The idea is interesting

paper.li touts itself as a service for creating your own newspaper website. You can set topics, pull in stories, and publish a “daily newspaper” around the subject matter you want. All the stories are pulled together into a newspaper-look design, and published.

Nice idea. Removes the barriers to entry for publishing news, current events and opinion, whatever your area of interest.

The implementation is poor

paper.li doesn’t know what it is. That lack of focus means it fails across the board.

It isn’t an effective aggregator

If I set various keywords and let paper.li search, it’ll come up with a full list of articles to populate my site. It’ll categorize them…kind of accurately. It’ll pull in items of no real interest, and leave out other items that might be “on topic” but miss a vital keyword.

If I want to look at aggregated recent articles on a certain topic, there are a multitude of services out there which are more effective. They’re more effective in pulling in the initial aggregation, but they also give me more power to further refine my search.

It isn’t an effective newspaper

A good newspaper isn’t just an aggregation of all the latest stories. Newspapers are a powerful medium; whether online or offline, because the stories they gather are curated. Curating the content means that topics of importance are effectively highlighted. Less relevant pieces are reduced in prominence or discarded altogether.

A newspaper that’s created automatically isn’t really a newspaper, and doesn’t work.

It isn’t an effective traffic driver

I’d like to see some statistics on paper.li traffic. I know that the web content I create has been referenced multiple times, on multiple people’s paper.li sites. I can’t remember ever seeing analytics that suggest any of those links has brought traffic back to my site.

That trend seems to continue regardless of whether the story is featured prominently on the paper.li site or not, or whether the paper.li publisher has tens of thousands of Twitter followers. It leads me to wonder whether  individual paper.li sites have any significant visitor numbers.

Better to do one thing well

If you want to read an aggregation of content based on your interests, there are good options. iGoogle, Yahoo or MSN personal homepages. They all let you set topics and bring in aggregated content based on searches and keywords.

If you want to curate your own collection of content more actively then use an RSS aggregator like Google Reader. Choose the feeds that you want to sign up to. Categorize and sort them. Check in daily.

If you want to highlight great articles for others, share them on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks. Write articles on your site that link to that external content. Show that you’re not just recommending something that was automatically aggregated, but something that you’ve read and rated yourself.

Do you think that paper.li has any strong benefits? Are there better alternative services for this kind of thing?

I need more walls!

On Halloween I went to a party at Artworks in Trenton. There was a lot of great art there, all available to buy. I fell in love with a piece called “Bride of Frankenstein”. I’m running out of space on my apartment walls, but I bought it anyway and found a place for it, because it’s a cool piece.

I always love finding awesome art, it’s always an inspiration to me. I love it for its own sake, but also think about which aspects I can incorporate into my digital media and web design.

Finding out more

The piece is by an artist called Bridget Roach. I wanted to find out more about her work, but I couldn’t find much information online. So I was really pleased a few weeks later when Bridget found me on Facebook! Just as I wanted to know more about the artist, she wanted to find out more about the person who bought her art.

Before the wider advent of social media, it would have been a lot more difficult for either of us to find each other. Now the tools exist for us to develop a greater engagement.

The wider benefits

In this case it means i’ve found a local artist whose work I really love. It’s vibrant and powerful, and in a great style. I can enjoy the art for its own sake and also be inspired for my work. I’ve also found other artists that Bridget engages with, e.g. by seeing posts on her Facebook wall, and seen more great art I wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

Bridget’s at the very least found a new fan. I definitely want to invest in more of her work. She’s also found a cheerleader, because I want to tell others about her talent. Some of my friends have already started following here on Facebook.

I’m hoping that at some point she might also have found a collaborator, because i’d love to come up with a project to integrate her art with my web design (Oh, and Bridget, you should have your own website!!).

Encouraging collaboration

I wanted to highlight how social media can benefit me as a designer. It’s easy to talk in generalities about social media, but speaking personally is more powerful.

As an art fan and a designer, I found a great artist with inspirational work. I hope the engagement will benefit both parties in future. It doesn’t have to be art and design, though. It could be anything.

Social media engagement can be used to develop encounters that originally started offline, and turn them into longer term relationships. Social media is a tool to build engagement, but remember it doesn’t always have to start and finish in the online medium.

Moving on, moving up

I had a good time working at TerraCycle for nearly two years. Designing and implementing the front end web experience for a growing global company was great for my professional development. When I first heard about the Web Engineer role at Function(x), however, I had to pursue it. It’s a great step forward in my career.

I’m working at a dynamic digital entertainment company with a great product. I’m excited to be involved during the early stages. Excited to be working to build a great core team of front end developers. I’ll be stretching my design implementation skills and improving my management and strategic abilities.

A product that excites

During my first couple of interviews with Function(x) they couldn’t tell me about what they were working on. When I first got to see Viggle in action it made me even more enthusiastic about the company. I was really happy last week when news about Viggle broke publicly, because it meant I could start telling people about it!

Jeff Bullas wrote yesterday about why social media will disappear. Despite the extravagant title to his article, his underlying point is well made. The future development of social media isn’t likely to be as a standalone service. The next stage for social media is closer and closer integration into other forms of media.

Viggle, the loyalty points and rewards program for watching TV, takes that evolution a step forward. It seamlessly integrates the TV watching experience with the sharing and discussion of social media…and it gives its users tangible rewards. It’s a very cool product.

New challenges

New challenges are important. They keep me motivated to push myself and develop my skills. Challenges stop me from getting complacent. From what I’ve seen at Function(x) so far, complacency certainly isn’t going to be an issue!

It’s important to work for a company whose vision I’m invested in. I have a strong belief in what Function(x) are trying to achieve, and in their future success. Investing in that vision means that I’m going to be motivated to push myself. I’m not only going to benefit Function(x) with that motivation, I’m going to make great forward strides myself.

Immediately escalating the issue

An interesting story this week was Google Kenya’s improper access of the database of a local company, Mocality. Google workers used Mocality’s business directory to try and sell a competing service to Kenyan businesses.

This issue became a big story because Mocality set up a “sting” operation to gather a lot of data and proof about Google’s activities in Kenya. After collecting all this information, they wrote an extensive blog post detailing the issue, and that post subsequently spread across social media before being picked up by traditional press.

Mocality apparently didn’t choose to contact Google directly regarding the issue. They also didn’t contact the local authorities (given that their allegations were about illegal practices). They took a social media route to make their allegations and spread them as widely as possible. It caused a lot of criticism of Google, a quick response from that company admitting the malpractice by their Kenyan team, an apology to Mocality and a promise to immediately investigate the issue further. A win for Mocality.

Public allegations vs private queries

If I have an issue with a company then my first thought is to contact them directly. The Mocality situation is an extreme example, but even if it’s merely a case of poor customer service the idea of contacting customer support directly seems to be becoming less common. It’s common to see widespread Twitter or Facebook memes highlighting poor customer service or other unfortunate activities by companies; forcing them to respond to a public outcry.

There are advantages to acting in this way.

• A widespread public outcry forces the offending company to respond
• It provides an opportunity for other people who’ve had similar problems to speak with a single voice
• The public nature of the criticism often forces a company to provide greater recompense so that they’re seen to be taking the problem seriously

There’s also a downside.

• A genuine accident or oversight can become “proof” of deliberate action
• The seriousness of an issue can become extremely exaggerated or inaccurate
• A company can become tarred for something outside of their direct control (the action of an individual, the behavior of a subsidiary, etc)

Gossip as a means of provoking action

Social media provides an opportunity to gossip on a global scale. I know that a strong allegation, particularly against a big company (because people always like taking big names down a notch!), can get a lot of traction online. It seems to me, however, that social media is a good avenue to redress problems if a company doesn’t respond to a direct communication effectively.

If I receive poor customer service from Amazon, then my first task is going to be contacting Amazon and attempting to resolve the issue. If Amazon deal poorly with my customer support request, then I might start talking about my bad experience through social media.

Social media is incredibly powerful in giving consumers a wider voice, and ensuring that their concerns and difficulties can be escalated. Should that come after other avenues have been exhausted, or is social media a legitimate first choice when demanding a response from another company?

The bill’s important, not the person

OK, here’s the story. The author of SOPA, Lamar Smith, was accused of copyright violation himself. A pre-SOPA version of his website uses a Creative Commons licensed image by DJ Schulte without correctly attributing the photographer. Cue every single SOPA related Tweet turning into a link to this article, as if it was some kind of silver bullet.

Instead of continuing to focus on SOPA, its huge flaws and dangers to free speech and a creative, entrepreneurial web, the argument’s suddenly been reduced to “look, Lamar Smith is a bad guy!” Everybody is talking about a mistaken copyright violation. Which means that everybody has stopped talking about what matters.

Lamar Smith could be the greatest paragon of virtue in Washington and SOPA would still be a terrible piece of legislation. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a hypocrite for the mistake on his website. All the focus on this issue merely distracts from SOPA itself.

It makes the opposition look small-minded

Here are two arguments against SOPA;

It’s a seriously flawed piece of legislation that will negatively impact American business and undermine free speech.

or…

Lamar Smith is a hypocrite.

I know which I find a more powerful motivator to oppose the legislation.

The triviality of using a minor “gotcha” moment as a focus of the anti-SOPA argument makes people think the issue itself is trivial. It’s not even a great proof of hypocrisy. “Congressman’s web designers make minor error in not attributing credit to otherwise free photograph”. Not exactly a Watergate moment.

Trying to censor the internet isn’t enough?

SOPA can certainly be stopped. If huge websites like Facebook and Google shut down then it’ll be a huge news story. These are sites used by the general public, rather than sites whose audience is more likely to be more heavily involved in digital/social media issues. The argument against SOPA is strong in terms of constitutional rights of free speech and in terms of potentially negative economic impact.

They’re trying to censor the internet. It’s an argument that people can understand, and which can be used to bring pressure to stop the legislation. Why waste that by instead talking about a picture that Lamar Smith used to have on his website?

Using fonts in web design

Used to be that web designers were limited to seven or eight standard fonts. These fonts were the only ones which had a relatively universal level of support across different platforms and operating systems. There weren’t many other web safe options.

Various interim options such as sIFR and Cufon provided designers with additional options, displaying a wider variety of fonts. These options had serious limitations, however. Loading times could be slow, text might be non-selectable, they could be awkward to install.

More recently, the universal adoption of @font-face has meant that theoretically designers can use any typeface on a website. All they need to do is host that font on the same server as the site,. They no longer have to rely on a visitor having the font on their own computer. CSS3 further provides greater options for altering the appearance of the fonts themselves (e.g. text-shadow). The technology is there.

The problems of licensing

While the technology is there to render any font on a website, the capacity to do so is seriously limited by the failure of font licensing to keep up with technological advancements. When a web designer uses @font-face to store a font on their server, it’s relatively easy for a technologically savvy user to be able to find…and download…that font file.

Protecting intellectual property

From a font provider’s point of view, that’s the same as illegally distributing the font. For perfectly legitimate reasons, font creators don’t want their font files to be available in this way. They want to protect their intellectual property, and therefore many commercial fonts specifically forbid using that font with @font-face.

Online font libraries as a solution

There are a couple of really good options to address the issue of font licensing. Online font libraries like Typekit or Google Web Fonts provide access to a wide range of fonts. They store these fonts in their own libraries, and allow users (either free or via a paid subscription) to access these libraries with a small piece of code. They utilize @font-face capability in a way which web designers can use both technically and legally.

The issue of wider branding

Online libraries are great. I use Typekit all the time. But for a business on a limited budget, and looking to make their website an integral part of their overall brand, there are some potential limitations.

Branding is more than just a website. It includes a wide range of physical media, too. Logos, business cards, letterheads, flyers, etc. Online font libraries don’t give any help when it comes to using those fonts outside of a web page. This isn’t an issue with free fonts provided by these libraries, but they often have limited character sets or limitations on commercial use. Commercial fonts often remain the best design option.

Except you might have to pay twice

Let’s say a company wants to use the font Atrament.

If they buy the font directly from a source like MyFonts they can use the font for physical media, but they can’t use it online (because they’d have to upload the font to their server to use @font-face and the license likely forbids this).

If they buy a portfolio subscription to Typekit they can use the font on their website, but they don’t have any capacity to use it offline.

To get the universal use of the font necessary for their online and offline branding, they have to pay for both options.

To buy all 10 weights and styles of Atrament on MyFonts is $339. A portfolio subscription on Typekit is $49.99 a year. While this might not seem like a huge amount of money, for a small or new business every penny can count. Having to pay twice in order to gain universal use of a single font is just another additional expense.

Future solutions

Even services like Typekit are still interim options. The long term solution will likely be the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). This file format allows fonts to be hosted on a server, and usable with @font-face, but in a compressed, encoded manner which resolves the licensing problems.

While WOFF is supported in the latest versions of all major browsers, Internet Explorer only started offering full support with the recent version 9. With the extensive use of earlier versions of IE likely to continue for at least a few more years, WOFF doesn’t provide sufficiently universal support.

In the meantime web designers will have to continue using imperfect methods. These methods, increasingly advanced and convenient to use as they are, still create a division between online and offline font support.

Yes, WordPress is great

The article argues that WordPress, as a free content management system with downloadable themes, makes it completely unnecessary for small businesses to hire a website designer.

WordPress is great. It makes hosting and administering a professional website easy and accessible. There’s lots of free support out there in the form of the WordPress codex, forums and blog posts. It’s the most popular content management system out there for very good reasons.

But a content management system is what makes a website work…it isn’t a website in itself.

Those ‘tricksy’ website designers

The biggest flaw in Mitz Pantic‘s argument is the suggestion that custom design has no benefit over a downloaded WordPress theme (commercial or free).

But you don’t need to customize your layout beyond adding your company logo (which you can do from the WordPress menu). Any professional-quality layout, like those included with WordPress, will put your customers and clients at ease. Spending extra money to create a custom layout won’t attract new customers or increase your sales—it’ll just waste your money on something you don’t need.

This is dead wrong.

There are great WordPress themes out there. Many of them are really high quality, and can be a great way to get started. They can give you a solid, professional looking website, with some customization options to brand the site, but it’s very difficult to make it truly “yours”.

The suggestion that there aren’t significant potential benefits in a custom design is really misleading. Spending extra money to create a custom layout can attract new customers and it can increase your sales and conversions. Sure, you don’t need to customize your layout beyond adding your company logo, but you’re hardly differentiating yourself from the crowd if that’s all you do.

The advantages of great web design

• A genuinely unique look and feel to your site (not a cookie cutter approach)
• Real “ownership” of your brand and design
• Calls to action specific to your customers
• Bespoke options and functionality that might not be available as part of a theme
• Strong code structure that naturally gives solid SEO
• A web designer who can answer your questions and give you honest feedback and advice

No theme, however exceptional, can provide all of these benefits. Gary Vaynerchuck in his awesome book ‘Crush It!‘ points out that getting custom web design is a possible exception to his general rule that anyone can start their own business without the need for financial investment.

Make an informed decision

I’m not criticizing WordPress themes. Many of them are genuinely great, and they can provide a really strong foundation for a new business, at a reasonable price.

Of course if you are a big wig with a big budget then you cannot go wrong with a customized designed website, but for the average person, see the cheap and stress free way to get a website.

What frustrated me about the article was the implication that custom web design is only for these “big wigs”, and that web designers were likely to unethically pass off an existing theme as their own design work. Neither of these accusations is universally, or even commonly, true.

One of the huge benefits of open source (and free) content management systems like WordPress is that they’ve made great web design accessible and affordable. You don’t need to pay for a bespoke content management system (and, indeed, you absolutely shouldn’t). A good web designer can help you differentiate yourself while still using a free platform. Often for a very reasonable price.

Custom web design will cost you more than using a free or commercial theme. Good custom web design will also provide a lot of additional benefits. If you choose to go with a theme, then that’s great. It might well be the best option for your business. Make it an informed choice, not a choice based on the false impression that a generic theme is indistinguishable from great custom design.

The attraction of luxury

Twenty years ago, an item like a business card was a necessity. It was the only way to effectively pass on your information to a potential business partner. Business cards were generally pretty plain; name, company and contact details. They were of functional importance.

People might collect hundreds or thousands of cards and put them in a rolodex. Today I collect hundreds or thousands of URLs and put them into my bookmarks. Those bookmarks are often lost and forgotten in the clutter, just like those cards in a rolodex often were.

My reliance now is more on websites and social media profiles. When so much of my interaction is online, it’s easy to give someone a link to follow. It’s functional, but because it’s so functional, it’s also boring.

A physical business card is more powerful now by virtue of being unnecessary. If it’s not a necessity then it’s a luxury. When I’m given a luxury (however trivial), I remember who gave it to me. I’m likely to examine it at least once, and to keep it.

Rarity and the personal touch

The premise applies to far more than just business cards. Think how powerful receiving a hand written letter from a friend can be. It doesn’t happen very often these days. I remember what’s rare and what’s unusual far more than something I experience on a daily basis.

Beyond rarity, physical media can also suggest a personal touch. The information in a letter could just as easily be conveyed in an email. That someone took the time to write a letter by hand, find a stamp and mail it, makes me feel important. By providing me with something physical, that person showed they cared.

A good demonstration of this is the relative failure of e-cards to replace physical greetings cards. Like most people, I only send greetings cards to family and close friends, people I genuinely care for. An e-card just doesn’t cut it.

A tactile experience

I like to buy art. I have various framed prints, but my favorite pieces are created with oil or acrylic, on canvas. They have physical dimensions, texture, even scent. It makes them more vibrant and powerful for me.

I always feel more connected to something that I can touch. It’s why I still do as much work as possible with pen and paper, even if the final result is going to be something digital. It’s also why, however crowded my shelves become, I’m always buying new books and never a Kindle or Nook. It’s why every drug store you go to has a booth where you can print out your digital photos!

Keep it feeling special

I can’t replicate most of the properties of physical media in a website. I still try to remember and replicate some of the qualities. The best websites feel luxurious, rather than merely functional. They’re unusual, and therefore rare. They make me as a visitor feel personally important. They look to incorporate texture or depth.

Imperfect as the imitation might be, incorporating those qualities into website design is an acknowledgment of the vital impact and importance of physical media.

All my previous international website deployments have shared certain similarities; they all use Latin script and lettering, western European languages, and the left-to-right visual alignment that I’m used to as a native English speaker.

Even in situations where I’m not sure of the particular wording or translation of content, I’ve always been in a position to know “this looks OK” or “there’s something wrong” when viewing a site that’s in staging.

Resolving local problems in a universal template

The challenge for the Israel site was to maintain our universal Rails code structure while allowing for the far wider degree of customization necessary to display a right-to-left aligned site in a non-Latin script. The added difficulty…I speak zero Hebrew!

The pay-off was significant. Creating increased flexibility within the code base provides a solid foundation for deployment of other websites with right-to-left, non-Latin language types (e.g. Arabic, Urdu or Japanese), in addition to the Israeli launch.

I asked TerraCycle’s Israeli team to make some initial translations and add some Hebrew content pages to provide a basic foundation for me to work from. It also let them look at the site and tell me what looked weird or needed changing. Without that initial content I wasn’t even in a position to guess effectively what might be needed.

The broad strokes were relatively simple. I added behavior configurations that administrators could set on a site wide basis. The Rails code then checked for this configuration when loading certain parts of the site. It defaulted the HTML document to right-to-left, and also loaded a specific right-to-left stylesheet.

These configuration options also enabled the site to utilize different CSS classes (while still utilizing as much of the master stylesheet as possible), or sometimes loaded HTML in a different order.

E.g. the search bar in the site header needed to be styled slightly differently, and so checks if the configuration “:right_to_left” is true or not. It assigns different CSS classes to the input elements based on the results of that check.

<aside id="header-search">
  <% if config[:right_to_left] == "true"%>

    <% form_tag(search_brigades_url, :method => 'get') do %>
      <%= submit_tag t('header.search'), :class => 'search-submit custom-font big-edges-leftonly' %>
      <%= text_field_tag :query, value = t('header.search'), :class => 'small-query-box big-edges-rightonly' %>
    <% end %>

  <% else %>

    <% form_tag(search_brigades_url, :method => 'get') do %>
      <%= submit_tag t('header.search'), :class => 'search-submit custom-font big-edges-rightonly' %>
      <%= text_field_tag :query, value = t('header.search'), :class => 'small-query-box big-edges-leftonly' %>
    <% end %>

  <% end %>

</aside><!-- #header-search -->

The devil is in the details

These changes put us on the right track in terms of moving sidebars, displaying page text content and other major aspects of the site. But things are never that simple. Lists and forms needed to be styled more specifically, and even simple issues such as graphical icons of an arrow pointing to the right needed to be reset to a mirror image.

Even more complex were changes to certain jQuery calculations. E.g. on the Points page of the TerraCycle site, the dynamic sidebar pulls an aside from the main content on a hover event. It clones and repositions it as a replacement for the default sidebar, and then dynamically calculates an offset to allow for the sidebar to scroll down the page with the user; all of these calculations needed to be updated.

Despite these challenges, the right-to-left specific stylesheet is less than 8k in size (a result, I think, of the strength of the base framework CSS and the flexibility offered by the use of absolute positioning). The right-to-left jQuery file is also about 90% identical to the English language default.

The importance of working with local teams

What became very clear was that localization of this type required far more hands-on time with staff in Israel. For most new country setups I provide the country lead a website administration document, allow them to get on with translation and configuration, and provide on-call support as necessary.

In this case, the last two weeks of the project saw me spending three or four hours on the phone to Israel on a near daily basis, talking through translations and design aspects. We needed to do this because I could make the changes, but I couldn’t recognize whether the changes were correct. Our Israel team needed to give me the Hebrew text, an explanation of the layout, and immediate feedback on the changes on the staging site.

My Skype chat history is filled with lines of text that I can’t read, but which is successfully integrated into the site!

Providing future flexibility

Website localization is more than mere translation, but a shared script, alignment and generally common norms of layout and content meant that the configuration of previous Latin-based language sites was smooth. The difference in scope of localization for a non-Latin language site was really driven home during the Israel site deployment.

The process has been a success. TerraCycle Israel shares exactly the same code structure as other TerraCycle sites. I didn’t need to use Flash, with all the strengths that underpin TerraCycle’s complex web system.

I think the Israel site looks great (I’ve fallen in love with Hebrew from a typographical design aspect). As a longer term bonus, the template for all TerraCycle sites can now switch to a right-to-left language with a single configuration option, a massive bonus when moving into other markets.

These configuration options aren’t just for content and application settings, they can provide a lot of flexibility for aspects of front-end Rails web design too.

The behavior gem

For basic site wide configuration options, the TerraCycle website uses behavior; a Rails gem/plugin for storing application configuration. It’s part of an overall attempt to incorporate as many content management options as possible into the overall TerraCycle web application, and focuses on overall application settings.

Some basic uses of the behavior gem include setting the Google Analytics code on a site by site basis, defining which language videos are shown on the front page, and activating or deactivating menu options across the site. But it also provides me with more options for implementing styling and aesthetic changes specific to different sites.

The advantage of flexible options

Setting up the behavior gem is easy. After installation (instructions at github), the config/behavior.yml file provides wide ranging flexibility for setting up different types of configuration options. You can set up strings, integers, passwords, text, decimals, select options or booleans quickly and easily, and have them available for configuration by site administrators.

A simple example might be creating a configuration option to show the Facebook ‘like’ button on the site, which is easily done by adding the following to the config/behavior.yml file;

fb_like:
  name: Show facebook 'like' button?
  default: true
  type: boolean

We can then use a simple if statement in the view file;

<% if config[:fb_link] == "true" %>
  Do stuff here
<% end %>

The site will simply check the database to see if the fb_link is set to true, and if so it will display the content inside the if statement.

Configuring for Rails web design

In addition to showing or hiding elements, or adding user configurable data such as a Google Analytics code to the site, the configuration options also give me flexibility for styling purposes.

Simply styling an element

A very simple use might be to assign an additional class to an element, which is then referenced in the global stylesheet. On the TerraCycle site there is a ‘Sign up’ button in the drop down navigation menu. By default this uses a larger, bolder font than other drop down menu links, but we realized that for some languages this meant that the text was too large and overran the button’s container.

I created a configuration option menu_signupbutton_style as a boolean option on the config/behavior.yml. This is set to true by default. The code in the view partial then reads;

<li class="sub-1<% if config[:menu_signupbutton_style] == "true" %> casual-font" id="nav-signup<% end %>">
  List item content here
</li>

By default the list item is assigned the class of “casual font” and the id of “nav-signup“, but these can be turned off in order to remove the specialized styling for that link.

Complex rearrangement of elements

A far more complex use of the behavior configuration on the TerraCycle site is the implementation of right-to-left layout and styling, as used on the TerraCycle Israel site, which is in Hebrew. There is still only a single option in config/behavior.yml;

right_to_left:
  name: Right to left language active?
  default: false
  type: boolean

…but there are a multitude of calls throughout the view files which determine whether this option is active or not, and rearrange code structure or assign additional styling depending on the context. In this way, we have a strong basic structure for any right-to-left language site we launch, simply through changing a single option from ‘false’ to ‘true’.

Frameworks need flexibility

Any web framework, whether Rails based, or otherwise, needs to try and provide as much flexibility as possible within the overall structure. It is possible to make a “one size fits all” solution for what may be multiple similar sites, but users and/or administrators need to have the capacity to make necessary changes. There are a number of different options in Rails to do this, and Rails 3 deals with this flexibility better on a native level than Rails 2.3.

Despite the size and complexity of the TerraCycle website, the simple application of the behavior gem has provided a lot of options not just for application settings, but also for Rails web design options.