logiccolony.com/blog

So I am thoroughly enjoying reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, but at the same time I think this review by Tom Slee sums up the negatives of the book really well. The book is full of great insights, but some of the conclusions it seems to draw strike me as very optimistic or naive.

Meanwhile Google unveiled its Google App Engine service earlier this week. So far I’ve just done the tutorial and uploaded the “Hello World” app. I love the dashboard for the applications. Obviously I’d love to see Ruby support baked in, and if I had more time I certainly wouldn’t mind doing some Python hacking. It would be fun to throw up some situated software on that infrastructure, but clearly I wouldn’t think of putting anything of potential Business Value on it. It will be interesting to see how this drives the development of Heroku and other competing services.

The whole hoo-ha about the Campfire clone (that was subsequently pulled down) has been a big PR disaster for the “Don’t be Evil” PR Masters. Damned for releasing a blatant clone of an existing product and damned again for pulling it down.

And in a week that seemed to have had a lot of Web Application Hosting news, some interesting news about Rails deployments. Could Passenger finally make Rails deployments as easy as PHP? Here’s hoping.

Everyone knows that deploying Rails applications is a pain. Love the development process, hate all the work of deploying your app (not such a problem if you have your own servers, sure). One of the great things about Rails is you can really, really quickly develop some handy little webservice or webapp just for personal, or small scale use. Clay Shirky calls these kind of apps Situated Software. But unless you have a nice deployment environment all set up, you might as well forget it - deployment will be more of an issue than development.

Heroku makes this problem go away. Quickly code up your service in the browser, click a few buttons and your app/webservice is live. This evening I threw together a handy webservice and some client side scripts in next to no time.

Another handy use of Heroku? Helping mentor other people in the use of Rails:

        Heroku + ( IM || Skype || Phone ) = Really simple and highly iterative collaborative development

So, to recap: Heroku rocks!

So I’m finally finding the time to get working on the design of the Logic Colony website. I just intend to do some very public incremental development. Today was the first iteration if you like, where I spent about an hour just getting things together on the server and throwing some Javascript widgets on the page.

Is there a master plan? Not really. Well certainly not a top-down detailed plan. I do however, have some strong ideas/themes for what I want the site to become, but its more of a case of seeing where the process takes me. Given the limited time I will have to spend on the site, it’s definitely going to be a case of embracing constraints.

Photo by mat0s, used under a Creative Commons license with thanks.

Came across some nice Twitter visualizations:

• RailsConf Twitter visualization (from twitter.com)
• Twittervision
• Flickrvision

I’ve got to say I really like the twittervision and flickrvision web mashups. Both are really nice pieces of information design.

This was the question that totally threw me on a del.icio.us user survey. I just did a double-take, because I found the idea of being loyal to a social bookmark site, somewhat odd.

How does a website earn your loyalty? I remember how quickly I stopped using Alta Vista to switch to Google back in the day. If someone made a better search engine, I’d ditch Google in a second.

Sure I like del.icio.us. Maybe I dont use it as much as I used to. These days I tend to find more interesting links on sites like reddit or digg. I’m finding adding links to del.icio.us a bit of a pain these days, perhaps because I have so many tags.

Has del.icio.us let me down in anyway? Nope.
Has it lost my bookmarks? Nope.
Do I feel its earnt my loyalty? Nope.

Do you consider yourself loyal to any particular website?

Yahoo! revamped their TV listings site, and got a whole load of negative feedback:

• Paul Kedrosky really doesn’t like it.
• Yahoo! blog - check out the comments (via scripting.com).

Sensible design and ease of use trump flashy websites any day of the week. Of all the AJAXed sites I use, the best still have to be Gmail and Google Maps. Mind you having said that, I’m starting to feel a bit of clunkiness in the Gmail UI. To be fair, I’m probably on the power user end of the scale, and am getting a bit too tag happy for my own good.

Of course, this would never be a problem with a rich client app .

As for Google Maps, mouse wheel zooming is just wrong. For every other website the mouse wheel is used to scroll around the page. Hit Google Maps and that behaviour flies out the window. Annoying and inconsistent. Googlers, make it stop.