08 Apr 2005
I announced this at the bottom of the post A response to DashLite criticism, but figured not many people would actually read that far… so I’m announcing it separately.
Essentially, version 1.1 re-introduces one only very specific feed, which pulls the “Releases” category from the WordPress development blog. This category is only used for posting updates to software — there is no announcement of community events, milestones, etc. To view exactly what’s being syndicated, visit the Releases category page.
Basically, this syndicates new release information and displays it in the “Do Stuff” sidebar, as shown in the screenshot.
Get it
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).
08 Apr 2005
Navid Azimi posted the following in a comment on the initial Dashlite announcement post:
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).
06 Apr 2005
Journalism? Our news on television and in print pander to the worst instincts in our culture, favoring sound bites over substance and critical analysis. Movies and books? So much pandering to simplistic character arcs and blockbuster plots that one has to wonder if we’ll see more lasting contributions to the culture from this past century.
Medicine? People can now live through incredible diseases, extending life well past what would be expected in the past. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where we expect medicine to save us or cure us when in fact it might be most natural to move on from this Earth.
We make things so easy to use, do, digest and process these days that we’re faking out Darwin and cheating Mother Nature, getting what we want regardless of the cost to ourselves or the planet. Most likely, though, it’s probably just a facade. We only think we’re cheating death and have advanced past clever monkeys with keyboards and a few choice words beyond a simple grunt. The question is when will it all come to roost?
Sourced from Design by Fire: Please make me think! Potential dangers in usability culture.
Link dump:
My life as a Berkperson — the centre looks interesting.
The Cluetrain Manifesto — looks startlingly relevant to the work, and overwhelmingly intelligent in its discourse and analysis.
The Future of Ideas — by Lawrence Lessig. Seen his name and this work before, but haven’t read. Adding to “to-do” list.
04 Apr 2005
No, I’m not talking about elgooG.
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?
04 Apr 2005
Okay, so maybe throwing a new theme up like that straight away wasn’t the greatest of ideas… but you’ve gotta admit it looks cool. I’ve just patched up the contact page (n.b. the address has changed, coz it’s now managed through WordPress Pages… I’ll figure out a way around this, and both the old form and the new themed one work, but for the time being the address is <a href="/blog/contact/">/blog/contact/</a> rather than the old <a href="/contact/">/contact/</a>), as well as a few posts that were being dodgy… especially with graphics, which’d been designed for a fixed-width site of 600px, as opposed to… whatever this is. I haven’t got time to go slashing at CSS just yet, but it’ll happen, unavoidably! (I’ve heard and completely agree with readability comments… that’ll be one of the first things to be fixed, because it’s a real problem…)
In other exciting news, I just cracked 1GB of transfers this year.. which doesn’t sound like a lot, but I did around 470MB last month, and this month (albeit 4 days in) is looking to be similar in terms of transfers and hits if the trend continues. Last month there were 44,444 hits (isn’t that a cool number?) exactly, probably in no small way as a result of the moderately successful DashLite, which has got a ridiculous number of trackbacks or comments in the last 24 hours (well, I thought it was… shrug!), taking the total number of comments on that post to 15, probably the most comments on any single post on this site.
Now I’m gonna wander off cram for a Business exam I’ve got in a few hours, so I can pack it full of buzzwords and be awarded marks accordingly… *sighs at folly of that subject*