Web Applications

This is part two of a series in Creating the Modern Website: You can find part zero ("Introduction") here and part 1 ("Fundamentals") here. This part covers Software, Open vs Closed-Source software, and Security.

Source: open, closed and free software

If you've been online any length of time you may have come across a news article heralding the death of the wedding: fewer people are getting married and on slow news days it seems like these articles are trotted out to fill the gap. I've come across one which inexplicably starts blaming twitter in the last quarter of the article. Twitter? I don't get it... did I miss a paragraph, or was one accidentally ommitted?

twitter_badui.png

I noticed this after viewing a link about twitter clones. If I want to sign up for a twitter account, this is the homepage. The question I have is: "How do I sign up?". Not in a figurative sense, but a real one... there's no 'Create an Account' right next to the login form, which has been a UI convention for some time now.

Stared at it long enough yet? I'll give you a clue: it's the big green box that says 'Join the Conversation'.

This morning I received notice of two security update releases in my inbox: one about Drupal core being upgraded, another about the OpenID module containing a security vulnerability before 1.2.

Since upgrading Drupal core is such a pain, I've generated a patch (it's attached to this post: click on '1 attachment' to retrieve it) for upgrading your existing sites from 5.7. If you're not running a 5.7 site, please don't try to use it.

If you're working on some feature that requires you to create many user accounts, here's a tip I find helpful. Use a service like Spaml that creates disposable email accounts just by going to the site.

Drupal allows valid email addresses as usernames. If you can reduce your user creation process to just those fields which accept as valid an email address, you can just go down the form, tab, ctrl+v, tab... and then hit 'Submit'.

In my experience, there are three different categories of site slowdown and delay:

• Imperceptible
• Perceptible
• Unusable

Other distinctions really don't matter so much. The user doesn't care whether the page load latency is 10 seconds or 15 seconds. They're just going to leave.

The progression of a delay is:

Imperceptible -> Perceptible -> Unusable

facebook-config.png

In my continuing trend of posting screenshots of Facebook screens, here's another one.

What's up with this? It's an interesting artifact of Facebook's "student-only" audience. It has no practical use for a large percentage of their audience. Since Facebook has the information available to determine whether someone is currently in an institution where you might have need of these fields, they should ideally only appear for those users.

... that they seldom come true. And in the age of the forever web making bold but inevitably false predictions is eventually going to get fingers poked at you.

Almost a year ago now, podcasting jockey Chris Pirillo predicted that Drupal was dying because of a shortage of 'intelligent' developers.

I don't know if he's forgotten his economics lessons, but low supply means one of two things:

Apollo2.jpg

After over a month of working on it in the little time I could spare, I've finally readied the new Shadowlife.

I thought about it for months, and I kept coming to the same conclusion: Wordpress was too limiting, and it was too difficult to add the features that I wanted to add. Now I have the opportunity.

So what's new? Let's see...

• A better image gallery
• Real 'pages' with better information
• A new theme (though, I really did like the old one)
• Reorganized Taxonomy and image categories
• Better tagging

In Jakob Neilson's alertbox newsletter for this week:

FACEBOOK AND METCALFE'S LAW

We are getting close to the bursting of Bubble 2.0, so it's a good idea to
review some of the precursors of Bubble 1.0.

In 1999, I wrote an article "Metcalfe's Law in Reverse" about the problems
of so-called walled gardens, where a service cuts itself off from the
Internet and tries to add value by being closed.

> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990725.html