Tue Nov 29
The clever chaps at A List Apart have posted an article about Boom!, a microformat for printing books from HTML. It’s a great idea, and the power built into the CSS3 specification is quite simply stunning.
I wonder how many websites will be using this technique to turn their content into books? How about offering a downloadable, nicely-formatted, printable PDF of this entire blog, complete with index, page numbers and appendices? That wouldn’t take much to do, and could be a great addition to any blog system.
Mon Nov 28
Further to my thoughts on reducing the number of options in a program, 37 Signals have brought my attention to this article on fastcompany.com. The article talks about Google and Philips, two large companies who have found that less is more.
The “More, more, more!” is a trap I fall into all too often. Perhaps it’s time to simplify.
Sun Nov 27
I was speaking to a friend last night (hallo Gremlin, if you’re reading) who has recently moved from developing Websphere applications to more general web apps (or that was the gist of the brief conversation, I hope I remembered the details right). I mentioned I do a bit of the AJAX stuff, and he said it looked an interesting technology. Which it is, but as with all technologies, it has its pitfalls.
One of which is the fact that a totally AJAX-driven application would be impossible for search engines to index. Think about it. If the only URL your application uses is your-clever-ajax-app.com, and everyhting else is done by AJAX, then your ranking in search engines won’t be impressive. In fact I don’t think it will be long before we find Google (they always seem to be on the ball regarding things like this) actively penalising a site that ‘hides’ content. Of course, they might do it already.
So I was glad to see that Forbes magazine, in their article on AJAX, threw in a word of caution about that very thing.
This post was brought to you by the letters A, J and X, and my thanks go to Ajaxian.com for keeping me abreast of the latest in AJAX.
Sun Nov 27
Some may call it cheating, we call it ingenuity. What am I talking about? Using a WAP phone to win a quiz, of course! Technology is a Good Thing :0)
Fri Nov 25
I’ve been thinking recently about my projectGenie system, an particular about the configuration screens. There are quite a lot of options in there, too many perhaps, and although I’ve cleaned up the UI for version 0.7 quite a lot, it’s still complicated.
Then along comes Matt Mullenweg, who says “the less options the better”, and I can see why. His popular Wordpress blogging software could be a configuration jungle, but he’s stripping out as many options as possible. That means that a) the users don’tget as confused and b) support calls are lessened because there is less to go wrong.
The downside is that for advanced users who want to tweak things to the nth degree, there isn’t the option available to do so straight away. However, Wordpress offers the ability to create plugins, which can do whatever you want (almost). So, the best of both worlds. After all, ifyou’re a geek like me, what would you rather do: wade through dozens of ‘advanced configuration’ screens, or crack open a text editor and write your own plugin? I know what I’d choose.
So, in the spirit of Less Is More, I’m scrapping a lot of the options for projectGenie. No-one wants to be able to minutely modify three different date formats, or set the name for every page. That stuff should be left for the system to figure out. From now on I’ll be giving the very most for the very least. Or something.
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Whitby from the Hill
