Critiquing Edmonton’s Winter Light website

By Mack D. Male · December 19, 2008 at 9:11pm

winter light 2009 Two weeks ago, I wondered where the website was for Edmonton’s new winter festival. A few days after that post, the official website was launched. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at it, I thought I’d post a bit of a critique. But first, here’s some new information that was released at the same time:

Opening Ceremonies and the Winter Light Gala will launch the event January 8 at 10:00 AM in City Hall and Churchill Square. The Opening Ceremonies will preview highlights of Winter Light 2009 programming with outdoor performances, a "Blessing Fire", and a media launch with special guests, dignitaries and hot chocolate.

"I think winter has been one of Edmonton’s best kept secrets for too long," says event director Pamela Anthony. "Our goal is to showcase all the wonderful aspects of our winter city – the incredible recreation opportunities, the gorgeous river valley environment, and the culture and heritage of winter peoples."

I wanted to point out that quote, because it contains a lot of imagery that I’d love to see showcased on the website. Unfortunately, it’s not there at the moment. The first thing you see at the website is an annoying ten second flash intro. Totally useless, totally a waste of my time. Once you’re past that however, things start to improve.

The main page features a nice winter scene, with the city skyline, people participating in winter activities, and the catchphrase written in the style of northern lights – let it glow, let it glow, let it glow. The site is broken up into five main sections – Winter Light (about the festival), events, calendar, resources, and contacts.

Here are the things I really like about the site:

The integrated Google Map (available on event pages and the resources page) is great. Very quick way to see where everything is happening.
Using Google Calendar in place of yet another custom calendar was very smart. Well done. Makes it easy to add things to your own calendar too.
Consistent layout and colors.

And here are some things I’d like to see improved:

The RSS feed is currently empty. Make use of that! Better yet, add a proper blog to the site.
Get rid of the “people” banner that appears above the content on most pages. It’s unnecessary, and increases the amount of scrolling people have to do.
Integrate a photo sharing site like Flickr into the photos page. I’m not going to email you my photos (see my reasoning here)!
Add some actual resources. Showcase the river valley! Teach me about the culture and heritage of winter peoples! The website doesn’t contain any of that.
Update the site frequently during the months the festival is active. Change the main page to showcase the current and/or next event taking place.

For the techies reading this – the site was built using Joomla, and it appears to be hosted by Webcore Labs (a Calgary company!). Not sure if it was built in-house or by a design firm – anyone know?

I also wanted to mention that I love the Winter Light logo. It’s simple and attractive, and the two color schemes work well (white/light blue/blue for dark backgrounds, and light blue/blue/dark blue for white backgrounds). Making the word “winter” bold is a nice touch, and reinforces the idea that the event is all about celebrating the season most love to hate. Well done on the visual identity I say.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not critiquing the website just for the fun of it! I have two main goals with this post. First, I am hopeful that someone from the team will read my comments and consider making the suggested improvements. Second, I am looking for lessons that can be applied to the Halloween Edmonton website, as that festival would be very similar – an umbrella for existing events along with a few new ones.

So far, so good!

Pingdom Website Monitoring

By Mack D. Male · October 7, 2008 at 8:52pm

pingdom logo Pingdom is a service that monitors your websites and/or servers and can let you know when something goes wrong. Despite your best efforts, something will go wrong, so it’s important to know right away when it does so that you can take action. That’s exactly what Pingdom helps you do.

I should have written this a long time ago – I’m a very happy Pingdom customer! I’ve used dozens of different monitoring tools and services over the years, and without a doubt, Pingdom is my favorite. I first got an account in August 2007, when I took advantage of a free offer for Mashable readers (if I remember correctly). I didn’t use it right away, but when I did, I was impressed. So much so that I bought Pingdom Basic account ($9.95/mo or $119.40/year).

The two Pingdom terms you need to know are checks and notifications. A check is basically a website, mail server, or DNS server (there are HTTP/HTTPS, Ping, TCP, UDP, DNS, and POP3/IMAP/SMTP checks). A notification is an email address or cell phone number (for SMS). Pingdom Basic gives you 5 checks, unlimited email notifications, and 20 SMS notifications. Additionally, you get included uptime reports.

The best thing about Pingdom is that it’s fast and reliable. I receive notifications generally within about a minute of something going down. That’s much faster than anything else I’ve tried. I feel confident relying on Pingdom to let me know if something is wrong with my servers.

Another thing I love about Pingdom is their blog, called Royal Pingdom. They occasionally post about Pingdom-related things, but more often than not they post about the industry in general. They obviously put some time and effort into it though, because their posts are original, in-depth, and very interesting. For instance, earlier this week they posted about 12 great iPhone applications for sysadmins and webmasters. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me subscribed.

If you’re looking for a website monitoring solution, I’d strongly recommend Pingdom.

Microsoft is adopting jQuery moving forward

By Mack D. Male · September 28, 2008 at 2:58pm

Just came across some really excellent news for developers. Microsoft’s ScottGu has announced that the ASP.NET team is adopting the popular jQuery library and will be shipping it with Visual Studio moving forward:

We are really excited to be able to partner with the jQuery team on this. jQuery is a fantastic library, and something we think can really benefit ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX developers. We are looking forward to having it work great with Visual Studio and ASP.NET, and to help bring it to an even larger set of developers.

I think this is just fantastic. I’m a fairly recent convert to jQuery, but I’m sold. I won’t build another website without it. The most immediate benefit of this announcement is the Intellisense support that Microsoft will be shipping in a few weeks as a free download.

You can read jQuery creator John Resig’s comments on the partnership here. This is an interesting kind of move for Microsoft. Instead of building their own or trying to buy a competitor like normal, they’re recognizing that jQuery is great as it is. Using jQuery will benefit Microsoft, and I’m sure it will benefit jQuery too as Microsoft can submit patches, bug reports, and other things.

Great stuff!

jQuery: Don’t build websites without it!

By Mack D. Male · June 28, 2008 at 2:36pm

jquery For the last few weeks I’ve been using a JavaScript library called jQuery. The more I use it, the more I wonder how I ever built websites without it! Here’s the official description:

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

jQuery makes all of your page manipulations easier. Best of all, it does so in a consistent, reliable way across all browsers. No more little hacks in your JavaScript to make something work in both IE and Safari.

In general, I’m a big fan of doing things client-side on the web. That might sound weird coming from an ASP.NET developer, since the whole idea behind ASP.NET’s postback model (called Web Forms) is to make everything happen server-side. I think most experienced ASP.NET developers would agree however, that the postback model is crap. It’s flawed, and if you can avoid it, you should.

We built Podcast Spot in ASP.NET, but we don’t use postbacks. ASP.NET is essentially just our rendering engine. We made use of prototype, another popular JavaScript library, but a lot of the code we wrote is just ugly. I wish I had known about jQuery back then. I’m tempted to rewrite everything using jQuery, but I’m mindful of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” adage.

It’s very unlikely I’ll be building anything new without jQuery though. That’s how much I love it! Here are my favorite things so far:

Works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Cross-browser support FTW!
At just 16 KB for the minified, gzipped version, it has a very small footprint.
The API feels natural if you already know JavaScript quite well.
Chainability – the magic of jQuery. If you’re familiar with object-oriented programming, you’ll love jQuery.
The jQuery UI API is much more consistent and complete than script.aculo.us, and the effects seem much smoother too.

To get started with jQuery, just visit the website. You’ll probably also want to take a look at jQuery UI. The documentation is excellent, and there are quite a few tutorials available online.

Something to keep an eye on: Microsoft Velocity

By Mack D. Male · June 11, 2008 at 11:56pm

Last week I heard about a new project from Microsoft code-named Velocity. You can think of Velocity as Microsoft’s version of the very popular memcached:

“Velocity” is a distributed in-memory cache that provides .NET applications with high-speed access, scale, and high availability to application data.

Basically it’s a backend technology that helps to make websites perform better. Instead of accessing the database every time a page is requested, the website can often get the data it needs from the cache which is much faster than accessing the database.

ASP.NET has had caching built-in for years, but it doesn’t work in a server farm. That is, if you have more than one web server, there’s no way for all of them to share the same cache. Velocity makes that possible. For a good technical overview of Velocity, check out this post from Dare Obasanjo. Also check out Scott Hanselman’s podcast interview with two of Velocity’s architects.

We use memcached in Podcast Spot, and we’ve been very happy with it. It’s simple, efficient, and does just what we need it to do. Of course, our memcached installation is no where near the size of Facebook’s. I’ve read in a few places in the past that they run a 200 server cluster with 3 TB of memory solely for memcached. I’m sure it has grown since then too.

I have no idea how well Velocity will perform compared to memcached, or even if it’s full of bugs or not! I am eager to play around with it though, and it’s a project I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on. Velocity is a project from Microsoft that is long overdue, in my opinion.

xkcd in the New York Times

By Mack D. Male · May 27, 2008 at 9:26pm

As a kid I loved Calvin & Hobbes, but that was about the only comic strip I ever read. I think I have all the books except maybe one or two. I still don’t read comic strips, but I do occasionally enjoy reading xkcd, a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” It was profiled in the New York Times yesterday:

The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has 500,000 unique visitors a day, he said, and 80 million page views a month. (Why “xkcd”? “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation,” his Web site, xkcd.com, answers.)

Here is one of my favorites:

A new comic is posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

The author, Randall Munroe, is only 23 years old! He’s one smart cookie. He also writes a fairly interesting blog. I think this entry from November 2007 is my favorite:

I was thinking of getting a couch or something for my room, somewhere for guests to lounge around.

Fuck new couches. I now have a ball pit in my room.

That’s right, he has a ball pit in his room (click through for photos). Freaking awesome! And in February, he quintupled the size of it.

My congratulations to Randall on the coverage! Definitely check out xkcd if you’re looking for something fun and interesting.

I Love TripIt (And You Will Too!)

By Mack D. Male · March 22, 2008 at 11:06pm

Late last year I came across TripIt, a free Web 2.0 travel organization service. TripIt helps you automatically build an itinerary, access it from multiple locations and devices, share it with others, and more. It also automatically includes maps and weather forecasts, among other information.

I’ve used TripIt four times now. The first was my trip to New York over Christmas. I managed to convince Sharon to join, and we built our entire itinerary using TripIt. I also used it for my trip to Yellowknife, for Northern Voice 2008, and for my recent weekend trip to Calgary. TripIt is dead simple to use, and once you get used to using it you sort of get addicted!

The way it works is you book your flights, hotels, car rentals, and restaurant reservations as you would normally. Then, forward your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. TripIt will automatically recognize the information, and insert it into your new itinerary. The only time this hasn’t worked for me was when we made our reservation at Bar Americain in New York (which supports OpenTable). I have to think that was a temporary glitch, because it has been flawless ever since (including our OpenTable reservation at Blink in Calgary). Megan booked the flights to Vancouver for Northern Voice, so I didn’t have a confirmation email to forward. I entered the information manually, and TripIt even made that easier – it knew the departure and arrival times and other information based only on the airline and flight number. Pretty cool.

That’s why I love TripIt – it’s just so deliciously simple! Forward the confirmation email and you’re done.

Sure you can add extra information and custom items to the itinerary, but TripIt does the heavy lifting and that’s what is most important. You can print your itinerary of course, and the formatting that TripIt provides is really clean and simple. If you forget to do that however, no worries – TripIt can send you your itinerary via email! You can send the command “get trip” to plans@tripit.com, and it’ll respond with your information. Or you can send something more specific, such as “get flight”. It’s really quite neat! You can learn more about the TripIt To Me feature here.

Some other handy features that TripIt includes:

The ability to share your trips with others. They can be either viewers or collaborators, meaning they can add items to the itinerary.
A travel guide for your destination. TripIt will load information from Wikipedia, Flickr, Eventful, and more.
See Who’s Close is a new feature that shows you when your connections (friends) are going to be near you at any given time.
iCal support, meaning you can load your itinerary up in Outlook, Google Calendar, and more.

As much as I love TripIt, it’s not perfect. Here are the top three features I’d like to see them add:

Twitter and SMS support! Most other apps that I use on a regular basis (such as Remember The Milk) have this. Email is great, but Twitter and text messaging are better.
Facebook widget. What I’d really like is for TripIt to do what dopplr does – show upcoming trips, and post an item to my news feed when traveling. If TripIt had this feature, I probably wouldn’t use dopplr anymore.
Library of locations. When we went to NY, we added items like “Greenwich Village” and “Statue of Liberty” ourselves. It would have been really awesome if TripIt could have recognized those locations and automatically included relevant information (such as directions from/to our previous/next locations, pricing information, etc). This feature would make TripIt absolutely incredible!

If you’re just planning a quick road trip to see family or friends, TripIt may not be that useful for you. For all other kinds of trips however, I think you’ll find TripIt to be absolutely indispensable. I can honestly say I won’t travel without it anymore!

Searching Wikipedia Sucks!

By Mack D. Male · October 17, 2007 at 8:48pm

Have you tried searching Wikipedia lately? Don’t bother, because you probably won’t find what you’re looking for! I am continually amazed at how terrible the Wikipedia search results are. Here’s an example of what I mean. Go to Wikipedia, type “al gor” in the search box, and click the search button. You should see something like this. That’s right, the top results are Al-Merrikh, Cy-Gor, Firouzabad, and Kagame Inter-Club Cup.

Absolutely terrible! If you type the same thing in the search box at Google, not only do you get accurate results, but Google prompts you with “Did you mean: al gore”. Why yes, I did! So why is searching Wikipedia so bad?

Part of the problem is that Wikipedia actually has two search modes: “Go” and “Search”. If you type “Al Gore” (spelled correctly) in the box and click Go, you’re taken right to the entry about Al Gore. If you instead click Search, you’re taken to a list of articles that contain or reference “Al Gore”. You can read more about searching Wikipedia here. So they’ve sort of complicated things by including two buttons instead of just one. The Go button is useful when you know the name of the article you want, but useless otherwise.

The other part of the problem is that the search algorithm just plain sucks. I know they don’t have a lot of resources, but you’d think that one of the most popular websites on the web could have a decent search feature. Matching “al gor” with “al gore” is a problem that has been solved for years, yet Wikipedia doesn’t even come close to accomplishing it!

Wikipedia itself mentions external search engines as a way to find what you’re looking for, but they aren’t really much better. For instance, if you type “al gor” at the special Google search for Wikipedia page, you do get the correct Al Gore entry as the first result, but the rest are not relevant at all.

So here’s where we’re at. Google knows that if you type “al gor” you probably mean “Al Gore”. Wikipedia knows about all of the entries that reference “Al Gore”. What we need is a way to combine the two! Is that really so much to ask?

If you know of a better way to search Wikipedia, please let me know!

JihadOnYou: Declare holy war!

By Mack D. Male · October 8, 2007 at 11:48am

I was reading Mashable today, and came across this post on a new website called JihadOnYou. Apparently the site was built over a single weekend – no word on how long it took them to come up with the name. Here’s the description from Mashable:

No matter what it is that has made your day a little bit more miserable, simply go to this site, rant about it, and “declare holy war” on it. Whether it be your annoying co-worker, an ex-girlfriend, the loaner car from the dealership, whatever it is, this is your place to rant. Other users then can rate your Jihad to decide if it’s worthy ala-Digg style.

Most of the comments at Mashable discuss the name, which could be described as offensive. To that I say bollocks!

If a word is “politically incorrect” or otherwise offensive, should you avoid it at all costs? My opinion is no. The word “jihad” will continue to carry the connotations it currently does only if we restrict its use. I don’t expect JihadOnYou to change the meaning of the word by itself, but every little bit helps. And yes, I realize that jihad is a word with a lot of history.

As for the site itself – it’s kinda neat! The about page says “we’re here to entertain, not educate” and to that end I think they have succeeded. It’s pretty hard to visit the site and not laugh!

Read: Mashable