By Matthew Hile on 11/17/2006 6:50 AM

Clay Shirky's talk, Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories (Audio/Discussion), is a part of the fascinating Seminars About Long-Term Thinking (SALT) hosted by Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation whose fame began in the 60s with the creation of the Whole Earth Catalog which Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer, called the conceptual forerunner of the web search engine.

Shirky talked about the difficulty of preserving our information over the long term. Much of his focus was on how one could find information that had been stored. He described the difficulties of structured catalogs. Comparing them to lost languages for which we have no Rosetta stone. As a solution he suggested "degeneracy" that is classifitory redundancy so that the same thing is said in many different ways. Degeneracy is embodied in the "new" social tagging systems such as flicker, and del.icio.us. "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody" and by enabling this sort of categorization we have an ever emergent understanding of how people think about these items and can therefore find they. Perhaps more importantly, these systems also alow us to understand how our understanding changes over time.

The notions of tagging have long been used to help locate information. In searching the scientific literature these are called "key terms" which are associated, by the author or others, with a particular article. When searching for some information I would rarely choose to start with such classifications as the Dewey Decimal system. Rather I enter some key terms that would seem to me to fit the concept I want to understand and use what I find there to expand my search to gather in the web of knowledge that surrounds it. What tags adds to this information is that other readers add sharable terms which will expand and enrich that web of understanding making our information links more fruitful.

Shirky's talk is a great listen and a good jumping off point to expand your own thinking about how to find what you want and how to understand the meaning of what you find.

By Matthew Hile on 11/1/2006 8:28 AM

In the most recent version of DNN 3.3.5 and 4.3.5 clicking a file link will fail in Firefox if the file name has any spaces in it. The work around is to eliminated those spaces until a fix is provided.

By Matthew Hile on 11/1/2006 8:13 AM

Error: You do not have permissions to view the requested file

In earlier versions of DNN uploading a file would allow one to easily make it available to portal users. With the more recent version 3.3.5 (and I assume the 4.3.5 version as well) they have added an option to store files in the file system (secure and unsecured) or in the database (secure).

By default the directory with the previously uploaded files which was formerly open is now marked as secure. This breaks the accessibility that we had come to expect. While I am all for security breaking this is not a great choice.

To change the behavior back to what you expect open the file manager go the the Security Settings at the bottom of the page and allow All Users to view these files.

One important note about the file system secured files. These files are only secure when DNN accesses them. The user can enter the full URL directly into the browser and access the, evidently not so secure, files.

By Matthew Hile on 10/19/2006 5:04 AM

In its default installation DNN (up to and including 3.2.2) breaks the expected user experience with regards to links. By default the style sheet sets links text-decoration: none;. What this means is that the user has only a slight shift in color to identify a link. Moreover, unlike the browser's typical default, visited links do not look any different than unvisited links. I for one rely on being easily able to identify a link because it is underlined and whether or not I have visited it based on its color. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article entitled Guidelines for Visualizing Links provides great information on why this is important.

So how do you fix the problem? There are two options.

• For a single site go to the Style Sheet Editor which you will find on the Admin > Site Settings page and add "text-decoration: underline;" (without the quotes) to the a:link and a:visited styles.
• If you want to fix all of the sites change the a:link entries in the ..\Portals\_default\default.css file.
  

Making these changes helps your users better understand and use your site.

UPDATE: This code only works in Firefix and not IE (tested in version 7). After much searching, experimentation, and trial and error work I found that dropping the trailing semicolon allowed this approach to work in both browsers.

By Matthew Hile on 9/21/2006 1:08 PM

I like Joel Spolsky's take on the software world. He also is interested in good user design. In a recent review of Sprint's new Power Vision Network phone he has an hilarious (or sad if you were the designer of this disaster) review of the free phone they sent him. The quote I liked the best

13. Remove the battery and put it in again. That should get you back to the main menu.

To get the full effect and read about a really poor user experience read his full post.

 

By Matthew Hile on 9/19/2006 8:53 AM

OK so I get a technical magazine each month in the mail. There is an article which attracts my interest and a reference to a “InstantDoc” id so I can quickly get the supporting materials and the code from the web. Cool!

Step 1 - So I log onto the web site. First it tells me that I need to be registered. So I search my records to see if I have already registered and find nothing. Try to create a new registered user and it appears that I am already registered (OK so this was my bad for not recording my information in my secure ID/PW file.) So I try to get an emailed reminder and find that my registration has my old email address that no longer works. So an email message to the publisher asking them to change my email address. I never got a reply but checked again in a few days and could then send my current email address the reminder.

Step 2 – So I log onto the web site with my ID/PW and request the “InstantDoc” and up it pops. Nope. Now it tells me that I must associate my user name with my customer number. Where is my customer number? On the package that encased the publication which is, naturally, long in the trash. That seems like a reasonable place to put this number so I wait for the next issue to arrive…

Step 3 – My next monthly issue arrives and I save my customer label and head back to the web site. I enter my ID/PW and try to associate my customer number so that I can get my subscriber access to the “InstantDoc.” In response I get a message telling me that I need to contact customer support and get them to associate my ID and customer number. Off goes an email and the next day I get a friendly response telling me that the two pieces of information have been associated and am good to go.

Step 4 – Imagine my excitement. I log on to the site with my ID/PW, enter the magic “InstantDoc” number and…well I get to a page that has an abstract about the article but where is the additional information? I click the “subscriber only” link – nope that just give me the opportunity to subscribe to the publication (there is also another “Subscribe to …” link just in case I missed the first opportunity). How about the “Main article” link? After all the blurb with the “InstantDoc” did promise “an expanded version,” but no the same information on the web as in the print version. But wait there is a sidebar link surely that will give me the additional information? Again disappointment, it took me back to the initial abstract page.

I tried other links. I could get a listing of everything that author had written, a listing of similar articles, order reprints in various formats. I could Digg the article, add it to Del.icio.us, email it, print it, add a readers’ comment…lots of stuff but not what I was looking for - the expanded article and a download of the sample code.

Step 5 - Wait a minute. For safe browsing I use the Firefox extension NoScript I try turning scripting on and voila … another advertisement with the opportunity to subscribe to the print version AND for an additional $5.95 a month I can get a “Online Pass.”

Perhaps the information I wanted is there somewhere. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps if I were to spend the additional $s I could get access to the additional information. Perhaps I couldn’t. Perhaps there is something in the fine print in the publication or on the web site that would explain all of this. Or perhaps there isn’t. At this point I have been trying for a month to get the advertised “sample scripts” and it is just not worth that sort of time.

I get a lot of IT related publications at the Institute and this is not the first time that one of them has become more trouble than it was worth. Print publications are struggling trying to figure out how to survive in the era of free and bountiful internet based resources. I hope that they succeed because I actually do like and learn by reading what they publish. But in their struggles they are becoming more and more irritating making me much less likely to subscribe. So in their attempts to make their way in this new world they are driving off those of us who are supporting them.

By Matthew Hile on 7/28/2006 9:25 AM

According to a 2005 Yahoo survey it may not make any difference if people know the answer to this question.

27% of online users consume third-party content on these pages without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.

So one clear area of focus is how provide folks with the cues that they can use to add this active content to their web browsing experience. Having it built into the browser, as is true for the Live Bookmarks in the current version of Firefox and will be true for the new version of Internet Explorer, will be a great jump up. Having it built into one's email client, as will be found in the new Outlook 2007 will also help.

Another help would be to change the term we use from RSS to feed or subscription. These may help "real users" feel more comfortable with the process and increase their use.

By Matthew Hile on 7/27/2006 6:29 AM

To continue my exploration for a good "real user" description of RSS I turned to Wkiipedia. Their definition includes these statements:

...the news media is utilizing RSS by bypassing traditional news sources. Consumers and journalists are now able to have news constantly fed to them instead of searching for it.

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. ...

These highlight a very important advantage of RSS over the more traditional emailed newsletters. An RSS subscription does not require you to give out your email address. Thus you will get no spam.

By Matthew Hile on 7/26/2006 5:18 AM

I work a lot with folks who are able to use a computer for things like email, word processing, and web browsing. More to the point, my work is to create web sites that these sorts of folks can use. One of the technologies I actively promote is Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Invariably, when ever I mention this the first response is "What?" Skeptic's blog Dead2.0 asked a real user, his mother, What is RSS? After a quick Google search her response, "I just don’t have a clue!"

Dave Winer's comment to that post had a really nice description.

When people ask me what RSS is good for, I start with “automated web surfing.” It gets you more news for the time you put into using the Internet. If you don’t want more news then RSS is probably not for you. But if there are subjects (that) you are intensely interested in, and if the people covering the topics also offer the information in RSS form, then your computer (or a web site) can make web surfing a richer and perhaps more productive experience.

So I think that this is a good place to start but I will continue my search for a way to tell/show real users the possibilities and benefits of RSS.

By Matthew Hile on 7/25/2006 5:57 AM

Two articles have caught my attention this week relating to the information we place on the web about ourselves and its impact on our lives. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new article (Volume 52, Issue 47, Page B6) about Juan R.I. Cole a professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history who was denied a job at Yale perhaps for his "strong opposition to the war in Iraq and to the treatment of the Palestinians" expressed in his blog, Informed Comment.

In Internetweek, Amy DeCarlo had an article which stated that "36 percent (of executive recruiters) have eliminated a candidate from consideration because of information they found online."

Is this new? No, people have always lost job offers based on what they have said and what others have said about them. What is new is that now we put a lot of information about our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs onto the internet, a very public space. Moreover, with sites like the wayback machine, even removing that information from the original site will not remove it from the web.

So what is the take home message? Be authentic - represent the real you in your online presence. Be ready to take the consequences of the real you because you will be judged by that presence. However, at least one advantage of this new state of affairs is that now the information being used is public and not supposition, rumor, and innuendo. With public information the decision making process is more transparent and we can see and understand how others see and understand us.