Connecting…

Several conversations over the last few weeks have set my mind a-racing about the whole nature of what I do. Yes I’m talking about the web, but looking at a much larger picture than just the technology used. The web is transcending the bits and bytes it is made up of, much like books transcend the paper they are written on or a CD of music transcends the plastic it is printed on.

For me the web is about two main things: people and information. It provides the means to connect between those things in ways that weren’t even dreamt of just a decade or two ago.

Connecting information to information gets a pretty technical subject very quickly (web services and the like) so I’ll not delve into it now. Some other time maybe.

Much more interesting is connecting people with information – pretty much anywhere and any time – is a far cry from the days when the privileged few wuld travel to a great city to study in the library. Now the information of the entire world, or at least a large and growing percentage of it, is available to anyone with a computer and internet connection. Classic novels, government survey results, people’s intimate diaries, school meeting minutes, all available to you and I.

But the greatest single power of the internet in my opinion is connecting people to people. The web is about facilitating communities where there wasn’t even communication before, enabling people to meet, talk, share and learn together. No wonder there are so many who seem to spend their whole lives online, it’s a lot easier than going out and finding such a breadth of communities in the physical world.

Today I saw something, a picture, that speaks to me of this immense power we wield. Here it is:

Just a postbox? No, it’s the postbox that allows people to share their innermost secrets with the word, to release their deeply-hidden desires and shames. Thanks to PostSecret, thousands have people have been able to put into words (or rather, put onto a postcard) something they haven’t been able to tell anyone face to face. The web provides one of the biggest oxymorons of our age – global intimacy.

And this is what I want to do. Whether I’m developing a commercial website, open source software, e-commerce system or whatever, I want to make sure I provide a tool that will not only connect people to information, but connect people to people. Make people feel at ease, make them feel like they are a valuable individual, make them feel like someone sympathetic is listening, make them feel they have a voice.

The web truly has done that; given a global voice to the people. And the people are talking.

That blinkin’ Javascript…

A while ago I had a wacky idea – using modern, unobtrusive Javascript to provide the effects used back in The Bad Old Days. You know, the sort of this where your boss says “I want it to blink! And scroll across the page!quot;. Well, I spent a couple of minutes the other night and put together this little demo.

So, ladles and jellyspoons, without further ado let me introduce you to GruntPage.Blink. Happy blinking!

Extending BBCode…

Shabby man exits shack

This week I have been mostly rewriting bulletin board software.

Man enters shack

And earlier today it occured to me that in addition to the usual gamut of BBCode tags ([b], [u], [i], [strike], [url] etc) there were actually quite a few other things I could do with adding to my list of BBCode tags.

For instance, one of the things I do regularly on this very blog is refer to Wikipedia article, so a quick way to accomplish that might be good.

So, how about [w]Peaceville[/w] which would give you Peaceville, or [w=Cleckheaton]the Luddite area[/w] which would give you the Luddite area.

But that’s not all. There are lots of other website it may be useful to provide easy links to:

Dictionary.com: [d]code[/d] = code

Thesaurus.com: [d]cheesy[/d] = cheesy

Google: [g=pies]find tasty pies[/g] = find tasty pies

I’ll leave the development of the regular expressions to make this codes work as an excercise for the reader :0)

An exciting time to be a web craftsmen…

One of my favourite blogs has mentioned one of my favourite words, and I like what Craig says. It is an exciting time to be working on software, especially web software, as there is a real feeling of the sky being the limit. Google, Flickr, Youtube, they all did it – why can’t I?

The fact is that while there is a lot of buzz and hype surrounding the current internet boom (2.0) there’s a distinct lack of what I would call craftsmen. Those people, like Craig said, who strive not just to finish a project but to do it right. And when it comes to doing it right, it’s all down to the end users.

They are the ones who will sit there looking at this stuff we make day in, day out. They’ll be clicking things a lot more than we ever will, they’ll find those niggly little things that we just don’t have a clue about. As I walk round my company I’m always slightly wary when I see one of my systems on somebodys screen – after all, if it doesn’t work they’re the ones who will complain because I haven’t ‘done my job properly’. Cans of worms, anyone?

So it’s important, no – vital, that we take what we do seriously. I’m not saying come to work in a suit and tie every day, or never have a laugh, but to always bear in mind the end user. And put the effort in to do things properly. I recently worked on a site that was nominally built with web standards (no tables, divs, paragraphs etc) but was completely unusable, broke in every browser by that one and was basically a mess. It had all the right components, but no craftsmanship had gone into it.

Last year my wife and I went to the beautiful island of Guernsey and while there went to a jewellery workshop. Let me tell you, those guys are true craftsmen. The hours they spend cutting, etching, shaping and polishing would put even the most nit-picky of web designers to shame. And all for something that’s just a few millimetres across. But how beautiful does that stuff look? They aren’t just making a piece of jewellery, they are making something that someone will one day consider an essential part of themselves. Something with potentially a massive amount of sentimental value, something to help make people’s lives more special.

It’s a challenging thought, but why can’t we make software with that attitude? As Kathy says, we don’t want to be just liked – we want to be loved. And we should want our software to be loved as well, because it makes people’s lives better (easier, quicker etc). After all, making people’s lives better is a worthy aim.

Web heroes: Roger Johansson…

There are certain people on the web whose knowledge, experience and expertise are almost unparalleled. Roger Johansson is one of these, and his site should be required reading for anyone building stuff for the web. He is, for want of a better phrase, the dogs.

So many thanks to him for providing the solution to not one (not three, not four, not five, not six) but two of the biggest bugbears I have when building sites. Behold:

1) Closing the gap in list items in IE
2) Opening new windows with Javascript (version 1.2)

Marvellous, my life is that little bit more complete.

Well, actually it isn’t. The neat Javascript to open new windows looks for a ‘rel’ attribute on the link with a value of ‘external’. For this particular site I’m working on I need to it open a new window for every link that goes to a different domain than the page is on. Still, that’s not too much of a challenge when standing on the shoulders of giants.

Hats off to Roger!