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Pragmatic, Pragmatic, Pragmatic

OK, now is the time to start being pragmatic when it comes to everything. Roles, tasks, platforms, frameworks, libraries or any other thing that could enable cat-fights in any web department. Ask yourself the question: “Am I a pragmatic person when at work?”. If the answer is Yes, could you be even more pragmatic in even more areas, in order to avoid unecessary (from a business point-of-view) discussions and fights. If your answer is No, start being more pragmatic, put feelings and opinions away and focus on facts, reality and truth. I know a lot of people who say they are pragmatic (everybody wants to be pragmatic) and at the same time say that we must spend 12 man-year on building an almighty architecture that will survive WW III, when business needs here and now could be solved with existing tools or with lesser efforts added to the project. In short: Start being pragmatic in your daily work, and stop saying you are pragmatic.

Focus on Possibilities

Recession opens up for good things. When times are bad, investors and competitors decrease their efforts and that is a possibility. When others are braking, you should increase your efforts in order to gain market shares or enter a market that are ultra-competitive during good times. As long as you are still employed or running your own business getting clients, make sure you invest whatever you can invest making sure that you are increasing your market shares and revenues. This sound easier than it is in real life. But in order to convince you: Apple, Microsoft and businesses such as Online Poker where born during other time of crisis. I am confident we will see new business-leaders born or growing big during the coming years. I am writing a post on what companies I think will go out of recession as winners, will publish it before Christmas. Remember: In bad times, brave people can build the platform for being the next winner.

It Aint Personal

If for some reason someone (your company or lack of clients) puts you in the corner where your job is at risk, or even worse you get sacked or have to shut down business, Do not take it personally, because during times like these even talented people are fired. Often middle-management has to fulfill a number of layoffs and meet some strange budget-requirement making their decisions somewhat numeric instead of human-resource-optimized. Often roles needed for running daily businesses are the ones that are prioritized to keep. If you do not do this right now, you are probably more likely to get sacked than the guy making sure that the SVN-server is up and running. But it aint personal (most of the time at least).

Business Argument not Techie Arguments

I do not like techie arguments when we have good times, and I am pretty sure no business owner likes them at all during bad times. Developers have to be better, in good and bad times, trying to put numbers on their arguments. This is important for two reasons: First, it is easier to convince the business owners with business arguments and second, if developers try to find business arguments instead of tech arguments, they will be better developers as they do understand business better and tech solutions are business driven and not vice verca.

Summary

We will face recession. Your company will adapt to this. Maybe they speed up, maybe they slow down. The important thing to know is that no one is safe but recession is not all bad, it also opens up for new businesses and possibility to enter competitive markets. One good thing to bear in mind during recession, as well as better times, is to try to be more pragmatic and business oriented not only in mind but also in action.

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I break these standards on a regular basis, and apparently a lot of other people do as well, according to Opera, only 1 in 25 adhere to web standards, and the rest breaks them in some way. Why is that? Are standards not worth following? My answer is: it depends on the context.

In this post, I will not discuss things such as page size, design from content separation, behaviour from design separation, search engine optimization etc etc, as I believe that all of these can be achieved just as good not adhering to web standards, and that the areas have been dicussed for 5+ years. I would like to focus on things that not so many people talk about when discussing standards; How it affects revenues and the actual organization running a website.

The Business Perspective

Building a new Website / Redesigning a existing one
If you are building a new website, there are few reasons not following standards for css, script and markup. From a technical point of view, there are probably no arguments that are valid for not adhering to standards, but from business point-of-view, there may be some arguments that are valid. These arguments may be:

- Legacy non-standard CMS Software enabling quick time-to-market
- More time efficient development given the teams core comptence
- Alternative Cost, how much do we gain (in money, short and long term) from adhering to standards comparing to not have it as a business requirement.

Running an existing non-standards compliant website

This is where reality hit hard on standard advocates. Converting an existing non-standard-compliant website to a standard-compliant website can be a really daunting job. But it all boils down to technical solutions and a lot of hard work. The real problem is to find the argument, money-wise, to do it. As a businessowner you must ask your self the question: “Why should we use X nr of resources for moving to standards, when we could use the same resources for making our product better?” This is where people who thinks standards are a matter of life and death have to sharpen their arguments. Below I have listed different aspects of a websites function and lifecycle where it is important to understand the conflict between reality and standards.

The Knowledge Perspective

Not all websites are built by people who are educated in web standards. I think that a very common problem with web standards, are the fact that a lot of web-frontends are built by someone who knows their standards and run and maintained by people who do not care or have the knowledge needed to adhere to the standards that the site should support. The big question is again money. How much do we gain, educating people in standards compared to keep the speed up with the current knowledge?

The Web as API Perspective

This is where standards becomes important, in order to expose your web as an API, enabling mashups, this could be done using micro-formats, your own XHTML-schemes or just letting external users grab your content easily and mash it up on their side. Of course a valid XHTML-page will be easier to parse and load as an API, but on the other hand, screenreaders, search engines and other page parsers have been able to grab info even from non-standard supporting websites for a long time, there are even numerous of libraries that lets you do just that. When it comes to the web as API, I believe it is important to focus more on building a website that is API-ified when it comes to url-structure and parameters for responseTypes and locales etc. From this perspective, adhering to standards is of course important, but not adhering to standards is not the same as not being able to expose your web as an API. The only thing you do if you run a website that do not follow standards is making it a tad more difficult for your integrators to mashup your website.

The Accessability Perspective

Accessability and Usability, how do they relate to web standards? There is one argument that everyone is talking about all the time, screen readers. OK, this is close to the above argument. My belief when it comes to this is that a screenreader that can not read non-standard pages, will not be a big success, since a lot of websites, as stated above, do not adhere to standards. Of course a semantic web is easier to understand by machines, and will increase accessability and findability enabling better SEO. As the machines reading the web will become more sophisticated, issues like this is probably a smaller issue in the future, than it is now

The Maintenance Perspective

Some people say that standard based front-ends are easier to maintain. From one perspective I am obliged to agree, web standards fronts are more often separated semantically, css doing design, script behaviour and markup for content. But the separation has nothing to do with standards. One argument could be that if we use standards we do not have to maintain “hacks” in css, script and markup, but as long as you are using components and frameworks you should not have to worry about these things. If everything is a mess with no separation and no standards followed, there may be reasons to change this, if we can find a business argument for it: The cost for moving the web to standards and separation of markup, design and behaviour must be lower than the gains from maintaining a standards compliant product compared to the old solution.

The Code Quality Perspective

Another argument is that standards are better from a quality perspective, that is just noncence. You can build crap with cheap and expensive tools, as well as you can build crap websites with standards and non-standards. You can even build great websites with non-standard solutions.

Conclusion

Standards serve a purpose, they get developers to start thinking how they build things, and slowly they adapt to new patterns and processess building webpages, creating better semantics and separation of design, content and behaviour. Standards are good. But not following them is not the same as doing wrong. There are a number of arguments that may force us to build or keep maintaining products that do not follow standards, often the reason are economical. I believe that in order to be business-oriented all developers have to understand that sometimes the “best” technical solution is not good enough from a business perspective.

Resources

• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-markup-validation-report/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/10/17/opera-just-413-of-webs-code-is-valid
• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/
• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/
• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-the-url-set/

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All these books are of interest to people who takes a scientific approach to developing and tuning the website he/she is running.

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders

Steve Souders covers all the different sections from YSlow on how to speed up your website. He shows that you will get most effect from putting your efforts into perfomance tune the frontend before working on backend tuning. I found this book really worth reading as it is spot on on every issue, and very focused on describing gains and implementation details for each and every single section of performance tuning on the frontend. I really recommend this book because I feel that for a serious website owner this book will pay itself in a couple of weeks with more generated sales and less used bandwidth.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Andrew B. King also focus on optimization and tuning of your website, but the focus is on SEO, PPC-campaigns and Conversion Rate Optimization. He also tries to write some chapters on performance tuning, but when it comes to frontend performance tuning I recommend Steve Souders book instead. This book is really good for people who would like to learn more about optimizing PPC-campaigns and start tracking and incread conversion rates. I recommend this book for those chapters, which are really good and have help me increase incomes on the websites I have PPC-campaigns for.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran

Toby Segaran guides us in building smarter web applications based on Collective Intelligence. The book mixes theory and practice and shows how “easy” it is to actually create applications with community based product recommendation system and other intelligent solutions. I found this book interesting as a starting point on how to technically implement some of the web 2.0 features users have become used to use online.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Wikinomics is the book I have just started reading and it focus on how the community trend will change the enterprises. The focus is on how the masses create something of big value through collaboration. An interesting thing of course is the fact that a lot of people interact in larger communities building a greater value (Wikipedia, Youtube, Linux etc, etc) without getting paid, still the quality of the outcome often exceeds the alternatives built traditionally with labour and investment banks.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

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John Resig is writing a new selector engine, sizzle, interesting

I wonder when John have the time to write code, write books, write documentation, write for his blog AND work for Mozilla. He is one productive client side coding entrepreneur. Sizzle is Work In Progress, but John claims it is 4 times faster than the jQuery Selector Engine.

YUI has a new Interaction Pattern in their library

I do not know how many times I have been part of discussions about how to implement a sign in procedure the best way. This new pattern from YUI tries to describe the characteristics of the problem. I really like Yahoo’s initiative with YUI trying to help designers and likes from revinventing the wheel time after time.

Parallax scrolling made easy with JavaScript

10 years ago something, we believed DHTML and JavaScript where the solution to everything, and there are solutions I am proud of from that time, and solutions I wouldnt mention even under torture. These days all client side stuff is focused on availability, usability and other non-relevant bilities . Where is all the cool stuff? jParallax is cool, and from a first point of view, somewhat useless, but hey, keep em coming.

Blueprint CSS 

I hate CSS. No I like separation of content, design and behaviour. But lets be honest, CSS is repetetive and often you find yourself chasing browser bugs hitting CTRL+S, ALT-TAB, CTRL-R, ALT-TAB …. That is why I believe we must minimize the rows of CSS we are actually writing, just as we try to do that with JavaScript using libraries such as jQuery, Prototype or Mootools. Blueprint CSS is interesting, I am thinking of implementing it into my mindset as the default CSS-library together with jQuery for JavaScript and Smarty for templating.

YAML (Yet Another Multicolumn Layout)

This one looks interesting as well, but the only reason I list this is because the name is the same as the configuration language YAML I will talk about below. 

YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language)

Before I have used XML for configuration, moving more and more over to JSON, because of the benefits parsing and using it. But YAML is what I have started using for some types of configuration, because of its easiness to read, write and share. Look into it. I love it for configuring navigations.

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• Yahoo Pipes
• Twitter
• Wordpress
• Delicious
• Magpie RSS

What we would like to achieve is a website that feels more dynamic even when you are not writing articles on your blog/website. This article is based on a web running PHP, Smarty, Wordpress and a hosting plan that gives you the possibility to create and change rights for directories. You can of course adapt these tips to any server architecture you may be using, but these examples will feature this architecture.

Integrate Yahoo Pipes for News

Yahoo Pipes lets you, easily and graphically, create advanced mashups from different external sources such as RSS and other content available online. You can aggregate, manipulate and filter the content to fit your needs. Yahoo Pipes is very powerful used correct. In this post we will focus on how to take 1 or more RSS-feeds, combine them into one and filter out the content that fits on your website as targeted news.

Below you find a screenshot of a pipe where I have aggregated a couple of RSS-feeds from startup-blogs, sorted all items on publish date and filtered out all items that have the name “social” in the title.

Pipes is very intuitive and you should be able to create a solution like this in less than 10 minutes.

Save your Pipe and give it a nice name, then click Run Pipe…, on the resulting page you will get the option to “Get as RSS”, copy that URL, it should look something like this: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=BMHzDooV3RGSSmEWJhOy0Q&_render=rss

You now have dynamic content that are filtered according to your needs, below we will show you how to integrate it to your website with Wordpress Plugins or with Magpie RSS and Smarty.

Integrate Twitter to Wordpress

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that lets users tweet messages to their twitter profile. If you are using twitter, why not integrate your tweets to your blog, making it more dynamic, and if you like to, more personal. Maybe you do not want to create a single post for every tweet (max 140 characters), a daily aggregation maybe suits your blog better. Alex King has built a Wordpress Plugin on top of Twitters API which do just that (among other things). Downloading and installing the plugin should not take you more than 10 minutes all together.

Integrate del.icio.us as Link Manager

If you run a web site or a blog, you probably collects and share bookmarks on social bookmark services such as del.icio.us, BlinkList, simpy, Ma.gnolia, reddit and other social bookmarking sites. Why not utilize the well specified apis and tagging possibilities that they offer. In this example I have choosen to go with del.icio.us, but I am pretty sure you can do this with all of the popular social bookmarking services, the only thing is that they have to have an RSS published for the tag you are using to pinpoint your dynamic content.

In this example we are going to use del.icio.us and my bookmarks tagged with jquery as a resource for adding external links to your website that updates automatically when you add new bookmarks tagged with jquery to your online del.icio.us bookmarks.

My jQuery bookmarks can be found at http://del.icio.us/hising/jquery. By adding /rss between hostname and username, you will get the list of jQuery bookmarks in a format suitable for integration with your web site. In this case the url to the rss is http://del.icio.us/rss/hising/jquery

RSS Integration Code Example

With Magpie RSS and Smarty

Download Magpie RSS and follow the installation instructions. One thing you dont want, is to grab the feed every time someone visits your page, you are want to cache the result for a specified period of time, in this example we cache the feed response for 1 hour (set this depending on how often you think you will update your dynamic content)

channel array which contains info on the rss
//$news->items array that contains the feed items

/*
item example:
array(
	title => 'Weekly Peace Vigil',
	link => 'http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257',
	description => 'Wear a white ribbon',
	dc => array (
			subject => 'Peace'
		),
	ev => array (
		startdate => '2002-06-01T11:00:00',
		enddate => '2002-06-01T12:00:00',
		type => 'Protest',
		location => 'Northampton, MA'
	)
);
*/
?>

When you have got the result from your controller/php-file make sure you expose the response data to your view manager, and print out your items. In this example I have used the Smarty templating engine

//PHP:
require_once(YOUR_SMARTY_PATH . 'Smarty.class.php');
$smarty = new Smarty();
$smarty->assign('news', $news);
$smarty->display('template.tpl);

//Template

{foreach from=$news->items item=item}
{$item.title}

{/foreach}

As Wordpress Plugin

Download a plugin for integrating external RSS into your blog. There are a lot of different plugins for this, in this example we will use FeedList. Upload and enable the plugin. Then in your template add this:

 'http://del.icio.us/rss/hising/jquery',
            'num_items' => 10));
?>

More Examples on Creating a Dynamic Web Quickly

There are many other ways to create a more dynamic web site. You could use FeedBurner for creating Headline Animators. Headline Animator is an animated banner that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items. It’s an easy way to promote your content anywhere you can place a snippet of HTML. By doing this you can promote content from another blog on your website AND add a more dynamic web. All this is easy steps, under an hour of labour, to achieve a more alive web. Do you have any other tips that are a quick win when it comes to adding dynamic content to your web site?

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