Who You Calling A Jesse?

As December sets in on campus the IT staff get a chance to huddle around Ron Coutts Hall (RCH) and get together to swap some stories along with learn new things at the WatITis conference. I have blogged loads about this in the past as I have enjoyed every single one since they started. It is a great way to find out what the heck is going on this large campus and put some faces to email addresses (not many on twitter, yet).

This year I am presenting on baby steps in an agile world (slides below). It is a slimmed down, more focused version of a presentation I did at Higher Education Web Conference in Milwaukee this past October. I took the feedback (thanks for the feedback folks) and slimed it down, focused on real practical tips for agile techniques, and I think I have a good 30 min presentation. Which leaves 15 minutes for discussion—something requested by the organizing committee.

Since no one will probably do it at the keynote I will set the hashtag now as the obvious #watitis09 (watitis without the 09 is a pretty funny hashtag to follow) and keep the realistic expectation that there will be a hand full of people tweeting ;) Looking forward to the day.

Over the last couple of months Joseph Fung and I have been working on a little project in a localized community site that assist the local tech community find out what the heck is going on around here and who is doing stuff. In the process we developed a site that could do it for a lot of other communities—we think. At the moment we are calling it Agnostic Platform and you find the Waterloo version at waterloo.techstartup.ca where we have a roughed in application and some warts showing.

The idea is to provide an open place that is semi-moderated by community connectors (a the moment Joseph and I are self-declared connectors) that can maintain the garden of awesome local information. Our experience/assumption is that automated attempts at local news, blogs, twitter, calendar, etc information is prone to both spamming and error. You need people in the community to ensure the quality but you also need to be open about who is included and why.

We hope that a site like this will help people (both new and longer term residents) make better connections with some of the amazing folks locally and find out what is of interest, what is going on, and who to contact. To do that it will need more community connectors involved, people contributing links, feeds, events, blogs, etc. The only rule for content streams is that the content creators are local. They live locally, they contribute locally, and it is even better if they participate locally.

It is a bit of a work in progress so please give us feedback and use the site. I am really excited to what we can do with this.

Communitech’s blog posted something about it as well.

In our team meeting on Friday we were throwing around some initial feedback we heard on a number of things and the following analogy was discussed:

Deciding to live in VeloCity is like joining a varsity team. You have to commit to being an entrepreneur; balance the demands of academics with developing your skills and learn to place entrepreneurship on the same level as academics.

This makes a lot of sense to me. If you are on a varsity sports teams there are set practice times, expectations on training, and expectations on how you perform in your academics. Sometimes the team needs will conflict with academic or personal needs but all members of the team figure out a way to balance it all.

As a student and an entrepreneur it doesn’t seem to be a whole lot different from being on a team. If you don’t put in the time in practice and developing your skills you aren’t going to perform. So what would the core skills be? At VeloCity I see the opportunity to work on the following three skills:

• networking and communicating your ideas (and/or pitching)
• taking risks and managing risks
• ability to prioritize tasks and doing what it takes to complete them (Waterloo students are exceptionally good at this, generally speaking)

Working on these skills is not something you can do just when you have time. You must to have the passion and the drive to create opportunities and take advantage of the opportunities that are created at VeloCity for you.

No surprise the analogy came from Sean Van Koughnett (the guy who made VeloCity happen) who spent many years committed to varsity Basketball at Waterloo… and from what I hear he was pretty good ;)

On the way home yesterday I wrote this post in my head about dozen times. Lots buzzing around after some great discussions and some late nights in Milwaukee. HighEdWeb is by far the best conference focused on web technology, strategy, and networking in higher education. It isn’t because of the speakers (although some were simply amazing), it is because it brings together people from the most diverse collection of schools from across North America all with similar problems but different solutions.

Messages I kept hearing:

• Web teams in some schools are already starting to evolve as they grow while other schools still have layers of committees (Web Task Force – WTF – is my favorite) duplicating work and removing accountability. Not many teams of one left out there.
• Usability testing is required, it is not an option. I would slide towards more of ‘usability monitoring’ along with iterative improvements is the way to go. Not many schools are there yet but enough are going there to see a trend starting.
• Engaging your audience using Web 2.0 tools with Web 1.0 thinking doesn’t work. You probably don’t know you are doing it.
• CMS deployments solve one problem, create many others that aren’t as bad as the original problem. No surprise here.
• Problems or challenges: budgets are being slashed, recruitment is getting scary, web initiatives are underfunded even though they could have a big ROI.

There were some extremely entertaining moments around the keynote from the second day. The presenter was well out of touch with the audience, slides were poorly designed and outdated, and his content was poorly delivered. He got mobbed on twitter (and isn’t on twitter himself even though his topic was on using the web to engage your audience) with the outside audience reacting in a funny way. The backchannel was rough on him but honestly if I did that I would expect the same reaction.

As for my presentation, I think it went ok, people seemed to appreciate it. I got totally nervous given how packed the room was though. I am sure they noticed but nothing nasty on twitter ;) In retrospect, I tried to cover too much in a 45 min slot. I could have easily broken it in half and I think people would have got just as much out of it. Project Management is a workshop, a lighter overview is a presentation. Maybe they will let me do that next time. Really looking forward to HighEdWeb2010 or 101010. My slides are here:

Last night at DemoCampGuelph Joseph, Stephen, and I demo’d our little side project… an app for taking the simple HR functions out of a spreadsheet and dropping them into a web app. Our big goal is to change the way people think about HR, for now we just want to make it easy for people to give feedback to each other, state their goals, and manage a few simple things like vacation. We call it TribeHR and at the moment we are really close to opening up a beta for a few folks.

Our site is missing some details but those will be filled in over the coming weeks. I am really excited about this little project as it seems to resonate with a lot of small businesses and startups that want to do something but they just don’t have an affordable tool.

Over the next few weeks I will probably talk lots about it. Hard to get feedback until people can try it out I know ;)

One thing that really been highlighted to me by the University of Waterloo logo fun (#uwlogogate) is that committees are overused in higher education and the quality of the work could be suffering. Even if the quality might not improve I can’t see how committee work isn’t contributing to an increase in work load and stress. This happens because (using this current issue as an example) a committee (or a series of committees) appears to be responsible for:

1. requirements, strategy, and execution of the branding work
2. logo research, design, and approval
3. communications planning

How the day to day works is that you have a number of staff from different departments with different reports and interests doing their normal job and working on the branding stuff essentially on the side. Focus is not 100% on the task, it can’t be. The result, a decent logo but one that meets the needs of very specific, unfocused, and likely insular interests.

A project needs to be a real project

What I think is wrong is that a committee of staff with other jobs should be responsible for:

1. high level requirements, strategy, and oversight of project

Then a project team is to do the work, report back on how what they are doing is inline with the vision/values, and get the job done. A project team that is doing it full time reporting to one Project Manager and sharing a common interest.

The project team will have the added advantage of spending enough time on something to develop expertise that it might be missing. It is really hard to be really good at something that you don’t have the time for. It is likely the quality of the work suffers because the expertise just isn’t allowed to develop with the project.

This actually gets really bizarre when you look at things like hiring committees and search committees. The membership is made up of ‘representation’ but not by people that are qualified (or likely) to understand the requirements of a job for which they are hiring someone. Their positions don’t offer them the context or the expertise yet they are drawn together to represent what are arguably irrelevant interests.

That is why I am not arguing for broader consultation on projects (like logo making). That doesn’t work. I think broader consultation on higher level principles is ideal but when it comes to doing the work let the people you are paying to do the work produce the best work they are capable of. If it is truly sub-par work then something is wrong and something needs to be done.

A committee that is tasked with doing real work removes all responsibility and accountability for the quality and delivery of the work.

You can’t apply good project management to a committee

Can you actually apply project management techniques to committee work? I don’t think so. Sure in MS Project you can claim an asset (person) has 20% of their work week for a project but it doesn’t take into account that with one day a week of time you are probably getting 1/3 productivity on that. The inevitable 1/3 of your day getting your mind focused and working, 1/3 doing work, 1/3 for interruptions.

Too much time is spent on updating progress, lingering issues that aren’t solved, politics in the office back in the home department, etc.

Highered needs to create more temporary project teams and less committees

I believe we need to stop using a faculty influenced process and go to a more business focused way of running projects with a twist. The twist being the project has committee oversight that agrees on the goals and the measure of the project is its adherence to the goals (committees can not say things like “moar lazerz”).

This is a rough thought of course… more discussion is welcome and required but in general we need to change how we do projects in higher ed or continue to put out sub-par work and over stress staff in the process.

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the regional Higher Ed Web Conference that was held at Cornell University over the past two days. What a great conference put together by Jason Woodward and his team at Cornell. The speakers started off yesterday with a heavy focus on how to get the user involved in your web project from user testing to engaging folks through social media story telling.

Today we moved into an actual project aimed at a particular set of users at Cornell, into project management (my presentation), and off into the high level thinking about the future of higher ed with Mark Greenfield. My head is swimming with ideas and issues but even more focused on the purpose of the web in higher ed.

My presentation slides are here, thanks everyone for the great feedback and I look forward to continuing many of the conversations online and maybe even at the big Higher Ed Web conference in Milwaukee in the Fall:

What is the ideal structure for a web application development team that is using Agile methodologies? What is the process that results in the most bug free development possible? Over the past few weeks I have been documenting and tweaking team roles and process for our front-end development. It has been a lot harder than I thought it would be, especially when you throw co-op students in the mix.

In the past year roles on our team have evolved as we have had to figure out the limitations of our technology, backgrounds, and our skills but I think after about 12 months of a team functioning in a development mode things are pretty much set. What I have found is that you have to adjust certain roles to match people’s strengths and find their comfort level—especially if they are co-op students or recent grads. Once comfortable in their role people start to really shine.

The Web Development team

Every team is a bit different but this is what the Special Projects Group looks like at the moment:

• Design/UX Lead: Manages the front-end design work, participates in development, has responsibility for what is displayed on the screen and how it is displayed – satisfying the requirements set forth by the Client and Project Leads. Interacts with the Project Lead to determine what is ultimately on the screen and how the users interact with the system.
• UI Tester Lead: Design, manage, and execute testing. Collects and consolidates data for the Lead Design/UX.
• UI Designer/testers: Works on designs, incorporates feedback. They also do what would pass as unit testing on the application using a web browser.
• Client Lead: Provides input and has shared authority with Project Lead on screens.
• Project Lead: The person responsible for the project wrt development and satisfying project requirements. Interacts with the Client Lead to determine functionality, business logic, and general interface requirements. Interacts with the Lead Design/UX and Client Lead to develop the front-end requirements.
• Developers: Code the screens.

Like with any web app project and team, there is a creative process group that must meet up with a coding/logical process group. Ideally you throw some usability testing/feedback, client feedback, and a project lead that has sold a particular level of functionality to the client and you get into some fun. The above roles try and address this but they need an integrated process that all roles can work with.

Problems that had to be managed largely had to do with timing

A problem we have had is that coders can’t code a screen until a UI designer/tester has run the screen past a number of people within the client group. That has been cut down to one client lead who has his own process to run it past a larger client stakeholder group. There was another problem with the feedback loop from the client and project leads and when was the best time for them to provide it. This problem is still not fully addressed but hopefully the current process will solve it.

Embracing the issue tracker (or how I love bug reports)

Bug tracking, even the concept of what a bug is, along with having a reliable/useful system was our final problem to overcome. We started with Team Foundation Server then we switched over to Bugzilla and adopted a very religious approach to using it as an issue tracker. This worked out extremely well in providing focus and a task list for coders to pick up. The new problem it has caused is that if you are tracking issues in the system how or why would you use the sticky notes on the wall? Honestly, we are still working on it.

Our process, incorporating bug tracking with sprint planning

The above work flow works really well. What we have done is broken the project into milestones that fit a two week sprint planning process (or a series of planning sessions). The screens are developed quickly with paper, they are discussed, modified, and bounced back and forth in less than 48 hours. From there coding can begin.

We make an effort to switch modes on a screen so that our bug system isn’t overwhelmed. Our team members roles funnel decisions up to a contact point and then allow certain ‘bugs’ or issues to be incorporated in two weeks or less.

Translate agile to your team

Agile doesn’t mean you are infinitely changing things and incorporating feedback. You need to have a cycle that allows you to reach a milestone, provide time to iterate, and move on. You need to be able to classify the feedback and make decisions against the larger vision of what you are building. Where Agile works for us is that it provides an opportunity to catch major problems before too much time to it. Where it fails is when our process doesn’t incorporate the tools at our disposal effectively.

The goal of this process is to avoid being ‘too agile’ where the people in higher positions can cloud the process with mixed expectations and contact points. Using a big wall with sticky notes full of stories and tasks works great but as soon as you introduce bug tracking software it starts to slide a bit. The balance is hard to find but when you do it is worth the short term pain.

With the Facebook data drama getting mainstream media attention and people dropping their Facebook accounts out of protest it got me thinking… people don’t understand the web do they? If you have ever had a conversation with a person insisting you change the results in a Google search as it points to an old page or out of date content in the summary you know how hard it seems to be for people to get what happens to things once they are posted on the web.

The data is crawled, it is stored, it is copied and pasted, etc. It might get locked away in archive.org or on someone’s screen shot. Whatever happens to it you only have control over the source but once you drop those keystrokes onto something accessible by a web browser or by someone else on the network you don’t have control over what happens to it. Facebook might have tried to simply write it is as it is but people don’t seem ready to understand it.

Worry about accessing your data not where it may be copied.

The real battle over your data in my mind is whether you can access it if Facebook decides you can’t. If you can’t export it or access your content (like say with Twitter past whatever number of tweets they let you get at) then we have a problem.

There has been a bit of a discussion in the uwebd list about when is the right time to launch a higher ed web site. Thinking that launch is for new sites and re-launch is for re-branding and something you do with care, my first reaction was “why would you launch a new higher web site?” There is still a tendency in higher education to launch new designs on the campus community from time to time and I think, in modern web time, that is nuts.

Think of the people that use your web site, how they use it, how long they have been using, and who the redesign is for? Are they the same people? Flipping the switch on large changes (navigation, content, etc) is, at an informed guess level, expensive. Every day users are disrupted, new users don’t notice, and the occasional student user likely will think a refresh gets in the way and ask why does their online course environment still suck when you obviously have time to make changes on this site?

Major website overalls on public sites are a waste of resources with little ROI

Here is a generalized version of redesign process in higher ed:

• Someone says ‘we need a fresh look’ (usually fueled by marketing folks or recruitment ‘studies’)
• Committee is formed to look at ‘revamping’ the home page
• 6-24 months pass with around a dozen people on a committee discussing designs
• assumptions are based on personal preferences about what people want to see on the web
• Someone brings up implementing or changing the CMS, another committee is formed to look at that in parallel
• ‘three’ designs are chosen, CMS’s are investigated
• In a perfect world usability studies occur
• In the practical world, ‘previews’ are given to key politically sensitive areas on campus
• After some news releases and committee discussions at various levels some last minute ‘additions’ to menus or content are made for the flavour of the month
• page is launched
• users freak out, some love it, some hate it, all have to learn the new navigation to get on with what they have to do online
• more additions are required for political reasons

Have I gone through this? Yes, twice in seven years. I changed jobs just before my third time came around. In the 15 years or so of a web presence for most schools I would imagine they have done this an average of 4 times with the range between 3 and 8.

This cycle plays out just about everywhere in higher education and I think it largely because we ask each other what we did and copy/tweak/repeat. My guess is that the investment into this type of cycle is around:

• at least 3 FTE of ~45K salaries initially
• into the dozens of FTE for campus wide change
• if you buy a CMS ~100-500K plus more FTE

There is also a cost in disrupting people’s work flows (staff tend to have click patterns to things they need everyday, moving that causes cardiac conditions to worsen), committee time, and the other things that don’t get done.

What do you get back on that investment? Nothing. I don’t believe for one second that students decide to go to a particular higher education institution because their website looked cool, modern, etc. If high school students say that they are just telling you what you want to hear (teenagers do that? really?). Finding the information they need about what it is like to go to school there, programs, the city, the cost, etc would influence them but not a picture of a researcher up to their waste in sludge (grad students that care already know who that it and what they do).

Incremental changes by design and invest in content: clear, concise, informative

I am not saying you should never freshen up your website. You most certainly should but it should never require a re-launch unless you re-branding or something significant. Slight changes to navigation, content, colours, etc can occur without throwing it all out and starting fresh. Your previous design can’t be that bad (if it is, replace it by all means) but it is likely looking pre-web 2.0 or worse, way overboard on web 2.0ness. So clean it up, design change, but don’t do a demolition unless you absolutely have to.

Take your experience with other websites. If you have to be there to find something do you care what it looks like? No. You only care if you can’t find the information you need or if Google didn’t get you to a quality source on the first search. Students, staff, faculty, friends, etc all come to a higher education website not to hang out but they come to find out specific information. If they can find it and it is readable and your site isn’t some over designed 10px paradise with animated gifs they will have a positive experience.

I do believe things like HTML 5 and Microformats places more focus on the content then the look as the content becomes more portable. More and more people do not see your content in a look and feel that you have 100% control over (you never had 100% control) so why focus on that? Make it so your content is structured properly and relevant. Search engines will like you more as will the people using them.

Update: Smashing posted an Article on Feb 3rd on what being clear and effective in communication on the web means. Facebook offers a great example of continuous improvement in design without relaunching anything (the new design was launched once but changed many times) over a period of 5 years

Where design efforts should be focused: on the tools students use everyday

…and that is a whole other blog post. Fact is that higher education rarely spends time on the experience in web based applications that students, staff, faculty must use everyday. Why is that? I have some thoughts that I will post later ;)

Quick question. If you have multiple devs working on a few different screens, each monkeying with CSS, it takes very little time to end up with a huge mess of CSS. How do you deal with that? Do you:

1. Delete the CSS and start again defining a common sheet?
2. Try to optimize the CSS.
3. Live with it.
4. Don’t ever let dev’s touch CSS… they are dirty.

I ran into a 6000+ line CSS file for a dozen pages. They each have some heavy js UI going on but 6000 lines? An auto-optimizer cut it to 2200 or so pretty quickly but you can’t work with that file. I decided to start again, clean.

The upside is that I know the site mostly works without CSS and it exposed some odd decisions with some of the HTML (yay for nekkid web sites). The downside is that we may have to deal with browser bugs all over again—but then again we do not support IE 6. Only IE 7+, FF (latest), Safari (latest).

Feature request for Dreamweaver CS5 – something to optimize my CSS!

A twitter conversation got me rethinking about the concept of content vs design yet again. I am constantly in a battle with having to design an interface for content, actions, and requirements that are either contradicting or simply not known yet. That is hugely frustrating however there are ways to design some general things without knowing the specific content and through a few iterations you get there. That is usually what you are forced to do if you are trying to be truly agile.

In Higher ed, what rules is content or design? My feeling is that it is still content. Aside from Alumni and High School students, the gross majority of consumers of information in the higher ed web space are a captive audience. They are staff, students, and faculty that are simply doing their daily activities in a web space they have to use. Sweating over design and what that design should be may not be a fair trade off over just simple content organization. If content is so important I think the use of Microformats is as well because it allows the higher ed space to open up that useful content to a larger audience and potentially enables their internal audiences to use that content better.

Design (impressive, high end, etc) should be more important for micro-sites that are targeting external audiences. An impressive design can be that ‘wow’ factor that will attract those high school students or make your internal audience more comfortable to find information within your web space. However, content may still be more important in the form of a social media foot print in youtube, twitter, facebook, and other places where you don’t have control over design… only the content.

That is not to say good design isn’t needed but I think if you have only 1 day to spend fixing something in your higher ed web space, fix up the content.

A friend is working on a rails app for me that will run the voting for the UW Staff Association. We had some simple requirements and she threw together the app pretty quickly. The poll requires options like ‘select one of three’ or ‘select three of five’ so there had to be check boxes that have id values… look something like:

input id="option[ids][]" name="option[ids][]" value="36" type="checkbox" 

In the case of ‘select three of five,’ if you accept the value of the input you need to check someone didn’t just change the value of all the boxes to the same so they don’t vote three times for one thing. This was her quick fix:

  unless params[:option][:ids].uniq.size == params[:option][:ids].size
    flash.now[:error] = "You can't vote for the same thing multiple times in one poll?"
    return
  end

The check just makes sure the same id’s aren’t submitted twice. Being a total rails novice I expected rails would have some pretty way to do this. The above is good (it works) but I had expected a more elegant data validation… I must expect too much.

How can you explain the state of mobile development (both web based on device installed) to non-mobile folks that are use to a windows dominated world that makes ‘adjustments’ for Mac from time to time? Here are my basic assumptions:

• CDMA devices are in some walled garden most of the time.
• Carriers don’t want to be a service provider, they want to control and profit from the whole experience.
• Long term contracts from carriers in North America slow down new device uptake.
• GSM devices are common and low barrier targets.
• Software on phones is rarely updated.
• No device is ‘easy’ to develop for, in fact most are like putting together an entire house worth of Ikea furniture along with all the little things.
• Mobile browsers suck.
• Microsoft doesn’t yet get mobile, but it will.
• RIM changed the game (with email, utility, service) but forgot about changing the rules.
• Apple changed the game further and re-wrote the rules (utility, Application store, touch it).

From those assumptions I am still at the same place I was over a year ago: supporting ‘all devices’ with regards to mobile development is not practical in North America. This includes mobile focused web sites and device installed applications. That isn’t to say there isn’t a market worth going after. Apple gives you access to a lot of people through it’s App store and you can target their browser easy enough. You can target Blackberry as well and if you target both I think you will hit a pretty good market.

The trick in my mind is defining where the market is. What developers need is good (unbiased, up-to-date) research on who is using what devices for what. Not because mobile developers don’t know their audience but because their paying clients, understandably, deserve some real numbers to decide what they need.

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in a meeting between a local mobile start-up and a mobile marketing start-up based out of Toronto. A major chunk of the meeting was spent discussing the various issues of platform and carrier issues.

The marketing group have a client that wants an app on ‘all phones’ – Bell, Telus, Fido, Rogers – but the local start-up can not justify the resources nor can they even think they could support all devices. The client wants to support all phones not because it thinks that is where their target market is but because they don’t know what devices their target market uses. If they new it would be easier for everyone.

This leaves me wondering… is it even possible to collect accurate information on device usage? Is it easier to just target the iPhone since they have data plans and are more likely to have users that want to try out stuff?

I don’t think people in larger organizations (maybe people in general) are use to the development processes of anything that could be considered ‘2.0’ so when they are participating in the early stages you need to be sensitive to that.

The system my team is building is essentially an enterprise 2.0 application for the higher education business of co-operative education. It is like some odd form of dating. It can seem like students are pimping their skills to the highest bidder (employer) but it’s not just about money. For students money can talk but so does being able to find a place to live for four months, having a job that isn’t just mindless work, nice office, helping their career afterwards, etc.

Oversimplifying the explanation of the project: Our goal is to create a web based application that does everything from building a resume to a job posting to applying to jobs and setting up interviews. We are designing it as a self-service collaborative environment that will eventually place the university staff in a position of oversight instead of direct service provision. This has to hook in with other university business applications.

When trying to be agile and include the user in our early stage development we have run into the fact that people that are use to business applications are not use to seeing a rough application. They treat it like it is production quality at the earliest of stages and in turn can bog down development. What happens is an overload of feedback and emotion which just takes the steam out of the user advocate and front-end team.

To add to the fun, we are an internal team so a loud backlash has political implications. We can actually get frozen in time until something at least is close to production level in the stakeholders eye. The result can be a big time sink but it may be a necessary evil of building an enterprise 2.0 application.

If you have an internal team that is replacing a Peoplesoft-like ‘take what you get’ mantra in enterprise application development you will need to account for the reality that end-users in business are use to that. In the past if they saw ‘early stage’ they didn’t see much difference once it hit production. I think it is unlikely that business users in general have been involved in truly early stage development.

In my paper, my research focused on an assessment technique and possible application of Microformats on a higher education home page. What I don’t think I included in that report was a really good reason why you would apply the formats to your entire site or if the current formats are good enough. There are many   making the case out there that cover the ‘why’ with my favourite being that you can make your web site or web application your API. That line of thought is what I applied when UW Events was built.

How does that work in higher education specifically? In higher education there are many issues that make a universal application or Microformats fairly difficult. But higher education web sites have so many consistent patterns in content and design along with a general attitude of openness that there is a huge opportunity that could be realized through the application of current and future Microformats.

Using the following diagram you can apply a couple use cases.

One of the use cases that initially comes to mind is the student that is trying to figure out what courses are offered at what school and where those schools are:

• geo and hatom can give a student an idea of the location and the latest news coming out of the school
• a new format for course information (lets call it hCourse for now) can help a student compare courses across different schools
• hReview can mix in prof rating and/or course rating web sites that use hReview to mark up their ratings and a student can get a better picture of things.

Another would be a prof trying to determine where to spend their next sabbatical without knowing much about the smaller schools in a particular area:

• the geo information can accurately place the schools
• hatom would give them quick access to the latest news
• a format for course information (hcourse) can help them connect with new colleague with similar interests
• hreview can reveal a hidden quality a smaller institution might have

A third scenario might be a person that is looking for a good resource on a story or book. Usually that information is being sent to the typical media outlets.

• hatom identifies the news so it can be easily found through searches
• geo can tie that information to a particular area

This is just off the top of my head, I could probably go on for a while about how easier to find and more accurate content could enhance the experience for people that are looking for information. I can think of some political barriers to this but thankfully it doesn’t require a top down decision to apply it. In the spirit of higher education, application of Microformats can be done on a grass roots effort without any decisions needing to be made ;)

Almost a year ago now I started exploring the idea of a research paper on Microformats with regards to Higher Education. After doing some research I settled on assessing ten Higher Education web sites, their mark-up and their content, identify some common patterns and explore the viability of Microformats for the typical Higher Education home page.

• You can grab a version of my paper in acrobat.com but if you want a PDF version please leave a comment.

In my paper you will find a literature review, the method I used, all the data, and my results. I did write this over the winter so things might have changed a bit and it certainly isn’t a perfectly written paper… but I think it offers a way to approach semantic mark-up that I hope some people find useful.

From my research, I developed a process to identify a design pattern for Higher Education web sites in both the mark-up code and the content. It may not be the most efficient but it seemed to do the trick.

I used those design patterns to come up with a mock-up of what the University of Waterloo home page could be (not graphically, just semantically) and tried out how that could be useful. My mock-up has:

• hAtom for news
• hCal for event listings
• hCard for the University address with geo information

There is also some other semantic richness in there. I thought that maybe someone would find it useful as there really isn’t a lot of research with regards to applying Microformats and why.

update: I have another post that looks at how Microformats can help higher education

On Thursday (July 10th) I was writing a nice email as to why I wasn’t getting an iPhone. Then I started looking into my plan and the $30 data plan Fido started offering as a result of the public backlash (likely). I decided to wait it out a bit… but then an act of stupidity happened and I found myself making sure I was at the Fido store on time to pick up a 8GB iPhone 3G. Here is the original post and then what the heck I am thinking…

The original post

I have been waiting until today (July 10th) to make my decision on whether or not to get the CDN iPhone from Rogers or Fido. If you haven’t noticed, there has been a lot of discussion about the cost of the plans in Canada vs those in the US as well as the 3-year contract. Rogers/Fido have tried to meet the storm halfway by offering a 6GB for $30 a month added to your existing plan. However, that doesn’t remove the need for a 3-year contract which is my main concern.

I have been with Fido for 8 years now, I have two accounts with them, and I went there initially because they were the only provider in Canada that didn’t require a contract. I have managed a new phone for a low cost ($200 or less) every 12-18 months and haven’t had much to complain about. Not having a contract gives me a little negotiating power with them, I don’t want to loose that. Having any influence over the telecommunications service providers in this country is rare and I just can’t give up my position.

What I am doing out of protest is reducing both my non-contract accounts to the lowest plan Fido offers and making an effort to use my phone even less. Oh, and not getting an iPhone for the moment. Maybe I will go buy an iTouch for now.

Besides, I am guessing that after Christmas (at the latest) they will drop to a two year or even one year contract. Maybe even a no contract option. My nokia 6300 makes me happy as it is and I know a new iPhone is likely already designed and in prototype phase. I can wait ;)

Why did I end up getting one?

Forget that I destroyed by Nokia 6300 the night before (just after I wrote that original post), the primary reason why I got the iPhone is that Fido changed the package and gave people a $30 data option on top of their current plans. I constantly run up $10-$30 data charges monthly (with their stupid pricing) so $30 wasn’t a real big increase. But this is my package:

• $45 gets me 350 daytime minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, unlimited North American long distance
• $8 FidoPro – an old package that gives me voice mail, call display, etc plus unlimited text messages
• $30 for 6GB of data (heavy use of iphone today saw a crushing 4MB of data transfer, 6GB might as well be unlimited I think)

That puts me at $83 a month for what is essentially an unlimited plan for everything but daytime minutes. I can live with that. Its not cheap, $53 a month was better but I could really use the phone for other stuff… I was going to buy an ipod anyway (own one pre-ipod photo). For now, at least, I think the device is pretty amazing.

Now why did I commit to a three contract if I was so against it? I haven’t even been married three years, how can I commit to a phone that long? Bell and Telus aren’t really impressive for starters. Talk about blowing an opportunity by coming off as the greater evil. I have been with Fido a long time, am I going to leave them? Not likely. So what the heck. It’s not an iphone plan, its a ‘3G phone’ plan. I can live with that.

Oh and it would have been stupid to reduce my plan… I would have had to pay two times as much for something similar in the future if I did. Lesson learned.

This past week the front-end team that I lead (it includes GUI makers, User Advocates, and UI folks) along with the rest of the team (SOA enablers) are religiously entering a scrum cycle for the remainder of the summer. We have broken into two groups along the lines already mentioned.

The problem I am having is that my group is a mix of the pigs and chickens and I am not entirely sure how to have them all involved. My approach for the moment is to have the UA/UI folks participate as observers in the first 15 min daily with the UI folks really taking the time to go over their tasks from yesterday, for today, and tomorrow. They leave, then the UA/UI folks do their thing for 15 min.

The other challenge as I see it is that we can’t ‘lock in’ tasks for a two week period as the expectation is that clients are giving feedback and expect to see some adjustments on a very short cycle. To address that I have set up two days of ‘respond to feedback’ where we tackle any tasks that can be done in those two days. Anything that can’t fit goes on the list for the next cycle.

This is going to be a bit awkward at first I think… not entirely sure I have it organized properly yet. Hopefully by the next two week cycle I will get it ;) Wondering though, anyone have a similar problem? How do they handle front end development of web applications in a scrum cycle?

Another TODCon has come and gone in a haze of mojitos, great food, and great company. This year it was back in Orlando—my favorite place for it even though it was really hot and humid, I am getting bored with Las Vegas. This year had an amazing line-up of presentations which had little to do with ‘Adobe stuff’ and more to do with developing rich experiences on the web using whatever tools you use. Sure there was some from folks from Adobe showing off some things in CS4. Greg Rewis from Adobe gave a sneak peek of Flash CS4, there was a demo of Fireworks CS4 from Alan Musselman, and some discussion on Dreamweaver CS4.

Really looking forward to next years conference already as I think there are some changes afoot that will make it an even better community focused conference.

My two presentations were on AJAX strategy and Web Project Management. I have stuck both sets of slides up on slideshare but I don’t think they make much sense without the whole presentation ;)

Adobe has made available a public beta of the next version of Dreamweaver. Go give it a try! Scott Fegette has a bit more about the release on his blog.

It is really good to see Adobe do this after they let Photoshop CS3 out in beta last year. The next version of Dreamweaver is a big improvement over CS3 for front end developers although I would like to have seen a bit more for application developers.

Illya posted some thoughts on Agile Release & Testing Procedures and instead of writing a big long comment I figured it was worth a blog post. At the University of Waterloo I have had experience deploying a number of different applications for a variety of audiences… it is next to impossible to get all the details in a post but here is the general truth: there are no enforced institutional wide procedures for web applications. You might think the lack of procedures is bad but it is a result of the relatively low risk environment (even though the campus community has a low tolerance for bugs and changes). There are rarely formal teams of developers, it is mostly the loan coder building a specialty application – enforced procedures would frustrate them.

When you are dealing with a simple web page, say the uni home page, I have essentially covered the typical user acceptance, performance, and stress tests when the page goes live. I go through the gamut of web browser testing, try some OS variations out, and then get it out there. There is a relatively low risk here as the users don’t interact with a database or a whole heck of a lot client side. Once rendering issues are dealt with, it is pretty much unlikely to have other issues. This is with 30 000 or more people seeing it within a short period of time too. I had relative success but I think it was more luck and the fact we kept web pages simple.

Stepping up the development a bit, throw in a Ruby on Rails or PHP application. My testing procedures involved pretty much the same as the web page testing: poke away at it, fix bugs as they appear, and get it ready to go off of the development server to production. We (co-op student and I) never really sat on changes very long. The thinking was that if it went bad on the production end we just roll back the version, fast. When I made the jump to Ruby on Rails development with Capistrano and SVN that became so easy it was scary. On many occasions we had new versions going up two or three times a day. Minor changes, but they add up. This meant a lot of bugs made it out to the community version but as a whole the community appreciated seeing the progress. Our harshest critics were few and usually the type of people that would sit on things until they are perfect, the web is never perfect.

Now I find myself in the .NET/C# development world. I am happily hacking away at the JavaScript on the front end but I still live in the development environment. Here we have a solid team, a lot of developers, some serious tools, and totally different requirements from the client relationship/expectations end. At the moment we are doing limited testing that makes sure it works and then pushing it to an environment that a group has a ‘sanity check’ and gives us feedback. Releases are going out on a weekly build routine with a daily routine for an internal release. The whole process is evolving as we go but in a very general sense we are aiming to maintain a weekly build schedule for one set of users, daily internally. Our goal is to not leave the application in a non-working state and at any time the build could go live. This habit takes time to develop though… I don’t expect us to be in the groove until over the summer.

That is the nutshell version of what I have had experience with, I suppose it is Agile without the buzz terms. Personally I don’t see a reason why any web application couldn’t work on a daily build process. If you break the big change down to a lot of little changes you reduce the risk of breaking it and you ensure stability (so the theory goes). The problem is that in order to break a big thing down to a bunch of little things you need to take the time to talk it out, plan it out, and scope out what goes into a big thing. It is a way of thinking and it doesn’t happen overnight, most people need experience thinking that way.

I am interested to know what other higher education folks are doing with release and testing procedures.

I have been using Minefield (Firefox 3 beta) for a little while now and just didn’t use any extensions. It is just too fast and way better than Firefox 2 I just couldn’t go back. Now extensions are starting to work – Web Developer now does and all I need is Firebug and life will be back to normal. Decided I should try out ScribeFire too. Using Simplelog means I can’t find a blogging tool that works (why don’t I just use Wordpress??? I like pain I guess) and it crashes every few days but generally I like it ;) Anyway, lets see how this post looks.

Update: seems to work well beyond not turning on comments, see what editing a post does (it removes comments, odd because they are set to ‘on’ by default).

You work on something for a couple weeks and then the due date comes close. There is a realization that you won’t meet the milestone unless you get a lot of code written today and deal with whatever UI issues and browser bugs you can. You order in some pizza, fill up on caffeine, and push through a 16 hour or more work day. There is something about that role you get on when you don’t leave your computer, things just make more sense.

My GUI team of co-op students have been pushing themselves this past week and this evening I think they achieved more tonight than all of last week. People will have to wait until May 1st to see it but our internal deadline is much earlier (demos to some stakeholders first and we need April to bug hunt). Maybe I will demo a bit at DemoCampGuelph in April or BarCampWaterloo ;)

Just wanted to post a just over mid-term thanks to Daniel, Shawn, Allen, and Michael for the commitment. They have gone from CS or Engineering students to fairly good AJAX developers in a very short time period. They have made some cool stuff, can’t wait to show it off.

With our second StartupCampWaterloo behind us here in Waterloo we hit a milestone. Over 100 people were in the main area of the Waterloo Accelerator Centre to talk with Startups and help each other with ideas (quick estimate based on 88 chairs in the room plus Ali’s colourful chairs). I am pretty sure all those that demo’d got some useful information and experience out of the evening.

A big thanks to Stefanus De Toit for opening up the evening and breaking-in the crowed by sharing insights like: Turning academic research into a product is hard if you don’t keep your paperwork in order; hire your friends; wow people with lots of 3D chickens to get investment (actually prove your concept with a solid demo). Another big thanks to Austin Hill for closing off the evening with a great presentation which included: don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas because someone already tried it – it is your execution that is important; Canada needs more of its successful entrepreneurs re-investing in the startup scene; beware the vulture investors; do a startup while you are a student; it helps to work for a startup if you are thinking about a startup as startup culture is infectious.

What was learned from this one is that 60 second intros with voting works out really well. Keeping things short and keeping the slides out of it kept the conversation interesting and focused. The big buzzer also helped. Only took one person being caught by it—no one else dared challenge their time limits. Plus it kept us on time, mostly.

I had a lot of good feedback and now can relax—until the next one. What are we going to do next? BarCampWaterloo is on March 29th, a DemoCampGuelph will be in April, and StartupCampWaterloo3 will be sometime in May. If you can’t figure out if you want to go, I have a post coming up tomorrow that will cover that ;)

Other folks to thank for making the trip from places afar and/or helping out last night… The Toronto folks venturing outside of the GTA in their large 4×4: David Crow – thanks for the books and disruption, Jevon McDonald,  Jonas Brandon.   Ali Asaria brought some chairs and name tags and Simon Law for came down from Montreal. The other organizers Simon Woodside and Mic Berman ensured that we appeared as unconference as possible ;)

Most importantly, the night was good because of the folks that were there. Waterloo has a great community.

Over the past year or so the MMNP effort has been working on ways to utilize mobile and media based technology on campus. A year ago a pilot project looked at the possibility of students replacing their land lines in residence is relatively smart phones. Lots was learned (primarily that students are shell shocked by the telco cost and don’t really use them even when a large chunk of costs are covered) and the project moved on to different ideas. One of those ideas was a living environment that doubles as an incubator for entrepreneurial students.

Enter 2008 and the announcement of VeloCity. The Daily Bulletin article covers all the details. From the VeloCity site:

“It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.”

I was involved with the project early on and it is great to see that Sean has taken his idea and made it a reality. I expect to see some exciting things come from this housing experiment. What a great opportunity for some students!

Ever had a bit of technology your use dictated to you by an IT department? Does it not even come close to meeting your expectations or requirements? Is it usually web based technology that is letting you down? This type of problem stems from what I call a ‘square peg, round hole’ philosophy in IT – when decisions of what technology to deploy is based solely on the ability to provide support, not the requirements of the project and/or an analysis of features required by the user. It seems to happen far more often with web based technology.

In a conversation with a colleague over a beer I tried to understand why this happens. Sadly I still don’t understand why, but I do better appreciate the position of people that decide to hammer that square peg in. But I think it because they don’t understand or have an actual use for the web themselves (that is a totally different post).

I believe this happens in every IT department and it stems from the environment. IT finds itself in a situation with limited resources to hire new staff even though they are tracking time on/and tasks and there is an expectation that IT needs to support everyone regardless of expertise. There is a project or group or department that has decided to use a particular technology. Reality kicks in and the service end has to learn to support the technology so a decision is made to apply that same technology to others that have similar but not the same requirements as that project group.

What happens next is ugly. The clients expect something that usually different because they may want the same features but they would apply a different priority to the features they use/need. This influences their expectations on the total experience. Take a content management system (CMS) for example. One group might put a high priority on workflow management, another on user management, another wants a templating scheme, another wants a forum, and another group really wants a wiki. A CMS can do all these things but I can’t think of a CMS that can do them all as well or anywhere near as good as specialized software.

However, CMS vendors will promise support and the ability to meet the demands of the user. This pulls on the support strings of IT. Rarely, if ever, will you find a CMS that delivers to a diverse groups expectations. What happens is that any number of groups become disenfranchised with the software and the overall project of deploying that technology is doomed to failure or mediocre success at best. The CMS vendor comes off either not being paid and/or looking really bad. The IT department comes off looking unprofessional at best which puts pressure on them to produce, and the cycle continues.

What should happen is that the IT department assesses the features as well as the priorities. They evaluate the technology providers based on that clear idea of what are ‘deal killer’ features for people. If it reaches a thresh hold that makes it impossible to please even 70-80% of the clients then IT needs to break down the technologies and groups not force them all onto one.

The web offers the opportunity for this to be easy. Web services, web sites as your API, universal log ins, etc. all make it possible to integrate different solutions on the data level. Sadly I think IT still approaches web apps as black boxes that work in silos.

The moral of the story for anyone building a web based service is that to really be a hit with medium to larger organizations you need to offer integration and openness in your apps. If you can be the folks that develop the integration tools as well as offer your product you can likely charge more based on a successful track record. At least from where I am sitting ;)

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

My role at work has me looking at a UI for a fairly complex application (known as jobmine) that has three distinct audiences with three distinct reasons for using the web app. The web application is the primary business tool for the co-operative education process at the University of Waterloo. This process sees anywhere from 10-25K people using it at least a couple times every four months. Staff in the CECS department use it for their day-to-day activities.

What is a co-op system? My definition is based on being a student and now an alumni, it is no way the ‘official’ take. Co-operative education is an approach to education that gives students a chance to learn outside of the classroom (and in the case of UW, make some good money) and gain experience in the ‘real world.’ If you are a student you look for and apply to jobs, manage your resume/CV, and find out about interview times and locations, accept and decline job offers. For an employer you post jobs, sort through applications, arrange interviews, and offer jobs. For staff you make sure this all works by supporting both students and employers, generating reports, manage a massive amount of data. Generally speaking.

It would seem easy enough if you walked up to it from a user perspective. You have your role, an idea of what needs to get done, and off you go. The expectations aren’t a whole lot different than say Workopolis or Monster.com.

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The list of web apps for the iPhone keeps growing with some mixed results reported. 37Signals went and announced their customized for the iPhone tada list, which is great but with all this it has me thinking—what about the other 99% or so of mobile users out there? All they really need is a solid browser that supports javascript like the iPhone does I would think. Could Opera Mini do that? I certainly hope so. Take a look at the iPhone interface in JavaScript to see what might be possible.

Contribute is an application that is so easy to use most people probably never take the time to look through the ‘how do I’ section or read up on its features. Rarely will you will run into problems but when you do sometimes it’s just a simple fix and you are done, other times it’s a bit trickier. This post is a collection of common problems and solutions I have had over the past few years as well as a couple picked up from the forum.

General Problem: I can’t connect to my server or Contribute is connecting very slowly or I can’t load my changes onto the server

Solution: Use network I/O logging to log operations and identify problems.

Why? The I/O logging is the first place to look to identify where your problem is occurring. You can quickly find server permissions issues or server speed issues.

Problem: I can’t edit files on the server even though I have it checked out.

Solution: Check to ensure group write permissions exist on the file you are editing. Certain Linux and Unix user set-ups can cause Contribute (and Dreamweaver) to not pick up the users umask settings and the files end up not being group readable.

Problem: I need to edit my source code.

Solution: Many people do not know about the ‘edit in external application’ feature in Contribute. This allows you to edit in your HTML editor of choice and smoothly go back into Contribute to edit the content or just put it back on the server.

Problem: Contribute is not rendering my page properly in edit mode or I want to highlight the places people can edit but I don’t want to use Dreamweaver Templates.

Solution: Design Time Stylesheets – you need to make sure you load the CSS to the server and the Dreamweaver Template itself has it included.

Problem: I need a section of text to have a certain div id or class name.

Solution: Contribute’s application of class or id names to items is stuck with adding them to the tags. So if you highlight a set of text and apply a style it will add that class name to the ‘p’ tags. Try using the library feature to insert a code snip that has the class or id name you want.

Tip: have a design time style sheet that adds a background at edit time so people know if they accidentally remove the region by deleting too much text. They can just insert it again.

Problem: I want to upload different file types to different directories.

Solution: Administer web site, user role settings, file placement.

Problem: I want to modify some style elements on the page

Solution: Page properties allow you to change some basic style elements.

I caught an announcement for a preview of Deepfish (IE for windows mobile) and it got me excited. Why? It renders like a desktop browser. The browsing experience appears to be a big improvement on the Nokia Webkit based browser that you find in the newer Nokia devices (and is really cool for being out for a long while now). Currently it doesn’t look like it will be a better experience than what the Safari browser in the iPhone promises but the point is the browser experience is getting much better for mobile devices.

I am not entirely convinced the desktop experience is a good thing for mobile devices over GSM or CDMA given the outrageous data plans we have in North America (although they are getting better in the US, not so much Canada). With dual mode (wifi + GSM or CDMA) devices it could be very cool. As this technology/experience improves I am reminded once again of the 1990’s and the web. Will developers even bother with the older WAP based slow browsers given most phones are replaced/dead/broken in two years or so? Do you take the time and invest in a stripped down site or do you just work on detecting the smaller screens and making some marginal improvements instead of big changes?

Figuring out if it is worth the effort is a tough call. Almost all the project participants here don’t use their devices for the web largely because they have a laptop nearby and the devices do not do what they want. What they want is the same experience they get on the PC. I think it is a good sign for RIA’s though. They might not need a J2EE version in the near future.

I am hoping to get my hands on a Windows mobile device running Deepfish this afternoon. I will report back if I do…

I had an interesting meeting this morning with a newly formed mobile application development group that is tasked with coming up with something that is useful to UW students and runs on a mobile device for the next phase (Spring 2007) of the project. The usual suspects were bounced around: Quest (student information system), Jobmine (Co-op employer/employee management system), Library systems, calenders, etc. Besides targeted data sources we also bounced around the idea of should it be web based and designed for the unpredictable mobile browser or a java app or a Flash mobile app? Each with their own quirky limitations.

What it boils down to though is what do students actually want to do with their phones? Surely you don’t want to apply to courses and fill out long emails but I bet you want to get notifications, reminders, etc. Maybe access quick information on things, send short notes, text other students, look up phone numbers…

This is an open question to all students (and anyone else really), if bandwidth cost was not an issue what would you like to do on your phone besides call people?

Tonight marks the start of a pilot project here at the University of Waterloo that will explore the feasibility of replacing land lines in Residence with mobile phones. There are, of course, a lot of other things we hope to learn from the project but what this first part needs to figure out is how:

• How useful are mobile phones really?
• How much will it cost (support, monthly service plans, device costs)?
• What is the coverage like on campus, in buildings, etc?

For this first pilot, we have around 50 students (half first year, half upper year) that live in residence. They get either a Blackberry Pearl or a Nokia E62 and are asked to use it as their primary device. There are a number of surveys to collect some data on how they use the devices as well as some group discussions planned.

The UW home page now redirects mobile devices to a customized version that is a lot lighter than the current home page you get on your computer. It has all the elements of the home page but in chunks.

This is part of a larger initiative being led by Housing and Residences to explore the use of leading edge (for Canada) technology in the living and learning spaces here at UW. I am really happy to be a part of the project team but more on the project later… I am really excited about this project and what it could lead to.

Given the IE 7 mention in the Daily Bulletin today and a message I got from John Jaray in the Computer Store that Apple sales are up 69% this year over last, I thought maybe some numbers on what we have seen on the home page might be timely to give web folks. I am currently using Google Analytics on the UW home page to get these numbers and can compare with numbers from a two week long period last year in November of 640 000 users in 2005 to 682 000 for 2006 so far this month this year.

Sorry for the lack of pretty graphs. What to note in this is that:

• Firefox has increased 5% in the last year to 21% nearly (without a campus roll out),
• IE 7 is close to 6% of our IE user base
• Mac/Apple machines have increased from 2% to 4% of the user base over last year
• 800×600 use is under 4% (yet we still design for it)

With the number of users on the home page, 1% is a lot of people.

Once we get a full month of Analytics data (it was off for a year), I will post it in web.uwaterloo.ca for people to have a look. For now, here is what I have to compare…

Browsers Last year (Nov 05):

• IE – 80.1% (of that, 99.13% IE 6, 0.33% IE 5.5)
• Firefox – 15.89% (of that, 1.0.x approx 99%)
• Safari – 1.51%
• Netscape – 1.34%
• Others – under 1% (Mozilla, Opera, etc)

Platforms last year (Nov 05):

• Windows – 96.72%
• Mac/Apple – 2.32%
• Linux – 0.62%
• SunOS – 0.33%

Resolution (Nov 05):

• 800×600 or below – 6.36%
• 1024×768 – 59.27%
• 1280×1024 – 12.65%
• Others are above 1280×1024

For this year the test size for November is similar so far, 682K:

Browsers this year (Nov 06):

• IE – 75.90% (of that, 93.83% IE 6, 5.90% IE 7, 0.09% IE 5.5)
• Firefox – 20.73% (of that, 1.5.x 74%, 2.0 is 13%, and 1.0.x is approx. 13%)
• Safari – 1.93%
• Netscape – 0.71%
• Others – less than 1% (Mozilla, Opera, etc)

Platforms for this year (Nov 06):

• Windows – 94.92%
• Mac/Apple – 4.28%
• Linux – 0.61%
• SunOS – 0.16%

Resolution (Nov 06):

• 800×600 or below – 3.57%
• 1024×768 – 47.78%
• 1280×800/1024 – 32%
• Others are above 1280×1024

That is a lot stats ;)

I was far too sleepy when Apollo was introduced at MAX to really grasp what they were showing me. It looked cool but I heard ‘webkit’ and I thought web browser. Then I noticed the TUAW coverage of Apollo and realized how wrong I was. But now I am left wondering a few things like what is the difference between the web browser as the platform and Apollo?

According the FAQ:

What is Apollo?

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

This really does beg the question: why? If you keep reading the FAQ you come across this…

Is Apollo a web browser?

No. Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that runs outside of the browser.

Theoretically you could build a web browser on top of Apollo.

So the skeptic in me says that is what a web browser does. If gives developers a cross platform environment to deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Although a web browser doesn’t give you the ability to package itself up and send it to someone and just work. But is that expecting a decent size change in people’s web browser centric thinking? I think so. There are advantages with regards to offline use an CD-ROM or Kiosk applications which I am guessing is a decent size audience (thinking distance education, part-time students, etc at UW). It could even enable you to create a custom podcast/vodcast reader for your school and thus take care of copyright/security concerns, just distribute it in house and autheticate with your internal system to install.

The talk at MAX was that Apollo would change a lot of things on the web, and it might if people create a web browser on top of it, but it really is just another tool you can try and use. Will people use it? Time will tell I guess. I think it is cool but like Flex I just don’t see a practical application in my everyday web work. Web apps can do the same thing, just not in as cool a way. I wonder if I will change my mind in the next few months?

So far MAX 2006 has been pretty much what you would have expected from the new Adobe. Although yesterday the introduction of Apollo was pretty darn impressive as are some of the implications. What is Apollo you ask? I am still not sure. It seems like the kitchen sink of rich internet applications but time will tell. Keynote day one coverage and keynote day two coverage is better than anything I could type ;)

What am I getting from MAX? Well Flash, mobile phones, and video are the source of a lot of really cool ideas. This morning’s keynote was all about making money creating Flash Mobile 2.1 applications for cell phones. I can see how, but it must be hard for developers to build and test their applications in the phones common in Europe and Asia but not so much here. George Fox brought my attention to the new mobile section of DevNet, it is worth a look if you want to know more. I am sure Flash mobile development would be dead easy for some students around here.

AJAX has been another hot topic as well with the Dreamweaver team being asked about it at the birds of a feather last night and again today at a presentation on Spry. They used this persona of a front end developer that looks interesting and probably true a year ago but I think front end developers know a lot more about JavaScript and AJAX then they assume now. I could be wrong… anyway, the Spry demo was cool.

Scott mentions a few things about tomorrow’s keynote but what I like most of all is that Flex 2 for OS X is available. If I had time to play with it, that would be nice but it’s off to another session for me!

It is now just over a week until I head down to Las Vegas for Adobe MAX.Last year in LA was just amazing, Adobe was about to take over Macromedia and everyone was speculating what that would mean for the community and the technology. There were a lot of great presentations and conversations (lots of talk about AJAX vs Flash) but the whole thing was overshadowed by the merger. Now this year the merger seems like ancient history… what will be the buzz of MAX 06?

I am guessing I will hear a lot about Spry, Flex, and Flash. The purchase of YouTube by Google will likely be mentioned as a huge win for Flash video. To me, Google has just given 1.65 billion reasons that Flash video is here to say. I am also planning on attending MiniMAX on the Sunday night which has both Tom Green and Scott Fegette talking about Flash video and such.

What I really want to look into, now more than ever, is mobile technology solutions. I probably won’t be able to talk about it much until January but I am involved in a project that makes mobile technology more important to me now ;) It is in the early stages but once a pilot is underway I will post more about that – its not me being secretive either, its just I have no idea where this project is going so its best to say very little about it but just so students around know we are trying to do cool things with technology.

I hope to learn lots, meet some interesting people, and refine some ideas while at MAX. At the very least I get to go to Vegas for my first time!

The University of Colorado at Denver and Health Science Center (heck of a name) has a nice little AJAXcourse management system that doesn’t yet plug into their main system but is designed to help make course registration easier. The basic functions do work if you have JavaScript off but you can’t save your work or use advanced functions. Fair enough. The list of browsers in the help might be a bit optimistic (IE 3.x?).

This is a pretty cool application for higher education though… probably the most relied upon application outside of course environments is setting up courses and I would be most schools systems are crude at best. This example of how it could be done is worth a peak – especially considering its not hidden behind a password ;) Any other schools have something similar?

Brown University has introduced a new public beta site to the world that is certain to cause a lot of discussion amongst the edu and even the design community. What is so bold about it is that it steps away from the traditional web site design into something more interactive and minimalist. For higher education there are few sites that try this (maybe because of the large amount of committee oversight) but those that do are often compared with MIT’s homepage whether they like it or not.

It uses javascript to establish an automatic accordion response on mouseover, which could be problematic for some if they aren’t expecting it or have fine motor control issues. It also has a dark background, light text (some people don’t like that very much) which does focus on brown oddly enough.

I like it. They use some elements I have thought about for UW’s 50th refit and I really like the darker background. Given UW’s colours of black and gold I am a little inspired by companies like Lightmaker to give it a try. We did have black background sites about 5 years ago here… they looked good too. Just way too many graphics and spinning logos.

Anyway, have a look at Brown’s test site and let me know what you think…

After a little thought about dates and talking with CECS, I can now say that BarCampWaterloo is a go for September 29th! We have a location now all I need is a few people to help out and maybe someone to donate some food budget (people that have food are always much happier). Oh and we need people to sign-up. Check out the site if you want to know more about what a BarCamp is and sign-up. Given that this will actually be my first BarCamp some experienced help would be greatly appreciated.

This event will be open to everyone in the community (staff, students, faculty, off-campus folks from other schools, alumni, etc). I know I talked about one the end of this month but that really isn’t a good idea given that this place is a ghost town that time of year. I will certainly post some more information once it is available…

Around 140 people attended 18 different sessions that focused on technology and inclusiveness. Topics ranged from designing learning spaces to web technology to mobile devices. Derek Featherstone opened up the day with a great keynote (last minute sub for Joe Clark who had to cancel on account of illness) which I think left everyone with loads to think about for the day. There were students, staff, and faculty in attendance as well as a good number of off campus visitors.

I presented with Antonia Palmer (formerly of LT3 soon to be in Distance Education) on adopting new web technologies with an accessible mind. Our presentation notes are available in the usual place for my presentations.

All the presentations were recorded so both audio and video will be available but it will probably be a couple weeks before they are all online. I will post more when they are ready.

Just a brief note: Day 1 of TODCon 8 has wrapped up things for the day. The day opened with Derek Featherstone providing the keynote followed by some great sessions and discussion. I managed to get into a few sessions but the discussion in the halls is just as informative at TODCon. Scott Fegette has pretty much spent the day chatting with folks about everything Adobe. Tomorrow is a Dreamweaver 8 birds of a feather with folks from Adobe to start the day. Looking forward to that.

Good thing I have until Sunday to polish up my presentations! ;)

Got this on a list today:

“We have been working hard on a Course Scheduler web application for the University of Colorado at Denver. We are now in our beta phase and are looking for feedback from other designers and developers. If you ahve any spare time, take a look at http://courses.cudenver.edu. We are looking for comments related to usability, browser compatibility, and accessibility (although it is under Accessibility review right now).”

Go have a look and give them some feedback. At first glance its rather pretty and Web 2.0-ish… but I think some of the functionality is disabled. Plus there isn’t even a doctype the W3 validator can read in the code. Too bad, it looks good but it’s ugly underneath.

Adobe has released a new AJAX framework called Spry through their Labs site. It is a pretty slick implementation of AJAX but it is very much a first release and they are looking for feedback:

“The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring Ajax to the web design community who can benefit from Ajax, but are not well served by other frameworks.”

Take a look at the overview by Paul Gubbay. From looking at the tutorials Spry offers a real simple way for AJAX newbs to get a feel for the technology, just be careful about using it on production sites at the moment as I don’t think the demos are accessible as yet. Maybe we will see some Hijax in the next version ;)

Go give it a shot, try the tutorials, and give them feedback. This is pretty cool.

As mentioned in a number of places, Dreamweaver 8.02 update is available and you can read all the details on the release notes. The two big fixes are:

• a fix for SQL injections
• a fix for active content (Flash and the IE ActiveX issue)

A quick note about the fix for active content. It automagically creates a javascript and drops it in a ‘Script’ (if you already have one in lower case ’s’ it goes there) directory on your site.

As well as drops in a JS call infront of your object. I am not a js guy so I can’t go through what it does but looks like it essentially is Adobe’s recommended work around. I don’t see this as being as clean as the simple fix I looked at a few weeks ago but DW does do this for you by default so at least you don’t have to think about it anymore for new sites. Which is good.

update: You should read Tom Muck’s post on problems with 8.02 if you are thinking about this update. Read the technotes. Oh and the ActiveX fix in 8.02 might not work in all IE installs.

Chatting with Derek and venting about issues that have come up in the day-to-day related to log file and traffic analysis, I have come up with my catch phrase for that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the whole thing with regards to web development/design/etc: know your audience, not your web site. This new ‘mantra’ of mine comes from a few discussions recently that are motivated this new found obsession with web stats that seems to pop up (maybe thanks to Mint,Measuremap, and Analytics ) and studying user traffic on your web site.

The intent of the whole know your audience, not your web site thought is to be a reminder about the importance of the audience over the numbers found on the server. It is my mantra for the summer.

Know your audience

A quick search for that phrase on Google will give you a load of results. Knowing your audience is the key to any presentation, written or multimedia or in person. Getting to know your audience can be achieved using a number of different approaches from straight assumption based on anecdote to observational study (usability studies). Does the value of this really need to be explained? It seems like a no-brainer besides the little problem of how do you get to know them.

The answer appears to be simple: watch the site traffic patterns and see what content the users are going to. If we get real tricky with something like Analytics or Mint we can look at how long they have been on that page too. What does that actually tell you about your audience? Not much I think. It tells you more about your web site than anything else. If you look at your page and see that people are going to this one page a lot but are spending very little time there it could be that:

1. Your content has a popular keyword in it that ranks high in search results so people go to that page, scan it, move on.
2. Your content is well written and people just scan and get what they need.
3. The page sucks and people think they have the right place but the page sucks so much they just leave.
4. I could go on.

The point is you really have no idea why people are leaving your page. They could be happy with it, hate it, or not even looking for that page. You don’t know unless you know what audience that page is supposed to cater too and what that audience is looking for.

Know not your web site

I am by no means saying that log files and traffic analysis should be ignored. What I am saying is that the emphasis should be on the audience and what they want first, your web site should be studied only once you have a good grasp on who these people are. Traffic analysis and assessment of value with regards to web content as a key part of a pro-active approach to your web site content management is essentially voodoo.

The value of this data comes from being able to study patterns of usage over time and figure out if a site you have put a lot of resources into generates the traffic to justify the expense. If it doesn’t maybe you need to ask your audience what is wrong? It may be nothing and you really should ask.

“I want to know my audience”

First you need to identify your audiences. Pick your primary, secondary, tertiary audiences – sure you can have more than one audience in those categories but it is critical you identify them. Next you want to solicit feedback from those audiences and assign weight to those responses relative to their status as primary, secondary, or tertiary. Just be sure to get feedback from more than just a few otherwise your information could be a little skewed one way or another.

You don’t need too do it but a usability study is invaluable if you can get enough participants from your primary audience at least. If you have a diverse primary audience like say the UW home page than try to get a couple from each group. I will post more about how to do a test at UW in the future. Really, just make the effort to get to identify and get to know them as your audiences will appreciate it and from that you can better utilize your server data.

This is my whole motivation around doing the usability study of the home page at least once a year. I want to observe people using the page, hear from them their thoughts, see their reactions to links and images. From a small group of them I can start to see patterns and hopefully identify things that need to fixed. Also, I hope to be able to better anticipate features that might make their experience better. I want to you, the audience, as best as I can.

Cross-posted on my personal blog.

If you have a few minutes take a look at Durham College’s web site and then drop by the design blog and tell them what you think—of their current site.I am not entirely sure if they have a before and after shot but maybe you nice folks that read this blog can bug them about that ;) They are looking for feedback on their current design and what can be improved. It might be especially valuable for students and others that have no idea what or where Durham College is to give them feedback.

Speaking of which I am pretty much out of time to pretty this place up for May 1st’s reboot…

update: need to learn to read email better, I have fixed the wording to reflect that they are looking for feedback on their current site that hasn’t been redesigned yet.

There are relatively few sites on campus that use Flash but they are starting to show up more and more. CPA has a couple pages and I want to make sure the Flash ran smoothly with IE 7 and soon IE 6 when the security update is applied. Basically because Microsoft lost to Eolas over the plug-in patent they have made some changes which means Flash or other embeded objects need to be activated by the user before anything is loaded. It’s fun, really it is.

Techniques out there

There are a number of techniques out there which has made deciding on which one to use confusing. Microsoft, Adobe, and there are some nice standards friendly ideas floating around along with the unobtrusive flash objects. This is by no means an exhaustive list either… but the one I like is posted on Beakdal.com and created by Jason Baker. It’s called the activateActiveX and all it requires is that you include some JS in your head. Check out the site for the details on how it works.

A gotcha if you use the head version of activateActiveX: onload

Using this simple fix I ran into a problem. If you are using nifty corners you can’t use the head version… it appears the onload in both scripts conflicts with each other (guessing you need to be careful with multiple onload usage in DOM scripting). Not being a js guy I don’t want to try and figure out exactly why, I just want a way to make this work. It didn’t take me too long to figure out I need to use the version for the footer—I really hate calling in my js in the footer but it works. I likely would have figured this out sooner if I read the site properly and wasn’t so stubborn with the footer.

In the future…

Why did I use this fix? Because I can add a call to my include for my scripts and that is all… no having to find each page with Flash and fix it. This is so simple I don’t see why I wouldn’t use it. In the future something like UFO over the default Dreamweaver code might be attractive although it appears accessibility wise the method used by Dreamweaver 8 might still be ideal even though it triggers a validation error.

Update: It appears April 11th (today) is the day it starts, Flash sites be ready!

I have disabled the CSS on this blog for Get Naked Day on April 5th. This is what the real UW CLF is all about, you strip the style and we all look identical. Hope you enjoy my nakedness as it demonstrates proper XHTML, good structure and semantic mark-up.

If you are wondering what the underpinnings of accessible design are—you are looking at it today.

note: comment submission seems broken… working on it. Fixed.

April 5, 2006 – 10:50pm: Clothes are put back on… enough nakedness for one year ;)

Over the past few months I have been trying out different JavaScript based applications to monitor site traffic. The three I have looked at so far are Measuremap (recently purchased by Google), Google Analytics, and MapSurface. I have written a bit about Analytics, I have haven’t had much to say about Measuremap yet (I like it but it is only for blogs really), but MapSurface is just cool.

Andy Budd has a great review on his site if you are interested in knowing more. If you want to try it out just hit ctrl-x on Windows or alt/option-x on OS X after you load this page. You will then see how low the traffic is on this site but also how cool this application is as well.

It only measures the page you are looking at, not all the pages on the site combined and all you XML readers don’t get counted either.

There was a rather pleasant meeting of minds organized by Mark Morton in Lt3 with one simple agenda item: podcasts and what is going on around campus? The short answer is that a lot is going on around campus but nothing organized as yet. There will definitely be lots to blog about in the future. For now though… what does it all mean?

The seminar last week in Toronto made some really good points. What I took from it was:

• Technology introduced to the classroom needs a reason to be there, using the technology for the sake of using it just does not work.
• In most cases podcasts are well received and used by students who appear to benefit from it.
• Podcasts learning curve is flat enough for most people to take advantage of from both the content creator and listener point of view.
• Podcasts aren’t only about recording and distributing lectures.
• Senior level buy-in is important.

From my point of view I want to think about how podcasts can be used in communications and marketing. Is there something we can offer the UW community as a whole that is worth at least trying out? I think there is.

There are a number of issues however:

• Accessibility – text alternatives, are they required in all cases?
• Copyright – although if you are worried about the copyright of content in your lectures maybe you should just avoid the podcast altogether ;)
• Being evaluated by the quality of the podcast – again if that is a concern don’t do it.

A few more issues are likely not listed there but generally at this point in time podcasting should be for those that want to do it and I hope more people try it out. Accessibility is probably the biggest concern though, I am working on a podcasts and accessibility post so look for that shortly.

There has been some talk in certain higher web people mail lists recently that suggest Contribute Publishing Server is no more. Some have heard this from the sales team at the new Adobe. Just for the record, I have heard from the Contribute dev team and they assure me CPS is alive and well. Which is good.

It is good because it is CPS that makes Contribute 3 much more useful. Sure you can live without it but if you have a server end controller like CPS that allows you to access certain things through an API you can do a lot of things.

What things? Well hopefully in the next month or so CPA will be using the API and some PHP to generate RSS feeds from the stories we publish. With the news release site we actually parse mailman archives and pull them into a database. This works but only because news releases go out to a mail list. For our news stories that are featured on our new CPA page we have had to get a bit more creative.

Stories are published with Contribute 3—and we are just trying to figure out how to automate things. First we needed to get the site up and have someone maintain it. Then we can figure out how to automate certain things.

Besides Joe Clark’s Failed Redesigns part 1 and part 2, the Globe and Mail has gone through a major redesign that I think is pretty cool, Collylogic is showing us all a really cool way to deal with width-based layout, and when designing how do you do up site maps for web applications?

There is an awful lot going on so far in 2006… I have a new ‘beta’ skin for the home page based on a lot of other stuff and a little JS. Collylogic’s width based layout just inspired me though. Stay tuned.

Just thought I would take a look at the beta 2 version of IE 7, really looking forward to it as well. Well gosh golly gee:

I think I know what is going on there. IE 5.5 does the same thing as well as certain configurations of IE 6. Not sure whether I should be fixing my CSS for it or not, but I guess I need to pay close attention to it.

For those trying it out, be sure to go to the IE 7: Beta 2 checklist page. Loads of information. Don’t forget to fill out bugs for the IE team too.

update: Looks like the folks at Project VII have documented the bugs I see. The IE team have a post explaining the CSS changes in IE 7 beta 2 – and that is a nice list of fixes. Hopefully they will take care of the new ones that have come up ;)

I was going to list a few predictions for 2006 and then link to a bunch more… but that would be boring. There are a load of predictions for 2006 in the web world out there and I will stick some in the cool stuff category. One thing for sure—there will be some real great stuff developed but I wonder if the web things people use everyday will improve or not? Like student registration systems, banking websites, buying books, searching for course information, etc.

What I plan for 2006 is more JS, XML, XSLT, PHP, mySQL, Adobe tools in my dock, and OS X.5 hopefully ;) What does that mean for the users of sites I am responsible for? Well so far my goals:

• searching for people, places, and things and UW will become much more useful—but must be careful to not provide the information overload.
• a much better designed, elastic width UW home page designed (not sure if it will ever see production but I am working on it now).
• news and information from CPA will come in many forms, maybe even with some podcasts.
• more images. Someone please hook me up with the UW photography club! I would love to feature their photos and credit them ;)
• ..and for me: organize myself better—not in a Getting Things Done sense, just in a ‘i want to see my desktop’ way.

With that out of the way… bring on 2006! Five goals that should be easy to achieve. Oh, and check out who made Joe Clark’s Failed Redesigns list. Its good.

Its mid-December, 2005 is pretty much over, so how did I do with my predictions from last January? Well lets take a look…

sIFR

This one is easy. We use it on the home page but I failed to get it included in the CLF template. Why? It is easy but it strays from the ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’ I was going for. It’s not hard to add though, if you are interested all you have to do is let me know.

Essential tools for web development and web management

Think I was beating around the bush on this one. Basically I was pretty against a Content Management System and I still am. What has changed is that CPA has basically created one. More on that in 2006 ;) As for tools, in 2005 the essential tools:

Applications

• Studio 8 + Contribute Publishing Server
• TextWrangler
• NetNewWire Lite – to keep on top of all that is going on.

…and one that has squeaked in this term:

• Zend Studio for PHP

Languages

• PHP
• Javascript
• XHTML
• XML
• JavaScript

Servers

• LAMP – Linux Apache MySQL

No version control in 2005… lets hope for 2006.

LAMP/Web application development

LAMP has been where all our work is done in 2005. Just a great platform that is primarily responsible for the development of most of the fall 2005 projects. The flexibility is perfect for web development.

Web apps on campus though? Leave that to the users but I think a lot of PHP based applications have appeared. Even Ruby on Rails is making an inroad.

What about 2006?

Just thinking about that now… I will have a post in January for that ;) For now check out these predictions already posted from others:

• Bold Predictions for the savvy designer, 2006 edition
• Web Design and Development Trends for 2006

More will be added as they appear.

I have updated web.uwaterloo with an article comparing Google Analytics with AWstats. There will be more documentation posted on or around the 15th as well with regards to the search and a few other tid bits including a podcast for the WatITis conference sessions. If you are counting down the days of this festive period for the big day of presants, check out out the 24 ways – the advent calendar for web geeks.

Vincent has also fixed the case sensitive problem we were having with tracking search terms. Its now case insensitive so the term tracker should be better represent what people are searching for.

…and we have more than enough people signed up for usability testing. We are just in the middle of it now. There will likely be some more testing in January and we will be in contact with those who already signed up first before we go looking for more. Thanks everyone who signed up and participated so far.

The main site for CPA’s web development has been updated. As part of the update I am working on updating content and streamlining access to that information. There is also a monthly schedule for updates and a better set up along the left for RSS feeds.

The big update is in the search documentation. We have added a dynamic graph of the most popular search terms and the total number of queries, accurate to the moment you load the page. If we find the page is popular we will have to change that.

Update: If you go the search documentation page you can grab the excel sheets of 101 169 search terms/phrases and the number of results in UW dir, UW keyword, and Google. Enjoy.

I am a little late for the November 1st deadline of the Fall CSS reboot but better late than never. Behold the new skin for the web dev blog. I am pretty happy with this design that evolved from the CLF and was refined by Vincent Marta and myself. Big thanks to Vincent for the work he has done so far this term. There are still a few little things to do but more on that later.

What a tough decision this term. I interviewed three great students on Wednesday and I had to rank them yesterday. Each had great qualities and no two were the same. So who did I choose? Well they should already know as I have ranked them ;) but for the other two, I would hire you both if I could. There is just no space and no budget—there is plenty of work mind you…

The Co-op process at UW is great though. They (Co-op and Career Services) handles everything, all I have to do is post the job, review some CV’s, interview and meet some great students, and then make a decision. The hardest part is actually keeping up with them during the work term.

Anyway… hope to introduce next term’s student soon. I also hope to showcase the work of Spring 05 (Areeb) and Fall 05’s (Vincent) students soon too. Stay tuned.

Day 3’s round up is a couple days late due to plane travel and overall being tired. The theme of day 3 for me was the Dreamweaver AJAX conversation and the conversations it created. First off lets start with Dreamweaver 8.

Dreamweaver 8

There were next to no real in depth sessions for Dreamweaver 8 really at all at MAX. That was too bad simply because of all the improvements that the team has done with standards, accessibility, and rendering. CSS is really simple with DW 8 and people need to see that. Steph’s presentation on CSS could have been a 3 hour hands on and it would have filled the room.

Randy Mode Rendering

Well you heard here first, DW 8 rendering is officially named ‘Randy Mode Rendering’ after careful consultation with fellow DWTF member Steph. What is it you ask? It’s a hybrid of IE and standards. As I am starting to figure out, it can really help you cut down on hacks (or maybe I use them too much?) by having decent rendering to remove the reliance on browser testing and you only viewing in one browser. If it renders properly in DW 8 it is likely to render in IE 6 without too much hassle. There are a few things DW 8 does better than IE 6 but it doesn’t appear to be worse. What this has to do with MAX is that I finally got to meet Randy Edmunds, the man behind the rendering and it just popped into my head ;)

AJAX in DW 8-ish?

There was a nicely conducted round table conversation on AJAX and DW 8 on Wednesday morning. The DW team gave a closer look to what they demo’d at the sneak peak and then asked questions about how any future version of DW should handle AJAX. It was pretty informative but I think some work needs to be done on techniques used and such.

Also, there is some potential in Flash 8.5… more on that in a future posting. Shall work on a total summary next week. I need to think a bit on what I got out of the conference. Generally though I met some great people, caught up with some folks I met last year, and left feeling inspired.

Day 2’s round up is being written in the middle of day 3 because, well, Disney Land was a lot of fun last night. It was a really long day but loads of fun so here it is.

Keynote

MAX 2005 is about Flash, which isn’t great to me but it does give an opportunity to check out new features. The Keynote covered a range of demo’s using the theme of Studio 8 match up. It was well acted and a lot of fun to watch. The star of the Keynote was Adobe Aftereffects and not because it is a really powerful and cool video editing software, not for me, it was the user interface that impressed me. It is just amazing. Dig around Flickr, I will update this post with some links later.

Sessions

For the day I will have to rank the sessions at a mediocre. Why? Well there is so much Flex/Flash talk it draws tears. It is a cool application and really demonstrate some power and simplicity that I have never seen in business application development. ‘Flex’ is flexible… just I don’t use it. But Java coders rejoice, with MM going to ECMA your java skills are wanted and given what SAP has done with Flex you can count on some big contracts in the private sector. More on that in the summary.

The Contribute team did their Birds of a Feather in the evening and that was really the next best part of the day. Finally got to meet a couple more members of the team that weren’t in New Orleans last year and learned about some seriously large and complex Contribute 3 deployments. Really impressive. Mike Hazard just has to give me all the custom code he has done for CPS ;)

Sneak Peak OK but Disneyland made my day

I wasn’t overly impressed with the sneak peaks but only because there were just some little things shown and what I really wanted after that keynote was ‘here is our new UI.’ Still, entertaining and fun.

For the big night out Macromedia rented out ‘California Adventure’ in Disneyland. What a great time. Lots of laughs, lots of meeting people, lots of dance floor craziness.

I will write up an overall summary of the conference and a Day 3 round up later on… Some cool things even on the last day ;)

Today was the first day of the MAX 2005 conference in Anaheim California. Just so you know, its raining and cool. There are a lot of photos appearing on flickr if you are interested as to what it’s like around here. To round up the day’s events:

Keynote

What a great keynote with over 3000 in attendance – but a little long. The keynote focused largely on the power of Flex, the impressive potential of Flash, and where MM thinks the (new buz phrase here) ‘web experience’ is going to improve for users. There were some great demo’s that really showed how easy it is to make dynamic, attractive, and powerful applications in Flex. Essentially Macromedia sees more integration of different data sources into web apps and far integration with portable devices (Web 2.0 I think?).

Also Macromedia has caught the alpha bug – Macromedia Labs was launched today. If you are wondering what this Flex is all about, go check it out. Note ActionScript 3.0 is ECMA (javascript). Very exciting there… if you try it out, let me know what you think. Zorn is there too… But perhaps the most entertaining part of the keynote was when Steve Elope called out Microsoft. There was great picture posted and some good comments.

Sessions

I didn’t make it to all the sessions I wanted to attend today. There was a lot of buzz in the halls on what Flash is doing in Version 8 and the coolness of the 8.5 player. I did get to Stephanie’s CSS presentation which was really well attended and I did learn a couple things.

The Accessibility in Flash presentation by Bob Reagan was on my list as well but I got chatting with a couple people and ended up late. Popped my head in and the room was full… so I will have to catch it at 8 am tomorrow.

I did get to the integration of AJAX/Flash/Flex and let me tell you… its cool. Not cool in the typical sense, cool in the fact that the move to ECMA and player 8.5 might mean that AJAX folks have a different way to render their code. They can use the Flash player instead – will this help with the potential accessibility issues surrounding AJAX? Dunno. Need to look into that more. If you want to follow what they are up to there is the Open Source Flash site. It has all you need to start playing.

Overall

It has been a great day. Just heading to the Birds of the Feather to meet up with the Dreamweaver team, maybe will add some of that to my post later.

Search version 2.5 is the last version for now and is up and running. With this search comes some new features:

• icons/buttons for off page resources, eye catching (so I think)
• highlighted UWdir results when there are some
• query tracking
• subtle colour changes and more whitespace

What is that about an API for keywords you ask? Working on it but it drops down the task list for now. Hope you find the new search useful.

Coming up is designfest.ca tomorrow which is in Toronto. Tickets are cheap, if you are in the Toronto area and want to be awake at 8 am on a Saturday I am sure it is worth the effort.

Then there is miniMAX in Santa Monica next weekend where I am presenting a little thing on Contribute 3. While I am there I might as well go to MAX. I mean it would be a shame to miss it ;) Hopefully there will be some word on the new Adobe Systems Inc – If I can I will live blog the keynotes or blog just after the keynote is done. Unless Macromedia plans a podcast or something.

…and happy turkey weekend!

Deeje has a posting of results of a survey Macromedia did with regards to blog postings. I think it is a very useful exercise but I hope that the Contribute team is not going to focus so much on a tool for blogs but instead a tool to access and edit content in a database.

The article I wrote a while back on a simple PHP script that can convert db content to static html and back again is just a hint of a larger application we built in CPA that actually drops content into a DW template and peels it out again for DB publication. There were some challenges with this once you go past straight text. For example:

• Inserting images, do they go into the database? how do we link to them in articles?
• Links to other files that are either elsewhere or soon-to-be on the server – how to manage those?
• draft tracking was just adding another stage to the PHP but it would be nice is the ‘publish’ button meant ‘to the database’ and the draft was managed not as a static file but within the db.
• how can we work with Contribute Publishing Services in this environment?

I use Textpattern to manage this blog. Sure it means typing in a box but thanks to Safari and a little bit of textile knowledge (that Drew has proclaimed serious commitment too) it is really easy. I have draft tracking, user management, file management (haven’t used it yet), plug-ins, and other features I have no idea what they do as yet.

Problem is that it doesn’t connect to my other sites and that is where the whole Web Publishing System can come in. The Macromedia folks are on to something, just hope they don’t focus a feature to be useful for only blogs but look at dynamic content as a whole instead.

If the over covered Apple to Intel is getting you down, how about Macromedia hooking up with Eclipse? Ok not really the same league but this is great news. So what if its just a Flex based move, its still a step in the right direction. A lot of ColdFusion developers are already using CF Eclipse – which I hear is pretty cool.

It has been just over a year since I started working on this blog so it is way past due a facelift. Here it is! Some work has gone into just using a custom.css from the current UW home page CSS. This work resulted in a fix for that centering issue people had with the left margin.

Why the right nav?

The point of this design is to demonstrate a content heavy site where the most recent article is the most important, the rest of the stuff in this site is an archive. This is a bit different than a traditional web page. People are not expected to navigate through, they likely get all they want from the one page.

Does it use the same code as the CLF?

Yes it does. I had to do little modification to get the presentation like so. The one major change is the ‘primarynavarea’ being an inline list instead of a column… which lets face it, that would have been a waste of space.

Work in progress

Without experimentation there is no progress. I will continue to refine these pages (I had a few sections to add but ended up fighting with textpattern instead) and clean up the CSS. I hope you all agree the end result is a decent web page.

Looks like Firefox is hitting the 50 million downloads mark along with a decent contest. That is pretty exciting considering it is a relatively new kid on the browser block.

Now 50 million downloads and we have 7% or show of our users on the home page using it. So what is the big deal? Well considering most lab and staff computers have no choice, what would happen if they did? If your lab machines run Firefox let me know, and let me know when you made it available. If it is going to be in the future then I can see if that impacts the average on the home page.

Microsoft may never admit it, but the growing popularity and potential of Firefox likely forced their IE team into gear. IE 7 is being promised in Beta by summer along with some encouraging features, albiet expected features that most CSS web folks have figured out work arounds for.

The buzz that comes from a new browser and its popularity may be encouraging innovation in other places. That is a good thing™. Dave Hyatt looks to have Safari passing the Acid Test 2 pretty soon and I bet other browsers are looking to as well. Netscape is revived with a bloated version 8 and Javascript is the coolest thing going.

Hrm, browser war that never ended has certainly flared up again and that is pretty cool.

Today someone pointed out a really odd font display in windows XP and IE 6. Seems the font sizes are displaying as large (body text was nearly the same size as the 28pt graphic text). I have not seen it before and couldn’t reproduce it with the same settings, but if anyone notices the web development site being odd in IE please let me know. I tend to think it has something to do with the percentages but sheesh. While on the topic of odd IE things, check out Quirky percentages in IE6 from poisitioniseverything.net which says nothing about font sizes but loads about box model fun.

Two decent articles popped up today that were rather interesting… IT is from Mars; web content is from Venus and Is communications up to running intranet? They probably deserve some comment but I will let the articles speak for themselves.

…and finally. Just before lunch today I had the pleasure of sitting in on a LT3 presenation on blogging and wiki’s. It was really encouraging to hear the whispers in the room and the ideas being tossed about. Lt3 has set up an experiemental blog (but i won’t link to it, if you want to check it out let me know) and another follow-up session in April-ish. I think there was but one tool missing in the suite of web apps available to educators… but that is an idea better explored in its own post ;) Could be I was sore this blog wasn’t mentioned..

Recently in discussions about the location and function of parts of a web site design, I came up against some ‘usability’ research based opinion. Which is good. Why? It means people care enough to look at how people use their site. But what made be a little hesitant to take the information as relevant to this particular design was that the study was based on a totally different design and content layout. The information is only literally relevant to that particular site. It doesn’t mean it is not useful information mind you.

All the effort that went into testing that site and the specific information is not entirely useful once you change the content or tweak some navigation or change the design or any change really. The general rules established by watching your users are useful, however, but do people focus too much on the specifics in the testing results?

The question of where to invest time and money when you have neither is really important. A very useful article entitled Testing versus Training might help you decide if you are better off training your group in general usability concepts or spending the time testing or both. I lean towards learning the concepts, checking out the excellent resources all over the net, and if you have time doing some quick and dirty testing to see how users view your site.

If you dig through my design and link collection categories you might find some useful stuff. In the area of usability, this site needs some work ;) Planning on doing that soon.

It has been remarked with stunning clarity that you should update your Movable Type. Do it. We don’t want another phpBB incident to occur around here now do we? (I am using Textpattern so I am ok)

I talk about accessibility a lot around here but some people need a Accessibility from the ground up talk I think. The article is great, read it. One thought (of many) that has come up often while designing the XHTML template and its accessibility features (or lack thereof), Does Accessibility Belong on the Server-Side? I would say yes/no/maybe. But what of the Perils of XHTML?

Now Ta-da Lists are pretty cool as is the online app they come from. But what I can’t believe is how successful word of blog is. I wonder if this blog helps market UW’s place as spot for cool online stuff ;) If people are actually reading this thing, what does this blog do for you?

Here is the required ‘predictions’ post for the new year. As my mind gets back into work, this is actually a useful exercise – call it my top three tasks for 2005.

sIFR

Here at UW we have a font issue, mainly the title of departments and such are a font that is not easy to get. The solution? Up until now it has been to have Graphics make a title for you. No more (I hope). sIFR has come onto the scene and wow does it look good at first glance. Currently nearing version 2.0, the original article explains it all best. I am exploring how it could be built into a template so the masses only have to worry about the text and the proper font appears. Since I am working on the template, this is high on the ‘todo’ pile.

Essential tools for web development and web management

You have forums, blogs, wikis, Macromedia products, image editors, CSS editors, text editors, sftp/ftp/webDAV, versioning, RSS feed readers, web browsers, operating systems, PHP/ASP/JS/Perl/bleh scripts, project management, bug tracking, etc. But what should you be using? One thing is for sure there is no one tool that covers it all. What is that? Content Management System (CMS) you say? Well a CMS could have all those things or a few but if it’s a CMS it definitely has at least two. Is a CMS app the solution or is the philosophy of CMS just another ‘tool?’ Something to think about, plan to put fingers to keyboard and explore this some more.

LAMP/Web application development

Like it or not web apps are going to explode on campus over 2005. There is a demonstrated need on campus for more advanced web development. Application development is the logical step for a lot of areas. The introduction of a supported LAMP box at UW in early 2004 was inevitable but it also opens the gates. The AMP platform is very powerful and easy to use. It really can do the basic stuff most high priced application packages offer if you have the time to code.

It is also easy to make bad apps. So please, think before you code. If anything can be learned from the PHP/phpBB security *issues right before the holidays, nothing is totally secure so if you are venturing into app development you need to be diligent. No write once, ignore forever apps. Also if you install a PHP app on a server you should keep it up-to-date and keep on top of security issues (with LAMP, you don’t need a sysadmin to install some applications).

End thought

Well how about someone else’s list? There are tons of lists out there but I will point you to a couple:

• My Coding List for 2005 – Derek
• Predictions for 2005 – Drew

Alright back to work.

Two things: If you have phpBB installed on campus somewhere please update it to the most recent release. There are issues. Second is something that I am going to echo from an article on Digital Web that I noticed today, Keep it simple, stupid! On that note, since Google has already spewed it across it’s search of UW pages.. I would like to introduce a beta of a template for UW web pages. It is still being refined so no UWweb-creators email as yet. But once Web Steering gives it the ok, expect to hear more about it. So take a look at comment away.

In a previous post I touched on how web development has a lot in common with software development. In ‘development’ I am talking application development, site design, layout, etc. The roles in software development are well documented but why would you apply them to web development? Especially when we are talking content. After all a web page is an ongoing project, it has nothing to do with project management since there is no beginning or end.

Publication Process

Content publication on the web, or web site development for that matter, is no different than paper publication except that with the web you do not have the commitment of paper. For example the Daily Bulletin (DB). The DB has a daily publication schedule that requires the editor to go through a ‘project management’ exercise daily to ensure the publication appears on time, accurate, within budget, and complete.

The process the DB goes through is essentially similar from the paper publication it grew from, the Gazette. The Gazette had a weekly (later bi-weekly) publication schedule that was a ‘project management’ experience repeated along the publication process. There is in fact a clear project process except we add a one other ‘advanced’ step – rebirth.

The roles in a weekly paper publication (Gazette):

• Editor,
• Writer(s),
• Pagination,
• Graphic Artist,
• and printer.

Then you have to think about distribution.

The roles in a daily web publication (Daily Bulletin):

• Editor,
• Writer,
• Page design/layout,
• Graphic Artist,
• Server admin,

But you don’t have to distribute it, just upload new material and update a link on the homepage.

Name a publication, paper or web, and you will see these five core roles being taken on by anywhere from one to x-number of people. If you don’t you likely see obvious problems with the publication – more likely with web sites.

Creeping Scope

Scope changes can throw a project into turmoil. What is know as ‘scope creep’ plagues many web pages for the simple reason that a web site was initially designed based on the content and requirements placed on the site at the time a ‘web site (re-) design’ had taken place. But since then the content has been added to, new content created, and maybe even the audience has changed. The web site’s architecture is now stressed, images are dated, information may be misplaced or lost or not properly classified, and technology changes could be leaving the site with inconsistencies.

An unknown is when to update your site in order to fix these problems. The Internet is too young, technology changes too rapidly, and the audiences’ needs are in constant flux. There are also legal responsibilities such as accessibility or privacy to take into consideration in many cases.

Why don’t we see this problem in paper publications?

With paper it is really easy to see the start and finish of a publication cycle – when the paper is printed it’s over only to start again (rebirth). I am not just talking newspapers either. On campus we have many publications like the course calendar, We’re Waterloo, Waterloo Alumni Magazine, Keystone Campaign newsletters, view books and other recruitment materials, and many more. All of these have obvious project/publication teams and a process that is followed. Some are better than others at this process but they all have a start-finish-rebirth cycle.

Publication and design cycles

I should mention that there are two clearly different cycles in paper publication as there should very well be for the web: publication and design. With a publication cycle you are looking strictly at content and its layout within a given template. In design you are looking at changing the template from logos to colours to paper to fonts. That is design. On the web it is pretty much the same thing from code to logos to colours to fonts.

Publication and design cycles vary but often in news papers you see subtle changes over time that if you look at a paper five years ago you really notice. On the web it can happen in a blink of eye that can result in massive user interface changes which is not ideal but is really the norm currently.

Road to improvement in 3 steps

The first step is let go of the thought a web site can be perpetually updated but the content layout never needs reconsideration. When a site is never updated I like to say it suffers from ‘drop down syndrome’ where new content is simply stuck in categories that had been labeled years before and don’t really fit, often drop down menus.

The second step is identifying a publication process. If you update content in sync with a paper publication then you have a process but you have yet to acknowledge it. Formalize the process, identify what content will appear on your site, who is responsible for it, when you expect it to be updated again, and why is the content there in the first place? Just because you can update your content right away, do you really need to?

Web project roles that are recognized by the industry include (From Web Redesign – Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto & Emily Cotler);

• Project Manager – Organizes the project from start to finish.
• QA Lead – Takes care of Quality Assurance, identifying and squishing bugs as they appear. Responsibilities include building a test plan and checking browser compliance, HTML, and content placement.
• Information Designer – This person develops the site map and structures the way content navigation is laid out on a page – all of this in a non-design-oriented manner. The information designer defines site navigation, functionality, and user interaction.
• Usability Lead – The usability lead gathers firsthand information about how users actually use a site and analyzes what works and what doesn’t.
• Production Lead/Production Designer – The production lead heads a team of HTML production designers to facilitate HTML production and testing, while keeping an eye on scope and schedule at all times.
• Copywriter/Content Manager – Expert in web-specific writing that includes style and tone.
• Art Director/Visual Designer – Basically does the stunning graphics that are found on the site.
• Programmer/Backend Engineer – This person worries about the server side code and architecture.

In web projects, any team member depending on the size or scope of the project often takes on more than one role. Very few universities have people assigned to these roles at the time of this report. The ones that do often are found inside medical schools or other specific departments.

The third step is to ask for help. There are a few web experts on campus and even more project management people around that can offer advice. I would also recommend talking to people involved in publication of paper-based projects. Communications and Public Affairs have decades of experience to share with those interested. Remember publication is not a new just the medium has changed.

I would like to encourage some discussion on this topic so please send me an email or comment below.

The day-to-day summary of MAX gives some detail plus MAX bloggers is a decent round up from a diverse group as to what went on. Here is what I got out of the conference beyond the day-to-day.

Birds of a Feather (BOF)

This was a unique opportunity to tug at the heart strings of the Macromedia development teams. It gives us product users a chance to talk to the people that make the software we use and hopefully influence them for the better.

The first one I attended was the Contribute group. For myself, I would like to see better documentation as to what goes on with C3 and CPS. I learned some stuff that I had forgotten in regards to SOAP communication and I got out of the discussion some good ideas.

With the Dreamweaver team the desire for web standards first, IE second design in CSS was expressed and it went from there. Dreamweaver has some issues – it is caught in that ‘how do I make a table’ user environment and often forgets the ‘I have a totally dynamic site’ type user that wants the latest and greatest and just wants a really cool code/text editor.

The message came across loud and clear – please stop designing your app for the lowest common denominator. Help us web folks to improve our skills and continue to love Dreamweaver for making that transition into advanced web development. The nature of the profession changing.

…and it would nice if CPS and Dreamweaver could work together.

Speakers and presentations

After three days no one presenter stood out. There was good topics covered and some exciting things discussed but I think the real advantage to MAX is meeting the people behind the emails and blogs. Discussing your problems with a diverse group of colleagues often leads to problems solving themselves.

Worth a mention is Mike Hazard from the University of Rochester. He did a great presentation on implementing Contribute in an academic environment. The discussion within that group was always good and I left the presentation with some ideas of my own.

Technology – good or bad it was cool

The keynote really opened my eyes to the world beyond HTML/CSS and simple page creation. The capabilities of Blackstone alone are just amazing. They set up a poll on which you would vote for and people sent a SMS to a number and the server displayed the results. Just think about how that could be used? I have some ideas ;)

The common technology in all of it is Flash, which I must admit I have never been a huge fan. But this skeptic has slowly been accepting the role of Flash but the potential of the next version of Flash (Maelstrom) mixed with the built-in features of Blackstone and a dab of Flex. There is so much that could be done.

Flash on cell phones? The second days general session spoke to the power of the cell phone and the eye candy Flash can add. Macromedia has a mobile site, check it out. This is such a huge market outside North America.

Mix in Breeze (more Flash like stuff) – PowerPoint on steroids. I would love to do all my presentations in it or at least some. That product has grown so much in a short period of time. Should be interesting to see where this technology goes.

The reason I went was due to my participation in the development of Contribute 3. Contribute and Contribute Publishing Server mixed with a little Dreamweaver and wow. The Publishing Server end is a really interesting technology. Built on Macromedia’s JRUN and ColdFusion, it is an application that someone would have created anyway – I think. It does tie a lot together and offer a platform to enhance Contribute.

Bottom line

The conference, I think, left people with a much better feel as to how this could all fit together.

Macromedia’s up and coming technologies open up lots of possibilities but while I was sitting through a lot of that I was thinking – what about accessibility? I have no idea. Macromedia could help a lot by creating and accessible port or player for screen readers and maybe allow from some tabbing and better information in the document itself.

I don’t think the web needs to be ugly to be accessible but the eye candy needs to keep the accessibility requirements in mind. It is really exciting to see what is possible with a little elbow grease and creativity.