Nicknames added to Google+

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The whole real names fiasco is still unresolved in Google+. The recently released pseudo name feature is not all that everybody asked for. The feature still requires a Real Name and does not actually hide your Real Name when used, but simply gives you a way to put in words alongside or in between your actual name. It is further diminished through the limitation that it may only be changed once every three months. As is, it feels like a place to store your nickname, not a means to protect your privacy or create a new identity.

Hollywood, the startup

Sunday, January 22, 2012

YCombinator has an interesting post relating to SOPA/PIPA and the recent internet conflict with the entertainment industry.

Frankly, they’re right. The entertainment industry (and in particular, hollywood) is dying as it is unable to adapt and compete with entertainment created using cheaper production costs by way of new technology.

Design choices

Monday, January 16, 2012

The most obvious choice was node.js. Having spent a few years as a javascript programmer turned enthusiast, and as previous node.js user, selecting anything but node.js was unthinkable. Rails, Django, and Express were tempting (and even YUI's node.js frameworks the more I think about it), but the reasoning really came down to starting with a comfortable level of expertise and inexperience.

Finding a host was a bit of a task. I initially went with Joyent based upon the no.de offerings but found their actual smart machines to be a little costly for starting out with not much of the no.de smartmachine infrastructure available to be used in their main cloud services. Primarily, I was interested to see if I could get a free node.js host for starting out combined with a custom domain. After having played with Heroku before, git push was pretty much required, I can't even remember the last time I used FTP or a web based offering.

With the software to be written myself, and the web host selected (Heroku), the next choice came down to a data store. Heroku has database add-ons for SQL, MongoDB and CouchDB. In an effort to learn more about what the cool kids were doing, I decided to try out one of the NoSQL offerings and see how far along they've come. I eventually settled on CouchDB after reading a document from Mongo's own website about the pros and cons of each. Frankly, having replication is not really feasible and I doubt a blog would demand many frequent writes to the database. If I had those problems, it would be godsend. What finalized my decision though was Cloudant's offerings because of the free space of 250MB, which should be plenty for a text based website for some time. The abililty to run CouchDB locally then push DB updates via replication was just icing on the cake. In this manner, I am able to keep a backup locally that is transferable to another host within seconds and get live previews before I update the main site.

CSS Lessons Learned

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Don't specify units in pixels except where assets are used. This avoids constantly resizing things when a font changes. Instead, focus on using most everything in terms of font sizes unit 'em'. This allows margins and paddings to automatically scale with the font size.

Use margins most of the time. Rarely will a padding be called for. Margins allow for more scalable layout since the box model gets weird with padding.

Specify font sizes in terms of human readable strings such as 'normal' or 'large' to avoid an unreadable site for somebody who has changed the minimum font sizes or face for each category.

Designing for mobile first means you generally have more concise styles that are intrinsic to the page layout and work better when scaling up. When you are scaling up, it becomes much easier to add a little bit of a margin here or there and then adjust the overal font sizes used on the page to make previous styles still applicable.

Additionally, chances are that the larger the screen of the client, the more powerful the computer. This means a larger screen client will be able to handle additional styles easier, rather than having a mobile client interpret all the desktop styles, then additionally interpret the mobile styles.

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