Posted by Doug Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:34:05 GMT
120 themes submitted for the Typo Theme Contest. That’s a lot of themes! Congratulations to all who participated. Like Rails Day, just participating is an accomplishment. I appreciate everyone who’s worked to pull this event off; particularly the sponsors.
Posted by Doug Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:56:07 GMT
I may not really be an old goat, but I remember writing documents in word-processors before WYSIWYG. It was laborious to keep hitting F12 to “reveal codes” to see why your document wasn’t doing what you expected. WYSIWYG was fun and much easier. Except… it was all a farce. WYSIWYG never really worked.
If you change your print driver and your document would get all screwed up. Spend a bunch of time getting everything the way you want and then insert a picture and everything is screwed up. There’s more, and Jacob Nielsen explores it in his latest Alertbox. Here’s his bullet list of what’s broke with WYSIWYG:
This is great quantization of the problem with WYSIWYG editors. Nielsen looks forward to MS Office 12 with it’s “results oriented UI”. The idea is you choose from templates that morphs your content into it’s format. What this sounds like to me is similar to good HTML/CSS. The content is meaningfully described and then the presentation can be changed at will (think CSS Zen Garden). So Neilsen is crediting MS with this change in paradigm from What You See Is What You Get to What You Get Is What You See. Clever; but hardly a MS innovation. However, Neilsen does nail this on the head:
If anybody else introduced a new user interface paradigm, it would probably remain a curiosity for years, but Microsoft Office has a special status as the world’s most-used interaction design. We know from user testing that users often demand that other user interfaces work like Office. When you’re used to one style most of the day, you want it in other applications and screens as well.
Which is exactly what’s happened. Getting users to do authoring in some form of SGML has been a lost cause since SGML was first introduced. However, if MS sets up user’s expectations that content-driven authoring is the way to go; then I’m all for it. For what it’s worth, this will be something else that will push more content authoring to the web since CSS is so ideally suited for it.
Posted by Doug Tue, 13 Sep 2005 16:51:46 GMT
I’ve updated my photo gallery with my overall site design. I’m getting pretty good at applying the design as a theme in various software packages. This time it only took me about half an hour. A few days ago I had updated my wiki and it took me about four hours.
I have friends that complain my gallery is too cumbersome to navigate. I’m using Apache::Gallery as a mod_perl application to serve up my photos. It’s very simple. It just scans a directory and presents the folder/images it finds there. I’ve modified it to handle IPTC meta-data better and also cache directory indexes. It already creates thumbnails and scales the images automatically.
I like it because it’s very simple. The server is actually located at my house. When I take a bunch of photos and then process them, I just copy the whole folder of processed images to my server. That’s my main archive of the photos and A::G automatically serves them without having to be updated.
The bad news is that if you don’t understand how I organize photos on my hard drive (and thus in my archive) then it’s hard to find photos in the gallery. It’s also impossible to tell which photos are most recently added. Finally, I’ve got all the photos I’m saving just crammed into the gallery. That makes it hard to wade through looking for the best photos.
My Rails Day 2005 project was supposed to be a new photo depot that solved all those problems. Unfortunately, we didn’t finish to the point where I could use it and I haven’t revisited it again.
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<!My name is Doug Alcorn. I'm a 30-something husband, dad, Christian, and hacker living in Cincinnati, OH. When I'm not on my computer or being a dad, I'm usually shooting photos or out in the woods.
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