Google Account Goo

I love Google. I hate Google.

Not long ago Google changed Google Apps, the wonderful suite of cloud services that makes it possible for a small organization to have robust group services, like email and contacts, for free. The change was to include all of Google's other nifty services, like Analytics and YouTube, to the list of things you could do with your Google Apps domain. Fantastic!

Not so fast. Quite a while ago we realized that you couldn't transfer an Analytics account (or profile, or anything) from one person to another. So, if as a web designer you created an Analytics profile for a client's web site, you couldn't then transfer the profile over to a client-controlled account later. That sucked. So, the answer was to create a Google Account for the company and start the Analytics profile there from the get-go. If you had a designer flake out on you and delete your profile from their account, along with all your data, well that sucked for you.

Now we have essentially the same problem with the Google accounts created for companies so that they could use Google Analytics, and other services like YouTube. You would think that once Google Apps moved those other fine services they'd figure out some way to allow an organization to merge their old Google personal account with their Google Apps domain, wouldn't you? I mean, who wants to loose all their data when bringing everything under one roof?

Not only that, but --and this was a painful discovery-- if you delete your organization's old account thinking you can free up the user name for your Google Apps account, you're going to be disappointed. Google retires usernames from deleted accounts so they can never be used again. That's a special bummer for organizations that got usernames that match their domain names or brand names.

Google, with all their genius, can't seem to figure out how to get user accounts to do kung fu, or even a half-hearted high kick. Google accounts are a data prison from which you can never escape.

Unweblike Behavior

 

For the second time in a single day I have come across content on the web that is "not available in your area". This is bullshit. It's the world wide web. It defies geographical location by definition. The whole point of the WWW is that if you put something on it, that thing can be seen by anyone on a computer anywhere on the planet.

I say that if a page has any content on it that can't be seen by anyone anywhere, then it is not on the web and should be removed from the web. Taking something off the web can be achieved in two ways. First, and easiest, it can be removed by the search engine companies from being included in results. If Google and Bing removed the above offending web site from their search results, the above offending web site would stop putting geographically limited content on their web site and thus gain re-admission to the web. I'm simply confident this is true. To effectively remove offending pages from the web, it might be necessary to remove entire domains from the search results. BBC doesn't want to have the entire bbc.co.uk domain taken off Google.

The second step would be to make a browser plug-in which referred to a black list of sites and removed links from the markup of any page linking to one of the offending pages or sites. The black list could be crowdsourced, so URL's could be added by users as they came across offending content. If this becomes an issue that people care about and start using this plugin widely, browsers might incorporate the behavior into the core of their programs.

Search engine companies like Google and Bing, and all browser companies all have an inherent interest in maintaining a global definition of the web. No government regulation is necessary to impose such a definition -- and I'm a guy who's usually in favor of regulation as a solution to big problems. But in this case there is a better way. Also, I'm not suggesting that all content be free and open to everyone no matter what. Pay walls and the like might or might not be a good idea, but they are not as a model contrary to a functioning world wide web. Certainly you do want to have restricted areas of web sites.

My thesis is simply that geolocation is an invalid filter for access to media on the web. It's perfectly fine to give me a default view that depends on my geolocation, but not to keep me locked out of certain content entirely. I think it will lead to a balkanization of the web.

Lastly, this does not mean that such geo-localized content would be banished from the world, just the web. Essentially, if you want to provide geo-localized content exclusively to people in a certain geographic area, then there's an app for that. Or, you make an app for that. The WWW is distinct and different than the Internet. I don't condone filtering the Internet.

Layout: Graphic Design Referenced

Day 14/150

"Throughout the myriad disciplines in graphic design and it's numerous manifestations, one fundamental remains constant: layout. No matter what the project is--big or small, online or printed, single- or multi-page, flat or three-dimensional, square or round--images and/or text must be placed and organized consciously. Layout can be objectively described as the physical properties (spacing , sizing positioning) and arrangement of the design elements within a determined area and, ultimately, as the finished design. This leads to the subjective assessment of how effectively those properties are arranged within that area--and to heated discussions among designers. While a layout can be executed in infinite ways, a few principles must be taken into consideration so informed decisions can be made on how to exploit it."

Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design, p. 23

The web is a particularly peculiar canvas, and this quote gets to the heart of why it is especially challenging. Working on a layout relies on working "within a determined area", but the area available to a web designer is determined according to different dimensions than other kinds of graphic design. For a print piece I might understand that I'm working on a sheet of paper with a fixed size of, for example 8.5" x 11". A web designer's page varies from viewer to viewer, and even moment to moment as a viewer can resize the browser window at any time. I guess a web designer just needs to focus on how elements are arranged in relation to the other elements, within contexts of classes of potential uses, be it mobile phone, netbook and tablet, or full sized widescreen display.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot. 

Drupal Rules

Day 13/150

Spent productive moments today sifting through the relatively impenetrable documentation for the Drupal Rules module. The stuff is seriously bad. Pure bloodymindedness saw me through to a modicum of understanding, to wit, I understand that to automate a task you first create a {rule set} which takes {arguments} and inside it create a {rule} which has {conditions} (but you don't use conditions here) and {actions} (which you do set up here). From the {triggered rules} section you configure the {condition} (your trigger) and {action}, which invokes the {rule set} you set up first.

I'm left frustrated, however, nagged by questions I asked in the Drupal IRC channel, but which were not answered:

Fighting my way through the Rules module documentation and I can't get my head around it, conceptually. Why do I have rules in rule sets if I can only ever address a rule set (i.e., from triggered rules) rather than a rule? Why can't I have a set of rules that deal with managing content and then build triggered rules that invoke rules within that rule set, depending on the condition?

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

Drupal Automation

Day 12/150

WixsonIT has been migrated from the shared hosting plan to the virtual dedicated server over the last few days, and has been updated from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to boot. I'm learning quite a lot about Drupal 6 in the process. In particular I'm learning that the workflow_ng module I used in Drupal 5 (played around with, is more like) has been turned into a module called Rules, and actions and triggers have been incorporated into the core of the Drupal program. It used to be that a lot of the automation you could achieve in Drupal was done with program plugins called Actions and Workflow.

So far, from what I understand, Rules is extensible, and allows for all kinds of automation not previously attainable. For instance, it integrates with CCK and Organic Groups, I presume to allow you to move stepwise through processes depending on the values of custom fields or membership in a group. I'm really interested to learn how to do those things.

I'm jumping into the deep end here. Today I watched the video on the Rules project site and did the second tutorial in the documentation, but I have yet to really grok what I'm doing.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

RBGa

Day 11/150

Microsoft really is a pain. It's an impediment to progress. Today I learned about using RBGa in CSS3. The "a" in RGBa stands for "Alpha" and it means the degree to which a thing is opaque or transparent. Having translucent color on the web opens up all kinds of design possibilities which have been available to print designers forever.  I'm really frustrated, though, that Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, doesn't support the RGBa feature of CSS3 -- not even it's most recent version. Come on! I have to use a special (and long) work-around to achieve in IE something I can do in every other browser?

Another reason not to use Internet Explorer, ever.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

HTML

Day 9/150

Today I'm thinking about Fundamentals of Web Design. People who are not web designers hope I will tell them that they can be web designers or develop content for the web without knowing HTML. Here's what a great HTML tutorial I found has to say about that:

"HTML is used to create web pages. No web designer or web developer can do their job without knowing at least some HTML. At the same time, the language is absolutely essential to people who are creating their first webpage or taking their business online." http://www.htmlprimer.com/

Fortunately, there is probably no subject more well documented on the web than that of how to create web pages:

• http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
• http://www.clickfire.com/simplest-ever-html-tutorial/
• http://www.goer.org/HTML/

For a preview of an upcoming subject...

• http://dzineblog.com/2009/04/tutorials-psd-to-html.html
• http://www.bolducpress.com/tutorials/from-psd-to-html/
• http://www.bolducpress.com/tutorials/from-photoshop-to-html/

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot. 

How Does the Web Work?

Day 7/150

For a class on the Fundamentals of Web Design I'm planning to teach at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, I shall begin with a presentation about how the web works. The way the web works has a big influence on how a designer will compose a web page. I believe such knowledge should be among the few dominate considerations for any conscientious designer. It is step one in learning to design web site; first understand the environment where your creation will be displayed.

A survey of web sites that attempt to answer this question, a complication like this can be formulated:

1. There is a difference between the Internet and the Web.
2. The Internet is the catch-all word used to describe the massive world-wide network of computers. The word "internet" literally means interconnected networks, a network of networks.
3. The World Wide Web, (or simply the Web) refers to the portion of the Internet that is the collection of thousands of web servers and clients using HTTP to communicate and the huge amount of information available using the same protocol.
4. Nobody "owns" the Internet - although there are companies that help manage different parts of the networks that tie everything together, there is no single governing body that controls what happens on the Internet.
5. The Web is sometimes referred to as a client-server system. Your computer is the client; the remote computers that store electronic files are the servers. Web software is designed around a distributed client-server architecture.
6. A Web client (called a Web browser if it is intended for interactive use) is a program which can send requests for documents to any Web server. 
7. A Web server is a program that, upon receipt of a request, sends the document requested (or an error message if appropriate) back to the requesting client.
8. It is important to note that every web page on the Internet  has its own unique web address, known as a Universal Resource Locator (or URL).
9. A DNS server is an index of domain names and their corresponding IP address, the numerical location of the web server on the Internet.
10. A HTTP client (web browser) send a request, which is routed through the Internet to the address of web host for the domain.
11. The web server responds to the request with either an error message or the HTML formatted document
12. HTML is a text-based string, which is interpreted by the web browser, and presented to the user

So, to publish a document on the web you need to acquire several things:

1. web host: you will rent space on a computer that is configured to respond to requests from web clients (browsers).
2. domain: the web host comes with an IP address, because all computers connected to the Internet must have an address - you will register a name to be listed with the corresponding IP address
3. dns server: this service is provided by your web host, your domain registrar, or an independent service and lists your web site's domain name and IP address for Internet routers.

My index of web sites that answer this question:

1. http://www.theshulers.com/whitepapers/internet_whitepaper/index.html
2. http://datacenter.cit.nih.gov/interface/interface190/web.html
3. http://www.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm
4. http://www.learnthenet.co.za/pg6.html
5. http://www.itep.ae/english/EducationalCenter/Articles/ww_01.asp
6. http://www.learnthenet.com/english/html/13wworks.htm
7. http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/http/#sample
8. http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot. 

Web Design: Seeing

Day 4/150

For the class I am planning to teach at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in March today I looked at artist web sites. The class is "Intro to Web Design" and the objective of the class is help the students display their artwork on the web. To start we will look at the web sites that other artists have created to show their work, and the best start is to review the best of the sites that instructors at the KIA have put up.

1. http://www.marywhalen.com
2. http://www.randywalker-art.com/WELCOME.html
3. http://www.vickivanameyden.com/
4. http://www.megtang.com/Home.html
5. http://www.multiplicityjewelry.com/
6. http://www.melodyallen.com/

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.