Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Ask Joel - Pricing Products (And there’s more so click that link):

“(1) As a small software company you are NOT going to compete on price. Don’t say to yourself “we have the ability to make this thing cheaper than anyone else, so we should compete on price.” Large companies have all kinds of economies of scale that you don’t have, and you’re not going to be able to sustain a price advantage. Find a different advantage.

(2) Pricing sends messages. Expensive products (like Perforce, $795/copy) “seem” like higher-quality products than cheap ones (Vault, $199/copy) even if they aren’t. People believe that “you get what you pay for.” A new high price may INCREASE your unit sales if the old price sent a message of “Cheap!”

(3) There are natural limits. Home/consumer users won’t spend more than about $20 in cash, or about $50 on a credit card. At most corporations the low level business managers have the right to spend some fixed amount of money on their credit cards without getting any permission, and that amount is usually either $300 or $500. If you set your price at $600 you are arbitrarily losing a lot of these sales because now the low level manager needs to go through purchasing and get approval. For years UserLand Frontier has been priced at $899 … just out of reach of everybody with a corporate American Express”

Ask Joel - Non-Technical Program Managers: “My organization has in recent years been overrun with program managers who seem better-equipped to make decisions about polo shirts and khaki pants than about technical matters.

They foment confusion by misusing distinct technical terms as if they were interchangable. They’re oblivious to technical nuance. Worst of all, they have no natural defenses against the influence of weak engineers. (Hmmm, maybe the weak engineers are the real problem here… Maybe software companies don’t need technical PM’s.)”

Great writing in the answers. I wish I could write like that.

At work, I still use (the default) Netscape Communicator 4.7 for email. When you open the email client, it shows a webpage with search and some news headlines in the message preview window. A co-worker alerted me to the fact that the news headlines haven’t been updated for about 6 months (I couldn’t figure out exactly how long). The last headlines (and these have been showing for months) are:

US News: Bush to Sign Partial Birth Abortion Ban
Sports: Judge Rejects Evidence in Olympic Trial
Entertainment: Keith Keeping CMA Awards in Perspective

What happened? They might have had a round of layoffs. I imagine the manager asking: “Does anyone know what that guy in the corner does?” Nobody knows. He gets fired, and the news headlines never get updated again. Nobody notices. If there’s a lesson in there somewhere, I haven’t found it.

Metadata in the environment - in this case embedded in the sleeves of photographs: Metaphotos of the Bettman Archive. The social life of information has a story about how the smell of certain archives contained metadata for a certain researcher (read the book - I don’t remember the details.)

I can highly recommend Bloglines as a news aggregator. It does everything you want, and makes it easy. They also come out with new features every few weeks that not only work well and are easy to use, but are also actually useful. The latest one lets you email your subscriptions.

This means you can set up a newsreader, add a whole set of subscriptions to it, and then email those to your friends/team/… Useful stuff.

According to Joho the Blog, Corbis (Stock photography) are doing interesting things with metadata and categorization. He’s writing a Wired article about it, something to look forward to.

To give you an idea of the classification challenges, the guys here at work recently had to find pictures of people, in business casual clothes, with diverse racial features.

Webmonkey, RIP: 1996 - 2004: “Webmonkey, the site that turned humble Web developers into attention-grabbing authors, said last week it is closing down following a round of layoffs in the U.S. division of its parent company, Terra Lycos (also the parent company of Wired News). Judging by blog posts and e-mails, the site’s fans aren’t surprised. Still, they’re sad to see the end of an era.”

I started out with Webmonkey. They had some of the best technical writing out there. But the last few years I rarely visited them anymore.

Arquitectura de información para diseñadores: diseñar sitios web para el éxito del negocio - capítulo 2. A Spanish translation of the free chapter of my IA book. Thanks to the excellent translation team at AIfIA.

Living with topic maps and RDF: an excellent article by Lars Marius Garshol about RDF and XTM. Lars writes good stuff - check it out.

This new project looks worth checking out: topic maps Wiki: “The project is called Topiki, and is a Wiki- and topic maps based application for intranet/internet collaborative documentation / CMS. It works almost like other Eiki’s, but has subtle Topic maps features that would make it ideal, and really is one of the big bugbears I have with Wiki’s today.”

Hey, I’m numbe three for a how to make a documentary Google search.

Oh man. From The Price of Loyalty: The Bush Files, a classic memo: “Before a January, 2002, appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Treasury Department public relations chief Michele Davis sent Secretary O’Neill a 3-page memo explaining how he should deal with host Tim Russert. The memo, which coaches O’Neill on how to avoid the substance of Russert’s questions, is a classic of political spin. O’Neill was told to answer the first question by praising the President’s economic stimulus proposals, “no matter the question.” “You need to interject the President’s message,” Davis coached O’Neill, “even if the question has nothing to do with that.”

In the memo are beauties like: “”First Answer, no matter the question: We must act to ensure our economy recovers and people get back to work.”

Anil Dash: Compulsion to Blog. I know what that feels like. “The compulsion to quote and link is too strong…. Being stuck in an airport last night without connectivity, I found myself ripping the pages out of a print magazine so that I could refer to them later and quote from them. Soon I’ll resort to creating links with scotch tape and thread.”

A search strategy I find myself using regularly is adding the word ‘blog’ to my search query. It tends to filter out the blatantly commercial sites.

Fast Company | Making a Resolution that Matters: Older people offer other valuable advice: “Follow your dreams.”

The Observer | Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us: “A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.”

I really like Christina’s Widgetopia.

Ah! Some good old fashioned IA discussion.

Mark Hurst writes about The Page Paradigm and gets talked about by Peterme, Christina and others.

As PeterMe says though (”I did a quick assessment of the site Mark points to, and I can say with no reservation that you should totally follow all of Mark’s suggestions when you’re designing a 26 page site. “), Mark is pretty much missing the ball here.

Mark writes: “Users don’t much care “where they are” in the website. So-called “breadcrumb links,” which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It’s not that users don’t understand the links; it’s that they don’t care.”

Of course users don’t care where they are in the website. Thinking that is a beginners’ mistake.

Mark writes: “I emphasize this because Web developers often waste time worring about “where content should live.”

But Mark, we don’t do that because we think users care about where they are. We do that so that users can more easily find things.

He also writes: “Consistency is NOT necessary.”

There are kinds of consistency that are important. Don’t put three links on a page with different names that point to the same page. (At least, I think that would be a bad idea. Don’t want to make it a rule though.)

Having fun though - I haven’t seen an IA debate for a while. Who is right, Mark or Peter? And there’s even comic books.

I am becoming more and more convinced that good design gets done by talented teams.

Mm. That sounded too simple.

The comment spam is getting funny (annoying is close now). “Your opinions expressed on your website are great to read. The way you have your website laid out is very cool. I enjoy playing bingo online at …”

Search Beyond Google: good article about how search engine technology is still evolving with leaps and bounds, and someone might take over from Google.

webservices.xml.com: Quick and Dirty Topic Mapping [Feb. 04, 2002]: “I don’t start with a predefined set of topics. Rather, I allow them to emerge from the material as I work my way through it. I don’t try to create a topic hierarchy. Having wrestled with questions such as whether XML should be a subcategory of Web Development, or vice versa, I’ve concluded that this way lies madness.” (Note Jon is talking about ‘topic maps’ but isn’t talking about the topicmap standard or XTM in any way.)

a possible database schema that allows to store Topic Maps.

tinyTIM - a tiny TMAPI implementation - a small TopicMap engine: “tinyTIM is a very small easy to use (40kb jarsize) in memory Topic Map engine. It implements the TMAPI interfaces, so one can work with TopicMaps via the TMAPI standard. TMAPI will be what DOM is for XML.”

I am starting to think that the best way to get a new site into Google fast is to link to it from a weblog. I linked to brutecreations.com (a friend’s site) a few days ago, and she’s in Google now. Nr. 1 for handmade colombia jewelry, even though the site is pretty much all images.

My logs show the Googlebot indexed 5 pages, the MSNBot indexed 4 pages.

What would a search-engine friendly robots.txt file look like?

WebEx (they’re not paying me) gives you 14 days free trial with unlimited meetings (maximum 3 participants). Try it out if you need to do a set of remote usability tests. It works pretty good.

I’m learning here: I was also guilty of this: “For example, why load all 1000 lines of error handling logic if there were no errors to handle? Why include that library of 101 functions if only one got called for the current request? Why fetch an entire table into a PHP array if you’re only going to display 10 records at a time? Why re-render HTML if the content hasn’t changed?”

SitePoint Blogs : Dynamically Typed: configuration with arrays smells bad.

I have been guilty of this in the past, just because I didn’t know of another method. And it is indeed annoying to maintain. Harry provides two alternatives, including the parse_ini_file() function that I didn’t know about. It lets you put configuration stuff in a classic .ini file, and then parses it into variables for you, fast. Nice!

A friend of mine is gathering grass-roots videa: Recover Video: “RECOVER is a new video magazine that is looking for videos that are 5-minutes or less. This issue focuses on the Republican National Convention coming to NYC in
August to nominate George Bush for President.
The deadline is April 15th, 2004.” Give him some linky love!

Google Search: salsa near 07030. Nice.

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby :: 2. Kon’nichi wa, Ruby Great writing about a programming language. Worth reading even if you’re not into programming.

I am getting about 5 comment spams a day lately. MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin works really well. You can import my blacklist file at http://poorbuthappy.com/blacklist.txt.

So some blogs just mix languages.

Michael: “The frustration I expressed at working in a bureaucrazy turned into outright anger today and then into cunning and finally enlightenment.
[...]
In the end, I lost the battle and was told to go pursue the person who gets feedback/problem email from the site and consider turning that into an FAQ. I gave up and agreed.
[...]
there are progbably other ways you can serve your users as well without having to navigate your political bureaucracy—without seeking approval. What’s that saying? “To ask permission is to seek denial”. You can fly under the radar.”

I’ve heard similar stories all over. One person implemented a best-bets feature in the organizations search engine without telling anyone (best bets can cause political battles). I’ve flown under the radar a few times myself. What’s your experience?

Yahoo! Birth of a New Machine: “Yahoo is rolling out a brand new search engine today, with its own index and ranking mechanisms, casting aside its long-standing use of Google-powered search results.”

Browser lock-in is subtle, and Firefox developers should do everything they can to decrease it.

So I download Firefox, and I want to make it my standard browser. I open it. I’m browsing around, and it takes me a while to figure out how to create new tabs instead of new windows. Developers, make ctrl+N open up a new tab, not a new window. Make clicking a link that opens a new window open up in a new tab. Tabs are a major selling point, they should be the default.

I come across a page I like and I want to blog it. But my bookmarklet is on IE, not here. Developers, make an IE bookmarks import function come up automatically the first time I run Firefox. Have it ask me if I’d like to import the bookmarks. Make it painless. I’m at work and have no time to go hunt around for how to import bookmarks.

So I decide to spend a few minutes to create a bookmarklet here. (I’m motivated - I want to use those tabs!) I go to my movabletype page, and it asks me to login. I have long since forgotten my password (IE keeps me logged in forever). So I can’t login and I can’t ask for my password because I’m at work and the password gets sent to my home email. Developers, make Firefox import cookies when it imports bookmarks.

The end result is that I am forced to go back to IE, and Firefox may just sit on my computer never to be used again unless I find some time to set up all these things.

An Archaeology of Browsing…: “So here’s a weird sensation. I’m trying to install a Photoshop upgrade at two in the morning, because i’m jetlagged and can’t concentrate on work but can’t sleep either so I’m procrastinating. And in order to install said upgrade I’m going to have to restart my browser. So I start the process of closing down windows and tabs and adding them to a little bookmarks stash [..]“

If I ever find time to program PHP again, I’ll get The PHP Anthology. Think of it as a pattern language for PHP.

49432 royalty free portraits for your personas. Should cover it.

Last sunday, I made a website for a friend. brutecreations.com I spend most of the morning taking pictures of jewelry she makes, and a few hours putting it all together and finding a domain name and such. (The site needs a bit of polishing, I know.)

It made me think about the process of getting people to feel ownership of their website. Often we know what they should do, what would work for them, but just telling them that isn’t always the best thing. I want them to live it, to learn it, not just to nod and say thanks for the site. (That’s not what happened here btw.)

Visit her site if you like handmade jewelry by a Colombian artist. And give her some Google juice!

DonnaM: A toybox full of memories: “I was attempting to clean up my daughter’s room. I was finding old scraps of drawing and cheap rubbishy toys - things that didn’t look important to me - but she wouldn’t let me throw them out. I could see in her face that the idea of throwing these things out was quite distressing. I listened to why she wouldn’t throw them - it wasn’t that she wanted to use them, or that the toys were fun to play with, but that they had memories for her. Some were drawings that someone had done for her, and some of the toys were ones that she remembered where they came from and other associations.”