tumblr.

A little over a year ago, I set up an tumblr account on a sub-domain here (random.jimdoran.net) as an experiment and also to have a place to post junk that I didn’t want to post on my “real” blog.

Tumblr is amazingly easy to use, and very friendly. I didn’t mess around with customizing themes much, but that is also easy to do. I enjoyed using it, especially the iPhone app that let me post images immediately. I published almost 400 post in the past year. I much prefer tumblr to blogger. It’s good stuff!

My experiment is concluded and I’ve removed my account and subdomain. I’m contemplating importing my tumblr posts here. I will continue to share nonsense, just not on tumblr.

flickr.

I don’t do much with flickr anymore. The recent redesign has disappointed many of its community members. I’ve been watching the forums and the staff  at flickr seem a little squinky, giving paying members “time outs” for expressing  overly negative opinions. If  the majority of your community stands up and tells you they don’t like the “improvements,” then they aren’t improvements. I think the user feedback is more than just resistance to change.  I’m also indifferent at this point.

Like tumblr, flickr makes it easy to back-up photos from an iPhone. Tagging is wonderful, and the interface was pretty straightforward. When I started the sketchbook swap, I thought a lot about whether to use flickr, blogger or WordPress.com. I choose flickr because it inherently lends itself to presenting images, and that’s what we were doing. The ability for community members to interact with each other (and here I mean the sketchbook group) was great. There are image editing tools available, so my new participants and less technically inclined artists would have easy access. The process of using flickr/posting images is very straight forward and thought out. It’s linear in many respects.

Google recently reworked their image search results pages to keep pace with Bing, and it’s an improvement.   I think  flickr could/should implement several things:

• The ability to favorite entire sets
• The ability to favorite other user’s favorites. Favorites are basically sets, so why not?
• Improve the speed. I can regularly count to 15 before the page loads, which is crazy.
• The ability to revert to and keep the older layout, or customize our own. Having to click several times to get “Show All Sizes” is a drag, and I prefer having the image title at the top after years of it being there.
• A “find similar” feature. Google has done amazing work on this – keep up, Yahoo?
• A better Yahoo ID system

WordPress supports tagging, publishing from an iPhone and has some great image presentation/editing features. My intention is to recreate a similar experience here, minus the community members. Sorry community members.

I will keep my flickr account, but will thin out what’s posted there.

More as it follows.

We’re giving away 5 free student tickets to  the first 5 students or faculty who include #aeaedu in a Tweet. Hurry!

I did. And so did a lot of other people, and I figured I missed the boat.  Then:

BINGO! I went to gray, rainy Boston on Monday. It was, as before, a really good conference. Friendly, like-minded people, excellent food and a sense that we are all working toward a common cause.  And I’ll never pass up the chance to talk with Mr. Zeldman while he’s trying to use the bathroom.

The “standardistas” emphasized:

• Web sites do not need to look the same in all browsers.
• Having a “content strategy” is important, because content is king.
• Design with CSS in the browser and not Photoshop
• Use a Grid
• Flash, particularly sIFR, can solve typographic issues
• User testing is vital

This is standard issue stuff (pun intended), and was highly emphasized at last year’s conference. And the one before that.

Which made me wonder – what’s actually NEW? The web is moving quickly. A lot has happened since the last conference I attended (last August).  Why aren’t we, as designers,  talking about it?

We have jQuery, which is so easy to use, it feels like cheating. It handily repairs shortcomings of IE6 issues, allows us to easily implement AJAX and JSON solutions and gives us ways to enhance our designs with expedient virtuosity previously unthinkable  for most front-end designers.

And, what about Chrome? How does bing.com enter into the SEO conversation? How is touch computing affecting web design and mobile devices? How does Flash fit into our conversation, aside from solving typographic issues and video streaming? And Flex?  It does some pretty amazing stuff. What the hell is the W3 actually doing? And, let’s talk about HTML5.

Another observation – every other person I talked with had something to do with Higher Education. Is there a curriculum for Web Standards?  I think it’s time to expand the discussions at Standards based conferences -  the world knows that we strive to keep content separate from formatting and behavior. As a teacher, I see things shift in 5 to 6 month cycles – each new class entering my room knows more than the one that just left. Our conferences should keep up, too.

I’m really glad I got to go – the design portions of the conference were inspiring, as always.  And it’s refreshing to get out of the office (hospital)  and be with other designers, to inspire each other and connect with a community.

So, as I sit here in this empty, quiet airport during the middle of the night, I wonder…what’s next?

There are two problems with this folder.

1) It’s an unorganized mess of thousands of pictures.
2) My Dell Vostro Laptop has died TWICE in the past year (as has Dawn’s). While I’m compulsive about backing up my data, sometimes I go a couple of weeks between making a DVD. I may collect quite a few images in two weeks.

So, this weekend I took a few hours and I created an application called  Perspiration™.  [And, yes, I'm super busy with teaching, taking classes and all the other projects on my desk. I just needed to do something else for a bit. Savvy?]

Perspiration™ lets me  upload an image to a password protected website and apply tags to the image. I can then search on tags, image names or have it show me random images.    I wrote it  in PHP, and the cool thing is, there’s no database. It uses text files, so the whole thing is highly portable (or as highly portable as thousands of images can be).  I’m using jQuery to handle thumbnail and image previews.

I’m *almost* finished with it – I’ll post the source code when I’m done for any peeps who want something like this.

This guy has a folder, too.  Enjoy:

Record your lowest score below.

To mark the 100^th post on this blog, I want to note another recent milestone – the big site at work went live this week. I have too many thoughts about that redesign project to share here on this blog – I’ll save that for a  Refresh Baltimore presentation and for my students.

I learned a lot sitting in the creative director’s chair – selling design to an ever shifting committee, building consensus and learning how to handle criticism like “my wife doesn’t like it.”

Sir Alec Issigonis said “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.”  Everyone is a designer, and everyone is creative. Building consensus and solving complex visual and technical problems within a diverse group of very smart people felt a bit like trying to pass a stimulus package in, say, congress. But, I did it. And my camel has been set loose in the wild.

SocialDevCamp Fall 2008

Following up on the successful premiere of SocialDevCampEastSpring2008, held in Baltimore in May, SocialDevCamp East Fall 2008 once again invites east coast developers and technology business leaders to come together for a thoughtful discussion of the ideas and technologies that will drive the future of the social web.

SocialDevCamp Fall 2008

I’m new to BarCamps – this is a great thing. We met in the morning and, as a group, listed a bunch of topics (Building sustainable co-working in Baltimore, iPhone Apps, Best practices in building your online community, etc.) – and then we broke out and presented/discussed/worked on these topics. Talk about user generated content!

Session Organizing

At one of the sessions, I won a shuffle! Holy crap!

shuffle

More to follow…

I’ve had a couple of days to digest the material from WordCamp and An Event Apart. I’m not going to transcribe the entire thing, as many other blogs have it covered, but here are a few highlights.

Frameworks

The WordPress WordCamp got my gear turning. WordPress == framework, which can be a website, blog, photoblog, social media site, etc. It’s open and completely customizable. Liz Danzico and Jane Wells did a fascinating demo of “Crazyhorse,” a prototype of the next generation of WordPress. It’s not clear if all the changes they’ve described will be implemented, but many were improvements. Their process involved a lot of user testing with cool “lasers” that track eye movement on the computer screen. They literally took what users asked for, proto-typed it, had the users test it again to see if the changes worked. Liz then gave an interesting talk on improvisation at An Event Apart, and how users and designers must work together to create better web sites. I think I was already tuned in having seen the Crazyhorse demo, and she offered that this process can be considered a framework.

Framework: Provides uninscribed and detectable cues that loosely govern a set of actions or interactions.

She made an interesting parallel to the recording of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album, where Davis walked in a handed the musicians slips of paper containing a theme, thus giving birth to modal Jazz. She called this “creative instability” and talked about the need for user design process to be improvisational. I think she sorta ran around Robin Hood’s barn to make the point, but I love when anyone uses music theory to make a point. Even if a pending book deal is likely in the works.

Eric Meyer’s first talk was on CSS frameworks…should we use them? His answer was essentially “No” and then he spent an hour talking about them anyway. Anyone who does CSS regularly already has some sort of base foundation they will use on each project, and an external Framework isn’t going to do much. I sensed a little contention between Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric about the next generation of HTML and XHTML – I think I would have preferred hearing their thoughts on that, than wasting time on something most attendees wouldn’t use.

jQuery

There was a lot of talk about jQuery, a very lightweight JavaScript framework at both AEA and WordCamp. The thing that drew me to jQuery initially was it’s simplicity. It’s a tiny, simple, extremely elegant library. I love jQuery. I was delighted that so of my peers do, too.

Jason Santa Maria, always an inspiration, asked us to put the “design” back in “web design.”

I spent some time with Jeremy Keith at the Minna gallery talking about accessibly navigation (and a day later with Eric Meyer, too).

I learned a lot about making sites MORE accessible using AJAX, about how panda obsessed groups battle each other on flickr and about project management scrums.

Do Websites Need to Look Exactly the same in Every Browser?

Finally, Dan Cedarholm definitively answered this tortuous question. I’m so glad this has been settled.

I co-presented a talk with Heather Katz on creating accessible content for e-learning. Heather did a wonderful job of explaining the current state of Flash accessibility and best practices. This is the third talk I’ve given this year on accessibility, and I’ve created a new area on my site for the subject.

Here’s me, demonstrating how to talk with your hands. About fruit.

Thank you to all the great people I met today.

Recently, Johns Hopkins University enacted an “IT Reclassification Process” on its technology employees. The idea was to examine what technical industries outside the university system are doing, and to try and match some of the “real world” salaries and position titles and job descriptions. When done correctly, this helps with attract talent and keeps employee turnover low.

As near as I can tell, someone whom I’ve never met or spoken with, and with little understanding of what I do, looked at my job description and decided that I am a “web site designer,” perhaps because the word DreamWeaver appeared in the description. I logged into the time keeping system one day last October, and I had been magically transformed from my department’s “web development coordinator” to a “web site designer.”

Which got me thinking about the roles web professionals play.

At a conference I recently attended, one of the speakers polled the audience:
“Who is a web designer?”
“Who is a web developer?”
“Who are the hardware and LAN administrators?”
“Who writes content?”

I never raised my hand – I was waiting for him to ask “Who designs AND writes code?” But, he didn’t.

He was making the point that the above mentioned groups fall under the purview of an IT department – there usually isn’t a web department separate from IT – and that designers/developers are often responsible for writing content. That’s an accurate assessment, to be sure.

I read something on Jeremy Keith‘s blog recently where he mentioned a group called “hybrid designers,” which would encompass people like myself, I suppose. Sometimes programmers back into interface design, or designers become interested in scripting and coding – either by choice or necessity. I’m not sure I like the term “hybrid designer,” although I understand what Mr. Keith was talking about.

Web development is exciting because it is all encompassing. We are designing experiences, and as such, benefit from having an understanding of how all the parts work together to achieve our goal. Volumes have been written on all the separate parts. What excites me is the act of creation from a holistic approach. To combine a beautiful, effective interface with accessible coding – to have a logical, clean site organization and to understand its impact on hardware resources – to determine the best schema for a database and create it accordingly – all this is thrilling. Flash, web standards, database design, typography and GUI design, information architecture – it’s a big tasty stew.

In my current role, I wear many hats. I have to gather and document requirements from doctors, nurses, administrative assistants and people from all walks of life. I have to advocate for patients and the end user of my work – I advocate for web accessibility. I design layouts. I communicate ideas and sell new approaches and technologies. I have to learn and understand these technologies. I live in the worlds of Microsoft, Linux and Apple. I program with ColdFusion, PHP, JavaScript and ActionScript. I use Access, SQL Server, Visual Basic and Mumps. I create animation with Flash and encode video. I produce design comps with PhotoShop and take digital photos whenever needed. I am asked to think about security and understand search engine algorithms. And that’s all before my second cup of coffee. It’s a great job – my favorites are always ones that are multifaceted.

Here’s the predicament. Those of us who are web Swiss Army knives, who engage our fields on many levels – what do we call ourselves? In my case, Coordinator wasn’t quite hands on enough – but designer is too limiting. Sure, we are developers – but we are more, too. Hybrid designers? Comprehensive developers? Web Generalists? Integration Architects? Web Experience Facilitators? InterAction Figures?

Is it not written, “This is a fine kettle of fish?”

I’m delighted to say that I’m giving a talk on the basics of CSS and you can download my materials here. My presentation slides, the examples and sample site are available in a zip file. I’ve been teaching the in-and-outs of CSS for two years, sometimes in a semester long format, sometimes in a single day. This is my first shot at an hour and fifteen minute long overview.

[Update: I'm writing from the conference. There are about 140 attendees - which is phenomenal - 140 people interested in web accessibility. That's more than the sum of all co-workers at every small company I've ever worked for. My talk went well, in my opinion.]

If you came to the conference, thank you! I hope it was helpful!

I’ve donated my own time to create this presentation and these materials – I didn’t get paid to do this. I think accessibility is important, and I think that if we all strive to make web sites using the standards provided by the W3 – as flawed as the process is – we will  shape that path we all are on – developers and designers, web users and browser makers.