I was going through my bookmarks this morning; a long overdue reorganization and I rediscovered this site: Retrievr. As you may have guessed by the missing “e” at the end of a recognizable word - the site uses Flickr and an algorithm discovered at the University of Washington for “Fast Multiresolution Image Querying.” Think of it as a database of images searchable by scribbling colors on a pad in any configuration you wish. Its fun to play with, and I can see this being extremely useful for photo gallery and photo repository applications - finding an image from a repository to fit a specific design is a snap and the results are quite remarkable; able to match color, shape and position.
Posted by Mike on May 14, 2007 in General, Emerging Technologies | No Comments
We have a Google search appliance on campus that I deal with occasionally. I wrote a parser in PHP for the XML returned search results and a styling object, such that setup on various sites is a 5 minute process. I’ll talk more in depth about that application at a later time.
I was in the process of writing an AJAX version (using YUI) of the PHP scripts to overlay the current page with search results from the Google appliance, when it occurred to me that most of the searching I do does not occur while using a form on a website. I have fully transitioned to using only the search input of my browser, to the point where even when I’m on Google’s search page I still use the browser’s Google search. So I decided to scrap the AJAX stuff and research how to create your own search add-on.
Its fairly easy I found out. Adding a search engine is as easy as writing a small XML description script and in about an hour I had it all done.
Continue reading Your browser’s search box and Open Search…
Posted by Mike on April 18, 2007 in General, Emerging Technologies, Web Standards, Projects, Search | No Comments
More about Wordpress MU - first off, if you install podpress, you better be happy with it, because it sucks on to your install like a lamprey. I’ve been trying to remove the “Powered by podpress” image from some feeds in Bloglines for a while now with zero success. The image isn’t in the RSS feed, yet it continues to show up in the source.
Subscribe to http://webservices.buffalo.edu/blog/?feed=rss2 and you’ll see what I mean.
In our last episode, we were pointing blogs that exist across multiple virtual domains (but reside physically on the same machine) to a single WPMU install. But what happens when you want to name your blog, blog? The issue with a WPMU install that uses subdomains, you can run in to a bit of a problem. The way WP sees it, if you’re setting http://yourwpmuinstall.com as your WPMU site, then anything below that (like http://yourwpmuinstall.com/my-blog-post) is a permalink to a blog post. The gotcha is that http://yourwpmuinstall/blog is where we wanted our blog - but WP locks up that subdirectory for itself. If you try to use the tricks described previously to hijack the subdirectory and impose your formidable will upon it, you’ll be out of luck. What you end up with instead is your blog being accessible at http://yourwpmuinstall/blog/blog!
So how do you fix this? Glad you asked. As I would normally do to finalize the change, I went to Site Admin -> Blogs and chose Edit next to the blog of choice. But instead of changing all of the paths to the appropriate subdirectory, the first path entry should remain “/”.
For example, for this blog, my settings are:
URL: http://webservices.buffalo.edu
Path: /
Siteurl: http://webservices.buffalo.edu/blog/
Home: http://webservices.buffalo.edu/blog/
This should do the trick. I remember getting in the nuts and bolts of the PHP code as I was trying to figure this problem out, but I don’t think I changed anything permanently! Please don’t hesitate to drop me a line at djfrey*buffalo’edu (I think you can figure that out!) if you have any specific questions about the strange WPMU hijacking I’ve been describing.
Posted by Dan Frey on April 6, 2007 in Uncategorized | No Comments
Last week’s An Event Apart in Boston proved thoroughly enjoyable and educational. Hearing from some of the leaders in web design, CSS, and web standards development was stimulating and refreshing. Each of the 12 sessions provided substantial information for designer and developer alike. One of the highlights for me was Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Writing the User Interface.”
Zeldman began his presentation talking about three things we know about the web:
- Content drives traffic - the top 50 sites are all about content.
- Freshness of a site is more important than the looks of a site.
- Words are the main interface on most sites.
However, by a show of hands in the audience, it was quite evident that most web operations have little or no budget for web writing. According to Zeldman, this can be one of the easiest and cheapest components of a site to fix.
Zeldman addressed the importance of high quality writing on the web, reminding us that it’s simply not the same as writing for print and we need to make an effort to make our web contact meaningful, impactful, and as short as possible. Plus, it’s important to write audience appropriate copy and brand appropriate copy. Every word on a page is an opportunity for you to interact with your visitors and reinforce your brand. And while you’re thinking about all of that, remember:
- Web users scan pages for the information they need - they don’t read!
- You should use subheads to organize content.
- Incorporate short sentences and bullets.
- Write using an 8th grade vocabulary.
Another component to think about is the overall tone of your copy. Along with being audience appropriate, what message is your content sending? Is it friendly? Aggressive? Relaxed? Arrogant? Formal? You may need to take some time to review your copy objectively and rewrite and edit so your tone best reinforces for your brand statement.
To learn more about writing for the web, take a look at these articles from A List Apart:
Attack of the Zombie Copy
Your ABOUT Page is a Robot
Posted by admin on April 3, 2007 in Uncategorized | No Comments
I think it would be a good idea if I shared some of the things I’ve learned about Wordpress MU with the blogo-whatsits. For those of you unfamiliar, Wordpress MU is the working solution to maintaining multiple Wordpress blog installations. MU manages all of the installations under one administrative umbrella, and keeps all of the posts, users and settings in one database. How it handles the creation of new blogs (it creates a new set of base tables for each new blog), and how some of the settings for each blog are stored (as a serialized string in a database field) aren’t necessarily ideal, but it does do the job, and it is a new product, so some of these things can be forgiven, I suppose.
Continue reading More about Wordpress MU…
Posted by Dan Frey on February 2, 2007 in General, Emerging Technologies, Projects | 2 Comments
After much tweaking and experimentation, we’ve successfully moved this blog to Wordpress MU. We wanted to retain our current URL structure (domainname.com/blog), but in order to do that, some database changes and Linux configuration needed to be accomplished.
Posted by Dan Frey on January 5, 2007 in General, Emerging Technologies | No Comments
Been messing around with this Yahoo javascript library from the Yahoo developer site. In the past I haven’t been a big proponent of AJAX for many accessibility and usability reasons, but I guess its here to stay. I should add that the Yahoo library has some support for progressive enhancement, which alleviates some concern about accessibility and older browsers. So might as well join the club.
The intent is to use such AJAX frameworks in creating internal applications for our users, to create a more dynamic and a desktop feel to the CMS applications we have.
The Yahoo framework, although extremely young right now, has been fairly simple to grasp thus far, in comparison to more complex frameworks like Backbase.
Posted by Mike on June 15, 2006 in General, Emerging Technologies | No Comments
There has been a big movement lately with desktop applications leaving the desktop and being hosted on-line. The concept is nothing new; way back in the mid ’90s ASPs (Application Service Providers) were popping up all over the place, however they didn’t last long. Limits on bandwidth, security and scripting technologies handcuffed the movement. Well it appears as if these limitations have somewhat subsided recently. Google has been releasing hosted applications by the basket full in the past year and Microsoft hasn’t been far behind, especially with the new Windows Live product.
Lately there has been a movement toward modifying blog software and wikis into usable desktop replacements for “Word”, “Notes” or “Outlook”. Applications such as Writely (a web word processor), Backpack (personal and small business information manager) and Flickr (your photo album organizer) have been taking advantage of the “new” space. Due largely to a technology I totally don’t approve of but does have it uses, AJAX; which has enabled a user experience akin to that of desktop applications without having to be local to the user’s computer.
I recently stumbled across a new application just yesterday, Stikipad which is advertising itself as your own personal wiki. Have a look its quite interesting and free, for now I assume. Features include unlimited authors, markdown editing, task lists, rss, personal pages, history, search, discussions, custom templates, Google Adsense, domain mapping and much more.
Posted by Mike on February 27, 2006 in General, Emerging Technologies, User Centered Design | No Comments
Found this site (9rules) recently and probably spent way too much time getting lost among the design and programming blogs listed here. Its a community of bloggers arranged by blogging topics, have a look and if you have a blog maybe you’ll want to join.
Posted by Mike on February 16, 2006 in General | No Comments
I was recently interviewed by collegewebeditor.com, a site that provides “News, tips and, hopefully, some good ideas for people taking care of websites and online marketing in colleges and universities.”
I have always found this site to be a great resource with keeping up with the latest trends in Higher Education Web development.
Posted by Mark on January 14, 2006 in General | No Comments
