I’ve got this friend who is responsible for a corporate front-end web environment with almost a dozen browser-facing web applications. Pretty much all he can do at the moment is change static content in the antiquated and wildly inappropriate CMS. Changing anything significant requires implementation of an expensive one-off SDLC waterfall-type project with a business case, requirements-gathering, PM, BA, dedicated test-resource – the whole box and dice. These projects often under-deliver, with scope being reduced en route to avoid budget and deadline blowout.

He’s not happy with the way things are.

He’s got it into his head that it would be far better to create an easily-manageable front-end, with a unified, standardised UI under the control of his front-end web team. Key aspects are simplicity, speed, cost-efficiency, and trust – none of which can be used to describe the current state of affairs.

Some ideas

I was talking to my friend, and he said that at a high level, he’d like to abstract the various applications from the UI, where possible, by means of API/Web Services/etc. On the front-end would be a web application framework – He’s thinking Symfony or similar. He believes he has sufficient developer resource on his team to build/maintain/support this.

Some other ideas he’s been tossing around, in no particular order:

• Source repository. (He doesn’t have one at the moment). svn or git? Stable trunk policy?
• Continuous integration. (thanks Mike!)
• Test-driven development.
• Automated processes.
• Security.
• Content management.
• Performance. Code-efficiency, caching, etc. (Although he’s heard it said that performance shouldn’t become an issue until performance becomes an issue)
• The database. Does CouchDB lend itself to supporting a content-driven web application?
• Will it blend scale?

More ideas…

… are welcome. He needs all the help he can get. While it’s all very bluesky (with pie) at the moment, he needs to turn it into a watertight, bulletproof, business case. And soon.

What makes Crazy Egg stand out from our other tools is not that it collects data that the other tools don’t, but rather how the collected data is presented and visualised.

With the volume of traffic we get to our site, we just run Crazy Egg for a couple of hours on a particular page, and can immediately see areas of the page that can be improved; e.g. we can see that many users are clicking a particular image that has no link. So we put an appropriate link on that image, and save our visitors some frustration/confusion and we save them a click.

It’s also quite interesting to note that across the board, people don’t mind scrolling. You can see where people of particular window-sizes clicked. Plenty of small-window users were using the links in our footer; they had to scroll down to see it.

Crazy Egg is free to use on up to 4 pages and for 5000 visits per month. We used the free plan while we trialed it, but have been convinced of its value, and so have since upgraded.

Calibri.

I hadn’t noticed any web sites using the new suite of fonts that ship with Office 2007 until now. I’d already hacked my system registry to enable ClearType (a bunch of my system settings are locked down here at work) so it looks good.

I understand there are some complaints about the new fonts, especially if ClearType is not enabled, and even with ClearType, the odd letter — e.g. the uppercase ‘I’ — looks a little fuzzy, but it’s certainly a refreshing change from the standard fonts we’ve had to use for so many years now.

Hear, hear, I say.

So when the user activates a control, I use JS to create some ‘input’ elements (including some radio buttons), add a few attributes to them, and then insert them in a table cell.
It’s not exactly rocket science, even for a JS |\|00|3 such as myself.

Let me expand on this.

I build in Firefox and test in IE. So I use the following code:

// NB: bits and pieces have been left out for the sake of this example.

// create the cell
var newCell = newRow.insertCell(2);

// create the elements
var newInput1 = document.createElement('input' );
var newInput2 = document.createElement('input' );
var newLabel1 = document.createElement('label');
var newLabel2 = document.createElement('label');

// set some attributes on those elements
newInput1.setAttribute('type', 'radio');
newInput1.setAttribute('name', 'rdoAddRemove_' + rowIndex);
newInput1.setAttribute('id', 'rdoAdd_' + rowIndex);
newInput1.setAttribute('value', 'Add');
newInput2.setAttribute('type', 'radio');
newInput2.setAttribute('name', 'rdoAddRemove_' + rowIndex);
newInput2.setAttribute('id', 'rdoRemove_' + rowIndex);
newInput2.setAttribute('value', 'Remove');
newLabel1.setAttribute('for', 'rdoAdd_' + rowIndex);
newLabel2.setAttribute('for', 'rdoRemove_' + rowIndex);

// append the elements to the cell
newCell.appendChild(newInput1);
newCell.appendChild(newLabel1);
newCell.appendChild(newInput2);
newCell.appendChild(newLabel2);

So you can see what I’m trying to do here, and so could Firefox, because it built the code correctly.

IE, on the other hand, displayed the radio buttons, but wouldn’t allow the user to select them. After much hair-pulling and fretting, (because I can’t find a Firebug equivalent for IE), I discovered that IE wasn’t adding the ‘name’ attributes to the ‘input’ elements.

Apparently (and I’ve lost the link now) IE has a ‘feature’ that means you can’t change the name of an element once it has been created.

So I tried this:

newInput = document.createElement('<input name="rdoAddRemove_' + rowIndex + '" />' );

Yay! It now works in IE! …but the good browsers spat the dummy. And I really felt that if I were going to do this then I might as well ‘innerHTML’ everything.

So I remembered my good old friend try {...} catch(err) {...} and came up with this:

try {
	// IE will eat this, FF Safari and others will choke on it.
	newInput1 = document.createElement('<input name="rdoAddRemove_' + rowIndex + '" />');
	newInput2 = document.createElement('<input name="rdoAddRemove_' + rowIndex + '" />');
} catch(err) {
	// Good browsers will eat this instead.
	newInput1 = document.createElement('input');
	newInput2 = document.createElement('input');
}

Now whether this is the best way to do it or not, I don’t know, but it worked in all the browsers I tested it in so I’m happy(-ish).

GRRRRR @ IE for wasting my afternoon!!

Barely containing the drool, I had a quick play with it and took a few photos for your viewing pleasure.

You can get a good idea of its size here on my desk, next to a CD, an A4 notepad, and my PC keyboard.

It doesn’t support WPA Enterprise, so we couldn’t connect to the corporate WiFi network at work, and without EDGE support, we couldn’t use the maps application. But it was so nice to play with. The two-finger gestures for zooming when viewing photos are great.

Being a kiwi, he wasn’t able to pass a credit check to sign up on plan for two years, so it’s on prepay.

It’s got the album cover flippy thing going on here in iPod mode. The earbuds have a microphone with a call answer/music pause/start button thingy.

There are a few more photos in my flickr account.

Virb°

The best layout/presentation/customisation by far. Profile customisation is amazing &emdash; you’ve seen my profile; it’s pretty much the default layout with a few different colours. Now check out local Auckland band SansArcade’s Virb.com profile. It’s the goodness.

Facebook

Compared to Virb°, Facebook is more about networking and less about profile customisation, i.e. while you can drag and drop your profile modules to change the layout, you can’t change colours/fonts/CSS. Profiles are not public – you’ll need a Facebook account to see them. The user interface is usable, and as with Virb°, very tidy.

Bebo

Bebo is much more casual than the previous two. Customisation is limited to colours and module background images – you can make your own if you want. Targeted at a younger market, Bebo is “the largest social networking site in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand, and the third largest behind MySpace and Facebook in the United States” (from their ‘About’ page.)

MySpace

MySpace is one of the bigger social networks. It’s also one of the uglier ones.

MSN Spaces

Microsoft’s offering. MSN Spaces ties in with your Windows Live/Hotmail account.

LinkedIn

A business networking application. Focus on skills and work experience.

Xing

Also a business networking application. Focus on contact generation and management.

Meetup

An online network to facilitate offline networking. Used for arranging meatspace meetings of people and groups with specific interests.

So those are the networks I have accounts with. I really only use a couple of them; the others I’ve just signed up to for a look-see.

Some observations

I’m not sure how much value these networks add. I imagine the business networks could be useful if you’re looking to hire people with specific skills, or if you’re looking for work. The ‘fun’ networks are handy for staying in touch with friends, etc.

Some people put a lot of time and effort into their profiles &emdash; really epitomizing their chosen sub-culture with references to stereotypical bands, movies, etc.

There has been some concern around people offering too much personal information, and inadvertently making themselves targets for stalkers and other unsavoury contacts. There have been a few incidents where use of social networking has allegedly led to criminal activity, even homicide. Some profiles are set up posthumously to honour the memory of a friend(s) who have been killed in car accidents, shootings, etc.

I guess I’m more of a recreational user, myself.

I am very much looking forward to the Auckland Web Meetup this coming Thursday evening. I’ll probably write about that at some stage.

What are your thoughts on online social networks?

E-mail was invented so people could quickly exchange text messages over fast or slow or really slow connections, using simple, non-processor-intensive applications on any computing platform, or using phones, or hand-held devices, or almost anything else that can display text and permits typing.

Amen. There is some interesting debate in the comments. So, it’s plain text for me. What do you think?

It’s a really well-built site, and I’ve just discovered/noticed today that the Portfolio section uses sparklines to show the amount of oral activity for each portfolio. How cool is that?