Meshing the Developer with the Information Architect

Many IA professionals come primarily from the creative side as I originally did. Now I come from the technical side as well. Both sides bring strengths, both sides have problems. I’m working on an intranet sub-site which is primarily being used by accountants and bookkeepers. A simple IA problem arose. It's a bit lenghty to explain. The intranet has a standard three column layout. Navigation on the left; middle column has major headings (bookkeeper & accountant items)and then drill down information on the right.

Everything is being kept above the fold in either iframes or scrolling divs as appropriate. The problem to be fixed was this: as the user scrolled down in the right column there was no indication of which heading had been selected. We needed to find a way to keep the label at the top of the right column.

The developer in me said: no problem just put a scrolling div inside the iframe and the problem is solved. The date and info would stay put as the data was scrolled down. It was more than a little disappointing when I found that an "unsolvable" problem came up. There were now two vertical scroll bars next to each other. The “obvious” solution was to remove the scrolling from the iframe. Unfortunately the coding that allowed the div to scroll (overflow: auto) overwrote the iframe code which normally removed the scrollbar (scrolling=no).

So what to do? Obviously we can’t let this stop us. There were two solutions. One solution was to build another iframe with the header information in it and have one link change both iframes. This would be a very clunky solution. The other solution would be to create a div that would hide the iframe’ scroll bar; leaving only the div scroll bar visible to the end user. Think of this div as an object in Visio or a layer in Photoshop that you brought to the front hiding what’s behind it.

I dislike these kludges; you shouldn’t have to hide coding problems with “fake” divs. That’s the developer in me speaking. What is the problem in knowing technical solutions? Simple, sometimes knowing the technical aspect of a problem is a distraction. The IA’s role is to solve IA problems; not to solve the developer’s problems.

Does this mean that developers are handicapped when it comes to doing IA work? Not at all I find that some IAs, from a more creative background, have issues with the Creative Director. They have the same problem in the creative end as I have in the development end. Namely do your job and leave others to do theirs – until they ask for a suggestion.

Display problems when combining AdSense with Blogger.

I was on the AdSense boards and someone was having problems with the AdSense ads breaking her design. She wanted to have text, followed by the ads followed by text. This following long post is to help her with her site design. In a nutshell blogger's CMS can be problematic when adding photos or graphics; especially for HTML newbies who don't want to look at the code.

So to this budding blogger and others following in her footsteps here's the simplest way to accomplish what you're looking to do. Place:

<div style="clear: both;"> THE TEXT GOES HERE </div> around your text.

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Now let's try it with the AdSense Ads that the person was having trouble with instead of plain graphics. Here's what it looks like without the divs:

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Here are some of the pages we have done in our notebooks over the last few months. We are plugging away at these parts of speech, learning a new one every few weeks. Our Latin curriculum is also introducing the parts of speech, so we are being introduced to them in that way also.

 Another Language Arts resource that we will be using very soon is called Primary Language Lessons by Emma Serl. I have a few friends who have used this and are loving it. It is a gentle way to do Language Arts with your child, and seems to go along nicely with curriculums like Five in a Row, which we also love. :) I have ordered this book and am excited to start using it with the girls!

We still have problems. Why? For two reasons. One because there is a line break between the <iframe> tags; and second because some tweaking needs to be done in the iframe tag. To get the two iframes to line up next to each other both must be align="center" or align="left" depending upon what you want. Don't depend too much on doing this when you upon load the image. You still need the ability to do basic tweaking on your site. Even for one as user friendly as Blogger.

Blogger's content managment software is not perfect. If you wnat to move the imported graphics around you will need to know how to tweak your site.

Twitter Digg and Predictions

I just looked at an old TechCrunch article Did Twitter Just Pass Digg? [January 20th, 2009] The author, and many of the commenters, cannot believe that Twitter caught up with Digg. I wish I had seen this article earlier. I cannot believe that they didn't see how FAST Twitter was growing. It is immaterial whether Twitter surpassed Digg in January of 2009 or a month or two earlier or later.

To be fair to the writer, and the commenters, Twitter and Digg have two very different models and their usage is difficult to compare. How does one compare a tweet with a news aggregator such as Digg?

The EFF and Net Neutrality

The following quotes come from the ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION's
January 14, 2010 submission to the FCC regarding net neutrality legislation.

In order to protect the free speech interests of Internet users, the Commission should reject copyright enforcement as “reasonable network management.” Copyright enforcement has nothing to do with the technical business of network management.

Congress has not deputized the FCC to be a free roving regulator of the Internet. On the contrary, Congress has consistently preferred to protect the Internet from excessive regulation. So while EFF strongly endorses the goals of this Commission as stated in the NPRM, a limitless notion of ancillary jurisdiction would stand as an open invitation to future Commissions to promulgate “policy statements,” issue regulations, and conduct adjudications detrimental to the Internet.

We need to be able to allow ISPs to provide greater access to the services that need it, such as real-time applications, while ensuring that they do not pay attention to content. ISPs cannot both be doing the government's bidding regarding law enforcement of copyright and illegal material AND at the same time be expected to be "net neutral." That is asking the impossible.

Facebook partners with AOL

ReadWriteWeb has an excellent post on the partnership between Facebook and AOL. Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login

The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence. Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what's at stake here, it's whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.

With all its problems Facebook has become THE social networking site. Some people are concerned with Facebook becoming a "monopoly." Privacy, and Facebook's approach to personal information, is the concern; not monopoly powers.

Pwned

For all those people who wonder what we mean when we say "PWNED."

Personal Blogs and Privacy

How does one make a blog in which NO ONE but you and a selected few can have access to the information? If you're a corporation with sensitive information the only answer is in a password-protected directory in a secure-hosted environment.

How about if you're a smaller entity or private individual and would like a more cost effective solution. For instance you want to have photos of your trips, or your children but you don't want these photos and private moments available to the world at large for this year and next. Blogger, for instance allows you to limit viewers but you must enter each and every accepted email address. This can be a time-consuming and irritating task if names are constantly added.

The best solution would be to have your blog in a password protected directory. Unfortunately some services, such as Blogger, doesn't allow that anymore as they have suspended their FTP service.

Your best solution is limited to finding blogging software that will store the photos and the blog posts on YOUR domain. You will then need to password protect those directories. At that point you will be completely safe from the Search Engines prying eyes.

There is another solution. It's not perfect but it should suffice for all but the most paranoid and that is to add tags telling search engines not to index the pages. The reason this is not perfect is that the tags are merely a suggestion. The search engines can still index and display the pages if they want. Chances are high that they will not index and never display these pages. But, it is not assured.