Bread and Roses Blog

Some new changes at Facebook

// July 30th, 2010 // No Comments » // Facebook

Facebook seems to be rolling out new services and design tweaks all the time, but several new developments caught our eye. One new service that some selected users are seeing is Questions, which evidently lets users ask questions so that there network of friends can collaboratively answer. Facebook claims that this new feature reflects the fact that many users use their prfoiles to ask questions. Which begs the question: if people are already doing this on their own, why do they need Facebook to create another service built around this informal way people do research? The most obvious answer is that Facebook hopes to use the information from Questions to engage in more data mining that can be monetized. Which will probably result in further Facebook privacy abuses and more targeted ads.

So, when you ask your friends “What car should I buy?”, you’ll get a targeted ad from whichever advertiser has bought into that Questions question.

We did some more digging and found that Facebook just launched another targeted ad service, this one connects you and your friends to product suggestions from Amazon.com.

We like that Facebook has just put together a page for news media organizations that have presences on Facebook.

By the way, one of the best sources for information about Facebook for developers and regular users is Inside Facebook.

Lastly, we want to share Joab Jackson’s article “Could Facebook Be the Next AOL?” which reports on encouraging developments around open source alternatives to Facebook.

- Chuck

Google’s Touch of Evil

// July 30th, 2010 // No Comments » // Internet Issues

Google has an old motto which is supposed to reflect the company’s take on ethics: “Do No Evil.” The company that runs the world’s most popular search engine and services that millions enjoy, appears to be taking some steps that will anger many of its users and fans. Google’s recent directions show that the company is more interested in growth at any cost, rather than being a good corporate citizen.

On the scarier side of their new directions, Wired magazine reports that Google is partnering with the CIA to back a company developing software that “will predict the future,” a kind of Orwellian monster database meets Minority Report psycho-predictive software. Given that Google already has terabytes of data on people’s search histories and even more information on websites courtesy of Google Analytics, Google’s partnership with the CIA will not got down well with the online masses.

Google growth at any cost mindset also appears to spill over into just about every niche of online services. Google is rolling out more local information services for Google Maps and Android, but according to TechCrunch, they are using reviews from Yelp.com in their new service. Copyright issues aside, it’s one thing to create a competing service, but to use content from a rival? This is just another sign that Google values growth above cute sayings like “do no evil.”

- Chuck

New B&R Website Coming

// July 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Just a short note to let people know that the long-overdue 2010 version of the Bread & Roses website is coming into form.

We should have a new website up and running within a week of this post.

As 2010 is almost over, we’ll have to get started soon on the 2011 version, which we plan to add all the bells and whistles to.

-William

The Necessity of Windows XP + IE (With some Open Software add-ons)

// March 10th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I never thought I’d be happy to finally have XP+IE running in the computer room.
But here I am.

I went down to the basement and dug up a really old computer with a really fat-boy tube screen. It has a whopping 350 mb Hard drive with 700Mhz Pentium III processor.

I previously installed Puppy Linux on this guy, since I was so worried about Memory use. But…Let’s just say my wife isn’t a Techie and when I saw her crying because she couldn’t use it, well, my heart went out to her and I immediately installed XP pro. She’ll have Ubuntu on the laptop, but in the meantime we need something we can both use.

She needed a computer while she waits for a new laptop.
And I needed to be able to troubleshoot IE.

So here we are. I must have installed or formatted about 10 times in the past two weeks.

I do like Mozilla’s Seamonkey, which uses the same database for Mail and Browser.

I also set up Sunbird (it was on the same CD).

Although it’s no longer supported, I downloaded Multiple IE’s which allows me to see IE.4 and 5, which is a great tool for working through Browser compatibility problems.

Adjusting Column Height Using CSS

// February 20th, 2010 // No Comments » // CSS, Design

by Chuck

If CSS was supposed to be a big improvement over the early years of HTML-based websites, why is it still so challenging to design websites using CSS? Some of us who have been making websites since the early days of the web are often left wondering why CSS doesn’t easily do some layout tasks. CSS is supposed to separate the layout and style of the pages from the content of each page and for the most part CSS is a welcome standard. But CSS does a poor job of handling some obvious layout tasks, such as making the height of columns in a multi-column layout match. I know I’m not the only one who has been trying to figure this out.

This blog will be featuring tip and techniques that address annoyances like the CSS column height problem. Today, we’ll share a link to a tutorial at TutWow about this problem: CSS 100% Height

Random WordPress Notes

// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blogging, Word Press

As many of my friends know, I’m very enthusiastic about the WordPress blogging platform. I’ve been using WordPress for around 7 years to run this blog. Lately, I’ve started training friends and my own clients on WordPress. It’s really the easiest and most versatile content management systems out there. I have many years experience with content management systems, but I prefer WordPress. Using it more often for business clients and personal projects.

At some point in the next few weeks, I will be blogging more about WordPress and other tech at the new Bread and Roses tech blog. But I’ll share a few items about my WordPress projects before things fire up over there. By the way, we need a catchy name for the blog.

Today we launched a new site for the Blue Nile Cafe, a popular Ethiopian restaurant here in Kansas City, Missouri. The old design was a simple one based on CSS and static HTML files. The new one is built on WordPress and uses a theme similar to the one used for this blog. I wanted to start using a content management system like WordPress for more client sites, mainly to make maintenance easier for me and so that the clients can make changes and add content. I also wanted to use a pre-built system that is friendly to most browsers–debugging browser compatibility issues is the thing I hate most about web design. Also wanted to use WordPress because it comes with lots of good plug-ins. Currently, the new site is using “My Page Order”, a versatile gallery plug-in, and a popular SEO plug-in.

Here are a few WordPress tech notes from the past few days:

• If you are setting up a draft WordPress site in a subdirectory of a current site, there is an important step you have to do before you move files around and make the site live. I didn’t do this right with my blog and it took several hours of hair-pulling to fix things. Before you move files, go to Settings > General and change WordPress address (URL) and Blog address (URL) to the new URL. DO NOT VIEW THE SITE! Go to the site via SSH or SFTP and move the files around. Things should work after the files are moved.
• I like the URLs for my websites to be readable, so configuring Permalinks was something I finally figured out how to do correctly. I want the URL for each page and post to include the words in the title of the page or post. You do this by going to Settings > Permalinks and typing /%postname%/ into the custom structure. Create an .htaccess file in the website root if it doesn’t exist and make it writable (777 should work). Click the blue Save Changes button and WordPress will write some code to the .htaccess file. Change the permissions back for that file to the previous settings. The new URLs for your blog / website should work.
• If you change the URL structure of your blog or website, remember that you may have to change previous redirects in .htaccess and you’ll have to add new ones.
• If you set up shorter URL names (or permalinks) for your blog, be aware that the new structure may conflict with existing directories. This blog used to be the only thing on this site and happily sat in a subdirectory called “blog.” I wanted to retain this address for the blog when I set up this website to be a homepage for myself with the blog off the main page. For days I couldn’t figure out why the blog wasn’t showing up. I thought I had to tweak the .htaccess file, which was redirecting visitors to the old subdirectory. This afternoon I finally figured out the problem. WordPress creates permalinks using the custom structure I mentioned earlier in a way that the URL looks like a subdirectory. The blog URL wasn’t working because there was still the “blog” subdirectory. Once I removed that subdirectory, the new URL works.

- Chuck

Facebook’s October 2009 Changes

// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Facebook, Social Media

This criticism of Facebook’s October 2009 changes was left in a draft status for several months, but we share it here to bring up our criticisms of Facebook design changes.

Last Friday Facebook rolled out significant changes to the functionality of their popular website. This is the biggest overhaul they’ve made to their site since earlier in 2009. It’s not surprising that the latest round of changes have pissed off many Facebook users. It’s not easy to please over 300 million users, but this round of changes could have been implemented better and pleased most of their users if Facebook had spent more time listening to users and web designers instead of the idiots in their marketing department. If you are doing something right–you run one of the most popular sites around–then it stands to reason that you’d be careful making changes. And it just doesn’t make sense to ape what your competitors are doing, especially the over hyped Twitter.

The biggest change Facebook made is to the functionality of the Live Feed, which is the page that most people use when they use Facebook. The Live Feed is typically accessed by clicking the “Home” link or Facebook icon at the top of any Facebook page. The Live Feed is where a user finds status updates of friends, links, posted media, and the annoying flood of application and quiz updates. The Facebook update to the Live/Status feed earlier this year added more pictures. information and user profile icons, but took away updates that shared which events people were attending, which friends and pages they were adding, and more. It’s a welcome development that Facebook brought back these updates in the new Live Feed, but they implemented the functionality poorly. More on this later in this article.

Facebook also added a “News Feed” which evidently takes the place of the “Highlights” box that was in the right column. The “Highlights” box always seemed to be Facebook’s concession to users who were upset about the main feed changes in early 2009. The ironic thing about the new Facebook look is that the Highlights box should have been kept simply because users need a concise overview of friend updates. The new “News Feed” is supposed to be an enhanced version of the Highlights box, but it provides too much information that duplicates what is in the Live Feed. One of the problems with the old Highlights box was that the formula for picking which friend updates was downright mystical. This problem could have been addressed by giving users options, but one of the problems with the Facebook update is that they won’t give users options.

Facebook explains the reasoning behind these changes:

“Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent.

Ultimately, Facebook believes these changes will increase engagement on the home page by surfacing more relevant stories to users.”

One of the things that should be obvious when one reads between the lines of the marketing department prose is the assumption that Facebook is assuming that there is only one kind user experience. What is Facebook thinking when it says “for the first time in a while”? The typical Facebook user is somebody who logs in once a day or more. It sounds like Facebook has created the News Feed for users who log in every few days or just weekly. Daily users aren’t going to care about what their friends posted yesterday. If they want to catch up with all the updates since their last session, the Live Feed should be designed in such a way to accommodate this. The News Feed is pretty worthless to power users who use Facebook frequently throughout the day.

Let’s look at some of the Facebook changes, both good and bad, and look at how Facebook could have implemented these changes without pissing off most of their users.

The Live Feed vs. the News Feed

Facebook did the right thing by adding events, friend updates, page additions and more, to the Live Feed. This is what many folks complained about after the early 2009 changes. For a social networking site, Facebook’s decision to remove these elements from the live feed was downright bizarre. When these updates are part of the live feed, users can see which events their friends are attending and they can learn about new pages and discover old (or new) friends. Since these updates were taken out, I’ve long wondered how much Facebook’s decision impacted people who were organizing events. The beauty of the old live feed is that you could see events that friends were attending and then you could RSVP to the events (and attend them). After the early 2009 change, Facebook took away this organic way of finding out about events. You still could learn about events when people posted them to their profiles or when you were inivted, but the removal of events from the live feed was pretty stupid.

While Facebook did the right thing by adding these things back to the live feed, they failed the implementation in several ways. They failed to give users better, more visible options, to control what types of updates appear in their Live Feed. The presentation of the information in the feed lends itself to information overload. This information overload will piss off typical users and even power users who refresh the live feed throughout the day. This will prompt some users to hide more friend updates, which clashes with Facebook’s goal of getting people to interact more. At worse, many more users will simply give up on Facebook.

Let’s get into the nitty gritty of what Facebook gets wrong with the new update and let’s look at some possible improvements.

One of the worst problems with the new Live Feed is that some types of updates take up more screen real estate than is necessary. The early 2009 version of the Live Feed had simple one line updates. When the updates take up too much screen space, they give users the impression that they’ll have to scroll through multiple pages of updates to catch up with updates.

Solving Once and For All Cross Browser Compatibility

// October 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // CSS

by William

I’ve done some thinking about how to approach this better…Here’s what I’ve come up with. It starts with the worst and gets better, not the other way around.

This method also accounts for browser usage stats.

1. Get a workable second computer with IE installed. Nothing special. Just something that turns on and loads/reloads Explorer.

2. Create 1st Design on/with IE. Go for 6 (19.6%). Now you can finally >:XX (get rid of designing for) IE5 (0.1%). By my quick calculations, IE6 could be with us for another 3-4 years. Unless usage trends change dramatically with Firefox/Chrome/Other new Browser. Kinda depends on the rate at which people are buying new computers.

3. Check to make sure code validates.

4. After first version is done/concluded, name the CSS “explorer.css” and put it away. That’s your IE version and should only be changed when absolutely necessary.

5. Create filter system for CSS to steer IE to explorer.css (Watch out for Linux going to that file). May need javascript. When loaded with other OSs, the page should be unstyled.

6. After transferring file, turn off old computer. Design now for firefox (44.4%), with all the bells and whistles you want. Css Code can be new or different or whatever you want. One programmer even creates different versions for “modern browsers” and provides a basic/less-pretty version for IE6 (Transcending CSS book).

7. Check again that new code validates.

8. Check for Safari (2.7%) and other OSs like Chrome (3.6%) and Opera (2.4%). Some give and take might be necessary here, but tweaking should be minimal, since they’re all good browsers.

9. Final check for IE7/Vista (Find a machine that runs it). If it needs tweaking, use IE conditional comments. Could just skip to #10 if you can’t get it.

10. Go to browsershots.org and cross your fingers.