"webapp" in Weblog

Not to be outdone by the likes of Google, A9 have launched their own maps site. Why would you use this one instead of Google? Well, check over on the right hand side… For several major cities they’ve got photos of BOTH SIDES of all the main roads! You can find out what the place you’re trying to find actually looks like…

Now I wonder what the photographer thought when he got that phone call.

“Hi, we’d like you to take photos of New York” “Which bit?” “All of it.”

I’ve been muddling through the invoicing process for a few years now but I’d not found a program that really felt right to me. They all seemed to be too complicated… When I heard about Blinksale though, my interest was piqued. I might even have been a little excited. Now it’s been released and I think my initial enthusiasm was justified. I’ve only had a quick play but it seems to offer everything I need in a very simple interface, with the added bonus that it’s all hosted, removing my financial records from my accident prone home computers. I think I’ll be moving everything to Blinksale very soon…

This service has probably been around for a while but I’ve only just discovered it… PubSub. I popped in “web standards”, css, accessibility and “user experience” and subscribed to the resulting feed, and now I have a customised RSS feed that delivers all the latest blog posts that may be of interest, directly to me. Combine this with del.icio.us’ Most Popular and I now have a set of customised news channels telling me exactly what people are talking about. Brilliant.

I first saw Bitflux’s LiveSearch last year when Colly implemented it on CollyLogic. I thought it was very cool but didn’t think much more about it. When Google Suggest came out I was impressed again - it’s an incredibly clever feature, but I still couldn’t see the protential of this no-refresh approach. Now Google Maps, on the other hand, along with a few other similar apps has really got me thinking… Web functionality becomes far more like an APPLICATION as soon as you take the browser out of the equation. Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications by JJG is a great intro and I think it may have persuaded my current employer to give it a go. Fingers crossed.

I’m late to the party but after my recent laptop misery I’ve finally decided to get into the whole web services thing, namely Bloglines and del.icio.us. EVERYONE else seems to have been into these for ages but I had such an enormous collection of links in my Firefox and feeds in my aggregator that I decided that it wasn’t worth it. I still have a backup of all that stuff but now I can’t be bothered to restore them so I’m starting afresh.

So far, I absolutely love both services. I can keep myself synchronised between home and work, check what’s happening in the blogosphere when I’m visiting my folks and share either set of links with other people via personalised pages. It’s that last one that is the killer for me right now. Want to know what blogs I read? No problem, just check out my bloglines page… How can I get my ageing links page up to date? Hook up the RSS feed to my del.icio.us page! For the first time I can reuse my connections into the virtual world and that could be very very interesting in the future…

I’ve had ‘convert website to blogging tool’ on my to-do list for bloody ages now… Well over a year. Right above ‘redesign website’, which has been there for 2 years now. So far I’ve been most impressed with Textpattern and Wordpress but I was just looking at Symphony and it could just be a contender. I suspect that it may not be as customisable as I’d like but it appears to be very well thought out, with a lovely interface and I really like the fact that the 21degrees guys have chosen XSLT for their templating language over a bespoke one.

This is a little off my usual topics but I’ve just started a contract with a really interesting company called Wordtracker out in Kentish Town and my orientation has led me off in some unexpected directions.

So. How’s this for a mental tool: WordNet? Pick any word. Anything at all. Pop it in the box and when the search comes back it’ll have a dropdown with a set of options: synonyms, hypernyms, holonyms… and loads more, all calculated by pattern matching library texts. I can’t even begin to imagine how you’d set about putting something like this together! And it’s open source so you can download it and run it locally… Think of the implications for a search facility. Someone types in a search term. Is that exact word mentioned on your site? What about similar words that your users might be interested in? Run that search through WordNet, run the results through the search, weight them but relevance and you’re on the way to having an incredibly powerful and useful search engine. Or how about generating related links? You could create a relationship-based site map and navigation by live-analysing your pages. Pages that use similar verbs could gravitate towards each other… These are lightweight uses compared to the what the chaps here have in mind and what the software is capable of but the possibilities for websites alone are facinating.

I spent a while last night chatting to Roland at Nykris about the guys behind mySociety, a collection of volunteers who are cornering the market in innovative and USEFUL government websites. Off the back of that I just spent a little while having a look around TheyWorkForYou, another of their projects. It’s a fantastic idea for a website and beautifully executed. What has my MP been up to? How would I ever find out? Well I could go and trawl through parliament records but since they all call each other ‘the honourable gentleman’, that could take a while. And I’d have to leave the comfort of my sofa. TheyWorkForYou allows me to first find my MP and second look at what he’s been up to over the last year. How many parliamentary debates has he been involved with? How often does he vote? How much does he spend on his staff? It’s all right there. myCommunity have done a fantastic job of providing a simple mechanism for getting exactly the information I want, and they’ve executed it very well. And not for profit?! What is the world coming to?

Developing and working with CMSs is a subject close to my heart at the moment for a couple of reasons, neither of which I think I can talk about, and two articles have helped me along no end.

The first was Scrivs’ timely MT vs. WP vs. TxP: Entry Page Design, in which he critiqued the design and usability of the 3 most popular blogging tools. He reached the same conclusions as I had but he seems to have used a lot more reasoning…!

Next is a set of articles called Building a Web Application that document the development of a CMS by Jonathan at Snook.ca. This set of articles run through the full development cycle from initial design decisions, through requirements gathering and specification to debating release license options. There’s a lot there.

I’ve just been reading the UI9 Interview with Jeffrey Veen on Content Management systems… It’s a great article and brings back a lot of memories of writing a CMS for the company I used to work for. He puts into words a lot of the things I was battling with at the time and he has a few hints that would have been invaluable to me back then. Amongst other things:

Start simple. Most companies don’t need clever CMS implementations.

Treat the website like a publication not a software product.

Look carefully at the content process before looking at products - you may find you don’t need a fully-blown CMS at all.

Now I think about it, the article is relevent to me and my site as well. I’ve been considering moving to a proper blogging app for a while now because I simply don’t have either the time or the inclination to develop my own CMS any further but I’ve managed to get by with what is basically just a jumped-up database editor for over a year and a half. The vast majority of small-medium sized business sites probably don’t have requirements much more demanding than me but it’d never really occurred to me to ask that sort of question. That’s why the Man Veen is considered an expert!