I updated my page on Expanding Nested Lists. In short, its a really simple CSS and JavaScript technique for creating a, well, expanding (and contracting) nested list much like the tree controls found in many operating systems.
Today was my last day at the Puget Sound Educational Service District. My co-workers gave me a wonderful parting gift: a "lunch board." This deserves a bit more explanation, so here goes…
Among my co-workers, there has always been a desire to go to lunch together. Sometimes this means going to an actual restaurant, and other times it just means a trip to one of the nearby grocery stores. But the point was that we'd do it as a group. Of course, this wasn't an everyday occurrence, as working from home, meetings, and other plans often got in the way. We'd manage to do this about two or three times a week.
The challenge was figuring out where to go. "So, where do you want to go?" "I dunno, where do you want to go?" This could go on for, well, far too long. Mostly out of this frustration, the lunch board was born. I don't remember exactly how it started, but the key was an old bulletin board that Karen wanted out of her cubicle.
The lunch board is that (ugly pink) bulletin board, nailed to a cubicle in a central location. The board itself is divided (using pieces of ribbon nailed to the board) into a number of sections: Other Plans, Group Lunch, and Restaurants. We wrote everyone's name on a little strip of paper and tacked them to the board. We also wrote down every potential lunch place in the area on strips of paper.
Here's how it works: each person decides what they'd like to do that day. If they have other plans, which could include being out of the office or even bringing a sack lunch, they just move their name into the "Other Plans" section. Then, they're safely out of the "What do you want to do?" conversation. If you are interested in going out to lunch, move your name to the "Group Lunch" section. Then, in the Restaurants section, pick one or more places that you'd like to do. One of our later modifications was to add pieces of string attached to each person's name. A person could then tie their name to the specific restaurant they'd like to go to. This way, a consensus could form around one of the choices without spending too much time debating. Multiple groups could even form, based on who put what up on the board.
It might sound a bit confusing, but its actually a fairly simple process, and quite low-tech. A picture might help, but I don't have a digital camera handy.
The started somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it turned out to be a great development. And, I think we can draw some interesting conclusions for the world of collaboration and knowledge management:
Low-Tech. Sometimes the easiest, most low-tech solution is the best one. Sure, we could have written a peer-to-peer application that reached out of surveyed everyone's lunch preferences. But the lunch board took just about no money (I'm not sure if Karen bought the string or not), and not much time. Technology people often look to monstrous systems (KM systems, CM systems, etc). Low tech and cheap can work, too.
Informal Communication. The lunch board widened the circle of people I socialized with at work. The lunch board made it easy to go to lunch with a different group than just the same two or three people. In doing so, I learned more about what other groups in my department were working on. In our case, we were all working with the same customer base (school districts), but we're often working in different areas. Spending social time together allows us to check in with each other and draw connections that might not otherwise have happened.
So, in honor of my leaving, I received a brand new lunch board. I'll definitely miss going out to lunch with this group, and I can only hope that my new co-workers are as good.
Molly Holzschlag has an important article on maintaining a balance between the advice given by usability pundits and user centered research: Integrated Web Design -- Usability: Drawing Outside the Lines
Macromedia has an interesting interview with two of the coders who redesigned Wired.com to take advantage of CSS.
A couple of notes:
Wired provides a great example of why CSS is a good thing.
The flash video they used for the interview is pretty cool. There isn't much traditional video, but rather tons of images and screenshots layered over the audio interview. Its actually a fairly effective technique, and probably somewhat friendlier in terms of bandwidth requirements.
The first time I visited the page, I read the text and thought that it was an interesting, if short, article. I didn't even realize that there was a video. I thought the video was simply a nice big graphic. I totally missed the little audio symbol that was suppose to clue me in to the multimedia nature of the piece. In part, the confusion was due to the fact that the movie wasn't in one of the standard video aspect ratios...it was more of a (very) widescreen shape. Also, there was no obvious "play" button. Other than that, the whole thing was rather well done...I just hope other visitors figure out how to use it!
David Hornik writes about the power of iterative design, discussing the Handspring Treo phone/PDA and then generalizing the experience. A quote:
Similarly, I have always viewed as one of the key strengths of building a web business, the ability to rapidly evolve a product or service based upon specific, quantifiable user feedback. Successful web businesses have never sought to put out the perfect product. Rather, they have put out products that can be measured and tracked, and have been quick to revise those products based upon the direct feedback they receive. The more agile a company is in responding to that user feedback, the more likely it will ultimately build a product or service that best meets the needs of its customers.
Amen.
Michael Angeles has written up his experiences on tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages. Basically, he figured out which navigation methods (global nav, local nav, breadcrumbs, content links, etc) are used by the users. Looks like a valuable exercise for anyone designing the navigation systems of a site. Maybe Angeles will post some more details on the methodology used to gather the data...
In the latest A List Apart: Helping Your Visitors: a State of Mind by Nick Usborne. Usborne provides a nice high-level overview of things to keep in mind when designing websites.
Dave Shea has collected a nice list of Internet Explorer related problems and some steps you can take to work around them: Side-stepping IE.
Christopher Allen has posted brief reviews of a number of wiki products. For those who have not heard of wikis, a wiki is a system, similar to a content management system, that allows multiple users to edit a site using a browser (some require accounts and authentication, others allow anyone to edit anything). Changes are stored, and the the site can be rolled back to a previous state, if needed. One of the more interesting examples of a wiki is the WikiPedia, an encyclopedia created by thousands of volunteers.
I haven't had much of a chance to play with wikis, but I think they can be great collaboration spaces for small teams. I've even heard of companies using them as the basis for an intranet.
The New Zealand-based site Quality Web Content has a long list of articles on writing web content. There looks to be a trove of useful information on a subject that often isn't well covered elsewhere. But, there isn't a lot of organization to be found...the articles look to be listed cronologically. It'd be nice to see them in topics. Of course, I can't complain too much seeing as I managed to lose all of my categorization information when I moved this weblog to its current home. One of these days I'll tackle it...
Dina Mehta recently posted her thoughts on what a knowledge management system should be like. She describes an interaction with a client using a "traditional" KM product--mostly archiving documentation. The system wasn't used very much, as is the case with most of these types of systems. So Mehta started asking questions, and came up with some interesting insights:
What it revealed is the need is not as much for a Content Management System as much as it is for a system that allows them to dialogue and converse effortlessly and seamlessly, brainstorm on ideas and projects, in a manner that is as 'face-to-face' as possible.
The KM system in this vision acts more like glue between people and projects rather than a centralized repository. Mehta lays out three components to this vision: presence indicators (who's available), real-time communication (videoconferences, voip), and collaboration spaces (weblogs, wikis, etc).
Another observation: the systems envisioned by Mehta support a project-based environment, as opposed to a bureaucratic environment. A bureaucratic organization is going to be much more interested in a "knowledge repository" type of system than a system that enables collaboration in a project scenerio. Mehta's system won't work for every organization.
(via Column Two)
I post this for my friend Tony, who is forever worrying that his finely crafted designs will be horribly screwed up by the folks that end up maintaining the site:
I set up a weblog tool at PSESD about a year and half ago. The installation, which uses MovableType, is pretty standard. I have about a dozen uses (only a few are active users), and five or six weblogs. MovableType is a great tool for a couple of weblogs, but I've found that it becomes troublesome when you try to scale it even up to my modest level.
Here are some of the biggest issues I've noticed:
Anyway, I think there is room for an "enterprise-level" weblog tool. So, when I saw a mention of SilkBlogs, I was interested. SilkBlogs claims to be an "Enterprise Blogging solution" (wow...three overused buzzwords in one phrase!). I haven't used it, but their site claims to address at least some of my issues. I think its probably one to watch in this space...
Bob Doyle has been quite busy lately whipping up new CMS-related resources.
CMS News is a web-based RSS aggregator that displays news from about a dozen well-known Content Management and Information Architecture sites. Many people interested in the topic will already have many of the sites in their RSS readers. But, for those who don't use a RSS reader, or are new to the topic, this new site provides a nice "one-stop-shopping" service.
CMS Lists offers a bevy of CMS listservs. It seems that the well-known CMS List suffered server problems and is currently offline. So, Doyle is filling the gap with these new lists.
As my last entry might indicate, I'll be moving to a new job shortly. One of the tools that I've absolutely relied on for the past year or so is my RSS newsreader. I've been using the excellent NetNewsWire, which is a Mac OS X product. In my new position, I'll be using a Windows box, so I'm going to need to switch my RSS reader. Also, I'll be moving from a laptop to a desktop machine, so the convenience of having my subscriptions at the ready both at home and at work seems to be slipping away.
As a stop-gap, I set up an account on Bloglines, a web-based RSS service. It sucked up my OPML subscription file (exported from NNW) and nicely displayed all of my subscriptions. And, because its web-based, I'll be able to access it from work and home. Oh, and its free.
But it just doesn't feel right. I loved NNW's UI, and something like that is hard to replicate in a website. I've heard good things about FeedDemon, so I'll check that out and see if it comes close to the experience I'm looking for. Its not a total solution, but it looks like a good start.
There are going to be a few changes to this weblog. The big one is that I won't be updating it here anymore. I'm leaving PSESD at the end of the month for a new job, and thus won't be doing my weblog writing here.
But, I do plan on continuing to write into a weblog. I've moved everything over to a new site: http://www.karlnelson.net/. We'll also plan on redirecting the RSS feed directly to the new site. So, if you're reading this via RSS, you should be automatically redirected to the new feed. If not, the new feed can be found at http://www.karlnelson.net/index.xml.
In the meantime, here are a couple of other PSESD weblogs you might be interested in:
It appears that Webmonkey is ending its run. Paul Boutin discusses the shutdown, and News.com has a piece on the restructuring of Lycos (Webmonkey's parent).
Its too bad--I always liked Webmonkey, and I've pointed to plenty of good articles from this weblog, and I've used their articles and resources in some of the classes I've taught. Let's hope they keep the content online for all to reference. In a related note, there seems to be fewer and fewer sites for beginners to pick up tips on web development. This is not to say there isn't a bunch of great sites out there (Boxes and Arrows, Digital Web, and A List Apart come to mind), but they seem to be focused more on either theory or more advanced techniques. I'm not seeing much out there with a wide scope, a focus on more hands-on articles, and a target of beginners and intermediates. Plus, I think its getting harder and harder to create quality websites. The list of skills that are needed is growing: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Usability, Accessibility, Information Architecture, and so on.
All in all, Webmonkey will be missed.
(via Dave Winer)
You can read Jim Byrne's book "Accessible Web Typography" on the web for free, or download a $5 PDF eBook. Either one seems like a good deal, as the book covers all sorts of details about fonts, text size, and other type-related issues.
Victor Lombardi has some good advice about "Managing the Complexity of Content Management" in the latest Boxes and Arrows.
Jeff Lash has written an interesting piece for Digital Web: More Than Just a Footer. My favorite suggestion is to put a mini-site map at the bottom of the page. This could be an interesting concept for large, information dense sites--like school district sites.
The New York Time reports (Registration Required) that Google and Stanford are planning on digitizing books:
And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.
Meanwhile, The Book and the Computer has a fascinating interview with Stanford's Michael Keller. Keller, the University Librarian, is leading a project to digitize eight million books. The article can be found here, but the URL doesn't look to be permanent, so you might need to do some browsing to find it.
Some take-aways:
Simson Garfinkel on the False Hope for Stopping Spam:
The spam wars are taking a turn—and right now, the good guys are losing. New legislation, new technology, and draconian anti-spam policies on the part of some Internet service providers are doing nothing to stem the tide of unsolicited e-mail. The stakes are far bigger than you probably imagine: Spammers hold the power to turn the tools of our technological society against us, for their gain and pleasure. And so far, we have been unable to devise technical means to prevent these tools from being misused.
Yesterday we upgraded the server that runs www.psesd.org (including this weblog) from Mac OS X Server 10.1 to 10.3. The whole process was a bit of a pain, but there should be some nice benefits, mostly with Apache and its admin tools. But there was one little issue that caused a fair amount of pain (mostly to me). OS X 10.3 has some quirks in its perl installation, and they bit us when trying to get MovableType running.
MovableType uses MySQL to store the weblog posts. MovableType is written in perl, and it needs two perl modules (DBI and DBD::mysql) to access MySQL. "No problem," says I, "I can just install them using CPAN":
perl -MCPAN -e 'install DBI'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install DBD::mysql'
But, the installation fails with an error. After doing some searching, I figure out that the problem is some missing headers for perl. I seem to remember that installing the Apple Developer Tools took care of this on the old server, and some of the pages I found confirm this. But, installing the Dev Tools didn't do it. More searching and I find that Apple has moved the aforementioned headers into the BSDSDK. Okay, so we install those. No dice.
(Oh, and if for some reason you don't want to install the BSDSDK, there are other options for getting the headers.)
Here's where things get fun.
First of all, no more playing around with CPAN's auto-installer. From here on out, its download the modules and compile from source.
My eventual solution combined advice from the following sources:
The MacZealots article pointed out that Apple screwed up its Perl configuration, and it needed to be edited:
sudo pico /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Config.pm
Change ld='MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 cc' to ld='env MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 cc'
This fix allowed me to successfully install DBI (perl Makefile.PL; make; make test; make install).
But, the fix didn't help with DBD:mysql. One of the comments on the Casey West page recommended removing references to '-arch i386' in the Makefile. I did that, and it still didn't work:
Makefile:542: *** missing separator. Stop.
It turns out this was just a linebreak that shouldn't have been there. I don't know why it was there, but removing the break fixed it, and the rest of the installation went normally.
So, I hope this helps others who are working on the same problem. All in all, it was a big pain, and hopefully Apple will make some changes (ship the headers out of the box; fix the perl config) to make this easier in the future.
The US House of Representatives has been using XML to draft legislation. The brief article gives more information about how the House has transitioned to using a WYSIWYG XML environment. XML works particularly well for this application because the legislative documents are highly structured. Unfortunately, the documents that most of us work on are not this structured, so its hard to tell if there are any lessons to be found for other organizations.
Update: Here's another article on a similar subject: the EU's use of XML. They have all sorts of interesting issues, not the least of which is supporting multiple languages.
A number of people have pointed to Scott Berkun's very interesting essay on "How to manage smart people." I've read some of Scott's other articles before, and they're quite good. But, since I can't find an RSS feed for his site, I don't always read the new ones in a timely manner. So, I browsed through his archives today, and picked out a few good ones:
Jakob Nielsen turns his attention to online surveys and concludes that shorter is better. He also points to the most useful survey question, as identified by the Harvard Business Review: "How likely is it that you could recommend [X] to a friend or colleague?"
I'd love to see more resources online about improving surveys. I think that creating an easy-to-use and meaningful survey question is something of an art. Its pretty easy to do it wrong. Anyway, the next time I need to create a survey, I'm picking up a copy of Improving Survey Questions first.