Open source in itself is in some ways for other people. It’s one of the things that got me into OSS in the first place. Other people in this context means a community of people looking to solve a collection of problems. When you release an OSS project you’re gifting it to these other people and hopefully they’ll return the favor at some point by allowing you to be the other people side of this equation. That’s not always true or possible, though, and thats OK. It’s part of the OSS contract that its a community, and you should try, but aren’t required to always give back to the people and projects that help you.

A while ago, GitHub allowed an option on projects to allow for creating a pledgie per-project. The idea being that people could donate a couple bucks to a project and its creator so they could buy themselves a beer. Just a little way of saying thank you. I think it wasnt that succesfull, maybe because remote beer buying just isnt there yet. Or maybe because its a question of what you’re actually buying? I never did this on Sammy.js or any of my other projects because, really, I don’t need the $5 for beer (thats not to say I wont take a free beer if you want to meet up at a conference or meetup and buy me one ). I just didnt see the point. Save your money, I thought, I’m doing this for the community.

Heres the new idea – I will take your money. In fact, I really, really want to take your money. Not for me. For other people. I’m starting a rotating Code for Other People fund. Every time we hit $500, well donate the money and rotate to a new charity. I’m very open to suggestions on that front as well. For example the first charity is the Anita Borg Organization. I’ve worked with them before, and they are consistently doing awesome things for women and diversity in the tech community. Other charities on the horizon are DonorsChoose and the Gary Greenberg Fund.

If you have an open source project, consider linking to this fund or promoting it on your blog or site. Your work on Open Source can not only help people in the OSS community, but help raise money for causes that need and appreciate it.

If you’re a developer or a user of other people’s code, consider donating some of your (probably healthy) paycheck – even a single dollar – to the fund. It shows your support for the different projects you use and also shows the communities commitment to the greater good.

I have $220 dollars of surplus from the recently awesome CodeFoodBar x JSConf Dinner. that I’m donating to kick off the fund.

Now when I release or work on an open source project, I’ll be working for something bigger – for other people.

Deep Linking

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, shall we? My first interaction with the ‘#’ as a method for getting at specific content (not as an anchor tag) was working in the ad/interactive space and with a lot of Flash developers. On every proposal or statement of work was a line about ‘Deep Linking’. In this case it meant plugging in swfaddress and wiring it up to your fancy Flash slideshow or fashion showcase. The point of this all was that when you clicked on the 8pt text in the menu that said ‘MENS BLOUSES’ you would be taken to the photo of a puffy shirt and the url would change to ‘#/items/puffy-shirt’. When you refreshed the page, or sent the link to your friend you would be taken immediately to the puffy shirt and be able to bask in its frilly glory without navigating through the 8pt menu again.

This was a big thing! Big, as in exciting and awesome, because it meant you could build relatively complex Flash applications, felt ‘stateful’ somehow. You would navigate somewhere and you’d be there, not in the middle of nowhere.

An important thing to note here is that this was not for Google. It was Flash. Google can’t crawl Flash. The point was allowing people to ‘Skip intro’ and have them feeling that this crazy interactive experience wasn’t all that different from there normal browsing. For crawling and SEO there were a host of other strategies – META tags, ‘ghost’ static HTML sites, etc. – and these were deployed alongside ‘Deep Linking’ as two different strategies trying to accomplish different things.

AJAX FOR THE PEOPLE

We’ve moved on (sort of) from the days of 8pt menus and pixel fonts. The old problem is new all over again. Now we’ve built these applications that rely on JavaScript being enabled to construct our site and fetch our data and animate our menus. Awesome! Its HTML5-tastic. At some point, we discovered the same problems that we had with Flash. Namely, when you’re loading all your content with AJAX and loading it onto the page based on clicks, you get lost in a sea of asynchronicity. What state are you in? Clearly, there’s an easy way to solve this – use the ‘#’ to route URLs without reloading the page and Deep Linking directly into content. I created and continue to work on Sammy.js, partly, as a solution to this problem. You want your application to feel interactive and fluid, you want to avoid page reloads, but when the user does reload, or copy the link, they should be taken back to the same place.

Then, confusion sets in. In a world where the only way people get to Facebook is by Googling Facebook you want your site to be ‘googleable’. This presents a problem: your application is dependent on javascript and ‘#’ and google don’t know about those. Well then, brotha, Google’s got your back. All you have to do is put a little ! after your # and tell google where to fetch your content and it’s like BLAM: SEO.

Except, no.

This is the part where I want to shake everyone. Like physically shake and be like “YOU! YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT”.

There are two different things. Crawlability and Deep Linking are two different things. For different reasons and different goals, and conflating them not only makes it hard on users, but also makes it hard on developers. You end up doing neither of them right.

I’ve been asked about a million times now, “How do you do SEO with Sammy?”. The answer is never simple, because its the wrong question. The question should really be – “If I’m really concerned about SEO, the crawlability of my site, and the persitance of my links should I use Sammy?”. The answer without a doubt is No. I’ll be the first one to say that Sammy and other similar frameworks are not for every site. Period. Theres no reason that your blog or your news site needs to load all its content with AJAX or needs to use ‘#’ to route for state. An important disctinction in what I’m trying to say is that its “you shouldnt have to” not “you never should”. If you’re building a site like Gizmodo you should pretty much always at least START with good ol’ semi-static pages that dont require JavaScript and load at old-fashioned URLs. This is not to say that you can’t build an application on top of these static pages that is more dynamic and interactive and relies on JavaScript.

Sammy and the ‘#’ are for applications. It provides a way to maintain state in a world where you can require JavaScript and even require the presence of certain browsers. If you’re an application, that requires login/signup you can make a number of demands of your users. You also probably dont even want the crawlability. You’re using ‘#’ to maintain state for a specific user in a specific session.

Outside of the world of the ‘application’ you really, really shouldn’t rely on JavaScript being there for your site to work (at least at a basic level). Jen Lukas has already talked really eloquently about why thats the case. I believe that this is where a lot of the recent frustration has come from, and really it should be directed at the use case, not the overall usage of ‘#’ for state. There have been some fingers pointed at Google for making this conflation possible, and I tend to agree.

How to do this right

I’m not going to go into detail about what framework you should use or how to lay out your app. Those are fairly complicated and my opinions could take up a couple blog posts. However, the basics are straightforward.

First, you need to determine some things about the structure of what you’re building and what your content is. Are you building an ‘application’ or a site? Does your content need to be searchable and reachable by the entire web? Do your links require true permanance and will changing them in the future “break” traffic to your site?

If you need searchability and permancance and you’re not building an application, the real best way to approach is to build your site as if JavaScript doesn’t exist. The fact is that there’s still a chunk of users for which that will be true. Not only because they’re using old browsers, but they’re on phones, or they’re on assistive devices or they just turn JavaScript off for ‘security’ reasons. If your site works this way and looks pretty decent (meaning its readable and the content is accessible) then basically you’re good. Golden. Your site works as expected, but maybe not all AJAAAAZZAY. It’s at this point that it’s acceptable to build a layer on top of your existing site, sprinkle the magic dust.

Twitter is an interesting example here because they took what was at its core really an information site, not all that different from a blog and turned it into an application. The questions of URL permanence are really gray here but I dont find myself hating it at all.

Web standards are at the core of this debate. Many make a strong argument that concept of the URL and HTTP is here for a reason, that URLs have worked and continue to work. I think instead of fueling FUD, we should get back to the work of building a better standard and a better web.

A brief epilogue on pushState/HTML5 History

A lot of people are pointing to the new HTML5 History API as a much better solution to this problem. I agree with reservations. First, the browser support for this currently isn’t very wide, and certain browsers that do support it have buggy/broken implementations. The bottom line is that it will work in some places, but not most, and this will probably be the case for years to come. That said, it is really exciting and I’m working on built in support for it in the next version of Sammy.js. I have other reservations, too – namely I think that not all hashes are created equal and in some cases the state you want to represent is really the state of a specific page not a seperate page that really requires a fully seperate URL.

WTF

This weekend after reading a couple posts and a lot of tweets I started getting really frustrated about the situation surrounding Matt’s talk at GoGaRuCo. My frustration and anger did not stem from being offended by Matt’s talk, nor did it stem from thinking that everyone who was offended was wrong. It came from a gut reaction to all this horrible negativity thats spreading like wildfire.

I was at GoGaRuCo. In fact I was also speaking. I watched every talk, attended the after-parties and had one of the best conference experiences I’ve had. I learned a ton, met a ton of interesting people, and heard about things from a ton of different perspectives. I’m not going to say more then that. It was awesome.

The ‘controversy’ around Matt’s talk started as a couple smart individuals being angry and frustrated at another smart individual for making a mistake. It’s become a blame game and a reason for people to blame a single talk for the ails of an entire community that had the same issues before. I want to stay positive, so here are three simple rules of ANY community:

• You can not fault an entire community for the actions of a single individual.
• In any community there will be opposing opinions on definitions of moral correctness for n issues.
• If you actually want to change the community, you have a better chance of influencing the future community through education then the current community through preaching.

Going from the last one, lets define a problem set and move forward.

The Problem Set

Lets rip open this silver lining. If anything good comes out of this let it be that it brought a bunch of long standing issues back in to the limelight. The big complaint out of this all has been that there are not enough women in the Ruby community. It’s pretty obvious that this is an issue. I mean, out of conference of 200+ there were less then 10 women. In fact, this conference probably had more women then any other Ruby conference I’ve been to.

I’m not going to try to deduce the myriad of reasons why this is true, instead just mention something that might lead to this situation.

Ruby is not taught in Schools. If we really want to make Ruby a language and community for everyone, the only way to ensure that people actually get exposure is to get it into schools. It would be awesome if I learned Ruby in college, but beyond that – it would have been AMAZING if I had HacketyHack when I was a kid. I whole-heartedly believe that Ruby is a great first language and the veritable cornucopia of implementations and uses could convince anyone with a slight inclination to do great things with it.

FTW

Let’s actually make this happen. How can we get more women in software development? How can we bring more women into the Ruby community? I don’t have the answer and honestly, I’m not a fantastic teacher or community organizer. However, I’m a pretty decent developer and as a freelancer I’m making some decent money so that I can give some of that money to people who are much better teachers and community organizers. With that said, I’ve started a pledgie and put $500 dollars in it. After 1 month, I’m going to donate any money I’ve collected there to a charity to support either teaching Ruby/development in schools, or supporting women in development. Depending on how much we raise, I might donate to multiple organizations. If you have suggestions about specific organizations please tweet @aq or email me at aaron at this domain.

Please donate! Even if its only $2. I’ll be posting updates to twitter and here to.

Let’s try to ensure that GoGaRuCo 2025 is an awesome gathering

rid.onkul.us is kind of like a “tumble-log” but more ridiculous. Kronenberg, my constant partner in hilarity, is co-captaining the ship of absurdities, and we’ve been off to a good start.

The main use of ridonk is to have a place to store all the daily crap that Kron and I amuse ourselves with.

There’s also a feed (of course) and future plans for comments and anything else we can cram into this pretty crude blogging platform I built and rebuilt in a couple days.

The Dorkster
. . . admits to being unpopular in high school
. . . is a Ruby programmer
. . . plays at least one instrument
. . . is suavely unkempt to perfection
. . . knew about your favorite band before you did
. . . thinks pitchforkmedia has jumped the shark
. . . may use the phrase ‘jumped the shark’ . . . a lot
. . . owns every season of Mr. Show on DVD

Are you a Dorkster? I think I qualify. Its a growing breed and a fun one, at that. I don’t think its specific to NYC, but certainly its specific to this point at time. A dork who is cool. An oxymoron? Add your qualifications below.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was in Rochester visiting Kat’s family, Kat’s younger brother Michael asked me if you can tell the difference between good coffee and bad coffee. We were on a after dinner trip to Spot, a cafe housed in a very art-deco former Chevrolet dealership. “Is this good coffee?” he asked. “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

This got me thinking, what is the difference between good coffee and bad coffee. Not necessarily the taste difference, but what is the gap that lies between Deluxe Town Diner coffee and road-stop gas station coffee. I can’t possibly count the cups of coffee I’ve had in my life, or how many different places and carafes this coffee has come from. However, I came to the conclusion, which I shared with Michael, that there’s great coffee and there’s horrible coffee and then there’s the big middle of decent java in between.

The big middle ranges from pretty awful to drinkable to tasty, but it can all be grouped together, because for the most part it is critically indistinguishable. Moreover, the big middle is BIG. Good coffee and undrinkable coffee are exceptions, a small percentage of all coffee, which the majority of is just mediocre.

Thinking more about this, I realized that the big middle applies to more than just coffee. I believe that the big middle applies to anything that requires some sort of skill to create. Food and drink, (e.g. Pizza, Bagels, Mixed Drinks, etc.) can easily be compared with the big middle. I would say that the Arts (fine art, writing, etc.) also have the big middle.

The big middle also means the slim slice of excellence. How many books have you read that were outstanding? How many books are published each year? This is not an insult to the writers out there, just an observation.

Of course, at the end of my train of thought, is my particular station. What about Web applications? or software? user interface? design? The big middle is definitely applicable here. Think about the small handful of applications from this generation of the web that have been bought or IPO’d. Not that monetary success is the sign of excellence, but it is certainly a sign of some sort of recognition or separation from the pack. So where does my work fit in with this? I recently “launched my first public live big time web app,” so I’m thinking about this a lot. How do you get your work into the slim slice of excellence? It’s up to the user to put you there.

So what is my mission? Work for the user. This does not mean be a slave to the user, spending every second fulfilling user requests. It means directing the user, satiating the user, and making the user happy.

Your user should say, “Damn, thats a great cup of web application”.

Coffee Photo Credit:

http://flickr.com/photos/dmaudsley/159629513/in/set-72157594154752449/

The first issue is that it seems that a lot of the users only tend to write about ‘fabulous’ experiences. Why would I spend the 5 minutes it takes to write a review if I didn’t really like the place or its mediocre. Also, the lack of anonymity, I think, frightens a lot of users from bashing a place that someone else gave 5 stars. Many people don’t want to disagree with people they don’t even know, or hurt anyones feelings. Sorry, but thats just stupid. If you’re really trying to build a good and trustable database of rated businesses, there needs to be real criticism. You needn’t be a professional critic to think critically about what you do and do not like about a place. I think one way this can be improved with Yelp! is prompting users when writing reviews for ratings on specific aspects of a particular service. For restaurants it would include ratings for service, atmosphere, etc. CitySearch already does something like this. I think getting users to think about the different aspects of a meal would get more critical and more trustworthy reviews.

Another way Yelp! could improve is by implementing a more sophisticated way to review reviews. They have a system in place already but basically its only for giving props and not for disagreeing. This could be used to give weight to certain reviews and less weight to others. A really advanced version of this would be if you could map your tastes against other users, creating trusted groups, etc. For example if I noticed that JayDEE4444 seemed to agree with me on most of my reviews, his reviews would be weighted higher against others in the global ratings that I would see.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I really like Yelp!, Im just giving my opinion on what would make it a lot better, and change it from something I use casually, to a service I trust, and use constantly. It has tons of potential – a youthful user base, a nice interface, and a certain factor of the elusive ‘coolness’. If anyone is listening out there in Yelp! land, don’t be afraid to criticize. I would love to see Yelp! get to a point where users could shift menu’s and get owners off their asses.

I’m planning on going on a big Yelp! rampage going through all of my local places and being as honest as possible. Keep an eye on my Yelp! feed

I get stumped a lot when designing. It’s so easy to. In programming and development, a problem I can’t seem to solve is usually just some deep thought or a google away. With design its so much harder to work through a block. To come up with something original and aesthetically pleasing is difficult. Include the necessity of good user interface and you add another level. Then try to do it on the spot or in a deadline and its damn near impossible.

Thank god for the endless source of visual content that is the world-wide-web. When designing for the Web its pretty easy to find examples of good and sexy CSS designs. CSS Beauty, for example. Also the original CSS Gallery, The Zen Garden. Often these sites just make me doubt my own designs more than anything else. Some of them are so good. And moreover, when I spend any amount of time looking at them, I find myself subconsciously putting their ideas in my own sketches – which is never good for originality.

So instead of turning examples of the end product, I start a little further back. One step backwards, is one of my favorite blogs, Swissmiss. Tina Roth Eisenberg blogs about all things cool design, including furniture, photography, and classic design. Its also my daily source of things I wish I could afford.

A step back from that, is my online obsession, photo-blogs. The first stop on the photo train is flickr. Flickr is great for just plain surfing. Start here – and wind up here I also can get enough of the swedes 40h and ulvelius. Browsing beautiful photos is great way to get the creative engine chugging. What I find most attractive in photos is colors and contrast. Often I’ll find a photo whose palate is exactly what I’m looking for. (If you’re on a Mac, you can copy and paste a photo in to the color chooser tool in any application and use it as your palette.)

A while ago I bought COLOR IMAGE SCALE on the recommendation of Treehouse Magazine. It is a really interesting study of the way colors and color combinations are associated with emotions and adjectives.

Start with color and work your way up.

Photo Credit : http://www.flickr.com/photos/smartfat/201884840/

Remember in Third grade, Friday afternoon, waiting for the clock to tick tock to 3 (or 2:50)? Things haven’t changed much, after a stressful week, I think we all, whether we;re aware of it or not, count the ticks until the weekend.

I wanted to get tons of stuff done in the last couple hours ‘fore the clock strikes, including writing a nice meaty post (I have about 40 ideas started), but alas, its time to go.

This weekend I’m off to Philadelphia to attend an opening for one of my friends since forever, Tal Ben-Yaakov. He’s a sculptor and is putting on his first solo show.

Many pictures to come after the weekend.

Off to the Chinese bus!

Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/4pizon/16571263/

I’ve been using Windows Vista Beta on my home media center now for over a month. Needless to say, it’s a step up from XP, but I still cant get over just how sloppy it is. The “glass” interface is much cleaner and nicer to look at, and some elements, like the start menu, have major design improvements, making for much easier navigation. Here comes the but.

BUT

It crashes all the time. I’d simply write this off as an affect of beta software, but something tells me the Release version is still going to have problems with freezing up.

Pertaining more to this conversation, it’s not cohesive. As a whole the design and interface improvements are great – but thats the problem – they’re not whole. Most menu’s fit into the new ‘glass’ paradigm, but every once in a while you’ll get a dialog or a menu that looks like Windows ‘95, and you’re completely thrown off. Again, Id throw it off to the beta – then I found this little diddy? (Via blackrimglasses). At some levels I just cant fathom this. Does Microsoft just not have the resources? Did someone overlook this? Do they just not care?

User interface and cohesiveness, if they are to exist in a computer workstation, must start at the operating system. Users want need to be given a clear set of idioms for how they operate and use a computer. At the most basic level, the icon to close an application should probably look the same throughout an operating system.

One of the reasons I switched and will argue for Apple, is Aqua, the cohesive interface standard that makes Mac OS X so pretty. The interface for the operating system, menus, icons, toolbars, and even the Apple applications are completely standardized. Most third party applications even try to conform to this standard, which makes using a combination of Apple and third party apps so easy and seamless.

I feel one of Windows biggest problems is that they haven’t grasped this yet. Many application use completely different interfaces to stand out. Basic interface elements, like menus, toolbars, and icons should be inherited from the OS. Is Microsoft ever going to grasp this? Even at the most basic level of a font menu?

Here was the plan. I had a Dell computer sitting around, that before the move was my audio production computer, but since I got a new firewire audio interface, it was now useless for that purpose. What would I need to turn it into a media center?

• a monitor
• a bigger hard-drive to fit the 120+ gigs of music thats clogging up my G5 (250 gig)
• a wireless keyboard (for couch-control)
• a DVD drive (just reader – for some reason this PC only came with a CD burner)

All the hardware didn’t add up to much, and minus the DVD drive, I could use all of the other parts with a new Mac when I get enough extra cash to go to Tekserve and pick it up.

This all seemed doable and totally reasonable. My general assumption was that if I just installed Windows Media Center Edition I would be able to browse my music and watch DVD’s from the comfort of my POANG. Whoa, I was wrong. After a successful install, or so I thought, Windows kept crashing and was moving about as fast as a turtle driving a car with square wheels.

Re-install.

Ok, a little faster, but now Media center wont play videos, and doesn’t even show an option for DVD’s even though I have a licensed version of the PowerDVD decoder. Nows the part where I peruse the internet for other options besides Windows Media Center. Via Om Malik I see that Yahoo! bought a product called Meedio which seemed to be right up my alley. Reading more it seemed that Yahoo took away a lot of the features that made Meedio great, and changed them to a lot of links to different
Yahoo! services. Through the Meedio Forum I found this guide for setting up Yahoo! Go TV to work a lot like Meedio once did. I tried it out and was able to do the whole dealio but the music browsing was horribly slow and thats really all I wanted.

Finally my sites turned to new unexplored pastures, Windows Vista Beta 2. I had read about the new Vista Media Center and was quite intrigued. “Where can I obtain a copy of this . . . Vista?” I asked. It was actually, uncharacteristically simple. Fill out some web-forms, download, and install with the key that they e-mail you. NOTE: You have to be running Windows XP to install Vista. I don’t know If this is documented anywhere, but the install fails if you try to install it on a empty disk.

Once installed, everything was pretty simple. Wow, Vista is kind of nice. And the Media Center is an unbelievable improvement (more about Vista coming soon). Not only does it run pretty fast, but the display and the way you view your music library is pretty sweet. I still have yet to get DVD’s to play within the interface, but thank the gods of open-source for VLC. Why is it that the open source software just works?

This story is not over, but I’m sick of spending most of my free time fiddling with this stupid Dell, so though I’m not completely content (Kat reminds me I never will be content with computers) as long as I can listen to music, I’ll settle.

Luckily, after the last time this happened I’ve smartened up a bit. I keep a PHP (4.3.11) source folder on my desktop and when the latest update was installed all I had to do was:

Sweet. That bitch-slap don’t feel so bad no more. Just don’t do it again, Stevie.

My moods and feelings toward the world in general are greatly affected by the weather. Guess, how Im feeling today . . .

Not as bad as you would think. RadioTail is getting ready to launch our first full fledged web-application. And I’m getting more and more excited about moving.

But snow? In April?

Good thing I never go outside anyway.

I had wanted to buy Kat a pro account, but also wanted to get one for myself.

Solution: COMBINE

It makes the most sense since we do most everything together and also neither of us could use up 2 gigs of space in a month alone.
To wrap things up (because Im a little delusional now and Im afraid Im going to ramble incoherently) here is a link to our spanking new pro flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/katandaq/

And for those savvy (and cool) enough here is a quick link to the RSS

So on this account I hope to first document my trip and soon after our move to Brooklyn.

This is going to be fun. We’ll see if I still think that when I land in Hong Kong after 24 hours of flying.

In less then 24 hours I’ll be on my way to Hong Kong. This is the first time I’ve been east of Israel, or west of California (depending on which way you look at it. Its probably also my last family trip. My parents are taking me with them to visit my younger bro, Dov, who’s spending a semester abroad in the SAR. My brother seems to be having a great time, an I really cant wait to join him.

Besides the obvious fun factor, this is going to be a big challenge for me for a number of reasons.

1. I’m in startup mode and I’m used to working 10 – 18 hours a day. Seriously. Its going to be great to get a way and refresh my energy – but I have a feeling the urge and push to work will overtake me on a daily basis.
2. Its going to be really hard to spend that much time with my family. I love my mother, father, and brother very much but I’m very much an adult now. We get along great – for an amount of time. The biggest problem is that all the men are too similar. We’re all stubborn and all get cranky when we’re hungry/tired. This is going to be interesting.
3. I’m very much accustomed to living and doing everything with Kat. As tough as it might be to be away from her for a weekend – I don’t even want to think about almost two weeks.

As I was typing this I noticed (in a quick self-refelctive way) that all of these issues stem from me being really comfortable in my life right now – or at least really used to the freedoms and habits that I’ve become accustomed.

So maybe this becomes a mission – to try to spend my time in Hong Kong and explore beyond the boundaries of my personal norms. That sounds kind of like the motivational tapes my mom listens to. It also sounds a tad bit cheesy but I think that’s OK.

Anyway, the real reason I wanted to write this was to let my (5) readers know that this blog is bound to only get more interesting over the 12 days. I’ll actually have something interesting to write about!

(rejoice)