Archive: November, 2008

Stan is baring his soul and showing his first website. He explains his actions thusly:

As embarrassing as it might be, I’m putting that old version (as well as my second site) online because I believe in trying to preserve the things we make.

He also says:

There are organizations like Archive.org/Wayback Machine that are doing a good job of capturing the web, but it’s still not quite there yet. For now, I don’t think it’s a bad idea for us to keep our own archives.

That echoes something I said in my talk, The Long Web:

Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive is a magnificent undertaking. But the scale of the endeavour is monumental. Saving our culture is a task that will probably need to be crowdsourced if it is to succeed.

You can read the whole thing if you’re interested in more of my thoughts on digital preservation but for now I’m going to follow Jason’s lead and show the first two versions of this site:

• Adactio, version 1
• Adactio, version 2

As you’ll see, I was doing superfluous bloated JavaScript effects before they were fashionable. I’m very, very glad that I switched my site over its current shape seven years ago. As Jason says:

We all have the urge to redesign our websites every other month, but it’s heartbreaking to see old designs just vanish forever.

But in my case I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too. Of course I get the urge to redesign my site but instead of replacing the existing design, I add the new design to the list of options. This approach is at once completely in agreement and utterly at odds with Jason’s claim:

The things we write are published with a specific design and context. When we change that, we break the context and alter the original qualities of that piece of work.

I’m finding that on today’s web, content and design no longer have a one-to-one relationship. One piece of data can exist in many different contexts: a one-to-many relationship. A blog post appearing at a website URL or in an RSS reader is a fairly simplistic example. But think about, say, all the photos on Flickr and the myriad places where they might be viewed. Then there are services like Fire Eagle and AMEE where the content has no visible home. It’s the data that matters.

That’s not to say that design is no longer important. Far from it. With the proliferation of all this data, it’s more important than ever to present it in a way that makes sense and, in a best-case scenario, in a way that has an emotional impact. The difference with the web as the delivery mechanism is that the design can be tailored to the person consuming the data. That is both immensely liberating and unbelievably challenging.

This is the kind of stuff that Jeff Veen has been talking about lately as Designing Our Way Through Data.

Here’s an interview with the makers of the game Geometry Wars, a game I find utterly fascinating for the way its very simple rule base quickly results in complex hallucinatory visions of beauty that are simultaneously mesmerising and baffling to watch.

After reading the interview, I moved on to the next tab I had open in my browser courtesy of Tom’s always excellent links. This was a post by Simon Wistow describing the iPhone version of the game rRootage. There I came across the word 弾幕 or danmaku meaning bullet hell:

…a sub-genre of shoot ‘em up video games in which the entire screen is often almost completely filled with enemy bullets.

Next time I’m trying to describe Geometry Wars I think I’ll just say It’s kind of danmaku.

Rate My Area describes itself as:

…the new and easy way to find, review, share and discuss all that’s good (and not so good!) in your area.

The name is a little bit confusing. You don’t actually rate your area as such, you rate the businesses in your area. But Rate My Cafés, Pubs, Takeaways and Everything Else would be a very long-winded name.

Anyway, the reason I mention the site is that Clearleft had a hand in it: information architecture, visual design, and front-end build. That last part was where I was involved; markup, CSS and JavaScript. Although the site launched just this week, we finished our work on it finished quite a while back. We were beginning to wonder if it would ever see the light of day. Now that the site has finally launched, I can see where the time has gone: they’ve been seeding the site with oodles and oodles of good data. It makes quite a difference: instead of launching a ghost town, it feels like a vibrant, active place.

I had another concern with the launch of Rate My Area: after all this time, would any of my markup have survived intact? I needn’t have worried. Although there’s been plenty of extra work done on top of the templates we provided, the attention to detail has remained consistently high. As most front-end developers will agree, it’s not often that you can proudly point to a final site without having to add disclaimers about late additions that messed with your nice, pristine markup. Rate My Area looks like being an exception. As well as maintaining Paul’s beautiful and daring visual design, the site has a solid foundation of semantic markup stuffed full of microformats and enhanced with unobtrusive JavaScript.

My congratulations (and thanks) go out to Mike and Rory, the lads with the Rate My Area vision. Right now the site is confined to areas in Dublin but it will expand; the rest of Ireland, then the UK, and then …the world. Mwuhahaha!

Oh, one more thing: the site has an iPod version (not Clearleft’s work). Alas, you are directed automatically if you visit www.RateMyArea.com on your iPhone/iPod. I much prefer a separate subdomain like m.twitter.com and m.pownce.com. Still, it’s one of the nicest iPhone sites I’ve seen.

I’m back from Japan. Thank you to everyone who took the time to give me some sightseeing tips. I had a a great trip.

Web Directions East was really well organised. John and his team took really good care of me and all the other speakers. The only glitch was on my part and it was medical in nature.

Maybe it was the long flight over, maybe it was lack of sleep, but my body protested its new-found surroundings by rebelling in the vocal department. As I was wrapping up my presentation on stage on the morning of the conference, I could feel my throat becoming raspier. An hour or two later, my voice was on its way out. I attempted some damage control by ducking back to the hotel for the afternoon which meant that sadly, I missed a whole bunch of undoubtedly excellent presentation while I tried resting up my body and throat. I still had a whole day of workshopping to do two days after the conference proper and I needed my voice for that.

I spent the day before the workshop being somewhat antisocial by not speaking at all. That helped somewhat but on the day of the workshop itself, I still sounded like Tom Waits. From a medical standpoint, I probably shouldn’t have attempted to spend a whole day talking about Ajax but from a professional standpoint, I was determined to deliver what I had promised. I made it through …just. There were times when I thought I really wouldn’t be able to reach the end of the workshop but it somehow worked out. On the positive side, I really only had to make sure I was audible to one person: the simultaneous interpreter. The interpreters’ voices were all working just fine so the workshop attendees received a translation of my words without an accompanying translation of my laryngitis.

On reflection, it probably wasn’t the best idea to celebrate the successful conclusion of the workshop with an evening of merriment that culminated with karaoke. But hey, when in Japan, right?

The rest of my time in Japan was spent soaking up as many sights, sounds and—most importantly—tastes as I possibly could. In brief…

• Everybody I met in Japan was friendly and helpful. This is a country where people don’t get into fights when they get drunk, they just get even more polite and friendly.
• Every subway stop in Tokyo has its own jingle. This is, quite simply, awesome.
• Advertisements eschew telling you a domain name in favour of showing you what to search for. They must be very confident of their search engine rankings.
• Shinjuku is a great part of Tokyo. Personally, I think it’s even cooler than Shibuya.
• A trip to Akihabara proved fruitful. I successfully acquired a tachikoma.
• Getting up early to visit Tsukiji fish market was totally worth it. It’s a huge chaotic cathedral of seafood.
• Visiting the Meiji shrine on a weekend was fortuitous. There was more than one wedding party to observe.
• Kyoto is a beautiful place, perhaps one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Staying in a ryokan heightened the experience.
• Osaka—or at least the Dotonbori— is crazier than Shinjuku and Shibuya combined. It’s an unimaginative cliché to say this but it really was like Bladerunner.

Then there was the food: sushi, unagi and yakitori in Tokyo, udon in Kyoto, okonomiyaki and takoyaki in Osaka …it was all wonderful.

Diligent tourist that I am, I had my camera with me at all times. For your viewing pleasure I give you:

• Over five hundred pictures I took on the entire trip,
• Over a hundred pictures of Kyoto alone and
• A morning’s worth of fish photography at the Tsukiji fish market.

I’ve been doing a lot of travelling this year. I intend to cut back (or attend more virtual conferences like Aral’s). I’m worried that my carbon footprint will require a few forests to offset. I mean, I’ve got the velocity of a squirrel, for crying out loud.

That said, there are certain opportunities that are just too good to pass up. Like, for example, when John asked me if I would speak at Web Directions East in Tokyo next weekend. Yes; Tokyo. A place I’ve always dreamt of visiting.

Tomorrow I’ll fly from Heathrow to Narita and I still can hardly believe it’s really happening. While I’m extremely nervous about my presentation and workshop, I’m also unbelievably excited about visiting the land of sushi and manga. Even better, Jessica is coming with me and, if anything, she’s even more excited.

We’ll be in Tokyo for the best part of a week before heading on for a couple of days in Kyoto and a couple of days in Osaka. We don’t have much of an agenda apart from soaking up the atmosphere and—being the foodies that we are—eating everything in sight.

If you have any hints or tips on what do in Japan, please share them. For my part, I can only promise lots of photographic documentation and maybe even a bit of blogging.