarklet.

All told, I have a pretty good level of control over the site; it's mostly the finer details that start showing up the limitations of the system.

the downsides to Blogger

  • Free, so you get what you pay for in terms of feature additions and support. That said, I've rarely needed support.
  • The comment system is a little bit clunky and some people think they have to have a Blogger account to leave a comment.
  • Syndication/feed handling is rudimentary and "configured" by other choices/settings. I currently work around some of the issues with a little PHP/XSLT.
  • Feature addition and bugfixes take a long time.
  • They don't support Opera all that well, most bug fixes for Opera are "use Firefox".
  • I suspect Blogger just doesn't have enough geek cool factor, particularly for standardistas. I've often had the impression people think it's one step removed from LiveJournal, which is a journal/social network system and not a blog tool per se. Geek status is an odd beast ;)

Blogger also tend to do some braindead things like release a new feature without writing the support pages for it. For example, the new linkback feature: A Consuming Experience: Blogger: backlinks feature (not quite trackback). If they'd released the details of the blogger tags, I'd probably be running linkback already.

other tools

I've looked at other tools and plenty of them look good. Some have problems with their hosting setups; eg. Wordpress seems to have a lot of maintenance downtime and Textdrive-hosted Textpattern sites seem plagued with availability issues (apparently attributed to 'growing pains'). Obviously these issues aren't really about the blog tool. Plenty of tools have a high "nifty feature" count, even if that does increase the "nifty undocumented feature" count as well.

As yet, however, I can't find any alternatives which are free, remote host the application but publish the content to my own domain... and that's before we even consider standards compliance and the actual application features. Plus I haven't even touched the problem of converting between systems, which is one of those things where I do not believe the vendor hype - I expect the process would be painful and/or produce less-than-desirable results, much like converting between email clients.

So for now I'm sticking with Blogger.

PS. Feel free to comment with your thoughts on what you run and why you chose it!

running to stand still

  • Sunday, October 09, 2005

From time to time it shows that progress is slow for web standards and web usability. While certain areas of the web move forward in leaps and bounds, many others seems to show a lot of activity without much in the way of visible results. we have to keep running just to keep our place.

  • It's that time again... Jakob Nielsen has released his yearly Top Ten Mistakes rundown: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). Sadly, no real surprises; although the whole fixed vs. fluid thing will probably never be resolved.
  • At WE05, John Allsopp released the results of a survey of major company/government websites; all-too-appropriately titled Are we there yet? Best practices in web development in Australia - a survey (link goes direct to PDF). Essentially it rates 83 sites on the "Allsopp Scale" for measuring how crap a website really is. Even as a cynical standards guy I was a little disappointed to see just how badly most sites fared.
  • I'm not entirely sure why, but somehow the appearance of Dreamweaver 8 is sliding into this post. I think it's something about the claims being the same as last time, along with a page full of "you need javascript and flash" graphics ;) I'll have to play around with it later and give it a fair chance.

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we05 - random informal observations

  • 2005-10-06

As Andrew has already noted, a proper rundown of WE05 presentations is yet to come after we compare notes. Still, I have a bunch of things written down which won't be included there yet haven't been posted yet. Hence, random informal observations from WE05. They include some timeline/social stuff and random notes scribbled down between the notes from the presentations.

day zero

  • At early registration, Maxine caught me by surprise when she immediately recognised my name and referred to a comment I'd made on Derek's blog. You mean people read the interweb? :)
  • Head back to the hotel with my WE05 swag and kill some time on the net... very very easy to kill time at 28.8k ;)
  • Andrew arrives and we head out for food, then alcohol and shooting pool...
  • By the time we crash, we've already become obsessed with the saying "Don't be that guy."
  • Did I say crash? HAH! A fire alarm next door to The Vulcan kept some of us awake for hours.

day one

  • Stagger out with only a couple of hours' sleep. Breakfast picks up my spirits with surprisingly good coffee from the Vulcan.
  • The WE05 experience seems to involve noise and fire alarms.... Tantek Çelik's question time was cut off just before I could ask my question, when the building evacuation alarm kicked in. Cue an evacuation out to the driveway in front of the ABC, dust flying everywhere. Turns out a demolition site nearby had kicked up an enormous amount of dust and set off the alarms.
  • A room full of coughing and sneezing geeks (all that dust!) was quickly sorted out by the unflappable WE05 organisers, who sprang into action and supplied water to anyone who needed it. Nice work!
  • Lucky seating on return from the fire alarm had us right at the back of the room, allowing us to bolt for lunch and avoid the huge lines. Spend the rest of the time trying - without success - to get the wifi access to work.
  • During lunch we spot Steve Faulkner doing a remarkable Jeffrey Zeldman impression.
  • Find seats within laptop power cord range. Dive on them like deranged fiends ("my baby needs power!"). Discover the flip up desktops aren't even close to level and experience the joy of typing downhill.
  • Question for the gallery: why are macheads so completely obsessed with making everything look like OSX?
  • I'm having to swap between laptop and paper because I can't keep using either one the entire time...! These presentations are too interesting to stop for a second.
  • At the day one drinks I meet and catch up with a huge number of people. I'll have to collate all the names and URLs later on ;)

day two

  • Considering there are really only three rendering engines in play at the moment, it seems weird that Opera barely gets mentioned. Are we really cross-browser developers, or are many "standards-compliant developers" just infatuated with Firefox? Are people just falling into a new version of an trap - only testing in Firefox instead of only testing in IE?
  • The on campus cafe barista actually knows how to make a decent coffee. I'm shocked!
  • Holy crap, nearly everyone in this room has heard a screen reader!!!!! I have the urge to stand up and yell "I have found my people!" (with a nod to Colin for that line... it's such a perfect way to express the moment).
  • During a presentation, text zoom is used... Firefox scales the radio button, but not the selected widget! Geek hilarity ensues.
  • Here's a modern moment: I post on my blog, Chaals comments on my blog, I run into Dean Jackson in the lunch line and pass on Chaals' "say hello to dino"... :)
  • Dean initially thinks my domain is zoook.com.au... yes, my handwriting really needs work. Plus I need to remember to cross stroke my zeros.
  • We really need some guru to come up with a keyboard replacement for drag and drop.
  • Interface designers... quit labelling buttons B and I and start labelling them STRONG and EM. Especially when they insert STRONG and EM!
  • Cameron Adams just got pwned by his own presentation after he forgot he had disabled javascript....
  • Tantek is so used to WE running behind, he was in his hotel room when the organisers were looking for him before his second presentation.
  • How can we resolve styling tables? I've found you often need to set widths according to each usage across a large site; yet we can't include attributes in the table's tags; and we should avoid style-based classes. Plus it's technically incorrect to insert border="1" even though tables become nearly unreadable without styles.
  • Geeks might care that something is not new, but the users couldn't care less so long as it's easier to download stuff.
  • Ajax/XMLhttprequest.... it's just like little framesets. But they're so damn useful.
  • Web 2.0.... basically harnessing the power of that one geek in Prague who went crazy on a caffeine bender and built something really good. Why the hell would you spend time and money creating it yourself, all over again, if the end result is the same?

PS. Yes, in case you're wondering, I do plan to eventually return to non-WE05 content ;) Give me a break, I'm on holidays! :)

we05 day two - quick post

  • 2005-10-02

Another quick post in an attempt to talk about day two. Realistically, I can't do it justice while full of pizza and alcohol (I highly recommend Zia Pina pizzeria at The Rocks); but I don't want to wait another day before posting :)

day two quotable quotes

  • Eric Meyer
    • Tip: [When trying to get design signoff,] schedule the meeting right before lunch, you'll get a decision!
    • Anyone support IE6.0? (Hands go up) Anyone not want to support IE6.0? (Hands stay up) Ahh, my people!
    • [Gives crap to Dave Winer] Oh, this is podcast! ... He's in America and I'm in Australia - can get asylum?
    • [Typos "right" into "roight") Border roight... I'm localising!
  • Steve Faulkner
    • Day to day, what I do is criticise other peoples' work...
  • John Allsopp
    • Introducting Tantek Celik: Tantek is so busy he makes me feel like a sloth!
    • After showing the sad state of corporate websites: Keep fighting the good fight!
  • Tantek Çelik
    • On the box model hack: I didn't think it was a big deal...
    • On meta-data like 'keywords': Invisible meta-data doesn't work! (I nearly cheered. Now I can go back to my organisation with some hope they'll listen to me on this point ;)
  • Cameron Adams
    • Coolness is overrated. ... Now the first real reason to do this...

Not a big deal, Tantek? :) Let's visit that in a little more detail. (Note that this is more paraphrased than quoted - I'll get into the podcast and quote it properly once I am back home with broadband. Still, I hope this is a reasonable re-telling of the tale...)

I happened to have the ear, or email, of Jeffrey Zeldman. Jeffrey was saying he couldn't stop using tables for layout because of this bug... he mused that it would be great if he could send a different rule to two different browsers.

I said "Is that all? That'll be easy!"

"He looked at me... well he didn't really since it was email... and said 'easy'?"

So, using a test suite, I set out to find an error that screwed up in exactly where he needed it. After a short time hacking around I got back to him with this hack.

Suddenly Jeffrey decided he could move to using CSS instead of tables.

So what would be a big deal? :)

day two notable moments

  • Molly referred to Instant Messaging, blogs etc as the traditional ways of communicating.
  • A show of hands during Eric's session revealed that very few people are working to a formal browser support profile!
  • Derek Featherstone casually asking the crowd whether anyone could find him a ticket to the NRL Grand Final. Certainly a novel approach to the "sold out game" issue...
  • The Mac freaking out at the end of Derek's presentation, allowing me to goob the old "get a Mac!" advert. "Get a PC!" ...I was probably lucky to get out alive.
  • Cameron Adams managed to explain the DOM in a way that makes it seem almost trivially simple to understand. Why didn't anyone just tell me it just makes a tree out of your document? :)
  • Andrew's observation is definitely correct: Cam Adams wins Most Smartarse Jokes Slipped Into A Presentation. Just wait until Russ hears about the "snoozefest" comment. It'll might look like the Eric vs. Doug animation....
  • What is it with crazed mac heads? Cam Adams has reproduced the OSX desktop within a browser. If viewed on a mac, would it create a singularity? Your machine might reach some kind of Apple event horizon and turn into an iPod.
  • Tantek managed to use the word "folksonomies" without making me want to scream.
  • Jeff Veen reminded us that Your web site is a tiny piece of a much larger experience.
  • Jeff also introduced us to the term and formalised concept of the Culture of Generosity; which explains many of the web's current success stories. Give plenty, maybe take just a little, everyone benefits.

I also think it's kind of a notable moment - or at least very cool - that my non-geek fiance came to the after-party and didn't get driven insane by geek talk :) Maybe we're not quite as bad as we think we are ;)

See also: we05 day one - quick post, eric meyer on mobile computing (that photo :)), we05 - random informal observations and all over, bar the shouting.

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