saila.com: About saila.com Feed

Not a Google beta

Quite a few of you have sent in feedback politely reminding me that this site is often illegible in Internet Explorer. Others have mentioned that the Twitter updates have been breaking the page as a result of numerous PHP errors. Others have wondered if this will be an eternal beta.

All the comments, have no doubt seemed to have disappeared into a black hole, destined to be unheeded.

Rest assured, they haven’t.

The unfortunate fact is my attention has been focused elsewhere, and is only now starting to return to the bugs I and others have noticed. But I wanted to thank you for your comments and bug reports, and let you know I will be fixing them (the Twitter/PHP error is the first, the Internet Explorer issue may be deferred, though).

With any luck this site will be shape just in time for Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 to be released — which will no doubt provide me with yet another reason to tinker with things.

Beta, baby

Welcome to the final stage of this prolonged redesign. Although “beta” is so Web 2.0, that is what this version is. There will still be some old links that are pointed in the wrong location, the design (such as it is) needs some further polish, some strange characters may pop-up, but essentially, it is done.

Along with the new look, the focus of the site is more tuned to longer, less frequently appearing articles. In addition, each of those articles are associated with topics that, in turn, reveal related articles and posts. The Living Can Kill You blog remains (as do other regular features, like the Main Page Rants and Web Design Tips), but notable links are more likely to appear as blogmarks. The CSS layout, one of the most enduringly popular features of saila.com, is still available but is now grouped with related content.

The URL structure has also been improved to make it more “REST”ful, allowing you to sort by date, category, and topic. Extending the ways you can access the site, there are now news feeds for the key sections; an enhanced print layout; and a planned mobile-friendly design. Finally, to better improve communication with the rest of the Web, saila.com is pinging Technorati with each new item posted and once again welcomes reader comments.

As you wonder through the site, if you notice something miss or have a suggested improvement, let me know — the more details you can offer the better I can improve the site for you.

Thank you for your patience, and I hope the site will offer more to you than it did before.

Gone alpha

The time has come, the tardy one said, to release this new design is only as an alpha. Finally, the key functionality is in place meaning there is once again feedback and comment forms; RSS feeds are now de rigeur, and the content is organized by topics. Most importantly, the site is no longer a mess of XSSI and is running off of a home-brewed CMS powered by CodeIgniter.

So if everything’s in place, why the alpha?

Key redirects are still messing (remember, cool URIs don’t change) and some content is not yet properly displayed (notably the tips and the glossary). As soon as those are in place, and any major reported bugs are resolved, the site will move to a beta — with links from every page of the old design pointing to their new version. The beta will also be broadcast to the subscribers of the long-dormant email list. Once any remaining issues from that release are resolved (and a mobile and print-friendly version of the site are done); the new saila.com will be unveiled to the world.

Keen eyes may have got a sneak peak at the new design (which will be changing, I only really like how it appears in the nightly WebKit builds) as I was setting up the alpha subdomain. There’s nothing spectacular with the visual look, but I was pleased the core worked out of the box in Firefox, Safari, and Opera. A few tweaks and IE 7 came into line. Internet Explorer 6 nearly three dozen new rules to even get it to behave.

Bug reports are more than welcome, as are design suggestions even if I can’t get the latter immediately. Have at it: alpha.saila.com

Arrival

If you are reading this then the Web host switch is done (at least for you) and I hope the email is functioning again.

As I mentioned yesterday, the switch was:

to coincide with the launch of the new site (which, again people, is going to be rough and border-line beta quality), but I forgot two things:

My testing database hasn’t been update with the content from the past year and a bit.

My production database hasn’t been set-up.

Truthfully, I didn’t forget, I just didn’t realize how much time it would take to do both tasks. So, the new host will showcase the old design for a bit longer than expected and the new design will be made available as an alpha for the willing and eager.

Packing the bags

Well, here goes nothing.

After ten years of excellenting hosting by my friends at ThinData, I am now switching to MediaTemple in what is the first stage of launching this redesign. Once again, the domain transfer is a first for me and, as a result, I am not really sure what to expect, except that service could be bumpy over the next while as the host servers update to point to the new location.

This was to coincide with the launch of the new site (which, again people, is going to be rough and border-line beta quality), but I forgot two things:

My testing database hasn’t been update with the content from the past year and a bit.
My production database hasn’t been set-up.

Truthfully, I didn’t forget, I just didn’t realize how much time it would take to do both tasks. So, the new host will showcase the old design for a bit longer than expected and the new design will be made available as an alpha for the willing and eager.

Thanks for your patience and we’ll see you on the other side.

August 26, 2005

Hid the subscribe box and showed the search box in the menu Changed the spotlit items on the homepage.

In a state of flux

To repeat what once uttered to a confused hostess for a chain restaurant in some suburban mall: “Ummm, just a minute; we’re in a state of flux right now.”

This site surprisingly switched servers causing a bit of breakage in the way it’s built (i.e., hacking Apache’s XSSI options). Compounding that, outside influences have been quite distracting. As a result, updates here have been, and will be sparse as I bootstrap the new design. however, I do offer a bit of a morsel to LCKY fans: a feed (RSS/Atom-friendly) of what will become the new site’s blogmark list.

Registration pro: FT; registration con: Newsbot

Registration is a buzzworthy topic these days, and I’ve just written a longer piece offering evidence for and against it.

Redesigns on a theme

Two recent redesigns reflect some of the design ideas I’ve been experimenting, offline, with. The first is Dunstan Orchard’s subtle, yet tremendous, new design for his blog and its use of both a page gutter and a sidebar containing one of three key navigational elements. The latter potentially creates a simple, non-intrusive personalization feature: if I want to see his blogmarks, and not his main navigation by default, I’d select that sidebar to load by default (it doesn’t seem to now).

Unlike Dunstan’s redesign, which seems to primarily target the user interface and information architecture, Andrei Herasimchuk’s new Design By Fire is a re-imagining.

Andrei’s design is a designer’s design which seems meant for a big display — although its default width is only 100 or so pixels wider than Dunstan’s — and my default browsing width does not do it justice. What he has done nicely, along with the ample use of white space, is remove the comments from the main entry. Unlike others, though, he’s kept the comments on the same page, but floated to them to the right of the main article. As he points out, it helps reduce the page length, but it also serves to reinforce the independence of the main piece. The subtle shift returns comments to just that: commentary on the main piece, not as a living addition to the main article. To combat complaints about having to scroll back up to read them, they could be set to position: fixed.

Both reflect strong print (specifically magazine) influences, and this may be the next big trend — especially if multi-columns become a reality.

Although I’ve worked none of these into the current working design, I anticapte this site’s new look will incorporate my experiments with these ideas.

Comments re-enabled

With this entry I give thee comments… (Which are still in beta, bugs can be sent via the feedback form.)

Comments a’comin’

For those that care, comments are returning soon. But before they do, I’m taking some time off.

Comments on a summer vacation

How’d you spend your summer vacation? I got the new comment system for this site working. (Okay, that’s not quite true, I only spent some of the first day doing that.) Like everything else with this redesign, it took me much longer than I’d anticipated. The main reason was again added functionality.

Now like many of the better comment-enabled sites out there, this version will soon (and the new design will):

offer comment previews;
allow valid XHTML or plain text (thanks to a modified version of Simon Willison’s SafeHtmlChecker);
identify my comments in an obvious (like Dave Shea), and more secure way;
decrease the visual impact of anonymous comments (again, like Mr. Shea);
and use some DOM-magic to clean-up spam protected email and Web addresses.

Planned, but not yet implemented (because it won’t work in the current design):

permalinks for each comment;
and numbering on each comment.

Redesign update

For those wondering about the redesign of this site, I’ve posted an update.

Will it ever launch?

In the ten months since my last column here, not much has changed other than my realization how deep the rabbit hole goes. With each minor new feature added (such as sorting by date) the possibilities and opportunities for the site burst wide open.

Ironically, it’s not the information architecture that is causing the problem, it’s the usability. The vision is to create a site so transparent, you’ll be able to navigate the way you want. With that goal/pipe dream, though, comes with a degree of complexity that taxes my technical skills; short spurts are all I can manage given the interruptions caused by my day job. Given enough c, c & q and the site would appear in weeks, not months.

Got a roadmap?

Various external pressures are creating a real deadline for this site’s new design. Already, the design I’d locked down for this relaunch contained elements that have since appeared in the redesigns of others. Though it’s good to know the non-designer in me wasn’t completely off-track, I anticipate the design will change yet again before the official debut. Once I catch the remaining broken links and finalize the output of some of the under-used features, it will launch.

This initial alpha release will be mentioned here, in the nearly comatose news list, and possibly LCKY. The next phase will have corrected the errors of the alpha, and finalized the less polished sections. Promotion for this beta version will be on each page; the current Web page will link to its twin on the beta site. This should catch any 404s and allow a bigger audience to test the site.

Finally, once the issues of the beta are resolved, the new site will be activated and the current static site will vanish into a zip file on my hard drive.

As for timelines, all I can say is that each subsequent stage will be exponentially shorter the the previous and that features of the new site will soon be available on this site (RSS, comments, and the afore mentioned newsletter).

Mine, all mine

All of this, including these columns is done for my own personal edification. While I do freelance work, I don’t rely on it; this design isn’s driven by design needs.

Aside from the reasons outline in the first of these columns, this process, like many personal-site redesigns, is done as a learning exercise. This is a playground that allows me to experiment with CSS (four years ago, this site introduced a three-column layout that is now being used on a number commercial sites); explore the server-side world; and experiment with all aspects of the launch process from project management to deployment.

That, and it’s easier than building maddeningly detailed historical dioramas.

Rare political rant

I’ve also posted a rare (for this site, at least) political rant about a disturbing trend emerging in the current (Canadian) federal election.