a work on process

The victory of version control

2008-07-02T12:13:18Z

It’s always fascinating to see how applying good practice in one area can lead to unforeseen benefits. The article on version control with subversion in the latest issue of A List Apart is a fine example of just that. Not only is the use of version control a good way to manage your own projects, it’s a vital enabler for significant shifts in working practices and management styles.

Those of us who’ve been building software for a while and keep tabs on best practice in that arena are unlikely to see version control as anything new—CVS has been around since the 80s, after all—but it’s arguably only now really coming into its own as we see social practices, work practices and coding practices coming together. And of course we’re finally starting to see promising mac subversion clients, which has to help.

On a related note, John Gruber noted a couple of days ago:

It strikes me as an odd coincidence that two serious Subversion clients would debut at a time when many developers are starting to switch away from Subversion to distributed revision control systems such as Git and Mercurial.

You could argue that it isn’t really a coincidence at all. Perhaps the fact that technologists have found a superior model for managing versions, and matured it to a point where many of us are starting to use Git is a consequence of really getting to grips with what tools like subversion allow. We’ve become good enough at communicating the features and flaws of one generation of tools that we can both provide friendly tools, and simultaneously witness a more widespread migration to their progeny?

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links for 2008-06-15

2008-06-15T04:30:38Z

Meerkat | Code Sorcery Workshop

"Meerkat is an easy to use SSH tunnel manager built specifically for the Mac."

(tags: mac software ssh tunnel)
bkkeepr | Track your reading and bookmark on the go

A nice little reading tracker service. You send them a message on twitter with the ISBN number of the book you’re reading, and they do the rest.

(tags: books library reading twitter)
mySociety » TheyWorkForYou video - seeking

One of a series of blog entries from MySociety about their great new video features on TheyWorkForYou. Not only can you track what’s going on in parliament, you can watch very specific parts of the proceedings thanks to some clever work on their part

(tags: flash mysociety parliament participation video)
BBC Topics: How It Works

An overview of the system the BBC have been using to bring together related content from across their huge network of websites

(tags: aggregation bbc topics)
MOO.com | Announcing the MOO API

Really looking forward to seeing what people build with this

(tags: api moo printing)
Yahoo! Address Book API Delivered (Yahoo! Developer Network blog)

Another step towards being able to import/export contacts without making users give away passwords

(tags: api dataportability yahoo)
Masquerade Rails OpenID Server

My post on building an open id server in rails still gets a lot of traffic, but I’ve not been able to keep the code as up to date as I’d like. I’ve not tried this option yet, but it seems worth a look

(tags: openid rubyonrails server)

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How to use twitter?

2008-06-07T12:21:20Z

I was pleased a few months back to see Calvin College sign up for twiter. A small college in the Michigan town where I lived for three years up until last summer, the college is my wife’s former employer, a previous client of mine, and a place that dominated quite a bit of our social life in Grand Rapids. Twitter seemed a simple way to keep up with what was going on without much effort. But within a couple of months I stopped following them, partly out of frustration with some recent political developments on the campus but primarily because their twitter presence felt far too much like an anonymous broadcast, and close to an abuse of the medium.

It’s an example I’ve had on my mind while pondering the possibilities for official twitter usage at Greenbelt. Twitter is easy to use as a broadcast medium, and (recent stability concerns aside) works very well for getting messages out quickly to those who choose to hear them, but to treat it solely that way fails to engage with the realities of how it’s used, or the set of expectations that have emerged within the community of its users.

There are contexts in which a broadcast-only approach can work. The automated twitter feeds for things like Tower Bridge and Low Flying Rocks are quite understandably just broadcasting updates. They represent inanimate objects and are simple prototypes of how a system like twitter can change the way we interact with such objects. At the same time the way that the Mars Phoenix twitter account has been used has been fascinating, making use of the fact that there are human intermediaries involved to engage with its audience and answer questions.

Barack Obama’s account has been broadcast-only so far. I find that far more understandable as a campaign schedule of the sort he lives within doesn’t make engagement easy, but also a little disappointing as that aspect of politics desparately needs more interaction and transparency. The Downing Street account occasionally offers responses and it’d be good to see that from the Obama team, along with some information on how Obama’s tweets come to be. Are they along the lines of John Edwards‘ which I’m told were approved in communications team meetings but sent by the candidate himself, or is there some other process/person making it happen?

I’ve been enjoying the Channel4News offering lately. That too has yet to respond to any of its followers (so far as I’ve seen), but the slightly irreverent tone of some of the posts really helps give some insight into how their editorial process works, how things shift through the day, and the fact that they don’t take themselves entirely seriously.

The recent Innovation Edge conference and Social Innovation Camp made pretty good use of twitter. In the former case it was entirely focussed on the day of the event, but modelled good interaction between official-tweeter and those in the audience also using twitter. What it was lacking was some transparency: it wasn’t until after the event that it became clear who was posting on behalf of the event. SI Camp has continued to operate, and it’s a good way to keep up with the thinking and projects that have stemmed from the camp. At the event it offered a really good communications channel, identifying different groups’ needs and interesting comments, but since then it’s not been clear if it’s a personal account or entirely focussed on the followup to the event. Some clarity there would be helpful.

Obviously any high profile use of twitter shouldn’t be expected to respond to every message sent its way, but setting expectations and demonstrating some engagement with the conversation is vital for any user whose tweets aren’t entirely automated. Establishing transparency by identifying who is actually doing the posting is very helpful, whether per post (eg. “(from @jystewart)”) or simply in the bio (”with posts of official news, gathered by X, Y and Z”). And it’s probably best to be flexible, and adapt an approach based on how followers respond, just as twitter itself was adapted in response to the community’s use of @replies.

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Don’t imply privacy

2008-06-06T15:53:15Z

Conversations about privacy are an increasingly vital part of any planning process for a membership-driven website. Having been engaged in such a conversation for a new project and fielding support emails for an existing one, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately.

We’re all managing a lot of personal data, whether we’re running sites that might be described as “social networks” or simply a blog that provides a way to connect up a commenters contributions. On any new project questions inevitably come up about whether or not users should be able to hide their profiles or specific pieces of information, often influenced by the way facebook’s closed walls give a sense of privacy by not letting google index profile data. I’m given to thinking that facebook’s approach has actually hurt such discussions, by implying a level of privacy they don’t really offer.

The problem is that approaches like facebook’s are far more about an illusion of privacy than any actual protection. The artifacts of our online presence, our comments, our photos, etc. and perhaps more importantly our friends’ comments and photos, are never going to be entirely shielded just because we can hide our profiles, but hiding profiles can make us think that protection is there. Similarly attempts by some sites to hide profiles from users who aren’t logged in offers an illusion. Because there’s a hurdle to see your profile it’s tempting to think that it’s protected, but that’s simply not the case.

Our designs need to guide people to be careful about what they’re putting in their profiles rather than having those profiles hidden, and to remember that their online artifacts will last even if the attention given to them dips from its initial high. Unless we’re providing something much more secure than a “hidden” profile, we should avoid the implication that our tools (rather than their behaviour) are what will offer privacy.

[Obviously there are some cases where our architecture needs to work harder to offer privacy, but that's far from the general case]

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Twitter timeline proof-of-concept

2008-06-05T16:03:19Z

Reading Stowe Boyd’s thoughts on plurk and writing my own post on the topic I began to wonder how much work it would really be to add a timeline view using something like the Simile Timeline library.

As a quick proof of concept I saved my twitter homepage to my laptop and added a little javascript. As well as calling in the timeline library from http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/api/timeline-api.js and using the first javascript iso8601 code I found through google, I added:

  jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    jQuery('body').prepend('<div id="my-timeline" style="height: 150px; border: 1px solid #aaa"></div>');
    var eventSource = new Timeline.DefaultEventSource();
    evts = [];
 
    jQuery('.hentry_hover').each(function (index, elem) {
      var $elem = jQuery(elem);
      var dateEvent = new Date();
      dateEvent.setISO8601($elem.find('.published')[0].getAttribute('title'));
      var evt = new Timeline.DefaultEventSource.Event(
         dateEvent, //start
         dateEvent, //end
         dateEvent, //latestStart
         dateEvent, //earliestEnd
         true, //instant
         $elem.find('.content a:first').text(), //text
         $elem.find('.entry-content').text() //description
      );
      eventSource.add(evt);
    });
 
    var bandInfos = [
      Timeline.createBandInfo({
        width:          "100%", 
        intervalUnit:   Timeline.DateTime.MINUTE, 
        intervalPixels: 10,
        eventSource: eventSource,
      }),
    ];
    tl = Timeline.create(jQuery("#my-timeline")[0], bandInfos);
  });

and pretty quickly I had a basic timeline view at the top of my twitter page.

Obviously this isn’t a very practical solution, but it’s an indicator of just how easy it would be to build something, whether as a GreaseMonkey script, or a proper client that uses the API and maybe loads tweets using AJAX as someone scrolls through the timeline.

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A few thoughts on plurk and twitter

2008-06-05T14:29:16Z

Along with many others I’ve been responding to the recent unreliability of twitter by checking out a few of the alternatives that are out there, particularly the dreadfully named but fairly cute plurk.

Plurk has quickly gained quite a few users but didn’t make a good first impression with me. The first thing that I was asked after signing up was to hand over my IM username and password to allow them to import my contacts. Being asked for passwords for such a purpose isn’t rare, but as Jeremy Keith so eloquently noted, it’s a very bad idea and—as dopplr show—increasingly unnecessary. That the developers ignored those sorts of details in an attempt to quickly build critical mass for their service makes me wonder how in step they are with other ideas of best practice on today’s web.

The timeline view that is plurk’s main interface is a nice idea, but it really doesn’t work as a primary way in to your data. Not only is there no fallback when javascript is switched off (neither progressive enhancement or graceful degradation here) but it quickly gets cluttered and when a “thread” gets large it proves very slow. The mobile interface, and per thread interface (as seen for jenny’s collaborative storytelling experiment) are an improvement but they lack the simplicity (elegance?) that twitter offers.

Rather than building a more robust twitter, plurk have experimented with new features, and in itself that’s a good thing. The icons are amusing, the timeline’s a nice visualisation for a small number of messages, and the threaded view works fairly well in very specific contexts. But the essential strengths of twitter—its open API, the way its team adapted the service based on how its users were interacting—aren’t there. And as Lloyd pointed out it requires too much “total attention.” With less focus on flow (and no sign of an open API that would allow clients like twitterific) it can’t become part of the general ambient noise of your day. And as Stowe Boyd observed most of the UI niceties would be pretty easy to layer on top of twitter using its API.

Can anything displace twitter in the near future and claim the space it currently owns?

On one level, we don’t yet need to ask that question as while twitter is a big part of the lives of many of us, the space it occupies is still pretty small and there are no guarantees as to how or even whether it will grow to the scale of facebook et al.

On another, I suspect that the next step from twitter is not a competing service, whatever fancy new features they offer, but is instead a shift from twitter-as-product to a far more distributed architecture that recognises that tools that help us engage with “the flow” of online chatter are a significant part of the infrastructure of how we live on the web, and so need to be built as infrastructure.

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links for 2008-05-24

2008-05-24T04:31:25Z

mad.ly – Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview

Helpful overview of one of a number of great improvements coming up in the next version of rails

(tags: rubyonrails timezone)
Mapping Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa | White African

More great work being undertaken using the Ushahidi engine

(tags: africa ict4d nptech ushahidi)

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Book Review: Refactoring HTML

2008-05-23T10:35:52Z

Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Refactoring HTML offers a step by step recipe book for migrating such sites to clean, semantic code.

Harold’s is a well known name in the XML world, and that background shows through in how he approaches the book. While a general audience will probably find useful content, the reader needs to be prepared for a series of command-line and Java-based examples. Tools like tidy are featured prominently, as is the use of regular expressions to seek out broken code to fix and, in the music-to-my-ears category, automated testing.

If you’re equipped to do so, following these steps will lead to much cleaner, more manageable sites, but I found myself wondering how many of those comfortable with command line tools and regular expressions are in the market for a book like this.

In general I suspect the key audience for this will be IT departments inside large organisations tasked with refreshing or extending an intranet. For those developers, who maybe don’t spend much of their time working with HTML and like the idea of using scripting tools similar to those in their regular workflow, this book’s worth a look. If you’re already familiar with current trends in web development, then there are probably other ways of picking up on the scattering of techniques that might be new to you.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.

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geekYoto: Fixing The Broken World

2008-05-23T10:19:49Z

I’m getting my event blogging a little out of order but a few words on last weekend’s excellent geeKyoto seemed in order. Put together by Ben Hammersley and Mark Simpkins to see what a group of self-identified geeks would say in response to the question “We broke the world, how are we going to fix it?” the event brought together a couple of hundred of us in a hall in Central London for a Saturday for a fascinating journey through a wealth of ideas.

The presentations ranged from discussions of designing sustainable tourism in the Mediterranean to an account of arctic exploration, by way of ideas like Secular Sabbath (exploring the impact of Sabbath on Orthodox Jews’ carbon footprint), AMEE’s aim to measure all energy usage everywhere, attempts to improve government web usage, and transforming bus stops into spaces for play.

Some might have complained that not much time was spent analysing the nature of the problem. The AMEE presentation was probably the closest to what you’d expect at a climate change event—demonstrating some of James Hansen’s recent work on the melting of the arctic ice shelf and the reality of climate change tipping points—but in general there was a refreshing sense that we didn’t need to dwell on such studies because we recognise we’ve gone wrong.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the event was the shared recognition that not only do we need to look for more efficient technology and ways that we can reorganise ourselves to reduce our impact, but that doing so may open up a wealth of possibilities. Whether that’s in recapturing communal, outdoor play (Bruno Taylor noted that 71% of present adults played in public spaces when they were kids, compared to 21% of current-day children), in building new awareness of the spaces around us, or in realising that the constraint of sustainability can drive more creative and more flexible aesthetics. In a sense that tapped into part of what we’re driving at with Generous. The vision of the project is to be more than just “green”, partly because we think there’s a lot of inherent value in some of the other commitments we ask people to make, but also because sustainability can only be achieved if we approach it with a broad vision of how we want society to be.

geeKyoto didn’t present solid answers on what we can do. It offered a few ideas, and reminded me of why it’s an exciting time to be working in this industry in London. There’s a growing sense that the web revolution’s implications spread throughout society and those of us designing and building in its wake have a lot to contribute. With events like Social Innovation Camp, geeKyoto, and a series of others coming up that strive to be more than just talking shops, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

The key question, of course, is how fast we get there. According to Hansen’s numbers we have around ten years before global emissions levels must have peaked, otherwise global climate change will accelerate beyond control. How fast can we turn some of the ideas floating around into significant practical change, and how do we manage the changes so they’re more than just lifestyle changes for the world’s rich?

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Project Launch: Debtonation

2008-05-22T20:36:40Z

With all the talk of credit crunches, sub-prime mortgage crises, and all that follows from them it can be difficult to know how to make sense of it all. When you add in the fact that money is a far more complicated beast than most of us realise it’s pretty bewildering.

Ann Pettifor is an expert in getting to grips with these issues, communicating them and campaigning on them. And I’m very pleased to say that you can now find her blogging at debtonation.org, the result of a quick project Jenny Brown and I have been working on.

There are lots of talks of exciting spin-offs, campaigns for more effective regulation of the financial sector, and the likes, but for now the key thing is to get Ann’s writings on the topic out there, building reputation and conversation. A quick blog fit the bill just right, so we’ve kept it at that. Where it goes from there will unfold over the coming months.