Adactio

Links for 2009-11-19 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Glossary | HTML5 Doctor
A very handy glossary of HTML5 from the medical professionals at HTML5 Doctor.
SPARKLINES IN THE GRID - Patent Application 20090282325
Microsoft are trying to patent sparklines. Twunts.

Links for 2009-11-16 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Statistical significance & other A/B test pitfalls
Cennydd delivers a slap of common sense to A/B testing. With science!

Links for 2009-11-13 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Links for 2009-11-12 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

cyoa
An in-depth study mapping all the permutations in "choose your own adventure" books.

Links for 2009-11-11 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Phonetikana - the johnson banks thought for the week
An interesting experiment in making Katakana self-describing.

Collective action

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:21:03 GMT

When I added collectives to Huffduffer, I wanted to keep the new feature fairly discrete. I knew I would have to add an add/remove device to profiles but I also wanted that device to be unobtrusive. That’s why I settled on using a small +/- button.

The action of adding someone to, or removing someone from a collective was a clear candidate for Hijax. Once I had the adding and removing working without JavaScript, I went back and sprinkled in some Ajax pixie-dust to do the adding and removing asynchronously without refreshing the whole page.

That was the easy part. The challenge lies in providing some meaningful and reassuring feedback to the user that the action has been carried out. There are quite a few familiar devices for doing this; the yellow fade technique is probably the most common. Personally, I like the Humanized Messages as devised by Aza Raskin and ported to jQuery by Michael Heilemann.

I knew that, depending on the page, the user could be carrying out multiple additions or removals. Whatever feedback mechanism I provided, it shouldn’t get in the way of the user carrying out another addition or removal. That’s when I thought of a feedback mechanism from a different discipline: video games.

Super Mario Bros. Frustration Speed Run in 3:07

Quite a few arcade games provide a discrete but clear feedback mechanism when points are scored. When the player successfully “catches” a prize, not only does the overall score in the corner of the screen update, but the amount scored appears in situ, floating briefly upwards. It doesn’t get in the way of immediately grabbing another prize but it does provide a nice tangible bit of feedback (the player usually gets some audio feedback too, which would be nice to do on the web if it weren’t to likely to get very annoying very quickly).

It wasn’t too tricky to imitate this behaviour with jQuery.

Collective action

This game-inspired feedback mechanism feels surprisingly familiar to me. Sign up or log in to Huffduffer to try it for yourself.

Tagged with huffduffer ajax games gaming jquery

Links for 2009-11-10 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

iQ Font
How to draw a font with a car. With. A. Car.

Links for 2009-11-09 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

TWOYOUTUBEVIDEOSANDAMOTHERFUCKINGCROSSFADER.COM
Best. Domain name. Ever.

Collectivism

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:56:26 GMT

Huffduffer was launched thirteen months ago. I almost missed the one year anniversary but for an astute huffduffer who pointed it out.

It’s been quite a year. Just over 2000 people signed up and huffduffed over five and a half thousand audio files. I’ve been tweaking the site fairly regularly—and blogging about it here—fiddling with forms, machine tags and sparklines.

Today I launched the biggest update to the site so far. I’ve added a type of social networking …kind of …not really.

Let me explain.

Right from the start, I was pretty sure that Huffduffer didn’t need to be Yet Another Social Network. The site was all about finding and listening to audio. If you wanted to listen to everything huffduffed by a particular person, you simply subscribed to their podcast. Simple.

I did offer a kind of low-level recommendation feature using tags. If you tag a file with for:username, it will show up as recommendation in the sidebar of that user’s profile. The for: syntax was something I shamelessly ripped off from Delicious.

When Brian was over to visit a while back, I was showing him that feature. He then went on to show it to Mike who, next time I saw him, said I get Huffduffer now; it’s a way for friends to put things into iTunes for me.

That really struck a chord with me. I realised that I needed to do more to allow for that kind of sharing on Huffduffer.

There are two problems with subscribing to individual podcasts from people on Huffduffer:

If you subscribe to the podcasts of three different people and they all huffduff the same file, you will get that file three times.
If you subscribe to the podcast of somebody else and they huffduff something that you have also huffduffed, you get an unnecessary duplication.

So, as of today, you can now subscribe to a podcast created by a collection of people. There won’t be any duplicates and the list won’t include anything that you have already huffduffed.

This is collective huffduffing.

To add someone to your collective, just click the + button on their profile. Subsequently clicking the - button, as you would expect, removes them from your collective.

You can take a look at everything huffduffed by my collective—and here’s the list of the people in my collective.

That’s pretty much it. You can create a collective and either subscribe to the resulting podcast or you can treat it as a pool of potential material for you to huffduff.

You can also drill down by tag. Here’s the tagcloud of my collective and here’s everything tagged with “psychology” in my collective.

Programming this (sort of) social functionality wasn’t too tricky. But once the code was written, I spent quite a while trying to figure out what to call it. I definitely wanted to avoid the inaccurate label “friends”.

Initially I chose the word “network”. But that sounds like it implies a degree of reciprocity. So I trawled through the thesaurus, trying to find a good word for the output of a group of huffduffers; a circle, a clique, a club, a clump, a cluster, a congregation, a coterie, a crowd, an ensemble, a flock, a gang, a league, a mass, a posse, a society.

I could have left it to the wisdom of all-sorts but I ended up settling on the word “collective”. That’s because it’s a good word for describing the people (the collective) and the (collective) output. It works as a noun and an adjective. Also, it has a nice mid twentieth century socialist ring to it.

If you’re already on Huffduffer, try creating your own collective—the link to “similar people” on your profile page is a good place to start. If you aren’t already on Huffduffer, you’ll need to sign up to start enjoying the benefits of collectivisation.

As always, your feedack is welcome.

Tagged with huffduffer

Burge Pitch Torrent

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:43:45 GMT

Hanlon’s razor entreats us to:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

While Clarke’s third law states that:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Mash them up and that leaves us with Clark’s law:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I have experienced a textbook case of extremely advanced incompetence.

When I wrote about the shenanigans of Perfect Pitch, in which a DMCA claim was used to remove a perfectly innocuous discussion on The Session from Google’s search index, I pondered about whether malice could be ascribed:

Could it be that the owner of perfectpitch.com sent a DMCA complaint to Google simply because another site was getting higher rankings for the phrase “perfect pitch”? If so, then that’s a whole new level of SEO snake-oilery.

In turns out that the correct cause is incompetence at a stunning level. I got an email from Gary Boucherle at perfectpitch.com who explained:

Periodically we’ve contacted Google to submit the following complaint:

We believe our copyrighted works have been illegally copied and made available for free download at the web sites listed below …

The following URL was one of hundreds of URLS (mostly torrent sites) found with the Google search terms Burge+Pitch+Torrent:

http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display/21250

While we try to check every URL to make sure it either contains torrents, or is a torrent file sharing site (not the case with this site), it was included with our complaint inadvertently.

So here’s what’s happening: A company is doing a search for a phrase on Google, making a list of all the URLs returned by that search and then submitting that list to Google as part of a DMCA claim. Google then removes all those URLs from its search index without verifying any infringement.

I subsequently had a phone conversation with Gary and he was quite contrite about his actions— although he did try to claim that the mere mention of torrents in an online discussion might be justification for a take down (a completely indefensible attitude).

The more I talked to him, the more I realised that he simply had no idea about the DMCA. He was completely oblivious to the potential consequences of his actions were he to lose a counter-claim in court.

Gary Bourcherle abused a piece of extremely poor legislation in a scattergun approach without even understanding what he was doing. It’s like putting guns into the hands of small children.

Well, Gary is very sorry now and promises he won’t do it again. He is going to contact Google and ask them to reinstate the discussion on The Session in the search index.

Here is an official statement of apology, sent by email for redistribution here or anywhere else (try to ignore the bits where The Session is referred to as “a blog”):

To All Readers:

Here at PerfectPitch.com we made a big mistake.

We instructed Google to block a blog site managed by Jeremy Keith, citing that they were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act (DMCA). As per our request, Google did indeed remove this page from their search listings.

We wish to formally apologize to Mr. Keith and his bloggers for this mistake, for which we are deeply regretful.

Please understand that we had no intention whatsoever to suppress the speech on Mr. Keith’s page. Please know that we are ardent supporters and advocates of free speech for everyone.

We recognize this was a careless error, and there is really no excuse for this. Nevertheless, please permit us a moment to explain.

Here’s what happened:

We were actually submitting to Google a list of sites that were illegally distributing copies of our copyrighted intellectual property. We of course have every right to request that Google have these sites removed from their search engine results because we believe these sites violate the DMCA, which prohibits the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials over the internet.

To our shock and horror, an employee of ours mistakenly included Mr. Keith’s site in our list, merely because it made a reference to illegal copies of our course. Naturally, this is not grounds for removal of this page at Google. Our intention was only to remove actual pages where the course is being illegally distributed, and not any pages of free speech, such as Mr. Keith’s blog. This was a misjudgment and error on our employee’s side, and on behalf of our company, we sincerely apologize.

This event has never happened to us before when reporting illegal distribution of our materials. Please rest assured that we will redouble our efforts to ensure this never happens again.

We have requested that Google immediately reinstate this page in their search results, along with our apology to Google as well.

If we have offended any potential musicians who wished to purchase our best-selling, university verified ear training methods, again, we sincerely apologize. To make it up to you, we would invite you to try our courses at a substantial discount not offered to the general public, valid until the end of this month. Please go here to retrieve your special offer with our apologies:

http://www.discount-offer.perfectpitch.com

Again, please accept our sincere regrets for this goof.

Happy blogging, everyone.

Sincerely yours,
Gary Boucherle
PerfectPitch.com

Contact: http://www.PerfectPitch.com/contactus.htm

Apology accepted. Now don’t do it again.

No word from Google on their “obey first, ask questions never” approach to DMCA claims.

And if you thought the DMCA was a bad piece of legislation, just wait till ACTA arrives.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to change my email signature to “Burge Pitch Torrent.” It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Like “Klaatu Barada Nikto”.

Tagged with dmca law google perfectpitch

Perfect Pitch

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:39:02 GMT

We were having a chat in the Clearleft office today about site stats and their relative uselessness; numbers about bounce rates are like eyetracking data—without knowing the context, they’re not going to tell you anything.

Anyway, I was reminded that I have an account over at Google Webmaster Tools set up for three of my sites: adactio.com, huffduffer.com and thesession.org. I logged in today for the first time in ages and started poking around.

I noticed that I had some unread messages. Who knew that Google Webmaster Tools has a messaging system? I guess all software really does evolve until it can send email.

One of the messages had the subject line Blocked URLs:

For legal reasons, we’ve excluded from our search results content located at or under the following URL/directory:

http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display/21250

This content has been removed from all Google search results.

Cause: Somone has filed a DMCA complaint against your site.

What now?

I visited the URL and found a fairly tame discussion about Perfect Pitch. Here’s the only part of the discussion that references an external resource in a non-flattering light:

I think that is referring to www.PerfectPitch.com. I’m not saying anything about such commercially-oriented courses because I don’t know them, but I think we’d all be wise to bear in mind the general comments voiced in the first two posts on this thread.

That single reference to a third-party site is, apparently, enough to trigger a DMCA complaint.

Google link to the complaint on Chilling Effects but that just says The cease-and-desist or legal threat you requested is not yet available. It does, however, list the party who sent the complaint: Boucherle.

By a staggering coincidence, Gary Boucherle of American Educational Music, Inc. is registered as the owner of perfectpitch.com.

So let’s get this straight. In a discussion about perfect pitch, someone mentions the website perfectpitch.com. They don’t repost any materials from the site. They don’t even link to the site. They don’t really say anything particularly disparaging. But it all takes is for the owner of perfectpitch.com to abuse the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act with a spurious complaint and just like that, Google removes the discussion from its search index.

To be fair, Google also explain how to file a counter-complaint. However, the part about agreeing to potentially show up in a court in California is somewhat off-putting for those of us, like me, who live outside the United States of America.

There is another possible explanation for this insane over-reaction; one that would explain why the offended party sent the complaint to Google rather than going down the more traditional route of threatening the ISP…

The Session has pretty good Google juice. The markup is pretty lean, the content is semantically structured and there’s plenty of inbound links. Could it be that the owner of perfectpitch.com sent a DMCA complaint to Google simply because another site was getting higher rankings for the phrase “perfect pitch”? If so, then that’s a whole new level of SEO snake-oilery.

Hmmm… that gives me an idea.

If you have a blog or other personal publishing platform, perhaps you would like to write a post titled Perfect Pitch? Feel free to republish anything from this post, which is also coincidentally titled Perfect Pitch. And feel free to republish the contents of the original discussion on The Session titled, you guessed it: Perfect Pitch.

Update: Thanks for inbound links, everyone. The matter is now being resolved. I have received an apology from Gary Bourcherle who was being more stupid than evil.

Tagged with dmca law google seo perfectpitch

Talking the talk

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:56:29 GMT

I’ve been doing a fair bit of yakking lately, all recorded for posterity.

First off, I had a chat with Tim from Design Critique on Ajax design considerations, mostly recapping what I talked about UI13 last year.

Jeremy Keith on Ajax design considerations on Huffduffer

After that, I had a natter with Ross from Web Axe, this time focusing on practical web accessibility.

Web Axe Episode 75: Jeremy Keith interview, Google Wave on Huffduffer

Then Andy, Rich and I paid a visit to the Boagworld crew out in the back of beyond where we had a free-for-all five-way chat about Clearleft and Headscape.

Boagworld 188: Clearscape Or Headleft? on Huffduffer

Lastly, I had a video chat with Ryan Taylor for his series, Please Start From The Beginning.

Please start from the beginning… with Jeremy Keith

Add them all up and you’ve got a veritable aural onslaught. If you manage to make it through all of those, then you will almost certainly be very weary of listening to my voice.

Tagged with podcast speaking audio video

Tears in the rain

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:44:20 GMT

When I first heard that Yahoo were planning to bulldoze Geocities, I was livid. After I blogged in anger, I was taken to task for jumping the gun. Give ‘em a chance, I was told. They may yet do something to save all that history.

They did fuck all. They told Archive.org what URLs to spider and left it up to them to do the best they could with preserving internet history. Meanwhile, Jason Scott continued his crusade to save as much as he could:

This is fifteen years and decades of man-hours of work that you’re destroying, blowing away because it looks better on the bottom line.

We are losing a piece of internet history. We are losing the destinations of millions of inbound links. But most importantly we are losing people’s dreams and memories.

Geocities dies today. This is a bad day for the internet. This is a bad day for our collective culture. In my opinion, this is also a bad day for Yahoo. I, for one, will find it a lot harder to trust a company that finds this to be acceptable behaviour …despite the very cool and powerful APIs produced by the very smart and passionate developers within the same company.

I hope that my friends who work at Yahoo understand that when I pour vitriol upon their company, I am not aiming at them. Yahoo has no shortage of clever people. But clearly they are down in the trenches doing development, not in the upper echelons making the decision to butcher Geocities. It’s those people, the decision makers, that I refer to as twunts. Fuckwits. Cockbadgers. Pisstards.

Tagged with geocities yahoo culture linkrot preservation history

The Chalkboard of the Fourth Wall

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:01:26 GMT

It has been said before but I’ll say it again: copy is interface. Josh sums it up nicely in his post Writing Microcopy:

The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing.

The canonical online example is Moo.com with its adorably anthropomorphised Little Moo robot personality. An oft-cited offline paragon is Innocent Smoothies with their cheeky little packaging easter egg delighters.

My favourite meatspace exemplar is right here in Brighton. The Earth and Stars pub has an outside chalkboard with a distinct personality. Over the past two years, I’ve been chronicling its announcements on Flickr.

Some samples:

Why does everyone always look at me? I know I’m a chalkboard and that’s my job, I just wish people would ask before staring at me. Sometimes I don’t have anything to say.

All the chalkboards inside think they’re so special! They seem to forget that I was here first! If I can see off the English weather, then I can certainly see off those punks!

I’m the unluckiest chalkboard in Brighton. Summer’s coming and this side of the building is always in the shade. Please come inside and tell them to move me to the western wall.

What are you looking at? I’ve told you before that it’s rude to stare! Be warned… I’m the chalkboard Kung Fu champion and not afraid to use my skills.

So bored of this job. I don’t want to be a chalkboard anymore. I wish I’d paid more attention in woodwork, I could have been a skateboard or a sun-lounger… at least I’m not a chopping board.

Stop looking at me like I’m a waste of space! I’m not just a chalkboard you know! I’m also a supporting wall. I provide shelter from wild beasts and tropical storms. Go inside so I don’t have to see you!

And my favourite:

Help me.

Walking past the chalkboard this week, I was pleased to see that it had been updated. Taking out my camera, I read the latest message:

Call me paranoid but I’m sure someone’s watching me, some are even taking pictures. I’m not sure of my rights as a chalkboard, but I feel violated. I’ll be watching you Mr. Keith!

I’m being cyberstalked by a paranoid existentialist chalkboard.

Made me smile.

Tagged with copy interface chalkboard pub

Optimisation

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:14:54 GMT

Derek Powazek gave up smoking recently so any outward signs of irritability should be forgiven. That said, the anger in two of his recent posts is completely understandable: Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists and the follow-up, SEO FAQ.

His basic premise is money spent on hiring someone who labels themselves as an SEO expert would be better spent in producing well marked-up relevant content. I think he’s right. In the comments, the more reasonable remarks are based on semantics. Good SEO, they argue, is all about producing well marked-up relevant content.

Fair enough. But does it really need its own separate label? Personally, I would always suggest hiring a good content strategist or copy writer over hiring an SEO consultant any day. Here’s why:

Google—or at least the search arm of the company—is dedicated to a simple goal: giving people the most relevant content for their search. Google search is facilitated by ‘bots and algorithms, but it is fundamentally very human-centric.

Search Engine Optimisation is an industry based around optimising for the ‘bots and algorithms at Google.

But if those searchbots are dedicated to finding the best content for humans, why not cut out the middleman and go straight to optimising for humans?

If you optimise for people, which usually involves producing well marked-up relevant content, then you will get the approval of the ‘bots and algorithms by default …because that’s exactly the kind of content that they are trying to find and rank. This is the approach taken by Aarron Walter in his excellent book Building Findable Websites.

On Twitter, Mike Migurski said:

I think SEO is just user-centered design for robots.

…which would make it robot-centred design. But that’s only half the story. SEO is really robot-centred design for robots that are practising user-centred design.

Ask yourself this: do you think Wikipedia ever hired an SEO consultant in order to get its high rankings on Google?

Tagged with seo google findability content search

Password unmasking

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:10:34 GMT

A few months ago, Jakob Nielsen wrote about passwords. Specifically, he wrote about the standard practice of the contents of password fields being masked by default. In his typical black/white, on/off, right/wrong Boolean worldview, Father Jakob called for this practice to be abolished completely.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Apple take a more empathetic approach, acknowledging that there often very good reasons for masking passwords. But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer the user the option to disable password masking if they choose.

This pattern came up in a conversation at Clearleft recently. We were discussing a sign-up process, trying to avoid the nasty pattern of asking users to input the same value twice. We were all in agreement that Apple’s solution to password masking was pretty elegant.

I’d like to use this pattern on the sign up form for Huffduffer but I can’t see a way of easily integrating it with the Mad Libs approach. But I have implemented this option on the log-in form.

Here’s what’s happening under the hood:

The “show password” checkbox is generated with JavaScript,
A text input field is also generated with JavaScript but hidden,
Toggling the “show password” checkbox toggles the display of the password and text fields,
Entering a character into either field updates the value of the other field.

It would have been a lot simpler to just use JavaScript to toggle the type attribute of one field between “password” and “text”. But, in a certain browser that shall remain nameless, you can’t do that …for very sound security reasons, no doubt.

So the script isn’t as elegant as I’d wish but it gets the job done. Feel free to view source on the JavaScript.

Update: Jonathan Holst points me to a post by Jeff Atwood on this subject. It’s worth reading just to boggle at the insanity of Lotus Notes’ security features. From the comments there, I found a bookmarklet to reveal password characters.

Tagged with huffduffer ui interface password

Small pieces, loosely joined by machine tags

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:33:06 GMT

I’ve already described how machine tags on Huffduffer trigger a number of third-party API calls. Tagging something with music:artist=..., book:author=..., film:title=... or any number of similar machine tags will fire off calls to places like Amazon, The New York Times, or Last.fm.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to include Flickr in that list of third-party services but I couldn’t think of an easy way of associating audio files with photos. Then I realised that a mechanism already exists, and it’s another machine tag. Anything on Flickr that’s been tagged with lastfm:event=... will probably be a picture of a musical artist.

So if anything is tagged on Huffduffer with music:artist=..., all I need to do is fire off a call to Last.fm to get a list of that artist’s events using the method artist.getEvents. Once I have the event IDs I can search Flickr for photos that have been machine tagged with those IDs.

There’s just one problem. Last.fm’s API only returns future events for an artist. There’s no method for past events.

Undeterred, I found a RESTful interface that provides the past events of an artist on Last.fm. The format returned isn’t JSON or XML. It’s HTML. It turns out that past events are freely available in the profile for any artist on Last.fm with the identifier last.fm/music/{artist}/+events/{year}. Here, for example, are Salter Cane gigs in 2009: last.fm/music/Salter+Cane/+events/2009.

If only those events were structured in hCalendar! As it is, I have to run through all the links in the document to find the hrefs beginning with the string http://www.last.fm/event/ and then extract the event ID that immediately follows that string.

Once I’ve extracted the event IDs for an artist, I can fire off a search on Flickr using the flickr.photos.search method with a machine_tags parameter (as well as passing the artist name in the text parameter just to be sure).

Here’s an example result in the sidebar on Huffduffer: huffduffer.com/tags/music:artist=Bat+for+Lashes

It’s messy but it works. I guess that’s the dictionary definition of a hack.

Tagged with huffduffer last.fm flickr machinetags