{"rowid": 166, "title": "Performance On A Shoe String", "contents": "Back in the summer, I happened to notice the official Wimbledon All England Tennis Club site had jumped to the top of Alexa\u2019s Movers & Shakers list \u2014 a list that tracks sites that have had the biggest upturn or downturn in traffic. The lawn tennis championships were underway, and so traffic had leapt from almost nothing to crazy-busy in a no time at all. \n\nMany sites have similar peaks in traffic, especially when they\u2019re based around scheduled events. No one cares about the site for most of the year, and then all of a sudden \u2013 wham! \u2013 things start getting warm in the data centre. Whilst the thought of chestnuts roasting on an open server has a certain appeal, it\u2019s less attractive if you care about your site being available to visitors. Take a look at this Alexa traffic graph showing traffic patterns for superbowl.com at the beginning of each year, and wimbledon.org in the month of July.\n\nTraffic graph from Alexa.com \n\nWhilst not on the same scale or with such dramatic peaks, we have a similar pattern of traffic here at 24ways.org. Over the last three years we\u2019ve seen a dramatic pick up in traffic over the month of December (as would be expected) and then a much lower, although steady load throughout the year. What we do have, however, is the luxury of knowing when the peaks will be. For a normal site, be that a blog, small scale web app, or even a small corporate site, you often just cannot predict when you might get slashdotted, end up on the front page of Digg or linked to from a similarly high-profile site. You just don\u2019t know when the peaks will be.\n\nIf you\u2019re a big commercial enterprise like the Super Bowl, scaling up for that traffic is simply a cost of doing business. But for most of us, we can\u2019t afford to have massive capacity sat there unused for 90% of the year. What you have to do instead is work out how to deal with as much traffic as possible with the modest resources you have.\n\nIn this article I\u2019m going to talk about some of the things we\u2019ve learned about keeping 24 ways running throughout December, whilst not spending a fortune on hosting we don\u2019t need for 11 months of each year. We\u2019ve not always got it right, but we\u2019ve learned a lot along the way.\n\nThe Problem\n\nTo know how to deal with high traffic, you need to have a basic idea of what happens when a request comes into a web server. 24 ways is hosted on a single small virtual dedicated server with a great little hosting company in the UK. We run Apache with PHP and MySQL all on that one server. When a request comes in a new Apache process is started to deal with the request (or assigned if there\u2019s one available not doing anything). Each process takes a bunch of memory, so there\u2019s a finite number of processes that you can run, and therefore a finite number of pages you can serve at once before your server runs out of memory.\n\nWith our budget based on whatever is left over after beer, we need to get best performance we can out of the resources available. As the goal is to serve as many pages as quickly as possible, there are several approaches we can take:\n\n\n\tReducing the amount of memory needed by each Apache process\n\tReducing the amount of time each process is needed\n\tReducing the number of requests made to the server\n\n\nYahoo! have published some information on what they call Exceptional Performance, which is well worth reading, and compliments many of my examples here. The Yahoo! guidelines very much look at things from a user perspective, which is always important.\n\nServer tweaking\n\nIf you\u2019re in the position of being able to change your server configuration (our set-up gives us root access to what is effectively a virtual machine) there are some basic steps you can take to maximise the available memory and reduce the memory footprint. Without getting too boring and technical (whole books have been written on this) there are a couple of things to watch out for.\n\nFirstly, check what processes you have running that you might not need. Every megabyte of memory that you free up might equate to several thousand extra requests being served each day, so take a look at top and see what\u2019s using up your resources. Quite often a machine configured as a web server will have some kind of mail server running by default. If your site doesn\u2019t use mail (ours doesn\u2019t) make sure it\u2019s shut down and not using resources.\n\nSecondly, have a look at your Apache configuration and particularly what modules are loaded. The method for doing this varies between versions of Apache, but again, every module loaded increases the amount of memory that each Apache process requires and therefore limits the number of simultaneous requests you can deal with.\n\nThe final thing to check is that Apache isn\u2019t configured to start more servers than you have memory for. This is usually done by setting the MaxClients directive. When that limit is reached, your site is going to stop responding to further requests. However, if all else goes well that threshold won\u2019t be reached, and if it does it will at least stop the weight of the traffic taking the entire server down to a point where you can\u2019t even log in to sort it out.\n\nThose are the main tidbits I\u2019ve found useful for this site, although it\u2019s worth repeating that entire books have been written on this subject alone.\n\nCaching\n\nAlthough the site is generated with PHP and MySQL, the majority of pages served don\u2019t come from the database. The process of compiling a page on-the-fly involves quite a few trips to the database for content, templates, configuration settings and so on, and so can be slow and require a lot of CPU. Unless a new article or comment is published, the site doesn\u2019t actually change between requests and so it makes sense to generate each page once, save it to a file and then just serve all following requests from that file.\n\nWe use QuickCache (or rather a plugin based on it) for this. The plugin integrates with our publishing system (Textpattern) to make sure the cache is cleared when something on the site changes. A similar plugin called WP-Cache is available for WordPress, but of course this could be done any number of ways, and with any back-end technology.\n\nThe important principal here is to reduce the time it takes to serve a page by compiling the page once and serving that cached result to subsequent visitors. Keep away from your database if you can.\n\nOutsource your feeds\n\nWe get around 36,000 requests for our feed each day. That really only works out at about 7,000 subscribers averaging five-and-a-bit requests a day, but it\u2019s still 36,000 requests we could easily do without. Each request uses resources and particularly during December, all those requests can add up. \n\nThe simple solution here was to switch our feed over to using FeedBurner. We publish the address of the FeedBurner version of our feed here, so those 36,000 requests a day hit FeedBurner\u2019s servers rather than ours. In addition, we get pretty graphs showing how the subscriber-base is building.\n\n\n\nOff-load big files\n\nLarger files like images or downloads pose a problem not in bandwidth, but in the time it takes them to transfer. A typical page request is very quick, a few seconds at the most, resulting in the connection being freed up promptly. Anything that keeps a connection open for a long time is going to start killing performance very quickly.\n\nThis year, we started serving most of the images for articles from a subdomain \u2013 media.24ways.org. Rather than pointing to our own server, this subdomain points to an Amazon S3 account where the files are held. It\u2019s easy to pigeon-hole S3 as merely an online backup solution, and whilst not a fully fledged CDN, S3 works very nicely for serving larger media files. The roughly 20GB of files served this month have cost around $5 in Amazon S3 charges. That\u2019s so affordable it may not be worth even taking the files back off S3 once December has passed.\n\nI found this article on Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3 to be really useful in getting started. I upload the files via a Firefox plugin (mentioned in the article) and then edit the ACL to allow public access to the files. The way S3 enables you to point DNS directly at it means that you\u2019re not tied to always using the service, and that it can be transparent to your users.\n\nIf your site uses photographs, consider uploading them to a service like Flickr and serving them directly from there. Many photo sharing sites are happy for you to link to images in this way, but do check the acceptable use policies in case you need to provide a credit or link back.\n\nOff-load small files\n\nYou\u2019ll have noticed the pattern by now \u2013 get rid of as much traffic as possible. When an article has a lot of comments and each of those comments has an avatar along with it, a great many requests are needed to fetch each of those images. In 2006 we started using Gravatar for avatars, but their servers were slow and were holding up page loads. To get around this we started caching the images on our server, but along with that came the burden of furnishing all the image requests.\n\nEarlier this year Gravatar changed hands and is now run by the same team behind WordPress.com. Those guys clearly know what they\u2019re doing when it comes to high performance, so this year we went back to serving avatars directly from them.\n\nIf your site uses avatars, it really makes sense to use a service like Gravatar where your users probably already have an account, and where the image requests are going to be dealt with for you. \n\nKnow what you\u2019re paying for\n\nThe server account we use for 24 ways was opened in November 2005. When we first hit the front page of Digg in December of that year, we upgraded the server with a bit more memory, but other than that we were still running on that 2005 spec for two years. Of course, the world of technology has moved on in those years, prices have dropped and specs have improved. For the same amount we were paying for that 2005 spec server, we could have an account with twice the CPU, memory and disk space.\n\nSo in November of this year I took out a new account and transferred the site from the old server to the new. In that single step we were prepared for dealing with twice the amount of traffic, and because of a special offer at the time I didn\u2019t even have to pay the setup cost on the new server. So it really pays to know what you\u2019re paying for and keep an eye out of ways you can make improvements without needing to spend more money.\n\nFurther steps\n\nThere\u2019s nearly always more that can be done. For example, there are some media files (particularly for older articles) that are not on S3. We also serve our CSS directly and it\u2019s not minified or compressed. But by tackling the big problems first we\u2019ve managed to reduce load on the server and at the same time make sure that the load being placed on the server can be dealt with in the most frugal way.\n\nOver the last 24 days we\u2019ve served up articles to more than 350,000 visitors without breaking a sweat. On a busy day, that\u2019s been nearly 20,000 visitors in just 24 hours. While in the grand scheme of things that\u2019s not a huge amount of traffic, it can be a lot if you\u2019re not prepared for it. However, with a little planning for the peaks you can help ensure that when the traffic arrives you\u2019re ready to capitalise on it.\n\nOf course, people only visit 24 ways for the wealth of knowledge and experience that\u2019s tied up in the articles here. Therefore I\u2019d like to take the opportunity to thank all our authors this year who have given their time as a gift to the community, and to wish you all a very happy Christmas.", "year": "2007", "author": "Drew McLellan", "author_slug": "drewmclellan", "published": "2007-12-24T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2007/performance-on-a-shoe-string/", "topic": "ux"} {"rowid": 150, "title": "A Gift Idea For Your Users: Respect, Yo", "contents": "If, indeed, it is the thought that counts, maybe we should pledge to make more thoughtful design decisions. In addition to wowing people who use the Web sites we build with novel features, nuanced aesthetics and the new new thing, maybe we should also thread some subtle things throughout our work that let folks know: hey, I\u2019m feeling ya. We\u2019re simpatico. I hear you loud and clear.\n\nIt\u2019s not just holiday spirit that moves me to talk this way. As good as people are, we need more than the horizon of karma to overcome that invisible demon, inertia. Makers of the Web, respectful design practices aren\u2019t just the right thing, they are good for business. Even if your site is the one and only place to get experience x, y or zed, you don\u2019t rub someone\u2019s face in it. You keep it free flowing, you honor the possible back and forth of a healthy transaction, you are Johnny Appleseed with the humane design cues. You make it clear that you are in it for the long haul.\n\nA peek back:\n\n\n\nThink back to what search (and strategy) was like before Google launched a super clean page with \u201cI\u2019m Feeling Lucky\u201d button. Aggregation was the order of the day (just go back and review all the \u2018strategic alliances\u2019 that were announced daily.) Yet the GOOG comes along with this zen layout (nope, we\u2019re not going to try to make you look at one of our media properties) and a bold, brash, teleport-me-straight-to-the-first-search-result button. It could have been titled \u201cWe\u2019re Feeling Cocky\u201d. These were radical design decisions that reset how people thought about search services. Oh, you mean I can just find what I want and get on with it?\n\nIt\u2019s maybe even more impressive today, after the GOOG has figured out how to monetize attention better than anyone. \u201cI\u2019m Feeling Lucky\u201d is still there. No doubt, it costs the company millions. But by leaving a little money on the table, they keep the basic bargain they started to strike in 1997. We\u2019re going to get you where you want to go as quickly as possible.\n\nWhere are the places we might make the same kind of impact in our work? Here are a few ideas:\n\nRespect People\u2019s Time\n\nAs more services become more integrated with our lives, this will only become more important. How can you make it clear that you respect the time a user has granted you?\n\nUser-Oriented Defaults\n\nDefault design may be the psionic tool in your belt. Unseen, yet pow-er-ful. Look at your defaults. Who are they set up to benefit? Are you depending on users not checking off boxes so you can feel ok about sending them email they really don\u2019t want? Are you depending on users not checking off boxes so you tilt privacy values in ways most beneficial for your SERPs? Are you making it a little too easy for 3rd party applications to run buckwild through your system?\n\nThere\u2019s being right and then there\u2019s being awesome. Design to the spirit of the agreement and not the letter.\n\nSee this?\n\n\n\nMake sure that\u2019s really the experience you think people want. Whenever I see a service that defaults to not opting me in their newsletter just because I bought a t shirt from them, you can be sure that I trust them that much more. And they are likely to see me again.\n\nReduce, Reuse\n\nIt\u2019s likely that people using your service will have data and profile credentials elsewhere. You should really think hard about how you can let them repurpose some of that work within your system. Can you let them reduce the number of logins/passwords they have to manage by supporting OpenID? Can you let them reuse profile information from another service by slurping in (or even subscribing) to hCards? Can you give them a leg up by reusing a friends list they make available to you? (Note: please avoid the anti-pattern of inviting your user to upload all her credential data from 3rd party sites into your system.)\n\nThis is a much larger issue, and if you\u2019d like to get involved, have a look at the wiki, and dive in.\n\nMake it simple to leave\n\nOh, this drives me bonkers. Again, the more simple you make it to increase or decrease involvement in your site, or to just opt-out altogether, the better. This example from Basecamp is instructive:\n\n\n\nAt a glance, I can see what the implications are of choosing a different type of account. I can also move between account levels with one click. Finally, I can cancel the service easily. No hoop jumping. Also, it should be simple for users to take data with them or delete it.\n\nLet Them Have Fun\n\nDon\u2019t overlook opportunities for pleasure. Even the most mundane tasks can be made more enjoyable. Check out one of my favorite pieces of interaction design from this past year:\n\n\n\nHoly knob fiddling, Batman! What a great way to get people to play with preference settings: an equalizer metaphor. Those of a certain age will recall how fun it was to make patterns with your uncle\u2019s stereo EQ. I think this is a delightful way to encourage people to optimize their own experience of the news feed feature. Given the killer nature of this feature, it was important for Facebook to make it easy to fine tune.\n\nI\u2019d also point you to Flickr\u2019s Talk Like A Pirate Day Easter egg as another example of design that delights. What a huge amount of work for a one-off, totally optional way to experience the site. And what fun. And how true to its brand persona. Brill.\n\nAnti-hype\n\nDon\u2019t talk so much. Rather, ship and sample. Release code, tell the right users. See what happens. Make changes. Extend the circle a bit by showing some other folks. Repeat.\n\nThe more you hype coming features, the more you talk about what isn\u2019t yet, the more you build unrealistic expectations. Your genius can\u2019t possibly match our collective dreaming. Disappointment is inevitable. Yet, if you craft the right melody and make it simple for people to hum your tune, it will spread. Give it time. Listen.\n\nSpeak the Language of the Tribe\n\nIt\u2019s respectful to speak in a human way. Not that you have to get all zOMGWTFBBQ!!1 in your messaging. People respond when you speak to them in a way that sounds natural. Natural will, of course, vary according to context. Again, listen in and people will signal the speech that works in that group for those tasks. Reveal those cues in your interface work and you\u2019ll have powerful proof that actual people are working on your Web site.\n\nThis example of Pownce\u2018s gender selector is the kind of thing I\u2019m talking about:\n\n\n\nNow, this doesn\u2019t mean you should mimic the lingo on some cool kidz site. Your service doesn\u2019t need to have a massage when it\u2019s down. Think about what works for you and your tribe. Excellent advice here from Feedburner\u2019s Dick Costolo on finding a voice for your service. Also, Mule Design\u2019s Erika Hall has an excellent talk on improving your word fu.\n\nPass the mic, yo\n\nHere is a crazy idea: you could ask your users what they want. Maybe you could even use this input to figure out what they really want. Tools abound. Comments, wikis, forums, surveys. Embed the sexy new Get Satisfaction widget and have a dynamic FAQ running.\n\nThe point is that you make it clear to people that they have a means of shaping the service with you. And you must showcase in some way that you are listening, evaluating and taking action against some of that user input.\n\nYou get my drift. There are any number of ways we can show respect to those who gift us with their time, data, feedback, attention, evangelism, money. Big things are in the offing. I can feel the love already.", "year": "2007", "author": "Brian Oberkirch", "author_slug": "brianoberkirch", "published": "2007-12-23T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2007/a-gift-idea-for-your-users-respect-yo/", "topic": "ux"} {"rowid": 159, "title": "How Media Studies Can Massage Your Message", "contents": "A young web designer once told his teacher \u2018just get to the meat already.\u2019 He was frustrated with what he called the \u2018history lessons and name-dropping\u2019 aspects of his formal college course. He just wanted to learn how to build Web sites, not examine the reasons why.\n\nTechnique and theory are both integrated and necessary portions of a strong education. The student\u2019s perspective has direct value, but also holds a distinct sorrow: Knowing the how without the why creates a serious problem. Without these surrounding insights we cannot tap into the influence of the history and evolved knowledge that came before. We cannot properly analyze, criticize, evaluate and innovate beyond the scope of technique.\n\nHistory holds the key to transcending former mistakes. Philosophy encourages us to look at different points of view. Studying media and social history empowers us as Web workers by bringing together myriad aspects of humanity in direct relation to the environment of society and technology. Having an understanding of media, communities, communication arts as well as logic, language and computer savvy are all core skills of the best of web designers in today\u2019s medium.\n\nControlling the Message\n\n\n\t\u2018The computer can\u2019t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what\u2019s missing is the eyebrows.\u2019 \u2013 Frank Zappa\n\n\nMedia is meant to express an idea. The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan suggests that not only is media interesting because it\u2019s about the expression of ideas, but that the media itself actually shapes the way a given idea is perceived. This is what McLuhan meant when he uttered those famous words: \u2018The medium is the message.\u2019\n\nIf instead of actually serving a steak to a vegetarian friend, what might a painting of the steak mean instead? Or a sculpture of a cow? Depending upon the form of media in question, the message is altered.\n\nFigure 1\n\nMust we know the history of cows to appreciate the steak on our plate? Perhaps not, but if we begin to examine how that meat came to be on the plate, the social, cultural and ideological associations of that cow, we begin to understand the complexity of both medium and message. A piece of steak on my plate makes me happy. A vegetarian friend from India might disagree and even find that that serving her a steak was very insensitive.\n\nTakeaway: Getting the message right involves understanding that message in order to direct it to your audience accordingly.\n\nA Separate Piece\n\nIf we revisit the student who only wants technique, while he might become extremely adept at the rendering of an idea, without an understanding of the medium, how is he to have greater control over how that idea is perceived? Ultimately, his creativity is limited and his perspective narrowed, and the teacher has done her student a disservice without challenging him, particularly in a scholastic environment, to think in liberal, creative and ultimately innovative terms.\n\nFor many years, web pundits including myself have promoted the idea of separation as a core concept within creating effective front-end media for the Web. By this, we\u2019ve meant literal separation of the technologies and documents: Markup for content; CSS for presentation; DOM Scripting for behavior. While the message of separation was an important part of understanding and teaching best practices for manageable, scalable sites, that separation is really just a separation of pieces, not of entire disciplines.\n\nFor in fact, the medium of the Web is an integrated one. That means each part of the desired message must be supported by the media silos within a given site. The visual designer must study the color, space, shape and placement of visual objects (including type) into a meaningful expression. The underlying markup is ideally written as semantically as possible, promote the meaning of the content it describes. Any interaction and functionality must make the process of the medium support, not take away from, the meaning of the site or Web application. \n\nExamination: The Glass Bead Game\n\nFigure 2\n\nFigure 2 shows two screenshots of CoreWave\u2019s historic \u2018Glass Bead Game.\u2019 Fashioned after Herman Hesse\u2019s novel of the same name, the game was an exploration of how ideas are connected to other ideas via multiple forms of media. It was created for the Web in 1996 using server-side randomization with .htmlx files in order to allow players to see how random associations are in fact not random at all.\n\nTakeaway: We can use the medium itself to explore creative ideas, to link us from one idea to the next, and to help us better express those ideas to our audiences.\n\nComputers and Human Interaction\n\nSince our medium involves computers and human interaction, it does us well to look to foundations of computers and reason. Not long ago I was chatting with Jared Spool on IM about this and that, and he asked me \u2018So how do you feel about that?\u2019 This caused me no end of laughter and I instantly quipped back \u2018It\u2019s okay by me ELIZA.\u2019 We both enjoyed the joke, but then I tried to share it with another dare I say younger colleague, and the reference was lost.\n\nRaise your hand if you got the reference! Some of you will, but many people who come to the Web medium do not get the benefit of such historical references because we are not formally educated in them. Joseph Weizenbaum created the ELIZA program, which emulates a Rogerian Therapist, in 1966. It was an early study of computers and natural human language. I was a little over 2 years old, how about you?\n\nConversation with Eliza\n\nThere are fortunately a number of ELIZA emulators on the Web. I found one at http://www.chayden.net/eliza/Eliza.html that actually contains the source code (in Java) that makes up the ELIZA script.\n\nFigure 3 shows a screen shot of the interaction. ELIZA first welcomes me, says \u2018Hello, How do you do. Please state your problem\u2019 and we continue in a short loop of conversation, the computer using cues from my answers to create new questions and leading fragments of conversation.\n\nFigure 3\n\nAlbeit a very limited demonstration of how humans could interact with a computer in 1966, it\u2019s amusing to play with now and compare it to something as richly interactive as the Microsoft Surface (Figure 4). Here, we see clear Lucite blocks that display projected video. Each side of the block has a different view of the video, so not only does one have to match up the images as they are moving, but do so in the proper directionality.\n\nFigure 4\n\nTakeway: the better we know our environment, the more we can alter it to emulate, expand and even supersede our message.\n\nLeveraging Holiday Cheer\n\nSince most of us at least have a few days off for the holidays now that Christmas is upon us, now\u2019s a perfect time to reflect on ones\u2019 environment and examine the messages within it. Convince your spouse to find you a few audio books for stocking stuffers. Find interactive games to play with your kids and observe them, and yourself, during the interaction. Pour a nice egg-nog and sit down with a copy of Marshall McLuhan\u2019s \u2018The Medium is the Massage.\u2019 Leverage that holiday cheer and here\u2019s to a prosperous, interactive new year.", "year": "2007", "author": "Molly Holzschlag", "author_slug": "mollyholzschlag", "published": "2007-12-22T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2007/how-media-studies-can-massage-your-message/", "topic": "ux"} {"rowid": 156, "title": "Mobile 2.0", "contents": "Thinking 2.0\n\nAs web geeks, we have a thick skin towards jargon. We all know that \u201cWeb 2.0\u201d has been done to death. At Blue Flavor we even have a jargon bucket to penalize those who utter such painfully overused jargon with a cash deposit. But Web 2.0 is a term that has lodged itself into the conscience of the masses. This is actually a good thing.\n\nThe 2.0 suffix was able to succinctly summarize all that was wrong with the Web during the dot-com era as well as the next evolution of an evolving media. While the core technologies actually stayed basically the same, the principles, concepts, interactions and contexts were radically different.\n\nWith that in mind, this Christmas I want to introduce to you the concept of Mobile 2.0. While not exactly a new concept in the mobile community, it is relatively unknown in the web community. And since the foundation of Mobile 2.0 is the web, I figured it was about time for you to get to know each other.\n\nIt\u2019s the Carriers\u2019 world. We just live in it.\n\nBefore getting into Mobile 2.0, I thought first I should introduce you to its older brother. You know the kind, the kid with emotional problems that likes to beat up on you and your friends for absolutely no reason. That is the mobile of today.\n\nThe mobile ecosystem is a very complicated space often and incorrectly compared to the Web. If the Web was a freewheeling hippie \u2014 believing in freedom of information and the unity of man through communities \u2014 then Mobile is the cutthroat capitalist \u2014 out to pillage and plunder for the sake of the almighty dollar. Where the Web is relatively easy to publish to and ultimately make a buck, Mobile is wrought with layers of complexity, politics and obstacles. \n\nI can think of no better way to summarize these challenges than the testimony of Jason Devitt to the United States Congress in what is now being referred to as the \u201ciPhone Hearing.\u201d Jason is the co-founder and CEO of SkyDeck a new wireless startup and former CEO of Vindigo an early pioneer in mobile content.\n\n\n\nAs Jason points out, the mobile ecosystem is a closed door environment controlled by the carriers, forcing the independent publisher to compete or succumb to the will of corporate behemoths.\n\nBut that is all about to change.\n\nIntroducing Mobile 2.0\n\nMobile 2.0 is term used by the mobile community to describe the current revolution happening in mobile. It describes the convergence of mobile and web services, adding portability, ubiquitous connectivity and location-aware services to add physical context to information found on the Web.\n\nIt\u2019s an important term that looks toward the future. Allowing us to imagine the possibilities that mobile technology has long promised but has yet to deliver. It imagines a world where developers can publish mobile content without the current constraints of the mobile ecosystem.\n\nLike the transition from Web 1.0 to 2.0, it signifies the shift away from corporate or brand-centered experiences to user-centered experiences. A focus on richer interactions, driven by user goals. Moving away from proprietary technologies to more open and standard ones, more akin to the Web. And most importantly (from our perspective as web geeks) a shift away from kludgy one-off mobile applications toward using the Web as a platform for content and services.\n\nThis means the world of the Web and the world of Mobile are coming together faster than you can say ARPU (Average Revenue Per User, a staple mobile term to you webbies). And this couldn\u2019t come at a better time. The importance of understanding and addressing user context is quickly becoming a crucial consideration to every interactive experience as the number of ways we access information on the Web increases.\n\nMobile enables the power of the Web, the collective information of millions of people, inherit payment channels and access to just about every other mass media to literally be overlaid on top of the physical world, in context to the person viewing it. \n\nAnyone who can\u2019t imagine how the influence of mobile technology can\u2019t transform how we perform even the simplest of daily tasks needs to get away from their desktop and see the new evolution of information.\n\nThe Instigators\n\nBut what will make Mobile 2.0 move from idillic concept to a hardened market reality in 2008 will be four key technologies. Its my guess that you know each them already.\n\n1. Opera\n\nOpera is like the little train that could. They have been a driving force on moving the Web as we know it on to mobile handsets. Opera technology has proven itself to be highly adaptable, finding itself preloaded on over 40 million handsets, available on televisions sets through Nintendo Wii or via the Nintendo DS.\n\n2. WebKit\n\nMany were surprised when Apple chose to use KHTML instead of Gecko (the guts of Firefox) to power their Safari rendering engine. But WebKit has quickly evolved to be a powerful and flexible browser in the mobile context. WebKit has been in Nokia smartphones for a few years now, is the technology behind Mobile Safari in the iPhone and the iPod Touch and is the default web technology in Google\u2019s open mobile platform effort, Android.\n\n3. The iPhone\n\nThe iPhone has finally brought the concepts and principles of Mobile 2.0 into the forefront of consumers minds and therefore developers\u2019 minds as well. Over 500 web applications have been written specifically for the iPhone since its launch. It\u2019s completely unheard of to see so many applications built for the mobile context in such a short period of time.\n\n4. CSS & Javascript\n\nWeb 2.0 could not exist without the rich interactions offered by CSS and Javascript, and Mobile 2.0 is no different. CSS and Javascript support across multiple phones historically has been, well\u2026 to put it positively\u2026 utter crap.\n\nJavascript finally allows developers to create interesting interactions that support user goals and the mobile context. Specially, AJAX allows us to finally shed the days of bloated Java applications and focus on portable and flexible web applications. While CSS \u2014 namely CSS3 \u2014 allows us to create designs that are as beautiful as they are economical with bandwidth and load times.\n\nWith Leaflets, a collection of iPhone optimized web apps we created, we heavily relied on CSS3 to cache and reuse design elements over and over, minimizing download times while providing an elegant and user-centered design.\n\n\n\nIn Conclusion\n\nIt is the combination of all these instigators that is significantly decreasing the bar to mobile publishing. The market as Jason Devitt describes it, will begin to fade into the background. And maybe the world of mobile will finally start looking more like the Web that we all know and love.\n\nSo after the merriment and celebration of the holiday is over and you look toward the new year to refresh and renew, I hope that you take a seriously consider the mobile medium. \n\nBy this time next year, it is predicted that one-third of humanity will be using mobile devices to access the Web.", "year": "2007", "author": "Brian Fling", "author_slug": "brianfling", "published": "2007-12-21T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2007/mobile-2-0/", "topic": "business"} {"rowid": 154, "title": "Diagnostic Styling", "contents": "We\u2019re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there\u2019s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content. \n\nNote: the techniques discussed here mostly work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. I\u2019ll explain why that\u2019s not really a problem near the end of the article \u2014 and no, the reason is not \u201ceveryone should just ignore IE anyway\u201d.\n\nBasic Diagnostics\n\nTo pick a simple example, suppose you want to call out all holdover font and center elements in a site. Simple: you just add the following to your styles.\n\nfont, center {outline: 5px solid red;}\n\nYou could take it further and add in a nice lime background or some such, but big thick red outlines should suffice. Now you\u2019ll be able to see the offenders wherever as you move through the site. (Of course, if you do this on your public server, everyone else will see the outlines too. So this is probably best done on a development server or local copy of the site.)\n\nNot everyone may be familiar with outlines, which were introduced in CSS2, so a word on those before we move on. Outlines are much like borders, except outlines don\u2019t affect layout. Eh? Here\u2019s a comparison.\n\n\n\nOn the left, you have a border. On the right, an outline. The border takes up layout space, pushing other content around and generally being a nuisance. The outline, on the other hand, just draws into quietly into place. In most current browsers, it will overdraw any content already onscreen, and will be overdrawn by any content placed later \u2014 which is why it overlaps the images above it, and is overlapped by those below it.\n\nOkay, so we can outline deprecated elements like font and center. Is that all? Oh no.\n\nAttribution\n\nLet\u2019s suppose you also want to find any instances of inline style \u2014 that is, use of the style attribute on elements in the markup. This is generally discouraged (outside of HTML e-mails, which I\u2019m not going to get anywhere near), as it\u2019s just another side of the same coin of using font: baking the presentation into the document structure instead of putting it somewhere more manageable. So:\n\n*[style], font, center {outline: 5px solid red;}\n\nAdding that attribute selector to the rule\u2019s grouped selector means that we\u2019ll now be outlining any element with a style attribute.\n\nThere\u2019s a lot more that attribute selectors will let use diagnose. For example, we can highlight any images that have empty alt or title text.\n\nimg[alt=\"\"] {border: 3px dotted red;}\nimg[title=\"\"] {outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;}\n\nNow, you may wonder why one of these rules calls for a border, and the other for an outline. That\u2019s because I want them to \u201cadd together\u201d \u2014 that is, if I have an image which possesses both alt and title, and the values of both are empty, then I want it to be doubly marked.\n\n\n\nSee how the middle image there has both red and fuchsia dots running around it? (And am I the only one who sorely misses the actual circular dots drawn by IE5/Mac?) That\u2019s due to its markup, which we can see here in a fragment showing the whole table row.\n\n
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\nI wish Google could find my keys
\n\nCSS:\n\na:link:after,\na:visited:after,\na:hover:after,\na:active:after {\n\tcontent: \" <\" attr(href) \"> \";\n}\n\nBut this is not perfect, in the above example the content of the href is just naively plonked after the link text:\n\nI wish Google