Archive for July, 2008
If the book is bad, put it down and find another one. You don’t have to suffer through because someone else said it was great.
If the music is bad, turn it off. Likewise, the movie, the TV show, the play, the game, the skit, the scene, the job, the career, the relationship, the car, the pursuit of endless piles of things, the bar, the campaign, college. Quit the band. Quit the show.
My name is Harry Love and I have some bad news for you. You don’t have time. You’re going to die. You have time for a few songs, a few movies, a few things. You have time to help a few people. You have time for a few causes.
Here’s the test. While you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing, imagine you have two years to live. Imagine yourself on your death bed, looking at yourself now from your death bed watching you doing what you’re doing.
Will you be happy you read the book, sang the song, spent two hours seeing this movie, working that job, played the game? To keep up appearances? To pass the time? Were you really trapped in your position? Was there really nothing you could have done to save your relationship? Or leave a bad one?
Could you really not have given up everything to help those people who needed it?
Just passing time? Are you serious? Just passing time? How much would the death-bed you give for one minute of the time you have now?
Do me a favor. Paste this URL into your browser’s address bar:
http://jetrecord.com/routes/sea+jfk
And now paste this one:
http://jetrecord.com/routes/sea+jfk.map?width=450&height=300
Oh, yes, my friend! You can now embed route maps from Jetrecord into your web site, assuming your web site or blog allows you to embed content using iframes or something similar. WordPress does. How do I know? Well …
Why would you use this? Just for fun, of course! Are you flying somewhere cool? Do you know the airport codes for your origin and destination airports? Use the URLs above as a guide. Jetrecord will create your route maps on the fly.
For example, the airport code for Denver International is DEN. The airport code for Boston’s Logan International is BOS. Type this into your browser’s address bar: http://jetrecord.com/routes/den+bos
Jetrecord will draw the map for you and create the route page. Scroll to the bottom of the route page below the Google map. There is some code listed there to embed the map. Copy the code, modify the HTML if you want to (you may want to modify the dimensions of the map and the iframe), and paste it into your web site. Or pass the URL around via email, create a link to it, whatever you feel like doing.
Have fun! Oh, and be sure to read the terms and conditions at the bottom of the blog post on Jetrecord.
I went to the Jackson 5 because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
No! Make it stop! You never, never, ever put comments in reverse chronological order as the default format on a blog. Never.
Why?
A blog is nothing more than repurposed forum software in which only one person is allowed to post topics and everyone else is allowed to post responses. (Usually. There are multi-author blogs but exclusivity of authorship is still part of the deal.)
A single blog post is like a forum topic. The original poster—in this case, the blog author—writes the topic. Just like a forum, if anyone cares to respond, they write a comment after the original post.
Once a person responds with a comment, the topic is no longer a monologue. It has become a conversation between and among the original author and anyone else who responds. Comments, just like face to face conversations, sometimes also take on a life of their own apart from the original topic, sprouting new threads of thought and conversation which may have only a tiny relationship to the original topic.
Now, imagine going to your favorite forum, clicking a link to a topic, and then being forced to click to page 6 of the responses and going backwards from there in order to begin understanding how the most recent response came to be and how it might possibly be related to the original post. Madness!
Because of this, the only natural way to display comments (in English, that is) for anyone reading the conversation for the first time is to display them in chronological order. Outside of clever methods of interface design, the simplest way to solve this is to write left to right and top to bottom. Even though it may not be linear in thought, a conversation is always linear in time.
A Case of Incorrect Form Following Function
The reason many people display comments in reverse chronological order is because they want to show what’s new at the top. The problem is twofold: they are trying to make the list of comments perform two functions and they are not solving the desired function with the best form.
The primary function of a list of comments is to facilitate a conversation. New comments come after old comments. Again, in English we write left to right and top to bottom. Always remember that: the primary function of a list of comments is to facilitate a conversation.
Reverse chronological comments, however, are trying to make a list of comments perform a secondary function, “Show me what’s new in this conversation.” The form they have chosen to solve this function is, “Display a chronological conversation in reverse chronological sequence.” While this solves the problem for exactly one case, the case in which a person has read every comment except the last one, this makes no sense at all for any other case.
Solutions
There are many ways to show people what’s new. Currently, the two most popular are RSS feeds for comments and email notification. There are also several third-party web services that track conversations in comments and attempt to display them intelligently. Another way would be to allow people to sort the list of comments based on time (with chronological order as the default).
While it’s true that some people display recent comments on the index page of a blog, this has an entirely different purpose. The purpose is to show what’s popular by showing what’s recent. In doing so, blog owners are hoping you’ll be intrigued by the latest comment, click the link to read the related post, and join the conversation. But there is absolutely no way you can understand the conversation by reading the most recent comment out of its context.
There is probably much more that could be said about this: the technical details, the usability issues, the lovely diagrams with lines and arrows showing page flow, but I’ll leave that to someone else. I’ve said my peace.
If I encounter reverse chronological comments on your blog, I’m not reading the comments. Sorry, it’s not worth my time.
I’m curious. Because newspaper is a medium. The reason newspapers have layouts that look like crammed, painful columns on the page is because it costs money to print them and they usually have more content than space available. Necessarily, the layout is based on the need to fit as much content as possible in a small space.
But web sites don’t have this constraint. Yet, newspaper web sites still look like their printed relatives.
Wouldn’t it be better to layout the web site around the content instead the content around the web site?
You can follow me on Twitter if you like but I’m not posting Twitter updates here anymore. Also, no more Delicious updates.
I’m slowly redesigning is why.
Note: I wrote this on a whim, not having researched and not having proof. This is a hypothesis of sorts. If you know relevant sources, please advise. After writing this I have discovered this is a plea for the creation of a system of recording and playing back conceptual discoveries.
On Discoveries
Discoveries have a predetermined path of several steps which must be followed in a particular sequence. A person rarely makes a leap over a step. Usually, what seems like a leap is actually a larger step. Sometimes adjacent steps may be taken near-simultaneously, thus appearing that a step was skipped or, perhaps, that the adjacent step was somehow foreknown or assumed. Of course, this is possible. But certainly, without knowing that we have jumped a step (how awesome are we?), we should assume that each point of discovery we make is adjacent to the previous step, regardless of the amount of work necessary to make the step.
I do not say these things to give an individual less credit than is deserved but only to point out that we should not give ourselves more credit than is deserved. Discovery is best made in humility, lest we be humiliated.
The moment of discovery, the a-ha, the oh-I-see-now, is what convinces an individual to change opinions and beliefs and is preceded by a number of smaller pre-discoveries. These discoveries must be made by the individual and cannot be forced upon an individual any more than love or hope or any type of real or abstract knowledge can be forced.
On that last point, I mean to say if we are trying to convince another to join us at our current position along the path of discovery we will be unable to do more than describe our position. And certainly we should if there is interest, even though we know most of that description will fly over the head of the other. We can explain the steps we took to arrive at our position and let the individual decide to take them or not. But it is of no use trying to help another cheat their way to our position (or worse, to force another to our position). Sooner or later, without the foundation of previous steps to rely on, the individual will wander back to the safety and familiarity of known things.
It is only after discovery, of an individual’s arrival at a new position on their own, that the choice is made not to return to previously held positions, thus establishing a new foundation from which to explore.
On the point of making a discovery all by oneself, I do not wish to ignore the collaboration that takes place between physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual connections both in and outside the body. That is to say, I cannot will into being the internal connections that form a discovery in my body, mind, soul, and spirit. Just as there are larger macro steps that are taken from one discovery to the next, there are many micro steps which occur internally to aid my movement along the path and while I am a part of them, I do not make them voluntarily. A physical example would be synapses in the brain. Synapses are a part of my physical being and are the junctions of brain activity—where, according to available discoveries, we still assume the connections of thought take place—but I cannot take credit for their existence, function, or performance any more than I can take credit for my parents.
At this point, then, we know that we are making discoveries and we know that at some point in the future we may wish to describe our position and the necessary steps to others. To do so we will need either a perfect memory or some system for recording our discoveries. We can hardly rely on the former. I am not convinced I have seen a good implementation of the latter.
Thus, a system for recording and playing back discoveries and their steps should be made. Moreover, the system should allow individuals to connect their discoveries and steps to those made by others such that old ground is not retread unnecessarily.
Domain names are in short supply. All the best ones are taken. But there are some alternatives.
