Technorati tags: akismet, spam

For starters, it is based on the excellent blogging platform WordPress, has excellent hosting quality, managed by the small-yet-efficient team of Automattic and has a lot of themes to choose from. The only other option is to host your blog by yourself where you have to arrange for your own domain name and hosting. It lets you focus on writing and not worry about a lot of other things like getting overloaded or backup. It pulls technology out of your way. I realised this when I moved my blog to self host it. The reasons behind that move included experiments and some other projects which I could not do here. But if you want to write, participate in a growing community and be least bothered about technology, nothiing better than WordPress.com.

Yesterday I received an email from one of my acquaintances about writing articles when I, again, asked him to start a blog. While reviewing the email I realised I had, again, not mentioned WordPress.com. It is so implied because it has become synonymous to starting a blog!

Technorati tags: wordpressdotcom, wordpress, start a blog

I don’t take competition too seriously, you have to do your own thing and not focus on other projects, but where services or features are particularly successful

There is also a very interesting link to the moment when WordPress was created. Very two powerful notions are projected from these:

• Web is forever, it is one of the best archival systems where you will be able to find stuff for a long time, and even track it.
• WordPress is an ideal example of open source movement. You can actually see collaboration between those comments and a common urge to build better software.

It will be really interesting to see where WordPress and WordPress.com head too. I personally feel, somewhere WordPress should look at integration into the enterprise world. However, the challenge here would be to do it without affecting the common WordPress user.

Technorati tags: matt mullenweg, wordpressdotcom, automattic

The problem with such a popular tool is that a lot of users have got too used to the older layout and there will be resistance. Scoble does not like it a lot. I like it! With Akismet working hard I don’t have to deal with spam a lot, so more comments are useful. Of course bloggers like Scoble might have a different story with spam because of the huge amount of traffic. But overall, I prefer this to the older one. Just that there is a slight feeling of nostalgia ;-)

Technorati tags: wordpressdotcom, dashboard

Another story is it has been nicknamed Ronan, for the first WordPress baby, congratulations Ryan.

Technorati tags: release, ronan

Technorati tags: trademark

Six Apart and Google now have to face the competition on multiple fronts – the blogging tool as well as the blogging service.

Technorati tags: wordpressdotcom

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

I believe Dustin is planning to release the 2.0 version of the plugin which might include a plugin, so keep a tab on it. Till then feel free to use my version.

Technorati tags: wordpress widgets, random quotes, random quote widget

Technorati tags: anonymous

I am going to keep writing on this blog, less frequently though. I will also change the sidebar content a bit to reflect fresh content from my new blog. If you have sill not update all your bookmarks using this information. I am still not getting used to not seeing WordPress.com top posts in the dashboard. I will try and see if I can hack it to do it. I realise the importance of being part of a community!

Technorati tags: moving blog

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Basic setup of the blog is done – posts, pages and comments imported, and functional theme is set. However, it is just that – functional right now. I still have to import links. I will need some more time to fix some things and make sure that the CSS is not bulky or bundled up. I will write a detailed post on things I had to do to move things from here.

That being said, you can take a look at the blog today and see if you like it. Feel free to throw brickbats or if you feel, bouquets at it.

Please update your bookmarks, blogrolls and feeds to the following addresses:

Blog address: http://ifacethoughts.net/
Blog posts feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ifacethoughts/entries
Blog comments feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ifacethoughts/comments

I know it is too much trouble to update these thing and I sincerely wish that I could automate this for you. But it is not happening, please take the trouble of updating the information. I will writing at the new blog. I plan to keep writing on this blog to write specifically about wordpress.com, and keep using the excellent and first-to-be-updated blog system here.

I will do one more post when the new home is completely setup and will include a reminder in that. Thanks for reading.

Technorati tags: moving blog, hosting.

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

I will definitely continue with WordPress. It has achieved the privileged milestone of one million downloads and is coming up with some dynamic features. WordPress.com too has seen massive growth, it hosts 310 thousand blogs on its first birthday. WordPress.com has time and again shown that it is one of the highest quality blogging sites, with lot of high traffic and slashdottable blogs.

I want to dig deeper now, get more control and start some experiments. The new avataar will also host some projects and some personal stuff. After some research I have narrowed down to bluehost.com, dreamhost.com and mediatemple.net for hosting with a bias towards bluehost. Feel free to suggest if you have any information regarding this. I am looking at PHP, Ruby and Python support. Any kind of guidance will be appreciated.

I am trying to evaluate the costs of moving, some are apparent and I am sure some will raise their head later. Right now though, none of the disadvantages are heavy enough to outweigh the basic advantage of being able to do more with self-hosted WordPress for me.

Technorati tags: wordpressdotcom, wordpress.com, hosting, moving blog

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Raymond, a champion of all things open, said it is vital to the future uptake of Linux that the community compromise to win the new generation of non-technical users aged younger than 30. This group is more interested in having Linux “just work” on their iPod or MP3 player and “don’t care about our notions of doctrinal purity”,

“We have a serious problem. Whenever I try to pitch Linux to anyone under 30, the question I get is: ‘Will it work with my iPod?,” he said. “We are not yet as a community making the painful compromises need to achieve widespread desktop market share. Until we do, we will get locked out of more hardware.”

Using proprietary and closed source binary drivers has been a controversial topic for Linux. These binaries, without their source code, fall in the opposition party and are immediately rejected. However, it cannot be ignored that they provide value today to the users. To be able to useful to these users, who want their computers to work with different gadgets, Linux should make a compromise and include them. He calls them necessary evil.

Users require Solutions

I think this compromise is just a small hurdle in the path. To be able to be accepted by the common man, especially the newer generation, open source should offer solutions to them. Open source has mostly been the object of fascination for the geeks and the object of ideology for the believers. However, now it has to move out of this and enter the realm of everyday use of the common man.

The challenge is that requirements of the common man will keep changing. A decade back he wanted a decent browser, today he wants the computer to work with other gadgets, tomorrow it can be used even in trivial tasks. For this open source has to do two things:

• Provide solutions rather than open source flagship products
• Talk to the common man

To be able to do this open source movement should graduate from just competing with the proprietary counterparts to actually identify and solve the user’s problems. Unless this is done it is not going to be popular, it will be seen only on the desks of geeks. To address problems and issues of the users open source has to provide direct value and use their language. It should not be used only to scratch the technical itch any more, it should satisfy the wants of the non-technical. And on the way, the open source movement might have to do compromises. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, thinks software patents and legalities are harmful to the open source movement. It definitely is, but I think identifying and delivering value to the user is more challenging and imminent. What I understand from Eric’s message is that open source can neither postpone nor slow down being useful and reaching the common man. It is time, or else it might get locked out!

Technorati tags: opensource, proprietary binaries, linux

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Update: A Spanish translation of this post is available, thanks to Adrián Moreno Peña.

Web has been the apex of networking, both from software and social perspective. The extreme software networking has turned Web into communication, social networking, collaboration, publishing platform as media and application programming platform. However, as mentioned earlier, Web was originally designed for documents as a way of information sharing. To be able to do what we wanted to do with Web, we had to make it programmable.

Programming The Web

The Web today is programmable. It can be programmed for various purposes, some of which we have mentioned in the beginning. This programmability is derived from the mature generic software programming principles. We need to have an architecture, a design and an implementation. The generic software programming has evolved through a lot of changes, some of which can qualify as improvements. From the programming styles like procedural programming the focus has moved on to architecture and design to produce techniques like OOP and the new Agile and Model Driven Architectures. On similar lines today the Web is full of upcoming architectures and approaches. Lets mull over some of them here.

Services

The concept of service was created to emphasize on loose coupling and a client-server relationship. The pre-Web software was usually tied to the hardware and the associated platforms. Web, being so open and ubiquitous, cannot afford to do that. Web was meant for sharing, irrespective of these restrictions. Hence came up the concept of service. A service is a function with a purpose, serves all the clients without any restriction on their implementation details.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Such collection of services were exposed that the clients could avail of and termed as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). These services communicated with each other, some collaborated and some were standalone.

To be able to do a handshake, the clients had to obey the protocols mentioned by the service. These most popular ones were XML-RPC, SOAP. They focused on abstracting Web for applications and domains. A different approach was taken with REST which focused on using the Web as it is, by following its basic principles.

The advantage of SOA was that now businesses could choose between services without being hindered by technology or organizational boundary. Neither the definition nor the specifications of SOA were limited or dependent on Web. SOA could allow interesting mashups and integrations. SaaS is completely based on this and has been able to bring analogical outsourcing concept in businesses.

However, there are some key disadvantages of this approach. The biggest being that in an effort to be platform agnostic and portable, SOA is buried under a load of specifications. Increasingly it is getting difficult and costly to be able to comply with the protocols and talk to a service. Another disadvantage, which need not be severe sometimes, is that the services are not discoverable. Knowledge of the services is required to be able to use the service which mandates a directory of services. Since Web is boundless by nature, it is impossible to keep such a directory. This makes SOA less reachable.

Web Oriented Architecture (WOA)

To make SOA lighter and more popular came WOA. It is essentially a subset of SOA which recommends using REST over heavier counterparts like SOAP. The philosophy of REST to differentiate between network programming and desktop programming makes it simpler to use for the former.

WOA is more customized for Web by including REST. And by specializing it can strip off the heavy abstractions that make you all-inclusive.

Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA)

Here comes a radical approach, well, radical from the SOA perspective. Alex Bunardzic introduced ROA. While WOA is conceptually still SOA, ROA is a rebel for a good reason. Alex points out that the concept of services might not apply to the Web. As mentioned earlier, services cannot be discovered and it is not possible to maintain a catalog. This is where it goes against the Web, ROA believes that Web is exploratory by nature.

Because of the uniqueness of the web as a medium, the only abstraction that does it true justice is resource. The web is a collection of resources. These resources are astronomically diverse, and it would be mathematically impossible to maintain any semblance of a reasonable inventory of web resources.

…

Each resource on the web, no matter how unique and complicated it may be, obeys only one protocol. This protocol has three major aspects to it. In no particular order, these aspect are:

1. Each resource knows how to represent itself to the consumer
2. Each resource knows how to make a transition from one state to another state
3. Each resource knows how to self-destruction

ROA is more of a paradigm than an architectural approach thats considers resources to be the elements of Web. The key part however, is that they can be discovered, and once they are discovered they can represent themselves. There is no requirement of prior knowledge of the resource to start a conversation, as against knowing capabilities of a service in SOA. ROA is completely based on REST and basks in its advantages – simplicity, minimal technical requirements and URI for every resource. The use of the basic elements of the original WWW makes it easy for a resource to talk to another resource.

The only disadvantage I see of ROA is that it is well defined for Web. Although there can be analogical implementations in other areas, like SOA it is not conceptualized on non-Web platforms. There are new developments happening in this area, but it is still not as mature as SOA.

Epilogue

If analyzed, all these focus on having a standardized interface. ROA is simpler than SOA and uses the hyperlinks effectively to reach a wider base. But whether that is a requirement will be determined by the business need.

As a software developer what is in store for me in all this? Well, these paradigms are about to define the direction in which Web programming will head in the future. The one that dominates will survive. However to be dominant it will have to prove itself to be loyal to Web and loyal to businesses. If both co-exist, it will be critical to identify applicability of each of these. If not, then there will have to be preparations to handle its disadvantages. Either way, these will affect the businesses in which they are being used. And with Web playing a very important role today, this impact will not be ignorable!

More readings on this:

• Pragmatic Service Oriented Architecture: Introducing WOA/Client
• SOAphobia?
• What is Service Oriented Architecture?
• WOA vs ROA
• Service Orientation Principles

Technorati tags: service oriented architecture, soa, web oriented architecture, woa, resource oriented architecture, roa, architecture

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

In a nutshell, the Web was intended for documents so that information can be shared. The design of the Web and underlying techniques like the HyperText Transmission Protocol (HTTP) and HTML target these hyperlinked documents and exclude the modern connotations.

Protocols

SOAP and XML-RPC

To be able to do more with the Web, a layer of abstraction was introduced. This layer introduced new protocols and data structure formats and new rules to abide by. XML-RPC is a product of this attempt and later evolved into SOAP to handle enterprise scenarios. Lets club both of them together for our purpose. The purpose of these protocols was to ensure communication between disparate machines with disparate platforms with disparate programming environments. That they did to the fullest extent. The utilities were offered as services, which the clients could use by requesting using the protocols. SOAP has now evolved to get more and more inclusive and stricter and tedious. A lot of specifications were developed which caused the effort and the cost of being able to use a service to climb up.

There are two problems with SOAP. One was that as Web was being used for all kinds of things, a lot of which were not enterprise or corporate. SOAP started getting oversized and bulky for them. Secondly, SOAP uses POST method of HTTP. (HTTP provides two commonly used methods – GET and POST. GET lets you retrieve information and provides a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for that. This URI can be used as an identifier for that information or resource. For using POST, a package has to be sent to the web server, a simple URI does not work.) Using POST meant SOAP had to do away with the URI and the associated basic benefits of simplicity, convenience and caching.

REST

So came in a new perspective REST – Representational State Transfer. REST, coined by Roy Fielding in Architectural Styles and the Design of Networkd-based Software Architectures takes an approach contrary to SOAP. Instead of building over the basics of Web, it tries to optimise it as it is. It uses GET to request information, and idetnfiies every single resource with a URI. This URI can now be used by anyone anywhere, a simple string that can identify and locate a resource on the Web. Not additional protocols other than HTTP and use the URIs that form the hyperlinks. Keep it simple and keep it accessible, very much goes with the ideology behind the WWW summary.

With the emergence of Web 2.0, there was search for an easier and open paradigm for using Web, which was found in REST. I am with REST for now. However I am not sure if it will be an over simplification for some problems. Only time will tell!

The RSS Blog has a good illustration of all the three protocols. I sometimes wonder if a combination of these protocols would provide a better solution in some cases. A lot of discussions end up in flaming and finger pointing. However there are some good thoughts on these:

• The SOAP/XML-RPC/REST Saga
• REST vs XML-RPC vs SOAP
• Representational State Transfer (REST)
• Web Services discussion worth watching

Non-participation by W3C

It would be better if the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) participates in creation of these paradigms and protocols. W3C is the authority and can play the role of keeping the integrity of basic principles of Web. Existence of multiple protocols is a bigger problem than just development inconvenience. It can divide the Web into incompatible parts which will ultimately be the failure of WWW.

Technorati tags: rest, representational state transfer, soap, simple object access protocol, rpc, remote procedure call

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Plugin and theme developers can access this global variable, however, to retrieve time and date information about posts within a loop the functions mentioned in weekday can be used.

Back to full list of global variables.

Technorati tags: month

For starters, static publishing is a way of exporting the post to HTML. A post when published, is processed, the HTML is composed and is saved as a page to be ready to be served. This was considered better as serving ready and composed pages did not go through the web server processing and increased performance. The lopside to this was that it was, for lack of a better word, static, which does not fit very well with today’s dynamic web. If there was a change, the post had to re-exported to HTML. Think of a change, like change in the sidebar or layout or design, that will affect all the posts and think of the trouble of republishing all of the posts. For all the ease that Blogger said it had, the user had to know when to republish all the posts, which actually can eat up lot of your time. This was a fundamental difference between WordPress and Blogger. Well, now its gone.

Another concept Blogger has embraced is the tags, or labels as they call it! It is very close to categories in WordPress. This will definitely bring in better navigation and better tagging for the users. However, the dilemma for lot of users would be whether to tag the existing posts done using the old blogger. If not, the tags will miss a lot of posts and not serve as good navigation.

Along with this, the hosted service, Blogspot.com will gradually get all these features.

Movable Type still supports static publishing. It does support a dynamic workaround, but it is strongly discouraged as a host of third party plugins don’t work in the dynamic mode.

Now that Blogger has got the new face it will be interesting to see if the demographics change. The existing loyalists would probably not leave, but new bloggers will have to compare a little more between the different blogging tools as the gaps between them is reducing.

More on this:

• New Blogger
• Blogger.com unveils new beta version

Technorati tags: blogger, static publishing, blogspot

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Ethan ends up by saying that it is unfair to compare F/OSS and Wikipedia since they have different ages. I agree, but for a different reason. I wonder if we are trying to compare the two on different planes. F/OSS is about software and hence ideas, Wikipedia is about organizing information and facts. The common factor is the openness for contribution, but nowhere do I see any level for comparison between software and facts. The inherent nature of software is to be able to prove one’s idea, one’s philosophy, one’s opinion. This cannot be true for facts, whether majority of the people agree or not, gold is a metal and homosapiens are animals. The power of open source software is the ability to do something on my own and then open it to others so that they can use it, build on it, modify it or better it. The ability to keep an open mind to suggestions from others is productive, and F/OSS makes it quickly possible. Open source in software development is about a strong belief in an idea, listening to others, gathering opinions, requirements or feedbacks. Open source in facts can is about contributing the right fact or correcting a wrong one. Isn’t the comparison between F/OSS and Wikipedia inherently handicapped because of what they are about – ideas and facts? What about the wiki software used to build Wikipedia itself?

Nicholas Carr takes the discussion in a different direction. I agree with him in the sense that open source does not Open source as a metaphor will fail, if appropriate context is not used. Open source is the nature of building, however, the details will be dependent on what we are building. So, using open source as a metaphor without any context will sound meaningless.

However, what can be common between F/OSS and Wikipedia is the basic advantage of open source. Opening up a pool of talent, much wider and much deeper. This source is not available in the proprietary or closed source environment. The primary reason is that closed source does not express well enough to invite participation, and open source uses the best tool – the code. Not only this it encourages the amateurs, experts, newbies and veterans all alike to share their code and express and connect across a farm of developers. I like what Assaf says in response to Nick’s post:

The thing is, open source is not a community. Or a movement. Or disruptive. Open source is code that’s available to the public. Nothing more nothing less.

Some of it has communities. Some of it has business models. It’s the side effect of it all that makes a difference.

If you want to understand open source, you need to stop reading InfoWorld and take a look at SourceForge. Pick a hundred projects at random and see what they’re about. Most are developed by one person writing the code, maybe a few people using it, often not even a thank you note.

What Wikipedia can learn from F/OSS is probably the way it has been able to harness the interested individuals to come up with a unified goal. I think Wikipedia is already on its way!

Technorati tags: wikipedia, opensource, FOSS

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

What business are we talking about?

A software is typically looked at as a solution to a problem. This problem lies in its own problem domain which lies in the business. The business involves much more than your customer. It involves your customer’s customers, your customer’s vendors, shareholders, other stakeholders and of course your customer’s competitors. A business also plays are role in the entire supply chain. A business interacts with its customers, interacts with other businesses, probably with customers of its competitors. A business is a system with other subsystems in it, in which people are involved. Any software, whatever its scope, used in any part of any subsystem has the potential of making an impact on the entire system and eventually making an impact on the supply chain. If the software does not make a difference to the entire system, then why invest in it? Accounting department of a company can want an accounting software. But if using it does not affect the business of the company, is it really useful? Meaning of usefullness can change when you consider this business.

The business gets its ROI only when it can leverage the software to improve its standing in the entire supply chain. This can be direct or indirect. This business is a different animal than your customer. It is affected by more factors, it runs under more restrictions and it also affects more factors. To be able to get a handle on these factors, it is imperative to understand and treat your customer as a business.

What factors are we talking about?

Business, being a generic term, lets look at its generic factors.

Localized Optimization

The software affects the peripheral businesses or subsystems, along with the problem it is supposed to solve. A manufacturing unit can improve efficiency of the production department, however, this efficiency affect the business only if it propagates through the delivery systems. Sometimes, an improved production department can stock up the inventory system which can turn into a cost centre. The production efficiency is also only as good as the efficiency of the business providing the raw materials. If this is realised earlier in the stage appropriate solutions can be identified for the possible problems caused by localized optimization.

The real benefit lies in overal optimization, which looks at the bigger picture and finds solution in the bigger picture. This factor can help us in tying features of the software to benefits to the business, without the middlemen of departments or localized cells. Somehwere there also lies the answer for ROI.

Current Investment

A business inherently involves people. With people come their skillsets, their ability to learn and their questions. Software is not only about development, it is also about training, it is about making the users use the software in a right way. This can happen only if their skillsets are considered. The business perspective highlights this factor which is missed a lot of times.

People are a form of current investments. There can be many others like using existing real estate, expertise and even softwares. A software initiative can consider to use them instead of requiring new investments.

Growth and Dynamics

A business wants to grow, wants to scale up, wants to do more things. The software should not be an impediment. There is no way of predicting future requirements, but the software design can include provisions for growth and scalability. Website for a newspaper, that has a thousand readers today, but expects five thousand in future, should be able to handle this scalability. An overhaul of the website for this purpose can turn about to be too expensive. This can be achieved by querying the roadmap or vision or goals of the business.

Restrictions

Last but not the least, a business operates under a variety of restrictions. Timelines, financial budgets and even the market trends factor into the various tasks that a business carries out. These restrictions percolate to the software initiative. Eventually, each of the restrictions on the software project are born out of some real-life business restriction. This realization can help us understand the impact of breaking any one of them. It can make us look for a better solution that can comply with all the restrictions. If complying with all is not possible, it can at least give us time to prepare for the eventuality.

Still Be Personal

Treating the customer as a business sounds impersonal. Being personal does not mean involving personal problems, but giving personal attention to the customer. Labelling the customer in a category of other customers and giving a generic treatment is impersonal. Every customer, every business and every project is different. Realizing this, treating them different and giving them personalized solutions is being personal, and this can happen only when you can deliver something that brings in positive results for the entire business. And this can happen only when you treat your customer, not as an individual, not as a group, but as a business.

Technorati tags: customer as business

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Plugin and theme developers can use weekday_abbrev to get abbreviation of a specified weekday name.

Back to full list of global variables.

Technorati tags: weekday_abbrev.

WordPress, however, is an extensible website content management system that can be used to run magazine-type websites. Here are steps I took to turn this online magazine on Cebu from a blog into its current presentation.

So very right, WordPress is being used as a CMS. You can see sites like The Blog Herald, that are inherently news sites. Supporting multiple authors, roles, scheduled publishing, custom fields, comments, static pages, multilingual support, syndication support are some of the capabilities that make WordPress suitable for this. The feature that takes the lion’s share though, are categories – multiple hierarchical categories. These categories can be used to implement so many features that they have become a must-have feature. The terrific template system along with this can work magic.

Along with the stuff mentioned by Max, WordPress automatically handles the volume and issue management. Being a blogging tool, the posts are archived chronologically, which is usual way for handling issues and volumes. Even if not, WordPress provides mechanisms for retrieving posts for any period, literally any.

WordPress is excellent, however, as a personal publishing tool only. For anything more than that WordPress can be found to be lacking as a CMS. The basic content type it can handle is a post, which can be packaged as an article or news item. For radically different items, say, events, post would not be an apt structure. In case you create a new content type, it will not be completely supported by WordPress, e.g., search will not work for that content type. Additionally, there are certain publication features that are missing:

• customizable and extensible workflow: the default workflow is very two step and limited. Usually, in practice, magazines include multiple roles in the workflow – jouanalists, editors, publishers. Sometimes, different types of articles are to be edited by different editors.
• version control and rollback: maintaining versions of the drafts, and ability to rollback to an older version.
• tracing: tracing actions that can be audited.
• search: the search is partially effective. It neither supports relevancy and does not search across pages, excerpts or custom fields. There are certain solutions, but still not what the industry expects.

Besides these, WordPress is an ideal publishing tool. The best thing about WordPress is it lets you control not just the content, not just the style, but both. Using this combination you can develop a theme that is accessible, usable and supports standards. And it has been used for websites of various types:

• WordPress as CMS for Stanford Community Health Resource Center
• Websits Pushing WordPress Beyond Its Limits
• WordPress as CMs at codex

Technorati tags: magazine, cms, content management system

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda

What Is Consistency?

Consistency is the ability of an application to hold its interface and response across time. Consistency comes out of transforming discovery into expectations by the user, and if it complies the user’s effort to use the application reduces. A popular example is if you find the search box on the top right corner of a web page, you will start expecting that the search box will be on the top right corner on all pages across the website. Do you expect that F1 will bring up help for a desktop application on Windows? Another scale is where for branding consistency has to be maintained across websites of a single company – the same logo at the same place, the same resolution, the same primary colors, etc., etc., etc.

Consistenly Different

However, what was missing out of this definition was that consistency can be for an atomic element or a composite element. Consistency across different atomic elements that form a composite element can result in consistency for the composite element. Lets look at a smaller scope for the discussion, left click on a URL link takes us to a different page and left click on a mailto link will open our default email program. This difference in response is accepted if this happens across the entire website. In fact now we expect this on all the web sites. If the response for these left clicks is consistent, the website can be consistent.

In other words, definition of consistency of the website included treating different elements differently. Which is what I call being consistenly different. However, it is very easy to go overboard with this and cross the delicate line between being consistently different and inconsistency. To design consistency it is of prime importance to identify the different content types. As part of the requirements analysis, the common behavior can be identified and the specific behavior can be differentiated. Whether two content types should be called different or not should completely depend on whether the user is required to see them differently. This can result in consistency across all content types and specificity for each of them. An example is, the HR reports and financial reports that a CEO reads can be different but both of them can export a PDF version. The PDF version is consistent across all reports, however the financial report can allow some complex financial calculations that the HR report will not.

The design should also include standards. Standards are a way of being consistent across an entire domain.

Consistency for a software application is a result of consistency across all the elements and consistenly treating the different content types differently.

Techorati tags: consistency, content, what is consistency

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

WordPress uses weekday internally. WordPress provides following functions, defined in [wordpress root folder]/wp-includes/template-general-functions.php for use within the loop:

• the_date($format=’ ‘, $before=’ ‘, $after=’ ‘, $echo = true): access date details of the current post.
• the_time($format=’ ‘): access time details of the current post.

The weekday can be accessed by using the format options specified here

Back to full list of global variables.

Technorati tags: weekday

It is a sore miss for those of us who could not be present there. Fear not, we have Matt Craven, Aaron Brazell and David Krug from The Blog Herald giving live coverage of Wordcamp. Thanks a lot guys! You can see (literally) them live blogging different sessions and contributing too to the barcamp style event. Live blogging is an efficient way to report.

More interesting stuff is expected to come out of the event. Hopefully we will get to attend the future ones. Or Wordcamp can start webcasts or virtual conferences :-) so that the world-wide user base can attend it. Nevertheless, we will see more coverage and more reports of the event later, till then continue to follow The Blog Herald guys.

Technorati tags: wordcamp

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.