Tag: software

November 1, 2010

Recapping WordCamp Philly and Hacks/Hackers

This weekend I travelled to WordCamp Philly and then headed down to Washington D.C. for a post-ONA Hacks/Hackers meetup. Both were an absolute blast.

WordCamp Philly had 4 simultaneous tracks of talks throughout the day so while I couldn’t see everything I did catch a lot of interesting sessions.

Taking over the world with custom taxonomies

In the first session Sean Blanda talked about how to take over the world with custom taxonomies. Sean is a self-described non-coder and claims WordPress makes him look smarter than he actually is. He talked about Technically Philly, his local tech news startup, and how they use custom taxonomies to create a directory of terms similar to TechCrunch’s Crunchbase.

Using custom taxonomies (and lots of dedication to go back and tag more than 1000 earlier posts) Sean’s been able to create slick-looking landing pages for companies, people, and locations within Philadelphia. While custom taxonomies have been around since WordPress 2.3 recent updates have made things easier to manage. Sean created all of this with small pieces of code and the taxonomy term descriptions are all powered through a WYSIWYG text editor. It looks like a great way to create a directory without a significant code investment.

Making WordPress work at work

Next up Doug Stewart discussed how to make WordPress work at work. Doug has years of experience using WordPress in behind-the-firewall situations.

After running into many companies that rely upon GoLive, SharePoint, Microsoft Word, and homegrown CMSes Doug realized that, “most companies don’t know how bad they have it.” This means Doug advocates an “install first, ask questions later” approach to getting WordPress going at large organizations.

While WordPress can help lower the cost of tradition IT departments it is far from a purely technical problem. As Doug mentioned, if you move to WordPress it inherently replaces another system that a co-worker now has a stake in. This means that Doug recommends focusing on the concrete benefits of employing WordPress. Things like easy upgrades, multi-site installations, and a strong community of plugin developers can help persuade an IT department.

Hacks/Hackers

From Philly I headed down to Washington D.C. with Max Cutler and Andrew Nacin for the post-ONA Hacks/Hackers hackathon. Daylife was generous enough to sponsor the day and we were put up in NPR’s offices.

Max worked with Daniel Bachhuber, Lauren Rabaino, Mark Lavallee, and Greg Linch on creating a Crunchbase-style directory for news organizations. Pulling data from the Daylife API and other sources they created a basic directory for more than 17000 news organizations. Ideally this directory would be used as a base layer for other forms of data that could be overlayed to reveal relationships and information that would not otherwise be apparent.

Another group used WordPress and the Daylife API to create a plugin that would rock the world of local politics coverage. It creates a custom shortcode that pulls candidate information into a sidebar to display personal, funding, and news coverage information to provide greater context for election coverage.

Nacin and I worked on rebooting the links feature in WordPress. Leveraging APIs coming as part of WordPress 3.1 we aimed to create a bookmarklet that allowed for low friction link saving. On top of this the plugin would create an internal link wire of all the content saved by site users. Links could be saved as public or private and everything could easily be selected and send directly to the editor for easy link roundup posts or as notes for longer essays. The recent and previously untested APIs combined with our combined 4 hours of sleep foiled us this time but you’ll see the plugin in a directory near you soon enough.

October 16, 2010

Merlin Mann writes about “distraction-free software” and its problems:

[It is bad to be] leaving your starry-eyed customers with the nauseatingly misguided impression that their “distraction” originates from anyplace but their own busted-ass brain is really not “helping.” Not on any level. It is, literally, harmful.

October 11, 2010

Forked version of Notational Velocity

If you are a fan of Notational Velocity, a forked version was released today. It adds things like full screen mode and some other nifty views. I’ve used it for notes today and have to say that the full-screen edit mode is pretty slick.

September 8, 2010

With a Little Help From His Friends

Sean Parker, who helped found Napster and Facebook, is featured in a Vanity Fair article by David Kirkpatrick.

August 4, 2010

Apps That Do Not Sync via the Cloud

A useful-sounding idea from Shawn Blanc for what would be close to my ideal task manager:

And my next wish? A cloud-based service like Instapaper, but for to-do items. I want it to be available in apps like Tweetie, Reeder, and more, so when I click on “Do Later” it sends the link or item of note into a running to-do list that syncs with Things, of course.

June 27, 2010

WordPress as book publishing platform

An interesting project is underway that seeks to create a model for book publishing that can thrive on the web and across devices. More intriguing, though, is that the founders are taking WordPress as their starting point and developing the software through plugins. There’s even been a prototype book release.

May 10, 2010

Thinking about a data-driven college

In an effort to start tracking some of the ideas I have while reading I want to start making note of ideas and questions that come up here. This is the first of such posts and we’ll see what form they take in the future.

Tracking my book reading

Interesting article that examines some of the frustrations with current systems for tracking reading habits. Since I just finished writing an article for The Whitman Pioneer about open knowledge systems this got me thinking:

  • What if colleges started working together on building an open standard for tracking reading? I’m thinking of a system that would get me set up as a Freshman with a way to keep track of every article, journal essay, and book that I read while in school. Then, when I graduate I can either move the system to my server, or the college provides an export file to import into various other services. If I could go back four years and be presented with a choice between a school that had this system and one that didn’t I know which I would pick in a heartbeat.
  • Could we conceive of a service that would not only track reading but track conversations about books? What if I could record conversations with others about a book and upload them to a service, forever associating that conversation with that reading experience?
  • What good is it to track book titles and authors if I don’t also have a canonical, searchable copy of that book online?

The Data-Driven Life

Long feature piece from The New York Times about the various ways people are tracking data about their everyday lives. It turns out that seemingly mundane things can offer remarkable insight into how our minds and bodies work. Couple points about this:

  • All (unless I missed one) of the services mentioned are owned by single companies. Some, in the case of Nike+, by massive corporations. I think there’s a huge opportunity for someone to come up with an open source data tracking system that allows users to own their data. Follow up: what happens to all this wonderful, data-driven insight when these companies go out of business?
  • How can we tie this data-tracking to business interactions? What ways could I track data that would reveal the companies that most consistently affect my day in a positive way?
  • Academically, it’d be interesting to track attention during a semester-long course to see which subjects and discussions were most captivating.

February 22, 2010

News as Software

Lately there have been a couple ideas bouncing around in my mind about news. To commit them to memory I wanted to write them down here. What follows is a rough outline of how I would structure a news organization’s online presence. These are by no means polished ideas but are first passes at a conception of journalism’s future.

The driving point behind all of this is an idea that I’m calling News as Software. What this means in my head is that news organizations need to start adopting some of the approaches that have been so successful for software developers on the web.

Use not Consumption

News organizations need to begin promoting the use of their product instead of its consumption. The traditional print product fit very well as a unit of consumption. Readers could sit down and consume the information. After reading whatever percentage of articles interested them there was not much left to do with the news. At least in my house the old product simply becomes paper to start fires with in the winter.

News as software requires a fundamentally different mindset. Software provides a sense of utility to users. It does something for them. More importantly it does that function over and over. Granted, this would be difficult to do but the first step is to break down the idea that news arrives in an organized package.

Experimentation and Play

Closely connected to this idea of news as software that people use time and again is the ability for users and developers to experiment and play with content. For the technically inclined among us Twitter is far more useful because of its API than it ever would have been as a limited website.

The API of a web service is what transforms something ordinary in something magical. The fact that I can use any number of client applications, or even other web apps, to read and post to Twitter is a testament to the ingenuity behind it all. By providing a platform from which users and developers can customize an experience Twitter has given us a service that we can customize to our liking.

Contrast this with any major news site. The New York Times simply does not allow for its users to play with the news. Sure, they’ve made initial attempts at doing so with things like Times People and the Times Skimmer but ultimately the content is staying within the New York Times packaged site.

Help your users

Every successful web app and desktop program I can think of has a thriving online community of users who help on another. Generally this is everything from fixing bugs in the software to promoting some of their favorite tips and tricks. Why doesn’t this hold true for mainstream news organization sites?

The New York Times has a “Help” page. You find it by scrolling all the way to the bottom and finding the link in about 11 px type. Perhaps this works for finding help with subscription related information or other things but it fails at stimulating the type of community that’s present in many web apps.

If I were a user looking to restructure the manner in which I consumed information from any mainstream news organization where would I go to find out about how others do it? Where could I engage with other readers about ideas for using the news? If there is any place that allows for this kind of thing (no, not Twitter, I want it on the news organization’s site) then tell me but I highly doubt it.

What do we do?

The current design of mainstream news sites is what I see as the biggest stumbling block toward this conception of news as software. Take a look at the New York Times, Washington Post, or The Guardian websites. Every one of those sites presents content in an already organized format.

Loading nytimes.com for example brings up a static grid of content. Once a user finishes looking over that content there is no sign of when new content will become available. There are very few ways for the user to customize or play with the content as well.

Furthermore, there is no method of tracking what content readers have already seen. Thus, were you to visit nytimes.com 2 hours from now there would be no way to tell what you had already seen. Some of the same stories will be exactly where you left them, others will have simply shifted around the page. To inspire people to start using a news site we’ll have to completely reorient the design of sites.

Currently, everything is prepackaged. Perhaps this makes things easier but somehow the success of services like Twitter, Google News, and others tells me that people like to have control over what information they see, where they see it, and how detailed it gets. Without inspiring creativity there is little reason for users to become attached to a news site. They all offer the same thing: prepackaged content organized by an editor with little connection to the millions of users. That’s not software, it’s shovel-ware. That’s not what people enjoy using and it’s certainly not what they are going to pay for.

August 28, 2009

The little things in an interface

You know that you’re making good software when you obsess over a 1 pixel abnormality:

Table headers are one of those things we have wanted to ‘fix’ for a long time, but somehow never got around to earlier.  By default, table views in Cocoa apps show a little separator on the right-hand side of every column header, even in the rightmost one when theres a scrollbar under it.  It has always bugged me to no end that in this situation, that rightmost 1px gray line – which, by the way, is completely unneeded – is exactly one pixel off to the left compared to the scrollbar drawn below it.