Web

I slipped up a new site bitter.nolan.eakins.net the other day. It's my take on the don't make me think blog. I've already implemented a basic web interface and just slapped together an XMPP bot that makes Bitter much easier to use. There's a lot that I've left out, but I put a Bazaar repository up if anyone wants to play.

I came across the site for Designing for Interaction just now. The book sounds like a great idea, but I seriously hope that the web site was not designed by the author(s). I had to ask if I was on a new page or not a number of times since they all look alike. The site also fails the following quote from the Luke Wroblewski interview:

Similarly, many designers will over emphasize the differences between individual interface elements through multiple visual relationships: different font, size, color, and alignment. You don’t need excess visual contrast to distinguish objects or make things findable. Think about ways to “eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak” and aim for the least effective difference between elements.

Or the web designer was to afraid to emphasize anything.

I toyed with Goog's Page Creator and created a home page. It's ugly, and I wasn't wowed by the page creator. It was an interesting use of JavaScript and proved that JS can be damn slow. I probably won't go back there unless I want to start a link farm.

WTF is this: ? Maybe someone could help me decipher it. It's definitely not throves, thraves, or chraves.

It just occured to me that all the Web 2.0 hoopla has subsided from the blogs I read. I guess it's only been a few days since it stopped. Is that the end of the Web 2.0 bubble? If it is, then we can add it to the hype of '05.

It was 37signals that pointed out Odeo's redesign. They praised it for its simplicity, which it is. Poking around the new and simple site, I'm left with the nagging question: what does this site allow me to do?

They've simplified things to much. The only way I'm going to sign up is if I'm either told in detail what the site does or better yet, show me. Yes, let me get in and try the service without signing up. Let me use my phone to see what Odeo does with it. I'd like to see it in action. If I can get my free sample, then I may just sign up. I might even pay too!

Short of signing up or finding someone who has, I'll never know what Odeo does. All I can gather is that it's something with podcasts, phones, and sharing—gasp, a site that lets you share music that you've heard when you got put on hold!

Here's a wish: I wish Amazon [and any other site] made use of URLs better.

That needs an example. To search for all the books by Ayn Rand on Amazon, I just punch in http://www.amazon.com/author/Ayn%20Rand. Or if I wanted to find a specific book, I would enter http://www.amazon.com/title/The%20Fountainhead. Even Google needs to do that, http://google.com/my%20search%20terms.

That's simple enough, so why don't they do that?

I'm actually trying to produce something with Ruby on Rails, and I finally got hit by the train. Here's the problem that makes no sense at all. I have a view that does the following:

<%= render :partial => 'role', :collection => @roles %>

@roles is a class attribute that's an array of roles which gets iterated over. This is where things get foobarred. In the partial I get a variable called role which is good, but I want to render a text field in this partial. Rails provides me with text_field. Good again because I can just enter the following to print the role's name:

<%= text_field "role", "name" %>

But wait! text_field will only work with class attributes for some dumb reason. Yes, that means it'll call @role.name to get the name, not role.name. If I wanted @role, I would have used @role in my call to text_field.

I can not figure out why this could have been a good idea. Now I'm stuck contemplating whether I should hack up my own text_field that works logically or not.

I've ran into one of those fun things that CSS can do. I have a layout that has a header with a menu and a couple of columns. The header pokes down on the right hand side. That area poking down contains the menu. To fill the gap that that makes, the left column is positioned higher than the right column.

I was having problems with it consistently laying out properly and went and tried it in a table. I got it looking and working perfectly in Firefox, but IE considered the mouse clicks on a menu button to be going to the table. So I had to rethink it all in DIVs and to float each column. I finally got that going in both browsers after IE would make them vanish (note: I think the container needs a width to prevent that).

Now it looks good in both Firefox and IE, but Firefox is acting like IE was with the table layout. Sigh...

Warning: The first Internet Explorer engineer I meet, I'm going to ring his neck!

I just wanted to say I hate captchas. I ran across two tonight. One was an image that was barely discernible to me, and the other was adding zero to 87. I have to ask: Can we come up with something better before I'm given a complete Turing test just to post a small little comment on a site or, with the spim discussions, send a message?