by Karina Beattiger 8.May 2008 08:18
Alliteration aside, I am what some may call a rabid hater of all blog and networking sites whose main method for gauging interest is akin to a high school dance. (You may choose your own details.) Facebook, MySpace, DeviantArt, LiveJournal -- I can talk here, I used to be an eeeeeaaaaaaarly adopter, with a username people tried to pay me to give up -- and other such 'friendslist driven' networking sites. You know what I'm talking about. For years, I've managed to stay away from the sheer ridiculousness that is "What do you mean, I'm not in your top 10?" and "Did you see what Nancy posted in her blog about George, who posted in his blog about Ray, who posted in Nancy's blog about that kid who set his pants on fire?" (C'mon, Youtubers, you've seen it, too...)
So when Twitter started making an appearance a couple years ago, I subconsciously filed it under 'don't care' and moved on. It was, to my way of thinking, just another popularity game with not-so-subtle hints of obssessive stalking and a continuation of the 'let's plug in to the internet and never leave' theme that's been creeping up on us (avalanched?) for the past decade or so. Yes, as a web designer, I can't talk too loudly, so I won't. About that, anyway. This time.
Except... Then I learned that WD Weems had his own Twitter. And that he was incorporating it into his blog. And that, now knowing you can do such a thing, he was incorporating it into his blog in a pretty awesome way. Oh, ho, ho. I am intrigued. And then he upped the ante: did you know Andy Clarke has a Twitter feed? I bet you do -- he's got 1,682 followers (in Twit-speak, it means 1,682 people are watching his feed). You're one of them, aren't you? It's okay; stand proud. I am, too.
This is where Twitter starts to feel vaguely stalkery to me. On the one hand, I'm the kind of person who watches my IMs to see what everyone's away messages are. If they're sufficiently clever, I leave a message with them. If not, the tiny part of me that is a frothing-at-the-mouth Virgo is at least content to know what everyone is doing in some vain attempt at controlling the schedules and whereabouts of my friends. (Why I am not dead in a ditch somewhere is beyond me -- my friends are tolerant and kind.) On the other hand, it's pretty fascinating to get a glimpse into the daily lives of people who are, for all intents and purposes, nothing more than pixels on a screen to me: Kyle swears Andy is flesh and blood, but maybe he's just a really excellently crafted virtual reality rock star with fingers in every port worldwide, leaving clever comments like Alice, only with personality.
And then here's where Twitter starts expanding from simple stalkery. Andy isn't the only web guru on the system. Eric Meyer, star of meyerweb.com; Jeffrey Zeldman, of A List Apart fame as well as his own self-named blog; and so on. I could keep going, but I'm on a time limit here. My tea is getting cold.
There's a point to all this name-dropping, though, I promise: all of these gurus are linked through Twitter. Of course, Twitter isn't the only application that does this, but bear with me here. The beauty of Twitter is that it only allows for a few lines at a time -- there's a 140 character limit. This doesn't allow for very much room. It forces the Tweeter to keep it short and concise, either dabbling in the mysterious one-liner or laying out a thought-provoking statement of opinion or fact. Or, my personal favorite, engaging in the slow, yet fun to watch, exchange of comments to each other, a la the all-purpose @ sign. When they all meet up for a conference or event, the back and forth of Tweets and Twitterers takes on a uniform subject -- from the saga of the disappearing underpansuitcase to the travels and travails of getting to and from and surving the conference in question.
As if this wasn't cool enough, the sheer PR capability of an easily maintained mini-blog is mind-blowing. Not only can you single-handedly let people know that you're active, alive, and feeling chipper (or not), but you can always take the opportunity to network with your peers, as well. You can input the code into your website, or blog, or whathaveyou, offering a neat and easy way to inform your non-Twitter stalkers that you're up and about and busy as a bee, or you can simply use it as a kind of periscope into everyone else's lives.
...It really does sound a little stalkish, doesn't it?
So, a brief recap, then. Twitter:
- A Toy: Fulfilling everyone's undying need to stalk somebody.
- A Tool: Networking, idea-sharing, and a kind of GPS on the pulse of the community.
- A Guilty Pleasure: Because I admit to an undying need to stalk people.
All in all, like any tool, you're going to find your fair share of twits as well as tradesman. The key here is to find the community that you're interested in to begin with. When used sparingly, and without the popularity-driven fanaticism of MySpace's friends list-padding mindset, Twitter can be a useful and effective tool of the trade. As well as a guilty pleasure.
...What? I've got my cake. Now I'm going to eat it, too!
by Karina Beattiger 29.April 2008 14:53
There's a handful of sharp-edged burdens that martyrdesigners must carry, but chief among them is probably the designer-to-developer crossover. The one thing I've heard Heather say repeatedly -- whether she knew anyone was listening or not, I may yet never know -- is that the spacing gets all crazy from the proof to the cut stage. Though we do our best to eyeball and, sometimes, flat out use the CS3 selection tool to measure the exact padding measurements, there's a lot -- a lot! -- of room for error. Or, ahem, developers' judgment.
Just recently, Heather enlightened me to the secrets of the "design column" -- a way of using columns not as text layout objects, but as visual cues for what elements should go where. I'm sorry, but until you have passed the 100 Trials of the Wayward Peacock and returned to me with the diamond-tipped hairpin of the seventh sister of the Lost Shogun, I can't say anymore.* (They're always watching...)
Enter Eric Puidokas' Firefox extentions, GridFox! This little gem of an add-on (sorry, IE'ers) allows the user to input the measurements of the designers' design columns. The add-on then overlays a shadowed opacity in the exact shape of the columns and gutters, providing immediate visual cues as to how far off the designers' intent we really are. A quick glance at the screen can show that your header, which should be 10 pixels from the left edge, is actually something like 20px, and that just isn't right.
Now, it also gives, in my unasked for opinion, feelings of severe complacency: don't let this handy tool take away your own eye for "how things work" on the web! The biggest disconnect between those who are primarily designers and those who are primarily developers is the translation of "what looks awesome" to "what will look less (or more) awesome, but still work on the internet". It'd be far too easy to mimic the designer's intent exactly, forgetting to keep an eye out on those layout issues that could crop up and affect usability and interface.
A seamless blend, that's what I promote. Inner peace and outer harmony, spiritual well-being between those who design, those who don't, and those who do a little bit of everything.
Having spent the past couple of weeks dealing with a particularly
sharp-eyed client, I can't share enough how something like this, when
used in conjunction with a designer who actually uses the design column
method, would have come in extremely handy.
* Stay tuned for future post explaining columns, if I can't find a better description on another website first. Shhhh.
by Karina Beattiger 15.April 2008 09:24
With WD Weems out of the office, it's time I seized control of all things Mindfly blog-like and make my coup. Translation: He's running late on blog posts and is guaranteed to shoot me evil, evil looks as I do my third post in a row. Mwaha. Mwahaha. Haha. Ha. So, today's episode of the Hitchhiker's GuideMindfly blog is a Creature Feature. There won't be any vampires, werewolves, and mummies, oh, my!, but there will be various annoyances, evils, and detailing that clients (and, yes, designers) sometimes ask for and want.
These are personal interests that I run into now and again, bits and pieces that I don't initially know how to do, or run across, or end up -- such as this particular bit -- being shown by Kyle's mad Google skillz.
Here we go. Lights, camera... For a website we had to do recently, one of the requests was that the drop-down menus would highlight to dark blue on a rollover, and then stay that way when you click on any of the pages in said dropdown. To date, the only way I knew how to do that was through javascript. A viable option, but for those of us still struggling to master javascript, an annoying one. I can't tell you how many times I have to get Kyle over here to do some simple bit of coding because I'm still trying to figure out if, else, then, blah. (Rumor has it that Andy Clarke once said at a conference that he's been known to hire other people to do his javascript for him in a professional environment. This makes me feel better. That being said, I think he's a wizard at code anyway, which sort of takes away from my inner contentment and spiritual well-being as a code-challenged individual. I have a sneaking suspicion I should get off my horse and actually learn what it is I'd be contracting out to other people: just because I want to go home and play World of Warcraft doesn't mean I should. ...Right?)
Anyway! The point here is that we at Mindfly feel that such "You are Here" indicators are essential to the complete website experience. It's nothing short of annoying to find yourself on a website where you have no idea where you are based on a quick glance. Whether it's done with headers or with visual cues, it allows your viewer (reader, customer, rabid fanatic stalker type, whatever) to know where she is in the space of a moment. If you have the kind of site that has layers upon layers oflinks and sub-links, it definitely helps a viewer keep her place mentally. No one likes having to search through a dozen links trying to figure out which section she's currently in.
So, with little enough ado, I summoned WD Weems, pointed to the screen, and said, "Quoi?" (Fortunately, he's learned to recognize what my various nonsensical sounds mean.) Since inputting yet more javascript on every page we make is not the most ideal solution -- after all, the more javascript you put on a page to load, the longer it takes, not to mention what happens when a user disables javascript -- we wanted a solution that would still work in most cases.
Enter active page highlighting with CSS. This is exciting stuff. This is... years old.
Oh, boy. Aren't I the slow one? Apparently, the only way to learn stuff is to research it, even years after it's been written. Seriously, who knew?