Let’s see what all the possible advantages might be of this feature:

• Authors of the book can easily promote it on their site, and the embedded content could include optional sales info or ratings info or whatever.
• People who have reviewed the book on Amazon’s site can display a snippet of their review on their website. Users who want to read the rest of the review would be taken to the Amazon site.
• Bloggers, like me, who want to write about a book could easily display a book cover (and maybe optional features like the search inside link in their blog entries.

So why hasn’t Amazon done this? Is there some legal reason that prevents it? Do they already have the feature but I just wasn’t able to track it down?

Why it was a good thing that we had virtually zero connectivity at the Conference

If there would’ve been wifi, if I’d be able to blog the even as it was happening, if I’d been able to stay on top of email, to check all the websites that presenters mentioned, then of course, I would probably have missed half the conference. I would have missed Michael Wesch‘s mesmerizing, sometimes heart-wrenching keynote, describing students in modern classrooms to be like prisoner’s in Plato’s Cave, questioning whether or not students are being prepared for the world they are growing up in by today’s schools (as in the students who spend far far more time using Facebook and MySpace than doing their coursework.) I would have missed Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg fantastic one-year-later presentation of their brilliant Many Eyes information visualization site. My favorite, which was both funny and scary, is the visualization showing which words were most commonly used in Alberto Gonzalez’s Senate hearings.

In fact, I would have missed so much of one of the best conferences I’ve attended in some time. Part of what made the Idea Conference such a success for me was the amazing diversity and consistent high caliber of the presenters. A lot of credit for this goes to Peter Merholz, who was the program chair and who very undemocratically hand-picked each of the speakers. Comparing the quality of these speakers to that of, for example, some of the IA Summits, well, there is simply no comparison. But let’s be clear, while this approach certainly has it’s place, a more democratic by-committee model such as that employed by the organizers of the IA Summit also certainly has its place. Otherwise, you’d basically have the same small group of A-listers doing the conference circuit, making it very hard for lesser known people to get a chance to present their ideas. Anyway, I digress. All in all, looking back I’m sort of glad there was no wi-fi (this was not by choice by the way, the organizers very much wanted to be able to do it, but apparently the people at Parsons/New School, where the event was held shut it down), and yet, and yet…

Why it was a bad thing that we had virtually zero connectivity at the Conference

There is simply something very ironic in having an event by and for people who live and breath connectivity, the web, the information ether, to have an event in the heart of Manhattan (granted, NYC is in fact a bit backwards when it comes to connectivity – e.g. you still can’t get reception in the subways, but that’s another matter) and not being able to get online. Oh, actually we were able to get online, but to do that you had to leave the conference and walk around on the street in search of a public hotspot – which you really didn’t want to since you didn’t want to miss the fantastic presentations. And speaking of missing the presentations, even though I said earlier that being able to blog about the presentation during the presentation might have meant missing half of it, well, I think that might only be half true. After all, why do we write things down? Why do students take notes in a class? To record, to remember, to process, and re-process the information through the multiple senses of seeing and hearing and writing it down and thinking about what you’ve written and reading it later. And when you’re doing that while also online, there is that whole added dimension being able to interlink your thoughts with what the presenters are discussing, that sense of immediacy, of getting your ideas and reactions out while they are fresh. Now, writing about the conference in retrospect, well, it just has a completely different feel. Weirdly, it’s bit like dreaming – you better write your dreams down as soon as you wake up, or they are sure to fade away…

Anyway, here is a sampling of the stuff that never got posted:

Outgoogling google

In the article “Looking for the next Google” in today’s New York Times, MIGUEL HELFT describes the efforts of numerous start-ups trying to take on the search Guggernaut.

“you earn your right to be in business every day, page view after page view, click after click,” said Barney Pell, a founder and the chief executive of Powerset, whose search service is not yet available.

When are we going to stop calling it Ajax?
I’m starting to lose count of all the meetings I’ve sat in, and articles I’ve read, where there is a constant reference to Ajax – we want to use a lot of ajax, this is going to be an ajaxy site – in some ways, this reminds me of the days of words like ‘database-driven’ and user-centric’ – what well-designed site is not user-centric? what commercial site (marketing one-offs notwithstanding) is not database-driven? I guess my point is that describing a site with terms like this is stating something that is a complete given, and I can’t wait for the same to become true with ‘Ajax’ – all we’re talking about is an element-level refresh on the page, mimicking desktop functionality.

Emailing as part of basic reading/writing skills

I recently received the following email from a real estate professional
Subject: “Re:”

——————————————————–

This e mail is for the named addressees only. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete it from your files. If you do not wish to receive commercial emails from me in the future and like to “Opt-Out” please click email address at end of this email and hit send or reply back to your sender with subject “remove me from your list.” All information is from sources deemed reliable but is subject to errors, omissions, change of price, prior sale or withdrawal without notice. No representation is made as to accuracy of any description. All measurements and square footage are approximate and all information should be confirmed by customer. All rights to content, photographs and graphics reserved to Broker.

3 attachments — Download all attachments

customerpacket1.pdf

customerpacket2.pdf 20K View as HTML Download

mediareport.pdf 779K View as HTML Download

[This raises another issue - how to represent email on a web page - I guess I am using the memo metaphor here...]

So basically this is an email with a blank subject heading and no content other than the automatic footer and the attachments. Because email has become such an integral part of how we interact with one another, it would seem as if there is a need for thinking about raising the importance of email to the same level as reading and writing in general. In other words, understanding the importance of a meaningful subject heading (particularly if you’re sending a message to someone in a business context) and understanding that sending someone a few megs worth of attachments may not be the best way to get on their good side.

With all these unfinished posts (and there are lots and lots more), it makes me wonder if there is a need for a tool that facilitates posting stuff that is either half-baked or facilitates finishing it. For example, stuff that is still in progress just have some kind of ‘DRAFT’ watermark under it, and then there could be an option to allow site visitors to make revisions and comments, so that you’re basically writing a post together, rather than one person writing and other’s commenting. Could have some potential, I guess. But I’ll leave that for another unfinished post :)

I guess it all started back when I decided that I really needed to support comments on my blog. And that was triggered in part by a friend of mine, wanting to comment on one of my posts, actually sent me an email to comment on it (as if to say, people are reading your stuff and you really need to, like, get your blog in order so we don’t have to send you emails to let you know what we think.) I’m not exactly sure how I ended up not having commenting in my blog previously, but I think it harked back to when I was implementing my web site, and I decided to completely build my own custom templates rather than go with the original blog templates. The advantag to that is much greater control (and that you end up learning a lot about building dynamic web sites.) But the disadvantage is that you’re kind of not leveraging all the effort and expertise that went into designing the original blog templates. Rather than using the xhtml and css of the original templates as my starting point, I instead took the opposite approach and designing a static version of each template and then went back and replaced my static dummy version of, say a post date, with the corresponding dynamic hook. I think I chose to take this approach because this is how I work when designing web sites for my job, in which (after doing some sketches and whiteboarding and wireframe and what-not), I tend to produce a static xhml version of the site, which then can be used for end user evaluation and an implementation reference. However, in those cases, I am usually designing something that has yet to be built, and I guess I failed to see that distinction when delving into implementing a blog. In that case, I am of course, not designing something new; instead, I am customizing something that already has been built, and should therefore have used what has already been built as a starting point.

So, back to wanting to add comments my blog. As it turned out, with the blog package I was using (yes, I ended up switching to a different blog package), because I had completely customized every template, I would now have to customize all the additional templates and modules and content-types needed to support commenting. It turned out to be a major headache. Part of the headache (actually a big part of it) was tied to how templates are integrated into the system. You have to do quite a few steps in order to actually see the effect of a customization (upload or copy and paste the new template code, save the template, rebuild the blog, or at least that template type, and then refresh your browser page.)
So, to make a long story a little shorter, I just got quite frustrated with the MT package (and this goes way beyond templates – the admin area just feels very dated, and the fact that you have to keep rebuilding the thing every time gets old in a hurry. I explored other packages, and fairly quickly found myself falling in love with WordPress. For starters, I love the 5-minute installation, and then the admin area is just so much more pleasant to work with than that of MT. And then there is the ease with which you can change the look of your blog. MT has something called StyleCatcher, which I tried but was never able to get to work, but from what I can tell, it doesn’t even begin to compare. And maybe most important of all, WP is built with PHP, which means that the dynamic hooks used in the templates are the programming language itself rather than a kind of blog API in the case of MT, which is built with Perl – a very powerful but IMO not at all easy-to-learn language.
So (note to self: need to stop starting every darn paragraph with ‘So’), that was the good news with switching to WP – the bad news was that, even after perusing many many of the ready-made WP themes out there, I just could not bring myself to use any of them – it felt a little like decorating my own house with someone else’s stuff. Despite all the issues I had faced customizing MT templates, I still ended up building custom WP templates. Though I did learn from my earlier mistakes. If you’re ever planning on designing your own blog, a few pointers from someone whose been through the trenches:

• Set up a local testing environment. If you’re a developer, this is a no-brainer, but a lot of people who are implementing their first blog are migrating from having only built static sites, where just viewing files locally in your browser will do the trick. Not so with a blog. The good news is that, with WP, this is pretty easy. If you’re new to setting up a local testing environment (i.e. installing an Apache server, the MySQL database, and PHP), consider getting a book that walks you through this process. One fantastic book is PHP for Dreamweaver 8, by David Powers. This is one of the best written computers books I’ve purchased, and it walks through the process of setting up a testing environment in great detail.
• Use an existing theme as a starting point. Again, this may seem obvious to some, but for me it was not. It’s much better to start with something that works and then make little changes to that, gradually adding your personal touch, than to try to build what you want from scratch.
• If you’re switching to a new blog package, you may need to create permanent redirects. While WP supports nice semantically meaningfuly URLs, not all blogs do, in which they will have their own idiosyncratic URLs., which means that all the permalinks from your old blog might become orphaned. In other words, even if you export your old blog and import it into the new blog (one of the things that did not go very smoothly between MT and WP), people and robots alike may have linked to or indexed the old permalinks. For that reason, you’ll want to add permanent redirects on the server, which will make the peramlink change transparent both to users and search engines. A good place to start to learn more about this is to just Google ‘permanent redirect.’
• Expect to learn xhtml, css, and php. For me, this was probably one of the more valuable aspects of making the move to WordPress. While I’ve been fairly fluent in xhtml and css for a while, it was great to also get comfortable writing php scripts. There really is no better way to learn a programming language than to have a set of specific problems to solve, for which you’ll have direct and personal benefit. Again, the David Power book mentioned above was, for me, a great resource in this area.

Well, I’m sure there were other tips I could add, but these are the main ones that come to mind. Most importanly, it’s great to be back from six months of (virtual) cryogenic suspension ;)

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