Category: Computers & Technology - Page 75

The Guardian gets newspaper web design right

Most newspaper websites are cluttered but utilitarian at best. Many, like my local paper, have undergone elaborate and expensive redesigns in recent years but still suck ass, if for no other reason than that they can’t really get the interface right and so are interminably tweaking it, not to mention that they allow their advertisers to shit all over the page layout with intrusive Flash overlays that jump out unexpectedly and cover what you’re reading if you let your mouse hand drift across the wrong spot on the page.

I’ve noticed in general that the British media seems to have more design sense, in that they actually seem to care about making things usable — in other words, facilitating the dissemination of information — as opposed to first and foremost making a buck, no matter how crass the means.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a newspaper website, though, and said, “Wow, that’s really good design!” but that all changed today when I saw the new site for the Guardian.

Maybe it’s the fact that there’s no advertising whatsoever on the home page. At least that’s a start. The layout is clean and well-organized, and doesn’t feel crowded or overwhelming, even though there are four columns and approximately 85 gazillion links on the page. Something else that helps: color coded sections. There’s risk in using a lot of different colors in a design. The page could easily end up looking like My Little Pony barfed all over it. But the nine different thematic colors are represented solely by colored type in the navigation bar at the top (no colored rectangles or obnoxious 3-D tabs) and by thin horizontal bands identifying the beginning of each section’s home page real estate.

True, on my 1280×800 display, the home page scrolls to the height of seven screens. A bit much, but the aforementioned organization keeps things manageable.

Ultimately, the designers have somehow managed to find the optimal midpoint between bland, utilitarian black-and-white monotony and retina-scorching, brain melting sensory overload. And in the land of newspaper websites, the space between the two is surprisingly small.

It’s no wonder that they won Website of the Year in the British Press Awards. Kudos!

A blast from (my) past

Tonight I made some updates to my portfolio page, and it got me thinking back to all of the projects I’ve worked on over the years, going back to my first professional web design gig right out of college in 1996.

Wowee-zowee. I really can’t believe this is still up. It was one of the last websites I designed at that first job out of college. The site went up in the fall of 1998, just before I left California to move back to Minnesota (the first time). It’s kind of shocking to see that the site doesn’t seem to have changed one bit… even the poor-quality digital photos I took with a then-state-of-the-art Apple QuickTake 100, the first digital camera I had ever seen, at the opening day of the Los Angeles County Fair in 1998 are still there (and promoted on the home page as if they’re hot news).

I remember that day as if it were yesterday. First off, let’s get some perspective. There are just shy of 10 million people living in Los Angeles county. That’s almost twice as many people as in the entire state of Minnesota. I wouldn’t necessarily say that that means the LA County Fair is twice the size of the Minnesota State Fair, because the Minnesota State Fair is disproportionately huge. But the LA County Fair is friggin’ huge in its own right, especially for a county fair. I recall standing in line for 2 hours in sweltering late summer heat just to get through the ticket booth, and I was wearing long pants because I had come straight from work and hadn’t really anticipated this turning into an all-day affair. Once inside, I squeezed my way through the teeming throngs to the appropriate exhibition hall, only to discover that it, too, was friggin’ huge, and I had no idea which booth CDW was in. Eventually I did find the booth, but Lenny (wonderful, wonderful Lenny) was nowhere to be seen. So I took my pictures and left.

OK, I guess that’s kind of a lame story. But that’s what I was up to ten years ago.

But wait… that’s not the only decade-old site I built that’s still essentially intact. There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many more.

Quite a legacy I left behind in California, no?

Barack Obama: the open-source candidate?

Now we’re speaking close to my heart. Granted, I’m a freeloader in the open source world. I have yet to contribute a single line of code to an open source project. (OK, I guess that’s not entirely true: I did write a WordPress plugin. Sweet. I’m in the club! Sort of.) But I have wholly embraced open source software in my work. PHP FTW, baby! (Uh yeah… whatever.)

These days the only thing I’m a more enthusiastic and outspoken proponent of than open source software is Barack Obama. So I’m surprised it took me so long to research what he’s running his website on.

Linux PWS/1.3.28

*Whew* Glad to see it’s Linux. But what the heck is PWS? I was at a loss. Then I found this blog talking about the very same issue. And suddenly it made sense why I didn’t recognize the acronym. I never would have considered Microsoft’s Personal Web Server to be the web server of choice running on a Linux server. I am still scratching my head at it. The whole VM thing seems the only logical explanation, except that there’s no logic to explain it. At least it’s not so transparently ass-backwards as John McCain’s configuration:

Linux Microsoft-IIS/6.0

And the inexplicable:

Linux ECAcc (lhr)

Interestingly, though, a Google search for “ECAcc (lhr)” reveals a link to a Digg post entitled John McCain Owns VoteForTheMILF.com. Stay classy, San Diego.

Let’s be clear: I think the idea of running a web site under Windows in a virtual machine on a Linux box is the most incomprehensible, mind-bogglingly stupid arrangement you’d ever bother with. I’d have to guess that the sites were developed to run in a Windows environment, but when it came time to deal with practical server and network capacity issues, load balancing and whatnot, some sysadmin made the (probably prudent) decision to load balance on Linux boxes instead of Windows, but since the site was tied to some feeble Windows technology, they couldn’t just move it over to Linux wholesale.

But let’s take this a step further. Back in late spring I received an email from Barack Obama’s IT director soliciting applicants for web developer positions with the campaign. Even though the job was in Boston, I figured it would be insane not to apply, so I submitted my resume. (I never heard back, for what it’s worth.) And it’s from this that I happen to know that the campaign was specifically seeking PHP developers. Rock on.

With that in mind, the whole Windows-on-Linux-through-VM arrangement made even less sense. Why would they develop the site in PHP, run it on a Windows server (definitely not the optimal arrangement for a PHP-based app, though it certainly will work), and then VM that Windows environment on a Linux box, instead of just gearing the PHP app for a Linux server in the first place? And that’s when I remembered that just earlier in the day I had been looking at taxcut.barackobama.com. Of course! Separate third-level domains are all over Obama’s site. Let’s check the configuration on that domain. Now that’s much better:

Linux Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a AuthMySQL/4.3.9-2 PHP/5.2.0-8+etch10

And I think it explains a lot. Campaigns start off small. Obama had to register barackobama.com and put something up there ages ago, long before he was the Democratic nominee and the hugely successful fundraiser he became along the way. So that original site, www.barackobama.com, was probably developed on a Windows box in someone’s proverbial basement, probably when was running for the U.S. Senate or maybe even the Illinois Senate. But as the campaign has grown, its websites (plural) have grown as well, and in a decidedly open-source direction. There’s some good stuff in there. Debian (which could mean Ubuntu, too… I haven’t checked the signature on Ubuntu’s Apache package to see if it’s split from its Debian roots), PHP (and a reasonably up-to-date version at that), MySQL, etc.

It’s kind of fun to do this kind of research, as long as you don’t mind being distracted along the way, because there are plenty of weird sources of distraction.

Aside from the aforementioned MILF site (classy), and the somewhat interesting fact that searching on “PWS/1.3.28” brings back as its first result a reference to Obama’s hosting, I discovered that for some reason the page title on John McCain’s official store is “Independent Online Stores.” OK. No one looks at title bars. And even fewer web developers look at <title> tags. I know that from experience. But of course that’s just a transitional landing page, announcing that McCain wares are not actually sold by the campaign, but by independent, for-profit companies, and buying these items doesn’t translate into money going back into the campaign. Huh. I can’t quite wrap my brain around that, but I’m a lifelong, union-loving Democrat, so I guess I wasn’t meant to. The only thing that comes to mind is that maybe it has to be that way, legally, now that he’s accepted public campaign financing. Anyway, the first McCain store link I found, which as they state is apparently an independent operation not affiliated with the campaign, is, not surprisingly, running:

Windows Server 2008 Microsoft-IIS/7.0

I also found that the company that hosts some of Obama’s pages also hosts a site for the American Model Yachting Association. Really? Model yachting? That exists?

Introducing the Room 34 Music Player

OK, I didn’t create the music player myself. It’s the freely available, Flash-based XSPF Player. But it’s a pretty slick tool to create a custom music playlist on your own website.

So now I have a convenient link you can click on to open up my music player in its own little pop-up window. It’s preloaded with all 23 tracks from the five LP/EP releases I’ve put out this year. (Yes, five! I’ve been quite prolific. I’ll leave it to you to weigh the “quantity vs. quality” issue.) And, for future reference, there’s a link to it right under the “Room 34 CDs and MP3s” heading in the sidebar on every page.

Enjoy!

Vintage Google

I learned this morning from Daring Fireball that Google has temporarily restored their earliest available index from 2001, allowing you to see what was available back then for your searches.

Kind of cool. But a little depressing for me personally, to see that back then my site was the first result you’d get when searching for John Coltrane. Now it’s 7th, but I suppose I should be glad it’s still on the front page, given my lack of attention to SEO. (Of course, I think SEO is at least 75% snake oil anyway.)