25 Nov 2006
FEVA’s “Promoting the Word through Image and Text” conference (they will break my link fairly quickly, methinks, but it’s good whilst it lasts) was today, and it rocked.
Sessions about architecture to creative strategies to the theology of “promotion” (which we don’t call marketing for fear of stirring the controversy pot) to a rather helpful copyright session (albeit one raising more questions than it answered), as well as great food, a comfortable venue, and generally excellent organisation, etc.
Go along next year.
And, now that positive recommendation is cemented firmly without mention of the web…
I did, however, take great exception to the web strategy speaker, who I am tempted to pour out all manner of vitriolic utterances against but will attempt to refrain. He essentially said that footer keyword-stuffing was fine, as was spamming meta tags (though, thankfully, he acknowledged search engines pay “less attention” to them these days — I would put that closer to “insignificant attention and not worth the markup bloat they so often are”). Everything he had to say about content for the web could be surmised in the keyword, “keywords”, paying no attention to the different copy-writing demands of web media and the flow-on effects of organic keyword enhancement. Further, he managed to suggest online games for youth and prize competitions as legitimate marketing tactics, which, to me, seems brain-dead — perhaps I should just say “an unproductive use of time”. The entire presentation appeared to have been repurposed from a very basic web 1001 presentation to small businesses, without much (or any) regard for audience feedback.
For example, he asked questions at the beginning to get an indication of where the audience was at in terms of web presence (I would say well over 90% had a website, with probably half of that being maintained in some capacity — yes, our website is getting touched up soon… heh, in all my free time) and then proceeded to completely ignore that (although he did act very surprised at the number of hands that went up) and tell everyone about how to get online in the first place. Complete with the worst in Powerpoint presentation technique.
Definitely not a highlight of the day!
Anyway, that aside, I went home feeling pretty motivated to GetStuffDoneâ„¢ and started on the three gazillion changes pending for the Matthias site… then gave up when Budd called saying Borat was on. I’ve generally had a great evening, though — a few hours with a glass of red wine and a sense of accomplishment as content takes shape, then a conversation about using Google Maps to plot some 2,100 retail outlets effectively (no consensus as to how to achieve this yet, because that’s 2,100 points to be rendered client-side as an overlay, which would probably crash some browsers, if not make them run hideously slowly — but the brain is churning over), then watching that crazy movie. Yeah, you’ve got to laugh at it, but… gosh. Really hope they went back and explained it was satire to some of those people, if not apologising outright. Having said that, I think he’s reached the limits of the persona; it really got a bit repetitive and predictable (but still evoking laughter for shock value) in parts. I still laughed loudly.
Anyway. More to come soon.
23 Nov 2006
Get ready for 24-hour living – New Scientist
Thinking Brave New World and being reminded of Abbreviated Human, especially by this quote at the end:
Stanley believes that drugs like modafinil and CX717 will tempt people to overdose on wakefulness at the expense of sleep. “Being awake is seen to be attractive,” he says. “It’s not cool to be asleep.” Foster has similar worries. “It seems like that technology will help us cope with 24/7, but is coping really living?” he asks.
It’s almost cheesy (as was AH), but interesting to observe.
23 Nov 2006
I visited Raw Ideas today and was really quite excited by what I saw. They’re about to move office again so I was popping in to return the keys (I still had them even though I haven’t worked there for several months now) and generally catch up. Tino was working on a tape library application for archiving DVCPro and Mini DV and HD(V, mostly) footage in a really searchable and generally more-manageable-than-shelves-full-of-labels kind of way, and he was pretty keen to show it off. Freakin’ awesome stuff. Aside from some DHTML gimmicks (fading rollovers, etc., stuff that you think is cool when you’re developing it but does nothing but irritate you once you have to sit down and finally use the application for five minutes!) it was great to see he’s using Scriptaculous for some genuinely useful AJAX-based functionality.
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 :-)
16 Nov 2006
Wow I can’t wait until this time tomorrow. So much stuff to get done now this whole uni gig is over. Incidentally, one whole year out of the way, eh?
This next couple of weeks will be fun… shooting a short film Saturday, Katy’s birthday that evening, somehow bidding in an eBay auction on Sunday morning whilst at TACKLES (might need to delegate that one!) to pick up some cheap lighting bars, continuing shoot Sunday afternoon, then I’ll be at work all week to catch up on the time I’ve been out of action because of exams/assessments, etc., and chase up all kinds of exciting things that have been on hold (including SMS stuff, yay!) for a conference in early December.
Then, next Saturday, there’s the FEVA Promoting the Word through Text and Image conference, which is plenty exciting and all the cool kids will be there, so get along to it if you can (it’s cheap for a media conference or about average for a Christian conference — worth it either way!)
Wednesday week there’s a performance on at Matthias by the drama kids (it’s a thing we do for networking with kids and parents in the local area more than anything, but it’s run by the kids ministry people at our church.) that shouldn’t be too high stress (at least for me) but I’ll be off work for a day for, then the next evening web-blast06 is being put on by the fine folks from WIPA (I’m going courtesy of hearing about it through WSG, not part of the elite that forms that organisation at present ;-)) at the Old Fitzroy, which is a fun little pub (and theatre) in Woolloomooloo. Which is all fun and games but weirdly suspended between high-priced real estate and the dodge-the-syringes bits of Sydney… shrug.
After that, I’ll hopefully cruise steadily towards the end of the year (December 14 for me, pretty much, coz I’m away til Christmas and it’s basically the New Year after that), finding a programmer and hammering out a bit more stuff for the early early parts of 2007 when development will (God willing) kick off in earnest. Last web thing for the year for me is going to be Webjam on December 12 at Hotel CBD (right down the road from where I used to work, actually) which should be a great deal of fun. I was tempted to try and present something but figure I’m in such a state of permanent verbosity I’d find it hard to do anything useful with three minutes. So I’ll be there heckling in the crowd :-) Should be great fun. If you’re keen to come along to either web thing drop a comment after you’ve RSVP’d (web-blast is full already, but Webjam appears to be open still) and we can arrange to meet up beforehand or something.
But I can’t get any work done until this exam is over because it makes me feel too guilty about not studying. Sigh. Incidentally, reading a great book on Tennyson and Madness (if only it were Madness and Modernism, but perhaps they’re occasionally synonymous!) by Ann Colley.
Colley, Ann C. Tennyson and Madness. The University of Georgia Press. 1983. if you’re interested — got some great stuff on his Maud monodrama which is the reason it got borrowed in the first place!
15 Nov 2006
I have got to get a better domain name. Some poor guy just tried to send a quote to my email address @goah.com
This domain is definitely not designed for telephone communication.
Any ideas for another one (I’m not relinquishing this one yet) with greater respect for the phonetic sensibilities of our language? Various combinations of josh/joshua street/st are available at both gTLD and ccTLD levels, but they bore me somewhat. Open to all ideas, accepting of them only at my discretion. ;-)