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“Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks” – a review

By Ted Roche on January 6, 2010 in Home Page, Web Development

Title: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

Author: Luke Wroblewski

ISBN: 978-1-933820-24-8

Published by Rosenfeld Media, 2008

In the nineties, I used to do a lot of presentations at conferences of computer programmers. I used to enjoy doing “concept” presentations; not so much focusing on “how-to” as to “why” and “what” to do. When I set the audience’s expectations correctly that they were going to be exposed to new concepts, I got a good reception. When I failed to make that point clear, I would inevitably get comments in my speaker’s review of “Great idea, but where’s the code?”

If you’re looking for the code, look elsewhere. This is not the book for you. If you are looking for the concepts, the big ideas behind user interaction on the web, how to get information from the browser, how to successfully convert the most browsers into customers, why different alignments might make a difference in accuracy, speed and satisfaction in filling out forms, this is the book for you. Luke Wroblewski is an experienced professional in the field of HCI (“Human-Computer Interaction”) or UX (“User Experience”) with some impressive industry experience. This book shows a thoughtful approach to “how do I get people to fill out a form, quickly, pleasantly, correctly?”

So as not to get lost in the weeds of HTML vs. XHTML and CSS 1, 2, 2.1 and 3 varying levels of compliance, Luke talks forms purely from the user standpoint: we see excellent cropped screenshots of forms, focused on the individual elements under discussion. (Rosenfeld Media has done an excellent job of producing a beautiful book: heft, thick pages, rich colors and fine printing.) The book is divided into three sections: Form Structure, Form Elements, and Form Interaction. Each section assumes some base knowledge, thankfully, and doesn’t start out trying to explain why you’d use a checkbox vs. a radio button. And he’s frank that there rarely is One True Answer (at one point, calling out, “All together now: ‘It depends'”) but talks about empirical testing of speed, correctness, and the results of studies monitoring user’s eye movements, pauses and mouse movements to determine which layouts work and which confuse.

If you spend a lot of time designing forms, the 215 pages of this book are well worth a read, and don’t be surprised if you find yourself going back to the book for a refresher.

Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! – A review

By Ted Roche on January 1, 2010 in CSS, Web Development

Well, almost everything

Authors Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank almost lost me at “hello” with their book titled, “Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong!” ISBN 978-0-9804552-2-9. I’ve never liked the “Dummy’s Guide” book for the same reason — I’m not a dummy — and I’m fairly confident (and hope my clients are well aware) that my CSS knowledge, while not encyclopedic, is better than average, and I’ve delivered some fairly good web solutions.

However, the first goal of selling a book is to get attention, and the title surely does that. And the opening line of Chapter 1, “The problem with CSS is that CSS is too hard.” Okay, I’m hooked, reel me in. (By the way, you can download the sample chapter 1 & 2 from the SitePoint web site; start at http://www.sitepoint.com/books/csswrong1/)

The reality is that the book shows one of the newest features, now available in all of the current brand of browsers, with the late release of Internet Explorer 8, of table layout options in the display attribute. After years of preaching that HTML table layout is less desirable than CSS layouts, this can be a hard sell, but Rachel and Kevin make a good case that a tabular layout of tables, rows and cells, but rendered from CSS and not HTML, is the best of both worlds. Chapters 3 & 4 show the equivalent layouts of many of the common design problems we run into (and perhaps fall back to using tables) and how they should work both with the new CSS 2.1-complaint browsers and how to fall back gracefully into a degraded but workable layout for earlier browsers. Chapter 5 gets into some very exciting layout possibilities that will be coming in the next couple of years as the CSS3 specification gels.

A big plus for the book is that it is brief: 111 pages you can get through in one or two sittings. The graphics clearly show the developing examples. The code extracts are clear (and all the sample code can be downloaded from the web sites). And the writing is clear and well-edited.

The book is well worth the $29.95 cover price, but keep an eye out around the SitePoint site (and their Twitter feed) to catch one of their frequent discounts.

Notes from Python Special Interest Group, 20-Nov-2009

By Ted Roche on November 20, 2009 in Apple Macintosh OS X, CSS, FoxPro, HTML, JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, PostgreSQL, Python, Technology, Web Development

Eight people attended the Python Special Interest Group, held a week early to avoid the Thanksgiving holiday. Anticipate a reschedule December meeting as well.

Last night’s meeting was a vigorous and far-reaching discussion of MySQL, Oracle, the future of MySQL, Maria DB, OpenOffice.org automation using Python, OpenOffice.org automation using Visual FoxPro, Twisted, IE6, Zope, Plone, Django, MS SQL Server, pyodbc, SQLAlchemy, Cascading Style Sheets, IE6, FireFox and FireBug, User Agents, IE6, how not to insulate a bungalow roof, the (Python!) cssparse module (http://cthedot.de/cssutils/), Fortune’s selection of Steve Jobs as “CEO of the Decade”, Lenovo netbooks and Ubuntu, the Millennium, why calendar years are one-based and not zero-based, distributed version control systems, master-slave and master-master replication using MySQL and Postgres, svn and git, and more! Whew! You should have been there!

Thanks to Bill for organizing the meeting, to all for attending and participating, and to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the great facilities!

Stay tuned for an announcement of the December meeting, and hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving!

This Thursday: Patrick Galbraith at MonadLUG

By Ted Roche on September 8, 2009 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Perl, Technology, Web Development

Who: Patrick Galbraith
What: Memcached and moxi
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2009
Time: 7:00PM
Where: SAU 1 Offices, 106 Hancock Rd., Peterborough

About the presentation:

Patrick will do a talk on memcached (http://memcached.org/), the moxi memcached proxy (https://code.google.com/p/moxi/) and about Northscale’s memcached AMIs for Amazon EC2 as well as using these with the memcached functions for MySQL (user-defined database functions) that he wrote. How you can use these for caching data to reduce the load on database servers.

About Patrick:

Patrick has been working with Linux since 1993. Some of his previous experiences have included working on Slashdot, Linux.com, Newsforge.com, launching Slashcode.com and Sourceforge Foundries, developing and maintaining DBD::mysql, mysqlslap development and more than I could possibly list here.

He is the author of “Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl” published by Wylie and Sons.

Notes from Python Special Interest Group, 27-August-2009

By Ted Roche on August 28, 2009 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Python, Technology, Web Development

Twelve folks attended the August meeting of the Python Special Interest Group, one of the most active chapters of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group. The meeting was held on the regular night, the fourth Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, gathering at 6:30 with the formal meeting starting at 7 PM.

I gave the usual pitch about the GNHLUG, checking the calendars for upcoming meetings, joining the announcement mailing lists for low-traffic meeting announcments, or the GNHLUG and PySIG discussion list for slightly-higher traffic but high-quality technical discussions, and mentioned some of the upcoming meetings. I also reminded members that user group discounts are available from many of the book publishers, and that if they are interested in reviewing a recently released book, I can request one through the user group program.

Software Freedom Day is coming up September 19th, and Arc will be running an event in Manchester. Keep an eye on the mailing list for further details.

Mark talked about his monthly Tech Talk presentations in at the Lawrence Library in Pepperell, MA (next meeting, September 30th), and his Tech Talk newsletter. Mark is doing a great job getting the word out there and spreading the message about Free/Open Source to non-technical folks. He’s also tried to get a hearing about Open Source in his local schools, but without much luck. Mark also pointed out the new Full Circle magazine Issue 27, which starts a tutorial series on Python.

Arc Riley gave a quick demo of Crunchy, a python-based local web server for serving Python tutorials. Looks neat.

Arc talked about the Python Software Foundation and the Google Summer of Code and also here. The project Arc mentored helped to develop the 3to2 program for rolling back code written for Python 3 to run in Python 2.x. While the code is still in an alpha state, it successfully performs a lot of the conversion needed, and will continue as a framework for the final product. Arc managed the GSOC for the PSF. The Python Software Foundation had the second largest number of sponsored GSOC projects (Apache was #1) and most were completed successfully. Thanks to Arc for a lot of hard work this summer!

Kent S. Johnson talked about itertools. Itertools provides a simple way to represent and manipulate large sequences of numbers without the necessity to consume large memory and CPU resources with creating the entire sequence before iterating over the sequences. Starting with some simple examples of arrays and lists, sequences and generators, Kent built up examples (with some contributions from Bill Freeman) into a more complex problem that illustrated why itertools is so handy. Well done!

Bruce Labitt is almost single-handedly responsible for keeping the pysig mailing list going this summer. Bruce talked about the work he’s doing with intensive calculations and huge arrays. Bruce is building some complex simulations of radio waveforms and calculating various aspects of the radio waves for regulatory compliance. He’s using Python and NumPy and other libraries to generate test data and simulations, and interfacing common PCs with some supercomputing facilities for the heavy number-crunching. Very interesting talk.

Thanks to Bill Sconce for organizing the meeting, to Mark, Arc and Bruce for presenting, to Janet for the awesome cookies, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the great facilities, and to all for attending and participating.

Notes from NH Ruby group, 20-Aug-2009, “Where’d you learn that?”

By Ted Roche on August 21, 2009 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Home Page, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Eight folks enjoyed an excellent dinner at The Rosa Restaurant. We had a private room upstairs where we could woot and yell over each other and tell geek jokes without inhibitions, not that that has ever stopped us before.

Nick Plante mentioned Rails Rumble coming up this weekend. Watch for some incredible apps coming from the Rumble. Can’t wait to see the winners.

Adam Bair brought along two books, Kent Beck’s “Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns” (ISBN 978-0134769042) and Martin Fowler’s “Refactoring” (978-0201485677). Adam credit both books as being very helpful for his practice in the past several years where he has had to refactor a lot of code in rescuing lower-quality Rails projects.

Adam also mentioned an inspirational presentation by Marcel Molina, Jr. at Ruby Hoedown 2007 called “Beautiful Code” (http://rubyhoedown2007.confreaks.com/session09.html) – Adam recommends the higher quality videos as they include video/slides side by side – and also browsing much of the confreaks.com site for some great videos.

Russ talked about Peepcode videos (http://peepcode.com), which he really appreciates. In particular, he mentioned the most recent, Advanced Command Line, helped him debug an unusual problem he was having with one remote client whose shell behaved incorrectly. He’s used inspiration from that video to reconfigure the way he uses his shell. Russ also mentioned Ryan Bates “RailsCasts” (http://railscasts.com/) as very useful, and in particular, thought that the three part series on forms (link updated; thanks, Russ!) changed the way he developed Ruby apps.

I talked a little bit about “The Well Grounded Rubyist” (ISBN 979-1933988658) by David Black, which has helped me fill in some of the background of how and why Ruby behaves the way it does. I also passed around Jason Clinton’s “Ruby Phrasebook” which is a handy book of recipes on how an experienced Rubyist is likely to solve common problems like parsing config files or processing XML.

Nick mentioned that he’s using the unix screen command to do screen-sharing for remote pair-programming and you could see the lightbulbs go off over people’s heads (“That’s my payoff for tonight!” one attendee exclaimed.) He’s also working with EC2 instances and is fired up over how simple and powerful they are. Nick promised a followup, perhaps a demo at a future NHRuby meeting, and Casey mentioned that there’s someone local who’s been doing demos on the Amazon Web Services offerings – we hope to come up with some contact info and see if we can schedule a presentation.

The group also talked about how, as a group, we might contribute to one particular open source project. A couple of ideas were batted around. I look forward to hearing more about this idea.

The night’s theme was “How do you know that?” and I asked about how people are keeping up on all the news about what’s happening. We didn’t really come up with a list of links or blogs or news sites, so if you think of any now (or have your bookmarks handy for sharing), I’d appreciate you passing them on and I’ll include them in the meeting notes.

Thanks all, for a fun dinner amongst friends and some inspiring ideas!

NHRuby, August 20th, The Rosa Restaurant

By Ted Roche on August 16, 2009 in LAMP, OpenSource, Ruby, Web Development

Some of the best user group meetings I have attended have been those with the most relaxed format, where the group pretty much steers the conversation to whatever is most interesting to them.While the formal presentations by experts are great for getting some deep and rich information across, the wide-ranging discussions of an informal meeting can stretch the breadth of your knowledge.

So it is that the August 20th meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby group will take place at 7PM at The Rosa Restaurant on State Street, Portsmouth, NH. We’ll have a good meal and swap ideas about where to learn more about Ruby. The announcement. more details and directions can be found on the NHRuby.org web site. Hope to see you there!

Notes from New Hampshire Ruby User Group, 25 June 2009: Pat Allen, Thinking Sphinx and Casey Rosenthal SASSiJS

By Ted Roche on June 27, 2009 in CSS, Home Page, JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Twelve people attended the June meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby / Rails User Group , held on the 4th Thursday of the month ( we usually meet on the 3rd Thursday) at RMC Research in Portsmouth (Thanks to RMC and to John for hosting the meeting!)

Nick Plante was our master of ceremonies. As is the custom, we made a round of introductions to find out the most of the folks were “from away.”

Pat Allen put on the first presentation, on Thinking Sphinx. Thinking Sphinx is a Ruby library (not just for Rails) that allows Ruby applications to work with the Sphinx full-text search engine. Pat presented a slightly shortened version of the presentation he gave at RailsConf, and the presentation was clear, engaging and interesting. Participants had lots of questions to ask on search technology, word stemming, project status, what it’s like to be a Freelancing God, what being the lead on a popular Open Source project is like, what’s a kilometer, and more, and Pat’s answers were insightful. Check out (pun intended) the source on github, the support on Google Groups and Pat’s guide to using Thinking Sphinx on Peepcode.

Pat also took a moment out to plug his upcoming Rails Camp, a not-going-to-make-a-profit weekend get-together in BarCamp/Unconference format for 30-ish people at Bryant Pond, Maine. It sounds like a great event and a nice location and a price that can’t be beat: $120 for 3-nights, 3-days food, lodging and conference. Get details and consider signing up at http://railscamps.com/#ne_july_2009

Casey Rosenthal asked us, “What are style sheets for?” a number of times during his presentation, for good reason. Casey talked about SASS, Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, a part of HAML and his reimplementation of SASS in Javascript, SASSiJS, sounds like “sausages” leading to all kinds of predictable jokes. But the topic was thoughtful, intriguing, interesting, and controversial. SASSiJS actually allows a .sass file to be downloaded as part of the HTML file, with similar syntax to a stylesheet link, and a JavaScript file that interprets the .sass file into CSS and applies it to the HTML document. Discussion was far-ranging and insightful: “What’s this good for?” “Would designers use this to make their CSS DRY?” View the source on GitHub at http://github.com/clr/sassijs/tree/master.

Thanks to Pat and Casey for their great presentations, to Nick for organizing, and to John and RMC for the facilities.

LUG Happenings, June 2009

By Ted Roche on June 8, 2009 in JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

There’s a couple more LUG meetings this month.

The Monadnock Linux User Group, MonadLUG, will be back at their usual location this Thursday, June 11th, and will feature Ed Lawson talking about Scribus, the desktop publishing software. I’ve used Scribus to create newsletters, posters and banners, and recommend it. Ed puts on a good presentation, too! You’ll find directions to the meeting here.

The NH Ruby / Rails group meets on the fourth Thursday of the month, June 25th, and will have two awesome presentations: Pat Allan will talk about Sphinx, and Casey Rosenthal will speak on SASSIJS. Details here. It promises to be a great meeting!

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