I’ve reworked my sidebar a bit, using buttons I found on Steal These Buttons, via this MeFi post. Hopefully it’s not too much — I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll find out after this post goes up.
Tech
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
Navigation – left or right?
I breezed through a usability study comparing left- and right-justified site navigation this morning.
I had the standard left-justified navigation for a while, and at one point had a three column layout with sidebars on both sides of the page, but in one of my redesigns I decided to go with the current right-justified navigation, and plan on sticking with it.
My basic reasoning is that this layout emphasizes the content over the navigation. As English speakers read from left to right, the content area has dominance. It also (I think) makes it a little easier to track your position on a page when reading a long post. With left-justified navigation, when you reach the end of a line on a page and move your eyes back left, you need to account for whatever space is taken up by the navigation bar. Using a right-justified navigation scheme, you just let your eyes snap all the way to the left of the page, and no searching is necessary.
Now, these are my opinions only, and I’m not schooled in usability at all, so I could be completely off base with that, so take my reasoning with a grain of salt. It’s just my thinking on an admittedly not very important matter. ;)
(via WebWord)
Getting personal
An interesting article in the NYT today about the pros and cons of getting personal with weblogs, something I occasionally struggle with. My site tends to be somewhat dry much of the time, but while I occasionally toy with the idea, I’ve never been too sure if I want to “open up” more in such a public medium.
I’m not likely to make a dramatic shift in the tone of this weblog — I’m naturally fairly private and reserved, and not likely to go into any sort of no-holds-barred expose — but there are definitely times I consider broadening the scope of what I write about. Maybe I’ll head that direction at some point, maybe I won’t, I’m not too sure. It bears consideration, however.
Of course, since I just edited this post three times, and almost deleted it, things may stay just as they are. ;)
(via Paulo)
Almost perfect
My current workspace here at home has been a bit cramped for a while. I’ve got two computers under my desk (one Mac and one PC), and three 17\” monitors on my desk (two for the Mac, one for the PC). It’s a nice workspace, but when you factor in two keyboards and two trackballs, it leaves very little actual deskspace left over.
This weekend, I picked up a new trackball for my Mac (a Microsoft Office Keyboard that I got free from work), my trackball, and my printer all plugged into the USB hub, switchable between both of my computers. Far more manageable, and I’ve got a lot more desk space available (of course, that means I’ll just have that many more soda cans strewn across my desk, but that’s beside the point…).
The only oddball glitch is that, for some odd reason, the Mac will occasionally forget about all the devices after I switch over to the PC and then switch back to the Mac. I’m not sure why this is, and was afraid I was going to have to go back to two sets of keyboards and trackballs. Then I discovered that as long as I leave the old Mac keyboard plugged in (sitting vertically on the floor, leaning against the Mac’s case), then when the Mac doesn’t respond to the keyboard or trackball that are on the switch, all I have to do it tap a key on the old keyboard with my toe, and suddenly everything on the switch starts responding again. It’s a little odd — and not quite a perfect solution, but hey, it works.
This babble brought to you courtesy of the fact that as I’ve been posting rather sporadically for the past week, I need some filler posts on the main page so that my site doesn’t look too tweaky. ;)
Speeding things up
If all has gone well, I should have just sped up my site when processing new comments or trackback pings, thanks to Sean Willson’s mt rebuild type modification.
Technical details follow (Kirsten, you’ll want to look at this one…)
(via Phil)
By default, MT rebuilds all index templates whenever an entry is created or edited, or when a comment is added. This is done to keep everything as up to date as possible, and is as it should be.
However, as a site grows, and as more bells and whistles are added to it, the time it takes to rebuild all those templates keeps growing. The usual set of index templates includes the main index page, the RSS feed, the main archives index page, the CSS stylesheet, plus whatever archive pages may be set up — all this has to be rebuilt, along with the page for an individual entry, whenever anything changes on a site.
I’d already done what I could to speed up my rebuild by setting my stylesheets to only rebuild when I specifically tell them to (as they normally don’t change), but I’d also added a few more index templates to the mix (the excerpts for my main table of contents page and a secondary RSS feed). All of this was what has caused my server to run so godawfully slow whenever comments or trackback pings are received.
Sean’s modification changes the way MT’s rebuild system works, though. While by default, MT only allows you to set whether a particular template is an index template (and therefore needs to be rebuilt regularly) or not, with this modification in place, there is much finer control over which templates are rebuilt under what circumstances.
So now, my table of contents excerpts, master archive list, and RSS feeds will only rebuild when I add or edit an entry. The main index file will rebuild whenever entries are added or edited, or when new comments are received. Additionally, individual entry pages should rebuild when trackback pings are received automatically, instead of my having to rebuild them manually (which is what I’ve been doing).
Kirsten — the reason I wanted you to peek in on this one is that as this is a modification to the MT system itself, and not just my weblog, you may need to go into your templates and set the rebuild options for each one. Everything may work normally if you don’t, but I’m not entirely sure how it will work if those fields haven’t been set, and you try to add an entry. The changes should be fairly obvious (you’ll need to go into the edit screen for each template, and choose the right option from the new drop-down menu), but if you need any help, feel free to e-mail me or IM me if it’s late enough. Hopefully this doesn’t leave you grumbling at me! ;)
Two Dave Winer grumbles
I don’t have as many issues with Dave Winer as many other people seem to, but he does occasionally come up with something that I’m tempted to comment on. Today, I gave into the temptation…
Today, Dave is looking back at announcing RSS:
“RSS is an XML-based format that represents what we in the Frontier community call a ‘weblog’….” The funny thing is that it wasn’t grandiose. At that time all weblogs were done in Frontier.
Not really. Frontier may well have been the first commercially available software built for creating and updating weblogs, but I was keeping my weblog up in 1999 (and even prior to that, I think I started using my site to keep my family updated on my life sometime in ’98), using the ‘old fashioned’ method of manually updating my website. I just didn’t know it was a weblog back then.
Unfortunately, at some point during my many site redesigns/updates, I was a fool and trashed all the old static HTML pages of my site from before I started using software to automate my site updates, but I can at least point to my first post using software to automate the process, and the post where I realized I was a ‘blogger’.
So Frontier may have been the first software for weblogs, but weblogs themselves were around pre-99. We just didn’t necessarily know that they were “weblogs”! ;)
Secondly, something I’ve whined about in the past: Dave’s RSS feed drives me up the wall.
Every other RSS feed I subscribe to links each post to its corresponding post on the source website, so when I find something interesting in my newsreader and click on it, I’m taken to the website. Dave’s feed, unfortunately, doesn’t. It seems to have one of three possibilities:
- The newsfeed post will link back to the post on Dave’s website. The preferred behaviour, but unfortunately rare.
- The newsfeed post will link to whatever the first link in Dave’s post is. For instance, if Dave is commenting on a post on someone else’s site, when I open his post in my newsreader to follow up on it, I’m taken to the link that he’s commenting on, rather than his comments. Incredibly annoying.
- The newsfeed post won’t link to anything at all. This seems to be the least common of the occurrences, but common enough that I run into it from time to time.
Seems to me that since Dave is such an RSS evangelist, and one of the co-creators of the format, he could at least create an RSS feed that doesn’t make his readers want to thwack him upside the head every time they try to follow up on something he says!
But maybe that’s just me.
My Netflix queue
After severely decimating my movie collection, I got to talking with one of the guys at work, and he gave Netflix a glowing recommendation.
It looks like a handy little service. You select what moves you’d like to rent, and then subscribe for a \$20/month fee. As movies become available, Netflix sends them to you. You watch them, then send them back. No per-day charges, no late fees — just send them back whenever you’re done. You’re allowed to have three out at a time, and when you send any back, more from your list get sent to you.
So, I figured what the heck, and signed up. ~~If anyone’s really morbidly curious, I’ll keep track of what’s in my queue here.~~ Feel free to suggest some, too!
Update: Trying to keep track of my rental queue was rapidly becoming fairly obnoxious to try to deal with as I kept adding stuff, so I’ve discontinued that. I’ve also moved my mini-reviews to posts of their own, rather than perpetually adding comments to this post. They’ll show up on the main page, or you can always check the MovieReviews category listing to catch up.
iTunes Man
(by Scott Taylor, with apologies to Billy Joel, sung to the tune of ‘Piano Man’)
It’s nine o’ clock at the iTunes store,
A phenomenal crowd’s logging on,
There’s an old man on AOL
Finding music from ages bygone.
He says, “Steve can you play me a memory?
“I’m not really sure how it goes,
“But I typed in a track and got album names back!
“And I’m not even wearing my clothes!”
Oh la da da diddy da da, la da diddy da da da.
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.
Now Claude at Vivendi’s a friend of mine
And his business is selling CDs.
And knows the solution for store distribution,
But he’s worried about MP3s.
He says “Steve I believe this is killing us!
“All these pirates don’t pay us a dime.
“Well I’m sure that you could be a billionaire,
“If you could sell music online.”
Oh la da da diddy da da, la da diddy da da da.
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.
Now Paul is an iPod enthusiast
Who listens to Jazz with his wife
And he’s chatting with Maxine, who’s still in the rap scene
And probably will be for life.
And the waitress is downloading Dixie Chicks
As the dial-up man slowly gets Stones
Yes they’re sharing the bandwidth from Akamai
But it’s better than P2P clones.
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.
Its a pretty good crowd for just Macintosh
And the PC guys give me a smile
Cause they know that iTunes will be Windows-bound soon
If they just can hold out for a while.
And the AAC sounds like originals
And rights management isn’t a pain,
And they sit at the screens of their iTunes machines
And say “Man, this is worse than cocaine!”
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.
(found on /.)
'Recent Tunes' update
Utilizing the iTunes Music Store linking hint I found earlier, I’ve updated the ‘Recent Tunes’ section of my sidebar. Before each artist, track, and album listing you’ll now see icons for Amazon and the iTunes Music Store — clicking on those will perform a search on the respective service for whichever line you clicked on. Nifty!
Some of the Amazon links are being a bit tweaky, and I’m not sure why, though. Sometimes they work fine, other times they get passed through with ‘"’ on either end of the search term, which confuses Amazon. I don’t know where that’s coming from, either — I can’t find that entity in any of the code on my side of things.
All the iTunes links work fine, however. The only caveat there is that they’re still building their selection, so the majority of my music probably isn’t listed yet. All good things in time, however.
Linking to the iTunes Music Store
Excellent tip that I’m saving here for future use: how to create a website link that performs a search on the iTunes Music Store.
Link format (as a single line, broken here for clarity): itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?
Immediately following the ending ? are any of four search terms, or a global search term:
songTerm=(song title)artistTerm=(artist name)albumTerm=(album title)composerTerm=(composer name)term=(global, search all fields)
Use & between query items if you are using more than one of the first four (non-global) querys, and replace any whitespace with %20.
Example: building a link to search for U2:
itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2
Example: building a link to search for U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’:
itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/ advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2&albumTerm=the%20joshua%20tree