a work on process

Processing Greenbelt 2009

2009-09-13T18:14:16Z

We did, in fact, make a newspaper. The hour or so after my last post were more than a little stressful, but the results (a few typos and a printing hiccup that most certainly wasn’t our fault) more than made up for it.

And the response has been wonderful. Thousands of people now have our little artifact as a souvenir of a wonderful weekend, numerous conversations about post-digital concepts and the like ensued, people tell me they’re exploring the URLs we printed, and we might get to do something like it again. There’s talk of a supplement for our next Sunday paper. Matt and I even got a mention in the Church Times!

I may expound on the way the ideas came together and spilled out another time.

(thanks again to James Governor, Ed Gemmell and Hewlett Packard for making this happen)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the activities my team got up to at Greenbelt this year was, as Steve kept pointing out, that we did a lot more with less. Certainly we didn’t bombard qik with videos in last year’s fashion. I took a lot less photos. The tweets were fewer and further between. But our reach goes further, our skills are (a little) more developed and we were able to be more selective in how we played with the tools.

The 2008 festival was essential for us to see how our “social media” tools worked when we were sat in a field for a few days. As I noted at the time, there’s a lot of complexity in effectively covering and communicating an event on this scale and you need a team with diverse strengths. This year I once again ended up spending most of my time as a runner/co-ordinator, able to organise passes, manage some communications and tie it all together, with the aim to free up the rest of the team to play to their strengths and produce the raw material.

It was also very noticeable how much the tools have matured in the past year. Even in August 2008 there was some fiddling to do to ensure everyone had 3G sims and to download the right software. A year on, the underlying technology hadn’t changed much, but there was a far greater degree of comfort and we all arrived on site fully equipped. For me, having the facility to capture and share video and audio from my iPhone saved a lot of hassle — no more switching devices or fighting the Nokia N82’s abysmal UI.

There’s plenty more to do. The newspaper brought a lot of new people to the content, as did a new festival homepage that functioned as an aggregator, but it also demonstrated to us that we’ve got a lot further to go in raising the profile of all this content even amongst festivalgoers who are clued up about the technologies but may not be immersed in our attempts to communicate what we’re doing.

If you want to catch up, you can find it all spread around AudioBoo, Qik, Flickr, and the like. You can download a PDF of the paper here. And you can see Jenny Brown’s team’s excellent videos on the Greenbelt site. I also wrote a little on the Ket Lai site.

And in case you’re wondering why we do all this each year, Jenny and Steve’s chat on AudioBoo is well worth a listen:

Listen!

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We’re making a newspaper for Greenbelt

2009-08-30T16:52:53Z

We hadn’t expected to get to do this. Arriving on site we didn’t know we’d have funding, but the call came in late on Thursday and the planning began.

Matt–given his background in typography and design for print–handled negotiations with the printers. A deadline of 7pm on Sunday was set, if we met it we’d be the first thing on the press that night and should be able to have the paper on site that night.

In an early meeting we decided that items on twittter tagged #gb09 would be key content and so began one of my weekend tasks of reviewing all the posts and marking as “favourites” any that seemed appropriate to include. Meanwhile Matt fired up InDesign on the iMac in our office and started designing a grid and photo layouts so we could quickly drop content into place.

Post-it notes were acquired and our wall soon filled with ideas of people who might contribute, whether through their own blog or the festival blog, and of other content we could source. Our crack team of official photographers could be counted on and we made sure they were briefed on our plans.

I’ve been glad of my backup iPhone battery as I’ve spent the weekend running round site to talk to potential contributors while tracking twitter traffic. It’s no easy task persuading a group of busy Greenbelters to do some writing while on site, however willing they may be there’s no telling when a key phone call will destroy any chance of their having a moment to spare.

Sunday morning was when it started to get really serious. Moving all those post-its (and the ideas that had never quite made it onto paper) onto a mock layout up on the wall of our grandstand box, we could finally see the paper taking shape. Art for ads was acquired, pieces were emailed, and a roving trip around site with a laptop secured a little more content.

As I write, there are 70 minutes remaining before this thing has to hit the press. It’s looking manageable, but tight. If you see this in print, chances are we’ll be feeling very relieved.

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Greenbelt has an iPhone app

2009-09-02T14:08:30Z

I’ve been watching the recent furore over Apple’s iPhone app review process with some concern. Partly, of course, I want the process to be clear, to make sense and to provide us all with good access to the apps we want. But the slightly more selfish reason was that I was waiting for the Greenbelt app to be approved for sale, hoping fervently that it would make it through in time for people to buy it before the festival.

With a little under 6 days to go, it was approved, appearing for sale on Saturday night. What’s more, they tell me they expedited the process in response to a pleading email earlier in the week, to help us meet our target.

I can’t take credit for the coding, which belongs entirely to pab. I played around with some of the code, tidied up a little javascript and provided some feedback, but he did all the hard development (and data entry) work. My role was managing the release and dealing with Apple. The app upload system is far from their finest UI work (it probably ranks amongst the worst apple interfaces I’ve used) but all in all the process worked well for us. The one rejection we did get early in the process was for a fairly clear bug that we quickly fixed.

There’s a lot more we’d like to add to the app, but it’s hugely satisfying to have it out there and it’ll be interesting to see how it affects peoples’ habits at the festival.

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Cucumber, wordpress and database_cleaner

2009-08-07T08:38:03Z

I’m up to my usual using-ruby-tools-to-test-other-environments tricks, using cucumber and my wordpress activerecord classes to do acceptance testing against a highly-customised wordpress install.

I’m hoping to write a bit more about that soon, once I’ve put it through its paces a little more and cleaned up some of the code, but I wanted to quickly mention one of the key pain-points and an extremely handy solution.

One of the things I enjoy most about testing in rails is the handy tasks to prepare a blank database and the transactions that ensure the database is returned to that state after each test. Obviously that wasn’t going to work cleanly with wordpress since it doesn’t use ActiveRecord, but Matt kindly pointed me in the direction of Ben Mabey’s database_cleaner gem.

With that installed it’s as simple as adding:

require 'database_cleaner'
require 'database_cleaner/cucumber'
DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation, {:except => %w[wp_options]}

to my

features/support/env.rb

file and my database is reset on each step. Combined with a few hooks to manage the configuration and load in the schema at the appropriate point, it’s turning into quite a nice little testing environment.

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Talking to Wordpress with ActiveRecord

2009-07-23T21:58:37Z

As mentioned in yesterday’s announcement I’m pulling some content across from this blog (running on wordpress) into the new Ket Lai site (a merb app). I’ve found myself doing similar things a few times lately, such as on Only Connect (on which more, soon) and so have built out a selection of ActiveRecord models to help me talk to a wordpress database from a ruby app.

At Matt’s urging (he’s been using them to move data from a legacy site), I’ve finally put those models up on github. Being a single file they arguably should have been a gist, but I’m reserving the right to reorganise them in future.

They’re far from complete in that there are lots of validations I could have added in, named scopes that would probably be handy, and loads of convenience methods that some might like, but hopefully they’ll be of use to someone and evolve over time.

(on the subject of wordpress, I’m glad to see the addition of changelogs to the plugin directory – being asked to upgrade plugins without any idea what’s changed has long been a bugbear of mine, so hopefully this will resolve some of that)

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Launching Ket Lai

2009-07-23T11:09:46Z

For a while now I’ve been transitioning away from using the name jystewart.net for my web development work in favour of Ket Lai. The shift is partly born of a desire to separate out my work from other parts of my life (increasingly important now we’re a family of three), but mostly a recognition that I rarely work on projects solo these days–instead pulling in a range of collaborators–and a group identity is more honest to what we’re doing.

Today, thanks to the design help of frequent collaborator James Weiner I’m launching the Ket Lai website over at http://www.ketlai.co.uk. There are still a few bits and pieces we’re working on, but it’s great to have it out there for the world to see.

The site employs a variety of CSS3 techniques to give a little more visual feedback and spark, and is built on top of the merb framework (rails seemed like overkill, and personal-ish projects are usually a good chance to try something that not many client projects call for).

This blog will continue roughly at its present location, though jystewart.net may eventually get a little reorganisation/redesign-love. Naturally redirects will be used where necessary. Relevant posts are pulled across to the Ket Lai site, but this will remain a personal blog and hopefully suffer a little less from brand confusion.

So if you want to know more about the work my collaborators and I do or services we offer, www.ketlai.co.uk is the place to go. And now that it’s launched maybe (just maybe) I’ll be able to write here about a few other recent projects and interesting tidbits.

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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