The magic 1st-cheque mark is approaching kind of like a curve approaches a line it never touches. I seem to recall this is something to do with Limits, but actually never even studied Calculus at all and know that has something to do with it… I seem to recall functions made sense only because I already understood them in the context of programming random stuff… maybe Adsense can teach me maths!

Because it’s a library, it’s basically one big search engine. Which means that autocomplete is a really handy thing to have, and being able to click on a piece of information and edit it straight away (so, taking plain text and converting it into a textarea or input field for editing immediately, without a separate admin view) is absolutely priceless for moving through a library quickly. This is so the way content editing should be heading — I’m hoping we all get there in the end.

But even more exciting than Javascript usability gimmicks was to see that he’s still using CSS, now more extensively and without assistance, and with kick-arse semantics. I looked at the source of his page quickly and the only complaint I had was his use of a span for a header instead of an Hx… totally wonderful to see a few months after the resident standards nazi (that would be me) has taken off!

So we threw around ideas about that (including ripping timecode off DV tape and trying to set marker points, importing EDL’s for use inside the library, automating transcoding processes and exporting H.264 or FLV for previews, and a couple of other equally fun things), then eventually started chatting about what I’m doing over here at Youthworks these days.

I think I made him kind of jealous. I’ve seriously got one of the best jobs in the web development world right now. I get to come up with stuff that’s genuinely useful for users (and productive for the Gospel, yada yada — that’s the implicit goal of all of this), entirely in response to their needs, without being burdened in particular by history, or legacy systems that need to integrate, or any major competitors — it’s wonderful. So we started talking about platforms and whatever and I said I was considering Django (and got a big tick accordingly, which was nice) with an RDBMS (i.e. MySQL, just because that’s pretty much all I have experience with insofar as DBs go) but then outlined a bit more about the project and he recommended an LDAP system pretty strongly.

LDAP is a directory-based database which is strongly heirarchical and finely granulated in nature. Which is bloody useful when you’ve got a user structure five layers deep:

But, of course, moderators do not “contain” leaders any more than leaders “contain” youth. All of these tiers exist independently of one another. They are internally defined by their extrinsic relations, even though their user experience of the website will vary depending on their heirarchical position. The latter makes LDAP seem entirely sensible, but the former definition of personal identity (that is, what constitutes a “self” or independent user entity — a Distinguished Name, in LDAP-speak) seems to rile against that directory concept.

“Moderator” is, in fact, a property of “Leader”. That is, it is a quality belonging to the user, who belongs to the group “leader”. Users should be unique and belong to an Organisational Unit (again, in LDAP speak) that reflects their role within the system. Thus, moderatorship generally will necessitate belonging to two OUs: one does not cease to lead within their own group context if they are appointed as a sitewide moderator — likewise, moderators may be appointed who do not have any formal role as a leader of a youth group. (This problem may be circumvented by creating such users at a CYIADA Global administration level, instead — for example, I do not lead a youth group in the target demographic, and I volunteer to edit content occasionally: I am not the webmaster administrator (hypothetically), but require moderation powers without being a leader associated with any group).

Groups, of course pose their own set of stupid difficulties. They appear to have no heirarchy at all: indeed, even where they could (for example, a Katoomba Convention branch with KYCK, KYLC, KEC, etc. sub-branches, or a CMS branch with Summer School, MMM, etc. sub-branches) this isn’t particularly useful (and, consequently, not desirable).

They don’t constitute OUs, because OUs have already been used to assign roles (probably a bastardisation of standard X.520 practice, but so much of this will be I don’t particularly care). The only way I could see it working would be by defining multiple Organi[s/z]ation components, but even then…

I don’t know. My head has been in relational database space for so long I want everyone to have a numeric identifier linking them to another table chock full of organisation records. It makes me comfortable. But then, LDAP would manage authentication and roles, if not association, and appears to generally have potential to make life a lot easier. So perhaps there’s some way to connect directory and RDBMS happily?

Feedback more than welcome. I’m not worried about platform specifics, just about the theoretical architecture of such a beast (and my conception of LDAP in general). If you’re reading this and know anything about OpenLDAP or AD or RHCS or any other platform, or just know about connecting to existing sources and extending them, please leave a comment and make me happy :-)

In every way what they’re doing and what they’re changing is absolutely awesome. As an IT company maybe it’d be fair to say they’ve got a headstart on the rest of the world. They’re certainly doing better than MSM are.

Say, for example, there was a social networking/photo site to be integrated into a TV programme’s community site: one that’s meant to actually connect with viewers, and falls under “Community” in the network’s structure — not the one that mindlessly pushes top-down content. And that because of concerns about moderation — chiefly stemming from the notion that public identities are untouchable and sacred in the network eye, and the arrogance that comes as a part of that –, the only advantages (politics and free bandwidth because of deep-linked photos aside) of integrating an external photo service are negated, and users have absolutely no incentive to sign up for a wider Yahoo! sign-on (which would allow them to comment on photos at Flickr, amongst other things).

So MSM structures are still winning. I expected this would be the case. I think it’s going to take another five years before people can get over themselves enough to realise that allowing people to comment (not anonymously — that was never on the cards!) isn’t an intrinsically dangerous thing. The idea that the greater fool is the one stopping to make flippant disparaging (even just seemingly so!) remarks about people they’ve never met is, in fact, turned on its head by the recognition of such remarks. To acknowledge a fool’s power surely isn’t the most intelligent thing one could do in response.

I digress. The point is, for as long as they’re thinking they have any chance of controlling what’s going on, this isn’t going to work. Wanna stop people commenting on a photo you stuck up on Flickr? Sure thing, feel free to disable it. If the comment is of consequence they’ll blog it anyway and the damage is out there and you’ve got a hell of a lot more work to do if you want to purge that blight on your carefully-constructed-cult-of-celebrity-image from the web… and if it’s not of consequence they won’t bother to publish it anywhere else, and, in all probabilitiy, it wouldn’t have done a great deal of harm were it to be published in the photo’s comments anyway. In many ways, inline commenting is actually a more restrictive form of social interaction in the online sphere because it’s centralised. I’m advocating it here because the audience has appalling electronic literacy (which is, I take it, typical of the bulk of the Australian population still: even if the SMH writes about blogs, only people who blog will bother to read an article that has “blog” in the headline… and then they’ll go and blog about it), so the blog thing is still, probably, 5 or so years off hitting “mainstream” audiences. (Incidentally, anyone proclaiming the death of radio/rise of podcasting should similarly anticipate no-one is even knowing what they are talking about for a similar period of time — and no, the fact that iTunes has an obscure feature doesn’t help matters).

Must finish with this priceless grab from a weekly newsletter, regarding viewer-directed content chosen via an online survey: “We always say our show is your show, so I think this segment makes a lot of sense.” And yet they’d rather not give viewers a voice at all. This isn’t giving viewers a say, it’s allowing them to effectively switch meta-channels (almost, presuming they’re voting with the majority). The segment makes sense from a MSM perspective, but the farcical nature of this “openness” comes to light pretty quickly as soon as any truely multi-directional communications channels come into play.

I think it’s going to be great fun watching “them” (MSM generally) slowly come to terms with this idea over the next couple of years. MSM isn’t going away, but I think any of these “social” shows are going to flop unless they radically re-think strategies (hybrid broadcast/Internet model, anyone?) or stop pretending…

A quick note: I haven’t mentioned anything by name here because, well, no-one else is bothering to blog about the site in question (an earlier blog post is on the first page of results for a particular keyword, I’d rather not do that again!) Actually it’s kind of funny because my site + semantic markup, etc., is blitzing the network’s core site (i.e. not our ancillary community site) in search engine rankings (well, Google at least, heh), but I digress! Not that I’ve written about anything sensitive… everything here is digested public information (or will be by the time this publishes tomorrow) and is consistent with my usual rantings and opinions about social media, IT, etcetera, and my usual cynicism and disdain for commercial (primarily broadcast — print is (painting broad strokes) generally less obviously tainted) media! Good fun.

It’s probably not really, but I’ll persist in my delusions until forced to learn otherwise (either by myself or others!)

Anyway, syndication services (Atom, RSS) rock my world and should be more broadly used even internally for things that you mightn’t think would require it. This is the conclusion I’ve come to having started putting together a new site (the one based around WordPress I was whining about) for my church and wondering how best to integrate an upcoming events calendar on the front page.

It remains to be seen whether or not I actually do it that way, but it’d be nice if syndication was already so heavily a part of WordPress’ processing that it became a trivial thing to run a parser function on any page. I’m still trying to decide whether to setup custom queries in WordPress to read future-dated posts for events + make them accessible (able to be accessed, that is; not especially applied to broad audiences, assistive technologies, etc.) prior to when they’re scheduled to appear… or whether to simply build my own app on the side that either spits out an include I’ll grab with PHP in my templates — boring — or an Atom feed that WordPress can parse, and lots of non-IE browsers (Well, prior to version 7! Can’t wait!) can do UsefulStuff™ with, and that can integrate into a Dashboard widget for Mac users and a Konfabulator widget for PC users, etc.

Yeah, people mightn’t use it lots but it’s a cool idea ;-) This is what doing one website for a TV network has done to me — it’s all about eye-candy and out-gimmicking the opposition!

Speaking of the Opposition (NineMSN, I guess) and Gimmicks, Windows Messenger 8 Beta looks like it’s shaping up into something I could actually use without complaining too loudly. They’ve pulled off the disposing-of-normal-UI-occasionally thing far better than Windows Media Player ever has, and everything feels as though it gels really nicely.

I’m a little concerned they’re trying to pull users into their own ‘portal’ thing with Spaces and various other Live.com crap, but it’s hardly as if they’re the only ones doing that. It’s ironic that we’re getting into an era of allegedly-more-open citizen-powered media that’s becoming progressively more isolated because of service providers. For example, what the heck do Yahoo! do? I don’t get it. I don’t know anyone that uses their Messenger service, or their blog service (Yeah! They have one! What the heck?! Discovered this last week and was suitably shocked), or their email service. Same goes for AOL (nearly… I know a handful of people that have an AIM account and supposedly use it… but it’s literally a handful, as in I have enough fingers to count all of them, and I don’t know whether they actually use it or not, not having an account myself!). And as for MSN Spaces… hmm. Well, my MSN Spaces page says “This isn’t my real blog, go elsewhere.” I flicked through a couple of other peoples today (Messenger Beta makes that pretty easy, though not significantly any better than the latest stable release) and found more than a few who were uncertain as to whether they should keep their MSN space or just go with Blogger. Every non-geek I know who blogs uses Blogger. More power to Google.

But I’m sure these demographics vary enormously depending on who you know: the point is, I’m not seeing any crossover, which is a little worrying. Of course, I only ever search using Google, so go fire conspiracy theories around all you like… I reckon most blog content on these services isn’t at all compelling, and doesn’t need to be. Blogs are, for the most part, mass-CC:-email substitutes that really shouldn’t be archived… and these easier to use services are probably exacerbating that problem.

I don’t excuse this blog from that entirely, of course, but there’s more than a little bit of content here that draws search engine traffic and is “timeless” in a sense that “my dog ate crayons for breakfast this morning and went to the vet and they said this happens all the time” could never be. But I digress, hugely (a failing of the medium, no doubt!)

So that’s all very interesting. Interested to hear if others know people in multiple “service provider universes” or if everyone’s friends are, for the most part, confined to a particular service (and what that service may be). If you’ve got a blog, this’d be a great time to play pingback/trackback tag instead of just commenting here… I’d love it if this could get a little viral and we could see what platforms people are using and “why”. For me, it’s mostly just that everyone I know is using a particular service. What is it for you?

The purveyor’s website is horribly Flash encumbered (i.e. I’d have never found it if I were looking for it in a search engine — I actually temporarily lost the developer’s URL for a bit there, and had to trawl through my browsing history to find it again!), but the app itself is rather useful if you’re looking for a run-from-the-desktop gallery kinda thing. My only qualm is the difficulty of generating metadata for it to do interesting stuff with, but a quick spot of shell scripting should see that problem met, hopefully. (Or even just nagging Ben until he hacks support for this gizmo into Cat-scan natively… wink wink? :P) This is the kind of app that’s a prime candidate for XML application, not in the least because of Flash’s reputedly excellent support for that kind of stuff… but it uses boring and rather confusing (mostly because I don’t speak German so a few words are odd) flat files instead. With that one caveat, it’s an otherwise helpful application. Just don’t make the mistake of confusing applications with websites.

Dean Jones responded to my Ansearch Answers post with the following:

All in all I feel [the post is] a fair representation of the so called facts, but I stand by my recent email… namely that simply reviewing us on technical issues that most people either

1. wouldn’t have discovered, or;
2. would not likely care about,

is selling your audience short.

I’m inclined to disagree, and just wanted to quickly post to say that. I like to think I understand the ‘audience’ here fairly well. They’re either people with (web-)geek tendencies, and are hence interested in any analysis and criticism I can deliver on the technical aspects of products, etc., or (and this category is completely unrelated to the former) students and humanities-focussed people reading various content I’ve published here — ranging from stage plots to a short story to an essay on the nature and effects of the digital divide.

Most guests in the latter category are just that: guests. They generally discover this content via a search engine, read what they want, and leave. Over 80% of my visitors stick around for one minute or less, presumably because they find what they need quickly, or discover that the content isn’t what they were looking for.

The “regular” audience/participants, however, are not that. I don’t think you’re all geeks, but this blog leans towards that style of content, and you match that accordingly. You don’t come here looking for product recommendations (the one exception to that being someone who viewed my post on Asterisk/VoIP, and asked me what my experiences with it had been some time later: to which I replied, we haven’t bothered, as we moved into a house with a Commander system preinstalled!). You come here, I think, for the quality of writing, for rants, for occasionally insightful (I hope) comment on various facets of things I deem interesting.

This is a blog. This is not a newspaper, though it is possible that search engines, ironically, are changing the clout of this medium to something similar. The distinction between newspaper and blog becomes blurred with posts like the one that inspired this, because of the form it was written in. It is important, however, to remember the audience.

People don’t come here to shop for search engines. We might be interested in how they work, what they do, what the potential benefits and failings of each one is, but ultimately it doesn’t affect anyone’s choice in the real world. Similarly, investors are unlikely to come here, scoping out Ansearch’s offering before buying into parent company Optum. And, if they did, my concluding remarks were positive — I genuinely believe the story balanced out in their favour more than anything else. If I overplayed the significance of a small flaw that could potentially be abused, my apologies. I don’t, however, regret including it in there at all, because I think it’s something my audience is interested in.

As you stated in an earlier email… “I’m not 100% sure as to how one should go about reviewing a search engine.” Here’s a tip. like Google, Yahoo, MSN… we are a business. For us to stay in business we need to generate revenue.

To do this we need to get more people to our SE, to get them to come back more often, and to, through their usage (CPM, CPC etc…) generate revenue.

To achieve this we need to provide a search service that the user finds useful. Given our rapid growth over the past months in UV’s and revenue, I would say we are doing OK.

Unfortunately for Ansearch and anyone else who wants to use this as an advertising space, we don’t particularly care if you’re making money. It’s good to hear they’ve grown: if their evolving product is anything to go by, they deserve it. But metrics such as revenue and Unique Visitors mean little to this audience, even if it’s what investors want to find out all about.

I think this is a fair assessment of this site’s ‘audience’ (the important ‘audience’, for me, being the minority that don’t come through search engines, subscribe by RSS, and come back regularly) — though, as always, your role is not restricted to that. You are participants. In light of this, I’d invite comment and discussion on this post as to your role as you understand it. It’s possible I’ve got this all wrong… but I doubt it.

Dean picked up my post via Technorati, a blog search engine that uses RPC update services to track what people are talking about in real-time. I was suitably impressed by this diligence and apparent desire to hear what the market has to say about their product: could this be the same company whose birth was so marred by a spat of cyber-squatting, in what Dean Jones was reported to have described as a fit of “youthful exuberance”?

Apparently so. Ansearch’s beginnings, though marred by dubious practices¹, received praise from various quarters of the mainstream press — or, at least, those quarters not controlled by News Corp, whose domains had come under threat. However, the Internet community responded quietly, and those voices that were heard were mostly of disdain at Ansearch’s domain practices.

Strangely enough, my original post wasn’t about any of that. I hadn’t heard of Ansearch until I read an article on them in the SMH — an article which reads a little too much like a rehashed press release for my liking: the telltale sign is in the closing sentence “Ansearch is the search engine division of Optum Ltd.” — if it were filed in the Business section of their paper, I’d understand, but it wasn’t.

I wandered over to their site, played around for a bit, and decided their offering was mediocre. In hindsight, it probably didn’t help that I wasn’t shopping for anything in particular — according to a ZDNet article, “In the short term [Ansearch] is focusing very heavily on the commercial end of the market.” — but at that point in time, I also don’t think they’d tuned their listings particularly well, as a search for DashLite turned up my WordPress hack over commercial listings for the actual Dashlite brand I inadvertantly used.

I say “at that point in time”, because it appears to have substantially improved since, as per Jones’ claim: “Much has changed since your first article on us some 6 months ago.”

Much improved, it seems, on several fronts. Their core offering has shaped up nicely, and some facets of my initial complaints regarding accessibility have been met. Their ancillary product offerings seem to have developed nicely: Ansearch CEO Jones claims “Each of [our properties] goes through up to 7 stages ranging from an initial, simple SERP/Directory style page through to a more involved service, mini portal, search tool, etcetera.” He went on to say that these ancillary properties (such as http://www.picsearch.com.au/, http://www.videosearch.com.au/, http://www.thefreedictionary.com.au/ and http://www.messengers.com.au/ amongst several others) are currently being actively separated from the core Ansearch site (he described it as “quarantining”), and the exact direction of a number of these projects would become clear over the coming months, with the appointment of a full time manager of these online properties.

I’m a tad concerned about his description of their strategy with regard to these — he said this would become clear over the months to come, and I’m hanging off two words here: distributed portal. Whilst I can see this as being of value to users (especially for generic, non-brand-specific/legally dubious domains such as jokes.com.au and the ones listed above), it doesn’t seem to fit Ansearch’s core strength as I perceive it: as a commercial portal, and not as another Google. “We are not aiming to be another Google… we don’t have their budget and, to be frank, there are enough people trying to clone them: why build another?”

In fact, Jones suggested that Ansearch’s strengths lie in that it is not the ubiquitous search behemoth, and that its index is “something unique… something faster… [and] against the so called “arms race” of search (my SE has more links than yours etc…)”. I’d agree this is indeed a strength, and also a reason for them not to try and be a portal. Australia already has Yahoo! and NineMSN for domestic portals, and I’m struggling to see what Ansearch will do to differentiate themselves in this: but I’m happy to be surprised!

Ansearch apparently holds an index of only 500,000 websites considered by its metrics to be “most popular”. I argued that this was potentially a bad thing as relevant content might lie outside this realm: for example, this website performs well when people search for reviews of the HP 2610 or information about Apache on Ubuntu linux or ACT files from MP3 players that record audio, but isn’t included in Ansearch’s core index.

Which is perfectly valid, for a commercially-focussed site, I just think they could be missing out a little bit. They can leverage on my content for their advertising impressions and potential clickthroughs, because they have more valuable content showing up in their listing alongside advertised products. If someone reads my HP 2610 review after having found it in Ansearch, and decides they’d like to buy it and remembers having seen a “Buy HP printers!” ad on Ansearch, they’ll most likely click “back”. It’s abstract, behavioural stuff, but valuable nonetheless.

Whether it’s valuable enough for them to bother is another matter. “We spider our own content… something that over time will be done daily,” says Jones. “Having only 500,000 websites will allow us to index sites more often, and as is the case with the ‘site info’ pages, provide far more info on these pages.” Which is a value-add, and worth preserving. If that’s all resources permit, I think they’re doing the right thing as is. Jones openly admits Ansearch’s index of popularity “has a commercial flavour to it” — and rightly so. Given their much-touted gender and age demographic based search feature, this makes sense.

Their index of popularity seems to be fairly slow-moving. “Monthly we add around 20,000 sites… and take out 20,000.” I’d guess this would be the lowest 20,000 that gets shuffled, and this seems to make sense. One has to wonder whether all the higher-ranking pages can have substantially fresh content month after month, but presumably they do — it’s one of the things the SEO experts have always cried from rooftops.

It was interesting to hear Jones speaking about these people, too: amusing, even! Web developers the world over often join in speculation as to what exactly makes search engines tick, such that we can boost our clients (or employers) website’s performance. It seems the reverse is also true: search engines all over the world similarly speculate as to what those horrible developers are doing to screw with their indexes day in and day out!

I don’t say this in jest, and I believe they’re right to complain: “The larger SE’s are having a very tough time coming up with clever ways to index content to counter SEO… only to have SEO’rs quickly find ways around it. Cat and mouse…” I think “counter SEO” was a poor choice of words, given that relevant content should hopefully still be rewarded, but his point stands.

Just as interesting is Ansearch’s strategy to avoid falling prey to dodgy SEO tactics:

By only indexing the root page, we remove almost all SEO trickery. This works in 2 ways. Firstly, people rarely put spam on their home page — that is, doorway pages, link farms, etc. usually reside away from the main index… and, secondly, it deletes multiple results from the same website. It also stops the site owner/webmaster from saying they are relevant to 100 or 1000 keywords or phrases.

Kids, we just found a new argument against clients who love their splash pages!

Content rich front pages aren’t, however, an absolute solution (at least, not in Ansearch’s index). According to Jones, Ansearch’s policy of “ranking sites in true usage popularity, both on and offsite” is “SEO proof… or at the very least, extremely resistant.” I’d agree it’s a powerful metric, but my reservations above still stand.

One caveat of Ansearch’s algorithm that appears potentially exploitable is its failure to exclude content in the from indexing. I don't just speak of standard meta author/keywords data, but of something else.

As highlighted in the screenshot above (click for original page, link may expire), Ansearch’s listing is including content between <style> tags. This presents potential for SEO abuse², as most browsers happily overlook errors in CSS — and <style> tags can be placed towards the top of a document: if we are to believe the SEO myths, increasing their relevance in engines. Of course, it’s entirely possible the content bears no weight at all — but the question of why it is stored in their index at all remains unanswered.

This is another reason to reward websites that use semantic markup properly, though at this stage that would exclude disproportionate amounts of the web, so I understand engines’ hesitance to embark on anything like this. It’s not something a lot of sites use”, says Jones, before continuing “but it will be used more and more in the future.” Well, so much of the web community hopes.

This formed part of Ansearch’s defense for not having embraced semantic markup from the outset. According to Jones, it’s built on a technology developed for a pre-April 2000 (dot com crash) search engine — so that partially excuses the markup at launch time. Jones’ first comment on their failure to use semantic markup was simply that “The majors [Google and Yahoo!] don’t use it” — something I’d dispute the validity of, as Ansearch isn’t a “major” player, and, as has been established, is chasing a fairly different market sector. Their core business is search, but it’s a different breed of search conducted in a different way: and semantic markup and accessibility is a different way. Encouragingly, Jones sees the potential for embracing semantic markup in the future on both technical and commercial grounds: “It makes sense to use it and as it does open us to a wider audience with various devices used to browse our site.”

He didn’t cite the “reduced bandwidth expenditure as a result of lightweight code” reason, presumably because their host, OzHosting/Destra charges only for the link, not for transfers over this, on their dedicated server range.

Irrespective of their reasons, the future of Ansearch in terms of markup is promising:

Our long term goal is to have Ansearch website designed without any tables and heavily styled using the CSS, which eventually will gives us more control on how we present our site to different media types.

Ansearch has gone through several minor enhancements over the past 6 months with the releases of versions 1 to 1.3. We are currently planning a major update for version 2.0 and the issues [of semantic markup and separation of presentation and content] will be addressed.

But as we know, markup isn’t everything: content is what ranks well in search engines erm… content is what draws an audience. Ansearch’s exploration into the development of portal environments is something to be watched with interest over the coming months, as well as its other business aspects, including an advertising network known as Soush that remains slightly enigmatic, and the mysteriously named “Factory” division.

An announcement is expected to be filed with the ASX later this week outlining something of Ansearch’s future direction: At this stage, I’m inclined to believe that the future is a positive one, as Ansearch distances itself from its much-criticised practices at launch, to a diverse range of product offerings that uniquely fulfil the needs of Australian Internet users.

Update: A followup to this has been posted, in response to a criticism that this review was overly technical in nature. Read on!

Notes

¹ Justified with the catch-cry “MSN do it, so we can, too!” — to which the only sensible reply is, “yes, but MSN do it with Internet Explorer, and as soon as you go and write your own web browser, feel free to hijack as many unused pages as you want.“
² I notified Ansearch of this shortly prior to publication in the hope that, if this is indeed an issue, it will be resolved before this post is noticed and widely acted upon. One hopes this potential problem disappears quickly.

I took up his invitation to contact him via email with questions and suggestions, but have yet to hear anything back. This is perhaps understandable given the length of the email: but I did at least expect a reply acknowledging receipt of this message. At any rate, at present any opportunity Ansearch may have had to clarify misconceptions presented here hasn’t been taken up. I communicated in the email that I was more than happy to publish not only his responses to explicit questions, but also “anything else you wish to add that I haven’t asked about”.

If anyone from Ansearch picks up this post via Technorati, the offer remains open. If you’d prefer not to use email, I’m happy to do a telephone interview for publication here (both in article form and as a supplementary transcript/podcast).

Update: Dean Jones picked up the post, and sent me an email saying he’ll reply shortly. Watch this space!

Does that strike anyone else as scary? I’m so sure we can’t be the only people in the state (of approximately 6.6 million people) to have posted their timetables online! And, if we are, that we all know each other directly — it’s a scary extrapolation of the idea of a “digerati” into a broader context! Have we formed our own élite? Does that make us relatively “heard” voices in this global community?

Call this an overreaction to search engine optimisation if you will, but I think it’s significant that three students (or ex-students) in the state who all know each other can rank so highly on a term hardly common to them alone — there is a candidature of approximately 60,000 students, and then there are the relatives and friends of these people to consider. Don’t laugh at this comment too hard, but where are the LiveJournal users on the first two pages? Certainly, someone must have posted such information, or, at the very least, a string referring to the same, on their own website.

“Democracy” on the web takes on a new tone when viewed like this. Creation of some compelling content in a semantic framework apparently entitles one to a greater voice on any issue. There are technical limitations to doing it any other way, of course — but perhaps this suggests that “the web” isn’t quite so democratic as it has often been heralded.

Unique: 2091
Visits: 4281
Pages: 14158
Hits: 44419
Bandwidth: 484.76 MB

Unique impressions are up by over 600 from last month, suggesting increased driven traffic (from external sites, search engines, etc., which accounted for 13.1% of total traffic, as opposed to incidental traffic — that is, regular visitors, syndication, etc.). Bandwidth is slightly up on March, exceeding 500MB if non-viewed statistics are included (there was 192.48 MB of non-viewed traffic, which means search engine spidering as well as certain syndication services I think), which is getting fairly sizeable I think, especially compared to last year’s statistics for this month (which aren’t really valid, because there was a holder page up then, but it’s fun to point out) — 2.38MB of traffic and 30 unique visitors!

The most popular post on this website remains the original DashLite announcement, although the updated version doesn’t really get a look in… which is okay, because it was released more out of social responsibility than any new need, and people can choose for themselves what they want.

See also:
February 2005 statistics
September/October 2004 statistics
June 2004 statistics

It’s a good practice for search forms to include some text (the value attribute) so that users can know what they’re for, even if it’s apparently self explantory. On this website, the search box at time of writing lacks any label at all except for the text denoting “search” in the box. This is all well and good, up until the time someone wants to actually search for something. They can’t just click the field and type the query and bang return; they need to ensure they select the contents of the field properly, so that they can delete it and it isn’t included in the query.

We can do this with event handlers — in this case, onclick. Essentially, the logic flows something like this:
If a person clicks the field, the contents are wiped.

Anything wrong with that?

Yes, of course there is. That’s the simplest way to do it, but it’s wrong. What if the user types a query in and uses the mouse to click a point in the text to edit it? Their query would be wiped, because onclick clears the field whenever it occurs, regardless of content.

So what do we want? Using the text on this site as an example, we want to wipe the contents of the field when a person clicks it only if the contents are exactly “search”. Admittedly, this still has some problems — if someone were searching for a search engine or had any other reason to include “search” in their string and went to edit, there’d be potential for issues, but that, by my thinking, is tolerable.

The simpler version, which doesn’t check to see if the value is “search” before erasing, is simply

onclick="this.value=''"

The marginally more complicated version, which is far more usable, goes like this

onclick="if(this.value=='search'){this.value=''}"

That means our new input field code looks like this:

<input type="text" class="search" value="search" name="s" id="s" size="13" onclick="if(this.value=='search'){this.value=''}" />

Now go use it!

p.s. No need to say that this isn’t particularly groundbreaking. I’d just forgotten to implement it here, and thought it could be helpful to other people write about.

This seems like a good implementation and definitely has it’s uses but for most administrators this could actually be more detrimental in the long run than initially expected. The primary idea behind the Dashboard was to allow all WordPress Administrators to stay informed regarding developments in the community.

Many WP users (or any community for that matter) install and sit. Often times being oblivious to new versions and (most importantly) security updates. This sort of unpatched software can be detrimental not only to your webhost, and your website, but also to the entire web community itself.

For example, when phpBB was exploited with a major security flaw — there was a major deficiency in contacting all administrators regarding the security hole. The problem is twofold. The more you promote the security hole, the easier it becomes for malicious users to exploit unpatched installations. You see where I am going here.

Of course — right now — in the prime heat of your blog you feel that you are checking wordpress.org everyday and you’re probably skimming the forums daily too. There is no way you’ll miss any updates. But as time goes on and you have tweaked, retweaked and redesigned your website five times you’ll realize that its time for your blog to push better content and not just look prettier. And its then when you simply stop keeping up with every nightly or reading the forums daily.

Then again, I could be completely wrong.

I kind of felt that this required a response more publicly than the continuation of the comment thread would permit, hence this posting.

I believe Dashlite solves a real problem which exists in the WordPress 1.5 system — that users are disillusioned with the Dashboard system (hence the tremendous response given the relatively “backwater” standing of this website), and that the Dashboard system is cumbersome in its execution of its role as an “alert system” for making users aware of software updates that are available.

I also believe that, especially in light of the proliferation of multi-user blogging, and the functionality which WordPress offers to facilitate this, the Dashboard system is overly invasive in its presentation within the WordPress administration interface.

WordPress 1.5 essentially permits the establishment of an author-moderator-editor system, allowing collaborative blogging in a multi-user environment, something which allows communal control, but also (and more importantly, if WordPress is to gain widespread adoption through upholding high usability standards) something which permits less technically-minded users to utilise the system painlessly and easily.

It was with this in mind that DashLite was created — notably, I did not recently implement it on this blog until upgrading to WordPress 1.5 a matter of days ago: this is because it was initially developed in response to another task, in which a client was required to update content themselves. The point is exacerbated through the recent WordPress search engine scandal, in which the news displayed on the Dashboard echoed sentiments of bloggers around the world who were either quietly supportive, or vocally against, the actions and circumstance which lead to that event — for most users, that is a matter of mere politics, and remains utterly irrelevant, although may serve to provide confusion if the Dashboard is considered an official and authorative source of WordPress news.

This is an ancillary issue, of course. The core problem is non-technical users aren’t concerned, and, in the case of many multi-user blogging setups, don’t need to be concerned, with the technical state of affairs regarding the system they’re publishing content on. Admittedly, the DashLite system makes discovering the latest news regarding WordPress one step further away, but, for a number of reasons, this is of no great concern.

Firstly, being a “hack”, this is something users will need to actively seek and implement. It doesn’t come as part of the default distribution, and hence will never be overly prominent — I address this as way of nullifying the point regarding the publication of security flaws in a two-fold sense (as with phpBB in the example cited in the comment): there’s never going to be a large audience out of reach, as with phpBB, and, those who are out of reach are capable of using “hacks” (that is, they haven’t just installed it from cPanel), and are probably slightly more technically competent — this means they’re more likely to have backups, to notice if their website has been compromised, and, although this is countered in the comment, more likely to check the WordPress website for updates, patches, and releases.

Of course, there are other ways to stay “in the loop” (excuse the pun — not the_loop) regarding WordPress developments, such as the WordPress announce mailing list, or keeping the WordPress development blog syndicated in your feed reader of choice. And, for the most part, those bothering/capable of implementing “hacks” are more likely to be those doing these things — as stated previously. Okay, let’s assume the implementor’s weblog reaches a kind of stasis, at least in terms of development, if not content. I don’t believe this is a problem for me personally, given my insatiable “need” to constantly tweak and alter things which are otherwise working quite fine, if only for the sake of novelty and originality, but that avoids the point that not all DashLite users would be like this, and that my standing on such matters may change at some future point as yet unforseen.

There is, then, a need for the Dashboard to syndicate content for these purposes… but only for the admin user. I haven’t got time to address this immediately, so as an interim measure the syndicated content (the WordPress Development blog “Releases’ category RSS feed) is visible to all users — I hope to address this in the near future, software complexity permitting.

I’ve rambled enough about this enough here, and I’m afraid people aren’t overly likely to read it all, so the actual announcement is posted separately, but I’ll include download links here, too.

PHP source file, rich formatting (HTML)
Plain text version of the same, save this as-is

To install the update, simply overwrite the wp-admin/index.php file in your WordPress installation — it is advisable you backup your old index.php file first, in case problems arise (none noted in the changes made, but it’s possible you’ll discover something, as always).

The Sydney Morning Herald published an article entitled “New Australian search engine launched” today, the first paragraph of which reads “Australia’s newest search engine Ansearch opens for business today with a novel twist, demographic searching.” It’s not a particularly well written article, but the article vendor is AAP, not the SMH itself, so we’ll leave that alone, at least for the minute.

It goes on to laud the search engine for their innovation, both in this feature of demographic searching, and in other areas:

Ansearch says it cuts down search clutter by displaying the main search results as single websites and not the individual pages of websites.

What, like the Google [More results from domainname] feature? You know, the one that actually works properly? I say “works properly”, because a quick search of Ansearch reveals that their “cutting search clutter” feature is a tad broken — not to mention their character encoding.

Speaking of broken character encoding, let’s take a look at their source… well, they get some marks — at least they bothered with a Content-Type. Never mind if the content is broken when displayed with that Content-Type — it’s not like a search engine could actually do any useful data processing to make things display correctly when using a slightly redundant Content-Type… oh, wait, disregard that comment: they’re not using a doctype, either.

See, what gets me is that this search engine has just been launched. Which means the climate in which it’s been developed isn’t the same as 5 years ago, when accessibility was just on the very edges of the radar — you’d (wishfully) imagine that at least a doctype wouldn’t be too much to ask for, even if they still insisted on using table-based layouts. Interestingly enough, that’s what one of their software providers, Omniture, have done. Which leaves something of a foul taste in the mouth, too, because they’re reselling that garbage to people — including, if you believe their website, three of the five top Fortune 500 companies (aside: doesn’t that make them three of the top Fortune 5?).

Perhaps that criticism is unfair — their latest version (assuming that’s what powers their own website, although possibly not… maybe their internal web team accepts that their product would be overkill, and coded it in Dreamweaver, instead… some of the JavaScript certainly looks Dreamweaver-esque, and, if Ansearch’s website is any example, the doctype probably doesn’t come from the Overture system!) seems to handle much better than what Ansearch are running: I say this, because apparently they’re using a version which was written back in 2003. Hey, if it works… but we’ve already established it doesn’t.

And there concludes my rave review of yet another quite-some-way-from innovative and fresh search engine, this time in Australian waters.

Note: I’m not saying it’s any worse in terms of accessibility, usability, and semantics than most other search engines are — only that it has less excuse, being launched now, as opposed to 5 or 10 years ago. It’s easier to make something work first time than it is to haphazardly patch over it later, especially something as gargantuan as I’d imagine a search engine would be.

Oh, and now for something that’s just plain amusing — the number 1 search terms on this brand new search engine, from befuddled users wondering why it sucks so much:

Yes indeed, the first thing users did was try to escape… how’s that for telling?

Practically, this means that that content is using semantically better markup, has better meta information for search engines, and is internally searchable, using the WordPress search function (it wasn’t before).

For most regulars, this probably doesn’t mean much, but the old articles attract the most search engine traffic, so this’ll be of benefit to people finding relevant content, at least, because the old script could be somewhat retarded in the way it was indexed, as there was no formal permalink structure, just a bunch of loose query strings, which search engines didn’t like.

</geek off>

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Yes, I should get back to posting real content, but I’m afraid that’s not too likely, between school (3 weeks to half yearlies! I know we’re not halfway through the year, but the final year of schooling is odd here in Australia!) and a production next week which is likely to consume all waking hours! I’ll hopefully get a chance to post regular or semi-regular photos, at least, but maybe not.