Year: 2007

Categories
Just Shelley

Breaka de web

I finally uploaded chapter 7 for the reviewers, and was it a difficult chapter to do. The topic has to do with breaking the web with Ajax, putting it back together again, and what are known as ‘single-page’ applications.

After thinking on it for days, and looking at some extraordinarily torturous ways of patching together kludgey fixes, I finally realized that either you create pages that do well when scripting is disabled, and then add the bits; or you just accept that the application breaks the web and accept the consequences. Personally, I believe that 99.999% of Ajax applications have no justification for completely breaking the web. But, I’m a stick in the mud.

Tired stick in the mud. All I have left is the remaining portions of the last few chapters and then I’ll be done with the draft. I have a wonderful group of reviewers who will then help me see the many errors of my ways, and I’m looking forward to their efforts. When we’re finished, I’ll list out the folks who are helping, who will also get effusive thanks in the book.

Once the editing is done, my god I’ll be able to turn off my computers. Get out of my chair. I want to hit the trails for three months solid.

Categories
Connecting

Rumblin’ in the Neighborhood

Melinda at Sour Duck has pointers to two interesting and oddly related stories. The first is The Dark Side of Community:

The core problem is how to handle conflict in a medium that enables rapid escalation of conflict. I’m not clear on what constitutes a full-blown “blog war”, but I think the phrase isn’t necessarily helpful when characterizing disagreements between bloggers. It’s inflammatory, for one thing; for another thing, it gets me into a mind-set where any disagreement is viewed as negative, wrong, and problematic.

The problem isn’t disagreeing. The problem is when disagreement isn’t tolerated.

The other story is the big one in weblogging right now, and rightfully so. The Edwards campaign hired two strongly opinionated feminists for campaign jobs. The conservative elements fell on the two like dogs over juicy bones; joining in a festival of righteous indignation, which I don’t think they realize will eventually come down on their own heads. Rumor has it that Edwards is going to fire them (or not).

As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

As James Joyner points out: “Bloggers have a ‘paper’ trail. The longer someone has been blogging, the more of their sometimes-developed thoughts are out there for public consumption. Not only have they likely written things uncomplimentary to their now-boss, but they have almost certainly written things that could embarrass him.”

One does not need to agree with the Marcotte or McEwan’s comments in order to realize the absurdity here, but if this is going to be the standard that is applied, I don’t think there are many bloggers, if there are any, who will be able to be affiliated with political campaigns in the future. Whatever is the case, the standards should be applied equally, not driven by the hysterical lynch-mob behavior that is the fuel of the right-wing blogosphere.

One of the leaders of this little movement is Michelle Malkin, doing what she does so well: climbing the stairs to success by stepping on the backs of those around her. You might remember her from when she wrote a book justifying the wholesale internment of Japanese during World War II. She’s also been one of the leaders of the effort to fence the borders between us and Mexico: got to keep them sneaky Mexicans out. Oh, darn, that was a mistake: got to keep them sneaky Muslims out, because they’ll come across the border with those sneaky Mexicans.

None of us can survive scrutiny in this environment–not unless we play it safe, and what’s the fun of that?

Categories
JavaScript

I don’t write JavaScript like it’s Ruby

I just uploaded the largest chapter, 9, and had hoped to get 10 loaded tonight, but my mind isn’t working well. Aha, I though, write in the weblog instead.

This has been such a difficult book in more ways than one. The examples were huge and now, during editing, I have to find some way to cut them down to size; or at least trim that which shows in the book.

There are so many factors complicating the examples and the writing: cross-browser differences, quirks, IE, memory leaks, XHTML doctypes, IE, markup, CSS, JavaScript, etc etc IE etc. Then there are the issues of graceful degradation so that an application works with scripting turned off, making the code unobtrusive, and most importantly, making it accessible. Testing with JAWs, with Windows Eyes, not even sure how to use the applications.

The examples must also be exciting, fresh, innovative, and fun. Sparkly, hip, fashionable. Attractive, clean, impressive. Efficient and secure. Optimized and compartmentalized. Leave Web 2.0 in the dust of my passing.

I had a wonderful time with Chapter 8 and advanced CSS and SVG and Canvas–what a kick. I really like my database examples, and I think I’ve made some good, solid points throughout the book. I’ve touched on all the major components, demonstrated the major libraries, but provided most of the code. There’s booze in it, but no sex.

My biggest concern? I don’t write JavaScript like it’s Ruby.

Categories
Stuff

Serendipitous find of the day

I was testing out a humongous mashup of Flickr, RSS, Google, Technorati that I created for Chapter 9 of “Adding Ajax”, when I clicked through on the tags for a Flickr photo of Chihuly glass, which led to a weblog post that features a video of the MBG Chihuly exhibit closing; accompanied by an interview with a smart young man who seems to know more about greenhouse gases than most of Washington DC; interspersed with quotes from famous people read by a safari-hat wearing Dickson Beall; ragtime jazz playing the background.

The site is WaterSANA, a site dedicated to environmentalism, featuring the Green TV Guide: eclectic videos combining tours of sites from throughout St. Louis, political commentary, interviews, music, and quotes, all packaged up into bite size pieces about two minutes long. If the above video I described doesn’t grab you, then may I also recommend Tiger, Bach, Lincoln, Twain: A tiger answers the call of nature during the week that George W. Bush (the ungrateful biped) had an urge for a surge toward success in Iraq. Or Pony Express, Cars, Stars, and Fools.

Categories
Weblogging

Falling Out

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Shel Israel, in comments to Robert Scoble’s post, where he mentions he’s being paid to be keynote speaker at the PayPerPost conference (yes, that PayPerPost):

Robert,
I am personally disappointed that you have chosen to do this. To me Pay for Post represents everything that the book you and I wrote opposes. I wish you would change your mind. This will not help your reputation.
…
One more thought, Robert. You taught me the standards for blogging that I adhere to. It is what you taught me that makes me so passionately oppose Pay per Post, who have shown themselves to be the sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere. Robert, I really hope you cancel. In the long run, you will be doing PodTech a service.

Now what was it Robert said, back in October about PayPerPost?

To hear that one of the illuminati is taking filthy lucre from the despised PayPerPost, after all such sneered at the little people who earned bucks to do things like, oh, pay rent or buy food, does demonstrate that too many people are quite willing to define rules they can’t live by themselves.

Speaking of which, there’s the Techcruch 20 conference, being billed as a humanitarian act to help the poor, financially burdened startups, being hosted by Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis. Oh if only someone will donate some space–I’m sure that neither Arrington nor Calacanis is going to benefit, personally, from such generosity.

They asked Dave Winer to be on the planning committee. Yup, three mentos sitting on a stick, just waiting for the diet coke.

Then there’s the Nick Denton and Gawker playfulness, where Gawker ads were sandwiched around copyrighted material and then uploaded to YouTube: probably one of the acts that triggered so much anger against YouTube and a mass DCMA take down effort:

For the past three months, an employee at Gawker Media has posted copyright videos sandwiched between ads for Gawker-owned properties such as Valleywag and Gizmodo.
…
At least 50 videos were uploaded by the Gawker employee since October from such shows as ABC’s Good Morning America and Inside Edition and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.

Perhaps Mr. Denton will have to resort to scrawling his ads on his own forehead, eh?

I know this is little interest for most of you, and I hope you’ll forgive me as I indulge in a spate of unseemly gloating as the White Boys with the Most tear themselves apart in front of our very eyes.

You guys are a real work of art, you know that?

And that’s enough of that.