Strong loyalty.

Earlier today Wordpress.com along with 10.2 million blogs under its control went down for almost 2 hours.  The most amazing part to me is reading the comments on the outage announcement.  I don’t think there was a single negative comment… truly amazing considering most companies would have been screamed silly by their customers for such an outage.  Granted WP could be moderating negative comments out but historically that is not there style.

If you offer users an amazing experience from end to end.  They will repay you with loyalty and understanding in those times where things don’t go as planned.

Art time…

Every so often I get a craving to do something creative purely for the sake of creating.  This happened to me recently so here is the fruits of my labor.  If my sever starts cooperating I will post the originals.

Site updated

I finally got around to updating the site… nothing special… but maybe with the new look I will write a little more often ;-)

To Upgrade, Or Not To Upgrade

A few weeks ago I wrote a brief post about the newest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 (Hardy Heron).  The post consisted of my first impressions of the new system and really looked at the surface level enhancements.  After giving it some thought I decided to revisit the topic from a different perspective.  Is it worth upgrading?

With each new version of Ubuntu the reason to upgrade is diminished.  This is because the operating system continues to grow stronger and stronger making each consecutive version have less and less added value.  This is not to say there isn’t several good reasons to risk the headaches that could ensue.

The first reason that comes to mind is the improved overall experience.  A lot of work has gone into smoothing out the details of the operating system.  One area that I have noticed a great improvement is in the boot process.  In previous versions the boot process has been choppy with several different resolution changes that make the whole thing seem disjointed and a bit jarring.  In hardy this has been smoothed out a great deal (at least on my Sony Vaio).  Now instead of having several noticeable transitions between resolutions and background colors you get a smooth transition where the colors are better matched and appear to transition smoothly.

Another great enhancement comes again during the boot process.  Every 30 or so boots Ubuntu will scan your disk drive for errors.  While this is great feature as it provides a level of data security, it can be a bit annoying when you are in a hurry.  In Hardy Heron the user has the ability to bypass this by simply pressing the ESC key.

Once the system has booted up you will see the familiar menu options and applications.  You don’t have to look deep to see a couple of new faces such as Transmission (BitTorrent Client) and Brasero (disk burning utility).  These two offer a great upgrade to their predecessors with improved usability and increased functionality.

Another feature that I have found handy is the ability to “Bookmark” web based drives and server connections.  This is a nice touch as it allows you to unmount the drive with out loosing the settings.  For someone who uses several different network drives and is a little OCD about their desktop this is a great feature.  To utilize it simply select the “Add Bookmark” check box the first time you connect to your drive.  From then on you can access the drive from the “Places” menu or the “Bookmarks” area of Nautilus.

Better hardwareware support is something to strongly consider when upgrading.  If you have any problem hardware typically an upgrade offers an opertunity to get support as the kernel is always adding new drivers.  In my previous post I mentioned a problem with my network card.  This has been resolved and was simply a problem in the beta level software.  One thing I do enjoy is with the new update my system runs completely open.  I no longer have to depend on any closed source drivers (Thank you Intel for open sourcing the 3945 driver).  To many this may be marginal but I believe in open source software and try to use it when it is available.  It also typically means better support and performance.

The final reason for upgrading is to have a Long Term Support (LTS) version.  These versions will recieve support form Cannonical for 3 years meaning you won’t need to upgrade for quite sometime.

Overall I think the upgrade is worth it for me, afterall I have my Home directory on a separate partition so even a full install isn’t to much work ;-)

Building Expectations

One difficult aspect of overhauling an application is the loss of a preexisting mental model held by users.  This is to say that users have developed an idea of where items are located and how they generally look and act.   Often a major overhaul will cause these things to change a great deal.

Form the users perspective, one day they log out from an application they may love or hate and the next day the log in to a completely new application.  Sure the data may all be the same and the end goal of the application will probably remain the same but for the user this is effectively a completely new application they must now learn.

There are several ways that an organization can bridge this gap and make the transition a little smoother.  One way that I have recently seen and is quite simple, is just placing a notice on your screen announcing the upcoming changes.  This should link some final comps of the upcoming look and feel.  If you have a bit more time you can do what google did and offer the user both interfaces during a trial period.  This method allows the user to become familar with the new interface while having the ability to fall back on the trusted version should the need arise.  The danger with this is many users will never try the new version.

No matter what method you divise it is important to start building the expectation of change.  This will give the users a chance to prepare.  If done correctly it can also create a bit of buzz as users discuss what is to come.

Turn any RSS feed into a slide show

Today I was educating myself on a new format for creating slide shows called “S5“.  It is an open format that can create slide shows using XHTML/CSS and Javascript.  These shows can intern be run in any modern browser making them truly platform independent.  For the most part the standard is extremely well thought out and holds a great deal of promise.

In my research I found a great tool that will convert a RSS feed into a S5 presentation.   Give it a shot and see how flexible this format really is.

How did I miss this gem!

In writing my last article about the various search engines I came across a fun site called Ubuntu Popularity Content.    This site shows the number of downloads and installs for every package in the Ubuntu repository.  It is certainly an interesting look at what people are using and if you are an Ubuntu users I suggest you take a look, maybe you will find a great new package.

A different view…

I just discovered a great way to watch the election results come in while hearing what other techies are thinking.  If you are reading this after Super Tuesday I suggest you book mark the link and take a look at it in November.

See what I am talking about over at Google Maps

Blacklisted by Microsoft

When I started this blog I paid careful attention to my search rankings at the big three search engines (google, yahoo, and live.com) for the term “Daniel Hardy”. Shortly after its inception I was able to snag the #1 slot at Live.com, #3 slot at yahoo.com and #4 slot at google.com. Today the picture has changed a bit with the most interesting jump coming from Live.com.

It appears that I am no longer listed at Live.com. I am not sure how this works as my rankings on the other two have increased to #1 at yahoo and #2 at google. The conspiracy theorist in me (while small) thinks that perhaps all the discussions of Ubuntu are at the root of this decline. More likely this is a great demonstration of what a difference there is between these search providers.

Personally I find this difference to be extremely valuable. It is like a second opinion or another perspective on a given topic. Unfortunately one of these companies may soon be broken apart and melted into one of the other two. Hopefully this will not be the case but it is a tough world and Google is a monster of a competitor.

Dynamic Comment System

Yesterday a friend of mine showed me a great dynamic comment system being used over at deadspin.com . After seeing it in action I decided it would be fun to implement something similar on my site (even if I rarely get any comments). I have whipped up a bit of Javascript and tweaked my template a bit to support it. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. If it gets decent reviews I can great a tutorial on how to easily implement it on a typical Wordpress theme.