Google has some pretty neat toys for developers and CakePHP is a pretty friendly framework to quickly build applications on which is well supported. That said, when I went looking for a Google geocoding component, I was a little surprised to discover that nobody had created one to do the hand-shakey business between a CakePHP application and Google.
That is, I didn’t find anyone, though they may well be out there.
I did find several references to a Google Maps helper, but, that didn’t help too much since I had an address and no geodata. The helpers I found looked, well… helpful once you had the correct data, mind you. Before you can do all of the maps-type stuff, you have collect the geodata and that’s where I came in. Continue Reading »
Last night I was working on integrating oAuth consumers into Noisophile. This is the first time I had done something like this so I was reading all of the material I could to get the best idea for what I was about to do. I came across a blog post about oAuth and one particular way of managing the information passed back from Twitter and the like.
This person will remain unidentified as I don’t want gobs of people spamming his site, nor do I want to give his poor judgement any extra exposure. That said, the basis of the post was, it is preferable to make users authenticate with Twitter every time they logged into the system as opposed to storing the keys and remembering who the users of the site are.
The take-away message was, paraphrased, “it’s a simple back and forth between your site and Twitter each time they log in. It won’t bother the user and it is preferable to storing all of those authentication keys.” Continue Reading »
Earlier this year I discussed progressive enhancement, and proposed that a web site should perform the core functions without any frills. Last night I had a discussion with a friend, regarding this very same topic. It came to light that it wasn’t clear where the boundaries should be drawn. Interaction needs to be a blend of server- and client-side technologies.
Ultimately, it is rarely clear where boundaries are in a project. What is too much, what is too little? Somewhere between too much and too little is just right, much like what Goldilocks wanted in her porridge. We know that even the most limited of users should be able to access our sites within certain considerations. A photo gallery is, ultimately, little use to a blind person, but alt tags should still be in place. Sound clips of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra would be useless to a deaf person, though a caption or indication as to what each sound clip is would be quite handy.
Coming back to the point, finding a balance point is critical to providing rich, meaningful interaction between your user and your site. Perhaps the first question which should be answered is “can this be done without Technology X?” Continue Reading »
Since I am an engineer first and a designer second in my job, more often than not the designs you see came from someone else’s comp. Being that I am a designer second, it means that I know just enough about design to be dangerous but not enough to be really effective over the long run.
When I say I am a designer second I mean I am, in fact, a design school dropout. I went, I learned just enough to “get it” and then I ended up dropping out. I did go back to school and I got a math degree, but that is a different story for a different day.
If there is anything I learned from design school, it was that everything in design is done for a reason. Mind you, this is when design is at its best. Every designer that is working to solve a problem and communicate with the viewer has incorporated elements and done things so a specific message comes through. Continue Reading »
It’s always great when you have the opportunity to built a site from the ground up. You have opportunities to design things right the first time, and set standards in place for future users, designers and developers alike. These are the good times.
More often than not, sites are already built and deployed for the world to view. Moreover, there are probably unintentional standards in place which get in the way of your best efforts to do right by the site, the content and the user.
It can be said that, much like user experience is either good or bad, there is no such thing as no standard, there is merely a good or bad standard. Once a project is underway, if there are no standards to work from, they will create themselves.
Pretty soon you find yourself in the corner holding a roller and a can of paint with a confused look on your face. Continue Reading »
I am big on modularity. There are lots of problems on the web to fix and modularity applies to many of them. A couple of posts ago I talked about content and that it is all built on or made of objects. The benefits from working with objectified content is the ease of updating and the breadth and depth of content that can be added to the site.
Something really exciting that came from my previous post was that functions are objects. By this, I mean, site function does not live in a separate world, outside of the content object ecosystem. Functions should be and ARE integrated right into the website.
This is the beauty of the modern web. Since functions are merely objects which can be included in pages, they can be built, tested and deployed independently and then integrated seamlessly into the web application. Typically we think of this kind of function as a plug-in, though plug-ins are merely objects in their own right.
Hagan Rigers (@haganrivers) is currently part of the Web App Masters Tour. Without giving too much away about her talk, she discusses managing site (and application) navigation as a function. She breaks navigation out of the system and handles it as a separate function of the site, independent of the content. If we consider this approach, then we can see something really important:
Navigation is a function. Continue Reading »
Through all of the usability, navigation, design, various user-related laws and a healthy handful of information and hierarchical tricks and skills, something that continues to elude designers and developers is pretty URLs. Mind you, SEO experts would balk at the idea that companies don’t think about using pretty URLs in order to drive search engine placement. There is something else to consider in the meanwhile:
The user.
Several articles I found talk about the SEO benefits of pretty URLs and whether it is very important to consider using them with a site as they don’t encourage a major boost anymore. “It’s ten years too late,” they say. It’s never too late, I say. Continue Reading »
When I wrote my first post about object-oriented content, I was thinking in a rather small scope. I said to myself, “I need content I can place where I need it, but I can edit once and update everything at the same time.” The answer seemed painfully clear: I need objects.
Something funny happened between then and now. I realized that content is already made up of objects. All at once, I discovered I was one with all of the content scattered across the web. It was a very zen moment I’m not sure I could recreate on my best day.
See, we are already working with content objects everywhere, but we just haven’t noticed. Take Twitter for instance. Twitter specializes in the content object. It’s a very small object, but it’s there all the same. Take, for instance, a tweet from my feed.
My one tweet is both content on its own and it is part of my feed which is also content. The same can be said for blog posts, RSS feeds, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos, that picture of your cat and any other of a number of things scattered across the web. Continue Reading »
A little earlier this month, I made a post to Posterous called “What Have I Done?” It was less a post about what I had done as what I was doing. Here we are, approaching the end of the month and I’ve just completed phase one of what I was doing.
In saying all that, I would like to oficially kick this post off with a bit of rejoice. CobbleSite version 1 is complete and ready for people to play with it. Let’s just call it a version though it’s not. Not really, anyway. This is exciting for me as I get to do more than simply blog about what I do, I get to show it.
All of this isn’t very useful if I don’t share a little about why I did it. I mean, what’s so special about just one more content management system if it’s built to be a variant on everything else that is already out there? There is, after all, one major difference: Continue Reading »
With the advent of Ruby on Rails (RoR or Rails) as well as many of the PHP frameworks available, MVC has become a regular buzzword. Everyone claims they work in an MVC fashion though, much like Agile development, it comes in various flavors and strengths.
So, what is really going on here?
The idea behind MVC as well as many other design patterns, is to break programming tasks into chunks and handle them independently. MVC typically fills a need on the web as the view or UI is what the user ultimately sees and keeping it uncluttered makes life easier for the creatives to work their magic after the programmers have performed theirs. Continue Reading »