artcodes

ARTCODES is Emily Chang, an award-winning web and interactive designer, consultant, and technology strategist.

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082905

Monday, August 29, 2005

“Geeking is not about high tech. It’s about taking stuff apart and putting it together and making something new. It’s about curiosity and tinkering, whether it be with gardens, vacuum tubes or PHP.” - Caterina Fake

Posted by emily chang on 08.29.05
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Besuku ajax flickr gallery

Sunday, August 28, 2005

It’s late Saturday night (okay, it’s Sunday morning… I’m in denial) and I’ve been experimenting with various image galleries.

Tonight’s new find is the Besuku ajax flickr gallery, a very elegant image gallery by Ben Sekulowicz.  The gallery is powered by flickr and the flickrArray (which Ben released in July). Configuration of the gallery couldn’t be made more simple - open a config page, add your flickr username and upload the pages to a FTP directory. 

I like both the layout and the functionality of Ben’s gallery.  Now, both my visitors and I can view my photos by specific or shared tags without the flickr interface.  Since photos are pulled directly from flickr live, I’ll be interested to see whether the speed varies with traffic.  Look forward to seeing what develops from this.

See it in action: the Beseku ajax image gallery pulling in some my flickr photos.

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Posted by emily chang on 08.28.05
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Jalenack's Ajax Periodic Table of Elements

Saturday, August 27, 2005

I’ve been wanting a new way to have a grid of thumbnails that pop-up larger images.  While I like the functionality of my blog photo gallery in city bits, it’s not as seamless to click to each photo and to the next page or all the way back to the thumbnail page.  Once you’ve experienced inline loading or toggles, it’s hard to go back to clicking and waiting as a designer and a viewer.

When I saw Jalenack’s (Andrew Sutherland) Ajax Periodic Table of Elements (screenshot popup) last night I was inspired!  With the periodic table, details and relevant links simply pop-up over the chart and vanish when you’re don’t need them anymore, which allows you to stay in context.  One of the things I like about asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest is that I’m no longer experiencing short term memory loss each time a web page refreshes.

Andrew’s been kind enough to send me the code (licensed under CC GPL 2.0) and Max and I are going to try and make a gallery with it that imports blog entries of photos from a MySQL database using this same idea.

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Posted by emily chang on 08.27.05
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Adaptive Path's Measure Map already in use?

Friday, August 26, 2005

After just blogging about Measure Map and Adaptive Path a few hours ago, I’m reading O’Reilly’s radar blog this evening and at some point as I’m reading, I notice the call to a script in the lower left corner of Firefox..."Transferring data from tracker.measuremap.com”.  I had to screenshot it and post.  O’Reilly’s blog would be a great beta-test for their new product.

image

A quick search in Flickr revealed Esther Dyson’s photo of a Measure Map demo by candlelight posted on Aug 22.  Through the bluish laptop fuzz, the page looks a bit like Blogger (the four key task icons pulled up top) meets Flickr (black text and blue links below).  Whatever the final product looks like, I suspect that Jeff Veen is currently stewing in it all.

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Posted by emily chang on 08.26.05
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Wiki from Adaptive Path's Ajax User Experience Week

If you’re interested in gaining further insight into the many facets of Ajax (see my post about Ajax from Feb 05), there’s a wiki with conference notes and perspective from Adaptive Path‘s User Experience Conference held last week in Washington D.C.

To understand the primary differentiators of Ajax, see the notes and examples (at the bottom of the page) from Jesse James Garrett‘s Introduction to Ajax/New Web Technology.  Having already seen the openrico and protopage samples previously, I particularly like Andrew Sullivan’s periodic table example and can’t wait to try JohnVey.com’s del.icio.us direc.tor.  Of course there’s a good deal of buzz about Adaptive Path’s own product called Measure Map, which is designed by Jeff Veen and purported to be a hosted “tool for bloggers to better track traffic to their site.” I heard about this last week and plan to write a post about what I would like to see in a tool to help measure traffic, given that I’m currently using two stat programs, a gVisit map, four blog readers (online and installed), pinging ten blog hosts, tagging for technorati, checking views at flickr, and the list goes on.  A consolidated measure tool that would allow me to track my outgoing activity (tagging and cross-linking) and my incoming traffic (RSS readers, inbound links, google searches, technorati, bloglines and other readers, and so on) would be both a welcome time-saver, and as important, it would hopefully give me a more holistic view of “myself” (my content) and its “life” on the web.

I’m also wondering how long it will take for someone to to make a Flickr-compatible Ajax gallery for your blog.  There are already a mix of tools to manage photos between your desktop and your blog or Flickr.  I just came across the FlickrExport which will export from iPhoto to Flickr and there’s Photon (enables automatic creation and upload of images and thumbnails, plus configurable export of all photo data directly to a Movable Type blog) which Doug Bowman used for his Movable Type photo templates.  It would be ideal to have one management layer that would allow me to push selected content from iPhoto to both my blog and flickr at the same time, with the ability to sort, tag, organize, edit, share, publish, or archive.  The other key factor for me is where the physical photos are stored.  Ideally, there would only be one copy of each photo on one server, rather than at my photo blog, at flickr, and my other blogs. 

For me, the promise of a “new” web technology is the ability to 1) simplify my life as a blogger/web publisher/content producer and 2) to enable my site visitors to have greater control over the manner in which they view both my site content and the means by which the content comes to them (via my site, RSS, email newsletter, etc).

When I see current Ajax samples, I am both reminded of how far we have come from simple HTML hypertext pages to today’s possibilities, and it’s also an awareness of how young the internet really is.  While the terms have changed, the goal remains the same:  on the one hand, to deliver vast amounts of information efficiently, and on the other, to manage our ever-expanding network of information sources and relationships.

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Posted by emily chang on 08.26.05
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Virtual plazes become real

The web has always attracted me because of the play between what’s real, virtual, and how one can become the other fairly easily.  While others have framed this much more eloquently than I (eg. Tim Berners Lee on the semantic web), it’s the asynchronous and networked nature of the web that feels the most like our own brains - capable of multiple paths and interlinking, fluid at each moment of our consciousness, and with the potential to make live connections and topical relationships.

Just the other day, I blogged about Plazes, the new location-mapping site.  I had originally found the site through Joi Ito‘s blog, which I’ve been reading for a number of years now. 

Today, I’m logged into my plazes page while consulting at Six Apart, and I notice that Joi Ito is showing in my 2km range at the Technorati office on 3rd street, just one block away.  I close plazes to check email and not more than ten minutes later, Joi Ito walks by my desk. 

I get home around 6:30, flip open my laptop and my plazes icon is showing I have a message.  I log onto my plazes page again to find a message from Peter, the first person who had commented on my plazes post the other day and who had also blogrolled both Max and I that same day.  We click to see who’s in the 2 km range, and sure enough, Peter is no longer in Canada but at his newly-claimed location, “Hotel Diva” just a few blocks from here, where we’ve also stayed!

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Posted by emily chang on 08.26.05
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