Petit Bourgeois

Removed the date header (who cares) and pushed it to the meta info block at the bottom of each post. Pushed a few other things around. Not entirely happy yet, but at this rate, Paul might stop being embarrassed about this blog around the end of the decade! Unfortunately, Ouvaton's web servers are still having an awful lot of trouble with dynamic pages, so for now, this site's wonderful content is served uncomfortably slowly.

Christine Rosen's The Age of Egocasting features a compelling narrative of the great capacity of personalization technologies to encourage "some of our less attractive human tendencies: for passive spectacle; for constant, escapist fantasy; for excesses of consumption".

I find however that her conclusion falls short of the promise of the study. "Our pleasure at exercising control over what we hear, what we see, and what we read is not intrinsically dangerous. But an unwillingness to recognize the potential excesses of this power—egocasting, fetishization, a vast cultural impatience, and the triumph of individual choice over all critical standards—is perilous indeed."

The fetish is convincingly linked to personal technologies in the article, but I do not find the definition of the peril quite as compelling. Rosen quotes early 20th-century critics of technology, while ignoring whether their vision applies or applied to the time elapsed in the meanwhile. This is very relevant, because what matters in this struggle is not whether we'll be able to renounce the new technology (we won't), but whether art will be able to transcend it (it may).

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The web site of Meerkring (public school board of Amersfoort) has been renewed. Maarten and I had worked on it a long time ago, using a very nifty frame system (well, oh well). It's now been cleaned up, and more structurally correct code is used. This hardly required any visual change (I only gave up on the javascript-based scrollbar and replaced it with a standard HTML element). Expected results: better indexing in Google, increased speed and accessibility. This was a "low-hanging fruit"!

My beloved web hosting co-operative Ouvaton has just come out of a five-days spell of technical difficulties. (This is what kept me from posting here more regularly.) The current hosting solution, VHFFS, while built on some very interesting concepts, is not very easy to understand and our maintenance partner, Azuria, is bent on both cutting corners and fixing architectural issues.

The set of test machines that will allow us to validate our new hosting suite, Hostflow and put it in production, is almost ready (we're only missing our reverse DNS and one of the 5 machines). We'll thus soon be happily testing away, and I still hope to hold the March 1 deadline for the opening of the new platform to new users and the start of the migration of current users.

Among the exhausting and fastidious activities this implies, I've learned a few things: the more you understand of what's going on, the better you are at deciding what you need and getting it done. Actually putting your "trust" in a provider's care, when in fact you're just admitting your incompetence, is simply a foolish thing to do.

Another point: co-presence, physical proximity helps in getting your point accross. It's not that you can actually say more over the phone, or that you can bodily threaten people when you see them, but the larger bandwidth seems to help impressing more of your point unto the other person.

A pretty annoying combination in our case: Renaud is now sharing my desk in Amsterdam 500km away from the machines, Alexis is only 250km closer, Yann (who knows the most) has got a day job that takes him quite a bit of energy and even more time, and once your platform is offline, your 3000 clients are angry (or, say, 300 of those are), and the 5500 sites are actually down, every minute until the problem is fixed.

It is now, and I hope it will stay put until we've migrated.

I just removed the "document" icon that was at the top-left-hand corner of each post, which pointed to the same location as the "link" icon at the bottom-right-hand corner. Left only the link icon, not too sure about this, but it'll improve the text-only legibility, and streamline Google page summaries.

Many of the searches that end up on this site are on people's names. Jamy Vodegel, Ruud van Bragt, Brian Hoffer, Roel Klaassen... I'll be exploring how this could be used to make this site more useful to its (admittedly limited) audience.

The slogan of Splandigo is "quality web sites". We indend this as a pickup line, which allows us to elaborate on what we mean by quality, and particularly:

• user-friendly
• faithful to the client's identity and message
• of a consistent level of quality accross all aspects

I think I found what can make my "management-oriented" clients understand the value of our work. It's a long-term investment, but it's quite simple: we must build up on the old concept of user-centered design and its unique ability to create value (i.e. to ensure the requested features are actually delivered).

Paul just forwarded me an interesting quote from the AIGA design forum, regarding text vs. visual representation.

Another common assumption is that icons are a more universal mode of communication than text. [...] The endless icons of the digital desktop, often rendered with gratuitous detail and depth, function more to enforce brand identity than to support usability.

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My article about why standards-compliant code matters was published on Evolt.org, a valuable resource for web builders. Just wondering why they're publishing so little lately... Another article about iMode and how to use that technology is in the pipe.

Renaud Morvan has arrived yesterday to be the new web programmer at Splandigo. We're now seven people working at the office. Welcome!