a work on process

NPR Backstory: Using twitter to contextualise news

2009-06-20T08:06:54Z

I really liked this story about the NPRbackstory twitter account. The panel at SxSW about newspaper APIs (which NPR was tagged onto) was one of the highlights, filled with promise, and it’s good to hear about a tangible (albeit experimental) use of one of those APIs to begin to contextualise breaking news.

All too often we lack the memory or the back-knowledge to appropriately interpret the stories that dominate the news (I was a little surprised and disappointed that the BBC stories about Khamnei’s comments on Britain didn’t note that “blame the British” is a common off-hand comment in Iran). News organisations often have vast resources that could help us develop some of that back-knowledge but they’re under-utilised. It’s rarely helpfully presented by web-based news outlets, but for a radio station it’s particularly hard to get that out. Twitter provides a nice way of passing on some tidbits and it’s great that NPR are using it for more than driving traffic to their very latest content.

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Obsession Times Voice

2009-06-14T13:20:23Z

I didn’t write much (outside of twitter) about SxSW 2009. In part that was because life rushed off in other directions immediately afterwards, and in part there wasn’t much that really inspired me to write. There were numerous good sessions at the conference, but far too many “social media consultants” talking without real experience and far too much focus on “monetising.” Many of us with a longer view of the web and/or more of a technical bent expressed considerable frustration with such sessions and the voting process that had allowed them to dominate the programme.

One session I wish I had made it to was Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s. For months now I’ve had Gruber’s subsequent write-up open in my newsreader awaiting a link from this blog. In it he deftly sums up what so many of the panels seemed to miss, that the starting point for a successful blogging (and, I’d say, most any) venture has to be passion (obsession), and a next step has to be craft. The rest may follow, but it needs those starting points:

What’s so great, so amazing, about this racket is that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can obsess over your work, build an audience based on deep mutual respect, and eventually opportunities to earn money from it will present themselves. I don’t know how it works, I only know that it does.

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Wordpress and “Pathless Categories”

2009-04-29T11:26:43Z

I’m working on a wordpress project at the moment, and pushing that blogging engine quite a bit further than I have before. We’re going to be using categories very extensively and one of the first tasks has been to allow category paths without any preceding /category/ or the like. By default, wordpress wants the category with a slug of ‘case-studies’ to live at:

/category/case-studies

but we want it to be simply:

/case-studies

So far, so straightforward. I installed the pathless-category-links plugin and all was well. Until I started using subcategories. All subcategory links started returning 404s. It seems I’m far from alone in that problem, but I’ve not yet seen a solution offered, so a little digging was required.

What was happening with subcategories (at least in my setup) was that the wordpress method that parses the query string was identifying the top-level category name as the category name and the subcategory name as the ‘name’ (ie. the post slug to look for). What was needed was a check to see whether that ‘name’ maps to a category slug and if so, correct wordpress’ assumption.

The code I’m using is:

if (! function_exists('jys_pathless_category_links_query_string')) {
  function jys_pathless_category_links_query_string($qs) {
    parse_str($qs, $query_vars);
    if (isset($query_vars['name']) && get_category_by_slug($query_vars['name'])) {
      $res = array('category_name' => $query_vars['category_name'] . "/" . $query_vars['name']);
      return http_build_query($res);
    }
    return $qs;
  }
}
 
add_filter('query_string', 'jys_pathless_category_links_query_string');

(NB: This will break if you have permalinks set up as recommended by the plugin author (’/%category%/%postname%’) and a post in your top-level category with the same slug as your subcategory. But hopefully that’s rare enough that we’ll be okay!)

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Selected (belated, extended) Saturday Links

2009-03-28T20:41:02Z

The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape.

Making a jQuery Plugin Truly Customizable » Learning jQuery – Tips, Techniques, Tutorials

Some nice tips for managing options, and a reminder to find _useful_ customisations not just load with customisation options without much thought about/consultation with other potential users
iPhone Coding For Web Developers

Presentation slides from the internet's Matt Biddulph
Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app — Bryan Helmkamp

There's a _lot_ to like about increased adoption of rack. "With Rack::Test, we hope to make it easy for frameworks to encourage their users to write tests by making it trivial to provide a testing environment. We’d like to foster compatibility between Ruby web app testing environments (especially important as ideas like multi-framework apps become more prominent). The philosophy is the library should stay small and extendable so frameworks can layer on additional functionality they want to offer without modifying Rack::Test’s core behavior or resorting to monkeypatching."
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen …. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify." … and a a lot more
russell davies: newspapers and all that

"If we are going to create a new news ecosystem involving advertisers (and a lot of people would be grateful for that money) then we're going to have to do something about that institutional bifurcation between content and commerce. We're going to have to design the relationship between the two with the care of a good experience designer." – a response to Ben Hammersley asking if anyone talking about the future of newspapers had talked to anyone in advertising
Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors – Laughing Meme

"Simon Willison asked this week about best practice for architecting activity streams. And the answer is, “It depends.” Depends on the scope, scale, access patterns, and affordances you’re building — your contract with your users.

Which is a long way of saying think hard about the promises you make to your users, implicitly or explicitly.

And, Facebook, my friend, what the HELL are you thinking? You managed to negotiate the best deal in the business, talk about a racket, and you threw it away for a piece of Twitter’s pain? Are you stupid? Well, best of luck with that."
SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts | SXSW.com

Most of the sessions were recorded and this is the place to get hold of them.
SXSWi: Location-based service is the trend at Austin, Texas |

"Predictably, location-based services were a major feature this year, with launches that included Foursquare, a social, location-based game by the Dodgeball creator, Dennis Crowley, and a new Facebook application for the location management tool Fire Eagle. While early adopters such as the SXSWers have been exploring location-based services for some time, it is inevitable that more consumer and privacy-friendly versions will start to creep into the mainstream."
stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

"I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago." … and …" Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link."
On running a panel

A mixup over bus times meant I didn't make it to Andrew's panel at SxSW, but I heard many good things. It's really great to see this kind of debriefing-in-public going on. Hopefully it'll make for a stronger set of talks and panels next year.
Guardian API Maps – Home

"This is a site that lets you search the Guardian's new API and add location information to articles. All the place data we collect is being made available to anyone who wants it."
Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids | The New York Observer

Quite a few people seemed to be playing with Foursquare at SxSW but most of the Brits were excluded as we didn't want to use that much data and it wasn't available in the UK iTunes store. One to watch, though.
A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform

I saw Simon present the Guardian Platform at SxSW and it looks like a great achievement. Waiting to see what developers build on it, and how they roll some of the ideas back in
Taking remote imagery offline to Nigeria :: High Earth Orbit

Andrew's notes on trying to source good map data for use in Nigeria. It's a useful overview of a variety of services and ways to use them, though highlighting the absence of really accessible, high-quality data.
Pulse Laser: The Utility of the Unfinished

"One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it"
Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.

Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit
Generation Open | FactoryCity

"Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity." – Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…
Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org

For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.
scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku

A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.
How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist

Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably
Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden – O'Reilly Radar

A more positive spin on facebook's changes from David O'Recordon, who suspects they're going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.
Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. – broadstuff

Critical commentary on facebook's recent changes. I'm not sure I entirely agree with statements like "By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph" but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like "web of flow" (to steal Stowe Boyd's phrase)
Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia

Hosted solr for drupal: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.".
Oauth using pecl/OAuth

Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app

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Rails 2.3 final and theme_support updates

2009-03-28T13:02:51Z

Somewhere between Ruby on Rails versions 2.3.0 (RC1) and 2.3.2 (final) a change was made to the arguments required for one of the methods the theme_support plugin requires. I must confess I hadn’t spotted it, but github user knapo kindly sent me a message with a patch. That patch is now applied in the main repository, as are a few tweaks to the ActionMailer integration to better handle multipart emails. You can get the new version from github.

Perhaps more significant than those small patches is that I’ve now pushed up a new rails app for use in testing theme_support. The tests are a series of cucumber stories, and the app is very barebones designed entirely to test the various features. I could do with tightening up the way the test app and the main plugin repository are connected, but it’s a start and has been very helpful with the aforementioned patches. Any improvements to the test suite would be much appreciated. You can, of course, find it on github.

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Selected Saturday Links

2009-03-07T17:26:17Z

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days.

Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. – broadstuff

Critical commentary on facebook's recent changes. I'm not sure I entirely agree with statements like "By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph" but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like "web of flow" (to steal Stowe Boyd's phrase)
Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden – O'Reilly Radar

A more positive spin on facebook's changes from David O'Recordon, who suspects they're going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.
Generation Open | FactoryCity

"Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity." – Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…
Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.

Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit
Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org

For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.
scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku

A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.
How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist

Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably
Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia

Hosted solr for drupal: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.".
Oauth using pecl/OAuth

Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app
Phusion Passenger 2.1.1 (beta) released, thanks sponsors! « Phusion Corporate Blog

Rails 2.3.0 compatibility, Ruby 1.9 compatibility and, finally, fully working with mod_rewrite.
Ryan's Scraps: What's New in Edge Rails: Batched Find

Really pleased to see Model.each finally in ActiveRecord core
Passenger-stack | Sprinkle scripts to provision your server quickly

"Passenger stack is a collection of scripts for Marcus Crafter’s ‘Sprinkle’ tool, it allows you provision a standard Ruby on Rails / Rack server running Ruby Enterprise, Apache with Passenger, MySQL / Postgres and Memcached." – looks like an easy way to automate VPS setup

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Selected Saturday Links

2009-02-28T22:22:32Z

The Cost of Accessibility?

Comments by Drew McLellan on the recently released Atlas IDE for the Cappuccino web framework, and the need for accessibility to be taken into account in any new approach to web app development.
Accessibility & Degradation in Cappuccino

A response to Drew’s piece. I’m not entirely convinced, but that may be because I still feel like any attempt to bring desktop-style-GUIs to the web is missing the point.
Mixing Cucumber with Test::Unit/Shoulda

Looks like a good combination.
russell davies: interesting sounds again

“THE BASIC POINT is for people to show and talk about Interesting Sound-producing things they’ve made. Not just to perform with their ‘thing’ but to talk about what they’ve made, why they did it, what’s interesting about it. It could be acoustic, electronic, anything”
Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way

Some good pointers, many of them useful even if you’re not using Rails or building a startup.
Intro to CIUnit (part of fooStack) for CodeIgniter

Testing framework for the PHP framework. Looks like a nice tool and makes me wonder if I should try CodeIgniter next time I need to build a PHP app. (via infovore)
OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter now freeware

Now I really have no excuse not to try OmniWeb. And OmniDiskSweeper has saved me several gigs of disk space so far this week.
Querious – MySQL Database Tool

Nice looking new database tool. Perhaps not nice enough to tempt me away from Sequel Pro, but good to see nevertheless.

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Hacking wordpress to support per-post banner images

2009-02-23T15:54:17Z

I seem to be spending a lot of time with wordpress at the moment. It’s become so ubiquitous that it often makes far more sense to set it up and integrate with an existing app than to set up some other blogging system and re-train users. As a result I’ve been writing a few wordpress plugins. Most of them are too specialised to be worth sharing, but one seemed worth opening up…

Implementing a (not quite public yet) design recently I had need of a way to specify a banner image for each post. While wp has pretty good support for adding various media into the body of posts, this needed to sit outside the post body.

I whipped together a quick plugin to handle uploading a banner and storing its details in the metadata for the post. It was a simple process, nicely self-contained, except that the post edit form doesn’t have the appropriate enctype=”multipart/form-data”. I looked around for any hooks that would allow me to cleanly add attributes to the form tag, but in the end resorted to editing wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php to add it.

I’d hoped that there’d be time to find a cleaner way to do all this before telling people about it—perhaps some javascript that hooks into the existing media selector but allows it to populate a custom data field?—but it hasn’t, so I’m throwing it out there to the wider world as-is. The code is at github. Feel free to take it and use it as-is, to fork it and update it to be a better wordpress citizen, to email me patches to apply to my copy, or even to employ me to spend more time cleaning it up! Either way, it deserves to be out in the open and hopefully it’ll be of us to somebody besides me.

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Selected Saturday links

2009-02-21T15:09:28Z

It’s always a little embarassing to realise that two or more consecutive blog postings are nothing more than a collection of links, but that’s the way it is at the moment. Busy-ness, illness and distractedness have all kept me from the blog this week. There aren’t any clear themes in this week’s links either. Chatter around OAuth has continued apace, as have musings about fuzziness, location, time, and the web (represented well by Matt Jones’ piece), but mostly this is the (to be) usual random assortment that have spent more than a few seconds open in my newsreader or web browser

twitteroauth – PHP OAuth lib for Twitter

Further evidence that OAuth support for twitter is finally on its way in the form of a PHP library for interfacing with it.
Fixing OAuth

The author of my favourite iPhone twitter client (tweetie) outlines an idea for improving the usability of OAuth outside of web applications.
iPhoneFlow – iPhone Development Links

iPhoneFlow is a community link blog for iPhone developers. (via Mobile Orchard)
Interview with Matt Bauer, author of Data Processing and Visualization with Ruby

I’m really looking forward to this book.
CloudMade: Using OpenStreetMap to Chart the Future of Mapping

CloudMade is a new mapping service from some of the creators of Open Street Map. Lots of libraries for integration are available, along with a variety of services on top of the map data.
seed16 a new model for conferences

An interesting response to the ridiculous speed with which tickets for the next BarCamp London sold out, and the issues that that raises.
A new kind of front page

How Phil Gyford is currently experimenting with the front page of his site, pulling together his activities from across the web. I really like the way Phil approaches these sorts of projects and manages to pull things together in interesting ways.
Implementing Prototype’s Array Methods in jQuery

One less reason to use Prototype over jQuery if you’ve not already made the switch. Like Josh I find I rarely feel the absence of the array methods Prototype provides when I write javascript with jQuery, but there are some convenient shortcuts here.
Exporting the past into the future, or, “The Possibility Jelly lives on the hypersurface of the present”

A series of musings from Matt Jones on space, time and the web (in its biggest sense), “nowish”, “hereish” and all that. Also notable for having what may be the longest ’slug’ URL component of any article I’ve linked to from this blog.

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Selected Saturday links

2009-02-14T23:23:51Z

Initial Release Of Moneta: Unified Key/Value Store API

A new library from Yehuda Katz that seeks to provide a unified interface for key/value stores, meaning you can treat memcached and any other similar caching or database system as a ruby hash.
Twitter OAuth Spotted in the Wild

Excellent news. Hopefully soon we can get away from the ridiculous situation where every new twitter app wants to know my password. Or in other words, those of us who care about security can actually start using new twitter apps again.
Replacing ads with art

“Add-Art is an interesting Firefox extension which takes AdBlockPlus one more step forward and tries to replace the ads with a different art exhibit every 2 weeks.”
WhatTheFont for iPhone

Recognises fonts in photos taken using an iPhone. Looks handy for people like me who have a poor memory for font names.
Wordpress Art Direction plugin

Allowing per-post styling for wordpress, so each post’s permalink page can have distinctive styling. Could be very handy and liven up the blog world quite a bit.
The REST of the Cloud

James Governor takes a conversation we had in the pub the other day and turns it into an extended comment on avoiding the complexity-for-its-own-sake end of the Web Services world, and looking at how to keep it simple.
Amish Hackers

Kevin Kelly looks at technology adoption among the Amish. Fascinating.