Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “DIY Now More Than Ever”
“Do it yourself web production is rivaling even the biggest internet players. Zero budgets or even nascent skills are no longer a barrier to launching successful web projects. Teams of two or three can accomplish what used to take large groups to produce. Learn how these bootstrappers used their abilities to turn good ideas into huge accomplishments without going into life-long debt or making a deal with the devil.”
Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “Design and Social Responsibility”
Lots of accessibility talk at SXSW this year, which ties into the parallel heavy emphasis on web standards and the semantic web. Accessibility is not restricted to HTML pages – it can extend to rich media like Flash as well. But to get there, you need to change your / your client’s mindset, and make accessibility a fundamental part of the design process, not something that gets bolted on later “if you have time/resources” — that mindset will never get us there.
Technorati Tags: swintro
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The gentle maniacs at WordPress have released an open-source bulletin board system in alpha: bbPress.
bbPress is pretty new, but we’re certain of a few things:
1. Open Source, always and forever
2. Less (code) is more
3. Simplicity is a feature
4. Speed and security are the foundation of any good user experience
5. Put the user first
If bbPress can do to the phpBB culture over the next year what WordPress has done to Movable Type over the last, it’s going to become a force in online discussions.
The loose notes must make SXSW seem somewhat dry. The real juice happens between the margins:
When the catalog warned not to miss the after-parties, they weren’t kidding. The podcast should be up on GlitchCast once the pieces are assembled.
Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “How To Bluff Your Way In DOM Scripting”
DHTML vs. DOM scripting: DHTML was created by marketing wonks – a bunch of bluffers. The problem with DHHTML was that it had a lot of baggage – browser-specific code, lots of forking (yourself and your application). Lots of people doing stuff for screen only. Lots we can do improve accessibility. DOM scripting is the best approach to adding interactivity with respect for web standards. DHTML was a maintainability nightmare.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 presentation: Jim Coudal / Jason Fried Opening Remarks (keynote).
37 Signals has rocketed into the spotlight this year both with Ruby on Rails and with the tremendously popular Basecamp, Backpack, and TaDa Lists. But Fried sounds like a heretic, defying common web startup practices. He’s against functional specs, against VC money, against lots of features, for time and money constraints.
Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “Creating Building Blocks for Independents” with Tantek Celik of Technorati.
Overview summary of a handful of technologies / movements / sites that have provided powerful foundations for independent, bottom-up, independently run platforms.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: Ajax — What Do I Need to Know?
People tend to think of Ajax as a magic bullet … but it’s a bullet it’s really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with. New opportunities in web-based UI, but the field is riddled with gotchas.
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Over dinner with Andrew Devigal last night (that’s me, knocking back oysters), got talking about the massive amounts of bandwidth it takes to run a successful podcast. This Week in Tech, for example, reportedly chews through a terabyte a week. The only reason they can afford to do it is that AOL donates the bandwidth.
Started thinking about how badly RSS stats skew traffic logs. I’m subscribed to maybe 100 sites, and my aggregator is pulling feeds once/hour. I end up actually viewing those feeds maybe twice a month. The ratio of bandwidth consumed to media digested is just silly. Now map that same problem onto podcasting and you see the problem. I subscribe to around 20 podcasts but only listen to three or four of them regularly. Now multiply me times a few million podcast listeners out there. Massive amounts of bandwidth are being wasted to download serialized media that never actually gets consumed by the consumer.
There’s got to be a fix for this dilemma, or podcasting will be pulled underwater by its own anchor. First of all, RSS aggregators, and podcast aggregators in particular, need to grow some AI, and should politely recommend that untouched feeds be unsubscribed, or at least put into some kind of stasis. But that’s a voluntary solution, which could only mitigate, rather than solve the problem.
Another approach would be to take the load off single connections through seamless integration of BitTorrent (or similar technology) into podcast aggregators. The trick there will be not so much download/format recognition as discovery. Here‘s a tutorial on setting up a .torrent podcast… but until the discovery/consumption side of .torrent podcasting is solved, we’re still where we are right now — if you’re not listed in iTunes or similar, you’re not on the grid.
And ultimately, .torrent casting would only distribute the bandwidth wastage evenly across the network, rather than solve it.
Don’t hack your CSS trying to make MSIE behave — force the perp into compliance instead, with Dean Edwards’ (unfortunately named) IE7. Uses JavaScript to detect MSIE and tweak its DOM to act as though it had a clue. Not only a great solution for developers currently struggling to create clean code, but also future-proof: When/if MSIE7 gets on-board, developers won’t have to un-do the hacks they’ve done.
Not that I’ve worked out all the issues on this blog yet… even with “IE7” in place. Getting there.