Traffic Jam Diaries : 1

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Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Skinny Jeans on men.

Yes, they make it impossible to fart because they’re squeezing your cheeks together with a pressure that’s unachievable in any other way, but other than that, I fail to see any advantage to wearing them. They reduce sperm count, they make you look like you’re constantly on the verge of falling down, and they’re difficult put on without lubricant. And they don’t look good. On you. Oh, sure, they might have looked semi-normal on a Scandanavian named Aero and a Swede named Yan, but other than that, no. It’s like Gary Oldham’s hair in the Fifth Element. Sure, he could pull it off. But could anybody else?

Any comedy with Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, or Will Ferrell.

Likably clueless guys who get hit in the crotch and learn to overcome a measure of their idiocy (but only a tiny bit) for love are easy money. I get it already.

WTF.

I mean, WTF is up with WTF? It’s ruined the whole phrase. That phrase used to mean something! It used to be that only the baddest-a$$ kids in school would say that. That’s how you knew who to be afraid of. It’s how the social hierarchy was kept in order. But now it’s been reduced to three fairly benign letters that everyone and their little sister will use. WTF?!

Glossy logos.

It’s like putting bacon on crap. That first bit is tasty, but after that… You just can’t hide the taste of crap. Or skanky clothes on a marginally attractive (at best) woman. Oh, I know you looked, but you regretted it, didn’t you? Because your more attractive, more classy and more liked-by-your-parents-and-friends girlfriend saw you look, and now she’s gone.

And glossy does not automatically mean “web 2.0″. It usually means “I have no idea what the mission or brand of my company is, so I’m going to make things shiny and hope they attract the easily amused.” Problem with that is the easily amused aren’t very loyal. Go figure.

Oh, I’m sure they’re appropriate every once in a while; nearly everything is. But, like my momma always used to say, if your friends all dressed in women’s clothing, would you? I admit I’ve done a few such logos myself, at the behest of client demands (and always presented next to much more appropriate brands for their company that would last longer than the next couple of years when “Glossy” goes out of style). Yes, I did them, but, like those whose job is putting dogs to sleep, a little bit of me died that day because I knew I was doing something very, very wrong, and I’ll never get that part of me back.

Content Management for Sites that Matter

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Monday, July 20th, 2009

In the last five years or so, I’ve been involved in the enhancement, support, or creation of a number of CMSs. I’ve seen firsthand both the thought-process that went into the design of the CMS and the effort required to build the CMS that includes all the features proposed by the design. Some features tend to make more sense than others.

Probably the most popular feature of current CMSs is the built-in HTML editor, something that allows your basic non-tech savvy user to get WYSIWIG with their website. There are two flaws in the inclusion of a built in HTML editor, especially a WYSIWIG editor.

First, websites fall into two basic categories: those that matter, and those that don’t. If your website matters, you should not be leaving its creation and maintenance in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. And if your web dev/admin does know what she’s doing, the last thing she’s going to want is a clumsy, feature-starved HTML editor when she could just write the HTML by hand for far better results. If your website doesn’t matter, there’s no reason to bother with a CMS. Find some contractor to build your three pages and you’re good.

Second, built-in HTML editors are notoriously bad at showing you what your website will look like in the browsers that your visitors are going to actually use. There’s not much point in spending hours tweaking your pages to look right in your CMS’s editor just to discover that they only work in IE, and look like garbage in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

CMSs are often advertised as one-size-fits-all systems. This is next on my list of flawed design features. As I mentioned earlier, there are websites that matter, and those that don’t. If yours is one of those that matters, it is inevitable that you will want your website to do stuff that isn’t the same as every other website out there. No matter how many features that come with the CMS, you aren’t going to be happy with it if the CMS doesn’t support easily doing what you want. And trying to add a new feature to your one-size-fits-all CMS? Ha ha. Fat chance.

The fancier CMSs allow you do cool stuff like manage the structure of your website and upload templates. They take all this info that you give them and build you the pages for your site. That’s great and all, but it also brings us to the next flaw in CMS design. Where is your content stored?

Storing content in actual web page files, even ones that were created so fancily with smart templates and XSLT, brings with it unnecessary baggage. Most websites that matter are none too small, and that kind of content storage can result in the creation and storage of a vast number of files. All of those files will be discarded or re-created every time you make any changes to your templates (and possibly your site structure), giving you lots of time to play Solitaire while you wait for your change to be applied. It’s also no fun to move all those files around, and they are generally far too married to your web site’s design.

Content should be stored separately, preferably in a database. Pages can then be created dynamically (or “on-the-fly” for you buzzword junkies). Changes to templates don’t have any direct effect on an files other than the template, and of course the dynamically created pages don’t need to be stored or transferred. Most importantly, the content is agnostic, knowing nothing about the web site’s design. This makes your content highly portable. If you completely redo the look and feel of your website, the core content is unaffected, rather than requiring hours of painful page by page updates.

The most fundamental flaw in common CMSs is a lack of true versioning. CMSs are treated more like portals to a website, instead of a true management system. There needs to be at the minimum two basic versioning options: the ability to preview and then publish changes, rather than having them go live as soon as they’re saved, and the ability to roll back all changes to any past version of the web site. It’s easy to make mistakes when updating a web site’s content. Having a way to undo those mistakes easily can save lots of hours.

For people and businesses whose web sites matter, the best CMS is most likely to be a custom tailored CMS that will fit your needs exactly. Any CMS is going to have a similar set of basic features, and involvement in its customization will guarantee that additional features you will need are made available and has the added benefit of forcing you to review your website to determine what those needs will be. As long as your custom CMS allows you to freely edit content without having to use a clumsy built in HTML editor, includes all the features and options you need, and stores the content intelligently, you’re bound to be happy with the result.

Rain New Site Template/Package

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Friday, July 17th, 2009

As a frontend developer there are few things that excite me more than getting some great designs from a designer and preparing to slice and mark it up. But after four years of starting new projects and gathering all the assets I need for the site structure (you know, stuff like swfobject, jquery, reset stylesheets etc) I suddenly had an epiphany.  What if I created a template that includes said assets to make it smoother to get rocking? Yeah, I know. Something I probably should have done long ago.

So here it is, for the good of me, the other frontend developers at Rain, and anyone else who may want to use it. I’ll try to keep it updated as new versions of the assets come out. This new site template package includes the following assets which are most commonly used here at Rain:

• jQuery v1.3.2
• Swfobject v2.2 and expressinstall.swf
• XHTML  1.0 transitional doctype
• Eric Meyer’s reset stylesheet
• Shadowbox
• Drew Diller’s IE6 PNG support (hopefully we won’t need this much longer)
• Spacer GIFs (just kidding)

We don’t always use all of these assets, but it’s easier to remove them then track them down and add them. If you have other suggestions, recommendations, or comments we’d love to hear them.

Rain SVG

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Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Aaron Hardy wrote an excellent overview of SVG technology used at Rain to provide our clients with a robust set of tools for editing vector images online. We posted this as its own page as a reference on our blog. Check it out here.

Here are a few of our clients who have utilized our SVG library:

• ZenStudio
• AncestryPress
• Aspire