Ten Tonne Baby!

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Archive for December, 2007

• Personal RSS Feeds

  As far as I can see, the majority of RSS feeds exposed on most sites provide access to very generic, summary information. I’m quite surprised that RSS hasn’t really been embraced for the kinds of thing for which it would be most suited – i.e. bringing you highly targeted, highly relevant information based on some prior knowledge of who you are.

  I would love to be able to give a list of my favourite bands, and subscribe to a feed of gigs they are planning in my area; or give a list of my preferred cinemas, and find out whenever a new film is showing at any of them.

  Once you are providing more personal feeds, then authentication becomes an issue. There is fairly widespread support in aggregators for both SSL and Basic Authentication, but this can be overkill for certain situations.

  The data we are exposing is not particularly sensitive, and it would be a real pain for a user who has authenticated with the main site to be challenged when they subscribe to a feed. Instead, the approach we’ve taken in…

  • When a private feed is available on a page, the meta tag in the head includes a token on the querystring for the feed URL that is generated based on the currently authenticated user
  • When serving up a private feed for a particular user, we expect the token on the querystring, and bounce the request if either the token is missing, or is incorrect

  This means…

  • An authenticated user can subscribe directly to a feed without an additional challenge
  • If you know the URL to your own feed, you can’t get access to others simply by changing the feed URL
  • The mechanism used for feed authentication doesn’t expose anything related to authentication on the main site

  We’re exposed to the feed URL and token being sniffed on the wire, but unless the content is particularly sensitive this seems like a suitable, practical approach to ensuring some degree of privacy without introducing complexity and barriers to subscription.

  Posted:

  December 14, 2007 @ 9:14

  Categories:

  Personal

  Tags:

  authentication, privacy, rss

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• Aural Media Type

  Having added a handheld, and print stylesheet to this site recently, I was thinking a little about the Aural media type. So CSS is all about presentation of content. The idea here was to be able to control how content is presented when read – so being able to specify that H1 elements are read in a booming, male, American voice etc.

  Although this is very appealing and a very cool idea, I just don’t think it makes sense. When looking at a page on screen, there are lots of visual cues that help you make sense of the content. This means that we can apply different presentation and design without leaving you confused about what you’re looking at.

  When content is read, one of the main clues you have to differentiate and make sense of content is how the content is read. This means it makes sense for different content to stick to the same presentation, or conventions, so that you can learn what those conventions are, and what they mean. If everyone has control over audio presentation of their content, there is no pattern to learn, and it must be much harder to switch from document to document while listening.

  Not that this really matters yet, but it may have more impact as there are more embedded devices with connectivity – so being able to listen to blog posts in your car etc.

  Posted:

  December 13, 2007 @ 9:24

  Categories:

  Personal

  Tags:

  aural, css, stylesheets

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• Buy a Man a Fish

  I had a busy day today, so I bought a man a fish. Just kidding. I had one of those days where lots of people need lots of things and suddenly the day is over.

  The lesson for today:

  Whenever I need to provide data to someone, I should pause, breathe, consider, then build a report rather than running an ad-hoc query. The next time they need it, I’ll be laughing. Really. And looking smug.

  Posted:

  December 12, 2007 @ 20:27

  Categories:

  Personal

  Tags:

  life, observations, stress

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• The Dark Side of Agile Planning

  I spoke a little about all of the good things you get from adopting an agile approach to planning development of a product, so to keep the universe in balance I should point out some of the evil lurking around the corner.

  I think the success of this approach ultimately is totally dependent on having the right people involved. Try this with the wrong team, and there would be a big mess on your hands. The headline is that agile planning requires a mature body of thought behind the design, and proper consideration of each change that is proposed. You should be refining and enhancing the design, with clear purpose and structured thinking behind each decision. If you’re in a situation where you’re just chucking new features at a product that would be cool then it’s all gone bad.

  The very few times that we’ve rushed to work on a change without this process, it’s gone wrong.

  I think it’s a very healthy thing to have someone on the team who is very creative, and always coming up with new ideas and suggestions. However that needs to be balanced by someone who is very focused on the interaction design of the product as a whole, and is able to push back and say no if necessary.

  The benefits are really significant. I continue to be surprised by how much you learn as you go during development, and it would be criminal to waste all of the new information and thinking.

  An agile approach should mean a continuous, rigorous design process, rather than design upfront, then implementation. If it means that you bypass the design process and are using it as an excuse to jump straight to code, then you’re an evil monkey. Evil, evil monkey.

  Posted:

  December 12, 2007 @ 9:21

  Categories:

  Personal

  Tags:

  agile, evil, methodologies, monkey, planning

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• Windows Live Writer and Tagging Support for Wordpress

  I’ve recently upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress which now includes support for tagging posts as part of the core product. It was a little painful to go and tag up the entire backlog of previous posts, but it’s all done now, and it’s very cool to be able to get a feel for what I generally write about via the cloud.

  I’ve become accustomed to publishing content using Windows Live Writer and had totally missed how to tag posts, so that the tagging info comes through to Wordpress. In Live Writer there is an advanced properties bar that can be expanded at the bottom of the content area, and this includes a section for keywords. Anything entered here (comma-seperated) will come through to Wordpress as tags against the post.

  I’m happy again.

  Posted:

  December 11, 2007 @ 19:37

  Categories:

  Personal

  Tags:

  blogging, live writer, tags, wordpress

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• EmbeddedStream Mobile Version

  

  After learning that I have at least one occasional mobile using accessing the site (yes Jimmy, that’s you!) I’ve put in place a much more appropriate stylesheet, linked in with the handheld media type. I’ve been testing this against Opera – pressing Shift-F11 will switch Opera to handheld mode and will emulate it’s rendering behaviour when running on a mobile device. I think overall it works pretty well. Some of the features include…

  • Only 2 images in the design, and these are mini, mini images (3K each)
  • Single column fluid layout
  • More appropriate text sizing and margins
  • Better sizing of form controls

  I don’t really know enough about how widely the handheld media type has been adopted by mobile browsers, but I guess at least Opera crops up all over the place and it will render really nicely. Any feedback from my one mobile user would be appreciated

  While I was in the mood I’ve also added a print stylesheet, so think I should now be covered all round. I might have a little rant about Aural media type shortly, but will save that treat for another day.

  Posted:

  December 11, 2007 @ 9:06

  Categories:

  Personal

  Tags:

  browser, Design, handheld, mobile, my sites, opera, rendering

  Comments:

  2 comments so far

• Shiny New Site

  Well, shiny refined site. There are a number of things that have been bugging me about the embeddedstream site for a while, but I haven’t really had an opportunity to address them. Well, now I have.

  Some of the issues I had were…

  • I didn’t feel like the main content pages were particularly legible or easy to read
  • There was a lot of guff and noise around that wasn’t necessary
  • The homepage wasn’t very useful
  • There are lots of posts (about 160) that are not very discoverable

  Based on these gripes, I’ve reworked the site. The changes include…

  • Homepage now consists of recent posts with full content
  • Style changes to make text more readable
  • Simplified the design and removed any unnecessary noise (both in content and design)
  • Added tagging support, and tagged all posts to make content discoverable

  The main thing really is tagging, which now part of the core Wordpress product (from version 2.3 I think). I was always a little skeptical based on fads and fashion, but if you have a large amount of content it’s a really powerful way to find things you’re looking for.

  Have a look around and let me know how well the new shoes fit. Also if anyone knows anything about tagging support within Windows Live Writer, or the MetaWeblog API then let me know. At the moment I’m writing content in Live Writer, then updating tags in Wordpress.

  Posted:

  December 10, 2007 @ 9:12

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  my sites, redesign, wordpress

  Comments:

  5 comments so far

• The Last Word on Headings

  I promise. Those of you who have had their fill should leave now.

  So the weird and fascinating thing about this is just how murky things are when you look for correct / best-practice information on this topic. The reason seems to be that the various HTML specifications that have been released are unclear, ambiguous and contradict each other. It seems that everyone has a slightly different understanding or interpretation.

  There isn’t much detailed reading material on the subject, but the best I came across can be found here.

  There first interpretation is that the heading level indicates the level of importance, but nothing else. There is no implied document ‘tree’ or nested structure. Based on this approach it would be perfectly acceptable to have an H1 midway through the document.

  The other interpretation is that headings imply a hierarchical document structure or tree. Therefore although they are technically siblings, and H2 following an H1 indicates a subsection of content within the main heading.

  The latter is much cleaner and allows you to focus on providing a clear, organised, well-structured document. It is closest to the natural way you would author other types of document. Personally I find this a much better approach. There are some practical complications as I’ve mentioned recently – you should really have a descriptive H1 as the first thing you encounter in the page, but having worked around these issues the end result is quite pleasing.

  In addition this interpretation matches with the XHTML 2 proposed changes that are under debate at the moment. In this model, the hierarchy is made explicit, with nested section elements, and a single h element is indicate a heading at any level. Personally I think have a big nested structure will overcomplicate matters, make it very easy for minor typos to build a drastically incorrect DOM structure, and generally open the doors for user agent bugs. I think bloated, deeply nested documents move too far away from how simple and easy to adopt HTML is, which is the reason for widespread publishing.

  Posted:

  December 7, 2007 @ 9:04

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  accessibility, headings, markup, xhtml

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• The Trouble With H1s

  OK, so I’ve posted the background to the problem I’m pondering. This issue has come back after reading an SEO report of the site we’re working on. One of the recommendations was to use a unique, relevant level one heading for each page. Fair point – we’d adopted quite a common model of using the service brand name as the root heading for each document.

  So I have to admit, if you were authoring 30 different documents, the first thing you would find in each would be a relevant title / main heading for the doc. In a similar way, if you’re consuming an XHTML document, it would be great if the very first piece of content was a very relevant level 1 heading.

  This helps a couple of issues – firstly, search engines can give greater weight to what the page is actually all about. If the true page name / purpose is buried halfway through the doc as a level 2 heading among several others, there is no way to ascertain that it’s actually much more important (than Site Navigation, for example). The second is accessibility – rather than listening to the same chunk of guff at the beginning of every page, the very first thing a screenreader user will hear is a very descriptive heading, giving context to the content on the page. All good.

  To have a good document structure, with sections, and subsections, it is necessary to have the root heading at the start of the document. It makes no sense to have an H2 before an H1 in the doc. Think about a tree structure as how the document is organised.

  You end up with a great ‘un-styled’ document this way. The problem is when your visual design includes the page heading, and requires it to be mid-way through the document content. What can you do? You already have an H1 at the start of the doc, which means repeating yourself. Naturally you wouldn’t need the additional heading as you’ve already set the context.

  This mostly comes about as it’s very unusual for it to be ok for the H1 at the very start of the document to be the first thing visually displayed on a page. Therefore, you put it in to give good document structure, but style it so it isn’t visible.

  I’m not particularly happy with the best solution I’ve come up with, but it’s better than not using the H1 properly – if the design requires the title to visually appear midway down, we have to include it (again) in the document content. However it just seems wrong to have 2 headings on a page with the same text, therefore I’m using a paragraph.

  This gives an overall structure like so…

  • Lister’s All-time Favourite Movies
  • Brand Information
  • Site Navigation
  • Main Content
  • Specific page content (including a P re-iterating the page title, if the design requires it)
  • Page Footer

  I quite like having the heading ‘Main Content’ in the document structure, as it means you have a familiar, consistent place to go to for the page specific content. We can then provide a skip-to link directly under the H1.

  If you can think of a better solution to this, please let me know (soon!). I’m currently changing every page in the site, and it’s a bitch.

  Posted:

  December 6, 2007 @ 9:07

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  accessibility, headings, markup, xhtml

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• Good Document Structure Via Headings

  When you go about writing a document, you quite naturally break it into sections and subsections, with a heading identifying each. You do this without thinking because it makes it much easier to take in the content, organise it, find specific pieces of information etc. Whenever you’re working on a webpage, adopting the same technique and thought process results in a well-structured, clear, accessible document.

  As a quite aside on accessibility, this aids in a couple of ways that I know about directly (probably others I’m not aware of). I spent some time using Jaws a while back, and there were two main techniques I ended up using to try and navigate a document. One was the headings dialog – this brings up a list of the headings on the page, and reads each. You can then click to go directly to one of them. The other technique was hitting the ‘H’ key to skip between headings on a page. In a well structured document this made it extremely easy to skip over sections that weren’t of interest.

  It’s a good idea to define each new section of your page with a heading, even if visually you don’t want to display it. Often when content is rendered, there are many visual cues that give you a good idea of what something is without an explicit heading. If you identify the headings added to aid document structure with a class name, you can style these to be hidden when the visual design is applied. Note that styling with display: none will mean that headings are also hidden to screenreaders. Instead, use absolute positioning to position the elements to the side of the visible page. These will still be treated as valid content to readers, but will effectively be hidden to everyone with CSS applied.

  If you fail to identify a new section with a heading, it’s content will appear to sit in the section defined by the previous heading – think about a word document. If you have a section defined by a heading, and you start a new paragraph that isn’t related, it still appears to be within the same section.

  To get a feel for how good a job you’ve done, briefly disable CSS (Ctrl-shift S in Firefox web developer toolbar). If the document makes sense without CSS applied and is simple to take in, chances are you’ve built a well-structured, accessible document.

  Posted:

  December 6, 2007 @ 8:49

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  accessibility, headings, markup, xhtml

  Comments:

  No comments so far