Nick Lewis: The Blog

Hmmmm... this is a small point, but worth a mention. Perhaps Forbes -- as a whole -- isn't as clueless I thought. One Forbes blogger* Rich Karlgaard writes in retort to attack of the blogs,

When companies and people do the right thing, the majority of bloggers will write good things about them. But that's the rub, isn't it? Any company that wants a good reputation in the blogosphere must earn it. That means treating customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders with fairness and dignity, doesn't it?

Time and again, I get myself into conflicts by insisting that design makes or breaks a website. Often, those who disagree with me say things like, "well, we are an information site; our users don't care", or "maybe if we were going after an audience of teeny boppers, I'd agree -- but were aiming for an audience of busy professionals." I always knew they were dead wrong, and their decisions were going to harm the potential success of their websites -- but now I have studies to back up my argument.

I first learned to use unordered lists in 1999 while taking a highschool web mastering class. Regardless of the what the defenders of using divs for unordered lists might say, I would have got marked wrong even then had I used the technique that is used CNN/Money's website. My teacher would have grumbled, "What the hell are you thinking? You better start paying better attention! Why are your eyes bloodshot?"

For bulleted list items, unordered are the only reasonable choice of markup. The only real defense for CNN/Money's technique of using divs and hardcoded html entities for bullets is the inconsistent default margins and padding of unordered lists in browsers. But their technique is the mark of a beginner, an incompetent webmaster who hasn't updated their skills since 1995, or a lazy pothead. The CSS needed to make lists appear consistantly, in all of the many variations, be it block or inline, has been widely supported across all modern browsers for 4 years. (and yes, IE 5.5 mac is a modern browser, netscape 2.x isn't.)

So, lets get a coffin ready for divs and bullets appoarch for lists. Here's why CNN money [also known as fortune magazine] (and anyone who is coding HTML) should have used unordered lists.

I. For people with disabilities, semantic markup is more than a buzzword, or catch phrase of snobby html know-it-alls. Semantics are what allows them to enjoy the experience of navigating and reading pages on the web. In this case, a list would have alerted non-visual browsers that the latest items were part of a series -- something key for anyone using a text-only, or non-visual browser. However, since they used generic divs, there is no telling how confusing of a jumble it might actually be to blind people, or how difficult it might

Jeff Eaton has put up an awesome website for anyone who is just starting to get their head wrapped around drupal: Cooking with Drupal.

I like the culinary metaphor. Modules are like spices. The more you use, the less value you get from each one. Too many modules, and too much functionality usually confuses visitors (as well as yourself, KISS* is a good rule in drupal).

It seems to me that Drupal 4.7's bugs no longer overshadow its great new features. Last night, I built the beginnings of my latest project using Drupal 4.7 beta-3. It went so well that I took pictures of some of the huge improvements, and cool gizmos that only work with 4.7.

There is also a common theme in these modules that is  relevent to recent posts by Civicspace Labs Director Zack Rosen, and Lord Protector of Drupal, Dries  Buytaert.

*** 

The Control Panel Module 

One small module, one huge step for drupal in the intensifying opensource CMS wars. What we have here is no static Mambo/Joomla! admin section - this is a menu that's been transmogrified into a control panel from an actualy menu tree. In otherwards, its fully dynamic, and customizable from the the menu administration page. Notice how it deals with nested menus "logs", and "settings" and you'll suddenly recognize what menu your looking at. Hopefully, we can eventually build an api into the control panel so that modules can include their own icons for use in the control panel.

TinyMCE updates: 

You now have control over every single button on TinyMCE. Only include the one's you need, and screw the rest. Yes, this makes us very happy. There also appears to be new room for extending the interface, allowing (possibily) plugins like img_assist  to exist within the tiny_mce interface. That is another big one for Drupal when it happens. TinyMCE actually makes its profit off of the text editor by selling plugins that basically do what img_assist, and upload modules do. If we could integrate upload, and img_assist into tinymce -- we'd have the holy grail of opensource CMS WYSIWYG editors -- no competition -- none. Folks, I think these are the types of features 95 percent of users care about.

Nice Menus (javascript, css dropdown menus) 

My cursor isn't seen, but my its currently hovering over "user agents". Why is this signficant? Well, I used to have to go through at least 4 page refreshes (which translates to 14 something seconds) to get to that point. Now,  this is a big improvement. Any feature that shaves off time (and this module shaves off easily 3/4ths of the time it used to take) it takes for me to get where I need to go receives an A+

GraphSTAT 

Again -- key feature that most every user could use: graphs to help them sort through the hundreds of thousands of rows that can end up in their traffic logs. GraphSTAT appears to be a perfect base for a new generation of logs which put emphasis not on data, but displaying the data in a meaningful

I've recently started reading a blogger named Guy Kawasaki. Strangely, this is the case where the name of his blog, Let the Good Times Roll, is less memorable than his name, and his tagline, "Blogger: Someone with nothing to say writing for people with nothing to do is." is the more memorable than his name. I wonder what Darren would think of such an odd emphasis of taglines/author name/blog name. But as usual, my thoughts have taken this ship wildly off course, and I can only ask you dear readers to pray -- pray for us.

I just re-enabled my traffic graphs, and found out that I've received just short of 200,000 hits in the past 30 days. It occurred to me that in this blogs year of existence, it has passed long one-million mark for page hits. This is a glorious moment for us -- me and my blog -- and so before celebrating our success, I wanted to thank all of the little people who made it possible for us to be here today:

I had no idea that you didn't need an additional program to take screenshots. Try this.

1. Press the "print" button (often goes by several different names, but it is always the button that somehow suggests the idea of printing) on your keyboard.  
2. Open your favorite image editing program, and press "ctrl v". Or, select "paste" from the edit menu.

That's it! You now have your screenshot. I'm quaking in my boots I'm so excited.

Mike over at techdirt (probably my favorite source of industry news) points out some delicious irony:

On the very day the company officially announced its first Intel-based product, Apple's stock price closed at $80.86. If you don't get it, it's time to read up on your computer history.

So do it: read up your computer history. Slacker.

The price of a high page rank is eternal spam. On average, this blog gets spammed once every 5 minutes. This is enormously frustrating, as I've always been a radical supporter of open comments that are not moderated. I was able to do this for a while thanks to the bad behavior module. The module tracks every user that enters this site, it watches their behavior for red flags that indicate a spam bot. It worked wonders, but unfortunately, spammers seem to be as cunning as drug smugglers when it comes to getting around the barriers put up by authorities.