Chapter 42

It’s hard to imagine how this industry would operate without open source software. The PHP language that I use to write software for the web is itself free software. Unfortunately, the quality of open source code written with PHP is relatively poor and inflexible compared to the quality of open source libraries that can be compiled into PHP as extensions. Consequentially my personal relationship to open source software is a hybrid scenario of, on the one hand, being deeply invested in open source tools that expand the language I program in, as well as having a commitment to turning out open source projects of my own to the community, and on the other hand, a healthy skepticism toward the bulk of open source software written in PHP. Part of this is due to the fact that, being the chief server side programming language of the web, freely available PHP code could well have been written by your grandmother (apologies to my GM, who happens to be a very savvy user). Continue Reading »

Tags: open source, php

Last week, we flew Alex out to the Bay Area for some company togetherness and to devote some serious time to the aforementioned yet still-unannounced internal project. An also-secret major feature of said project required us to use PHP to place arbitrarily-selected images in arbitrarily-sized spaces (without, of course, unattractively stretching or squishing the image).

With some thought, we were able to come up with a taxonomy of content photo sizing: Continue Reading »

Tags: code, images, livewhale, lwblog, photos, resizing

Although White Whale is very much a modern, cutting edge, Web 3.0 kind of company, in some ways we become more and more like General Motors every day. Normal web people might spend their down time, I don’t know, reading design blogs or shopping at organic farmers’ markets. But Tonya (the VP) and I? Well, on Sunday we took a different approach.

Next thing you know we’ll be taking three-martini lunches and sleeping with our secretaries.

(I mean, don’t get me wrong: we like design blogs too.  And farmers’ markets.  And we don’t have secretaries.)

Site launches are a really big deal for us; we work with only a few clients at a time, so by rights we ought to stop the presses and pop champagne whenever one of our clients’s sites opens to the public. But inevitably new client work (and summer vacations) intervene, and our celebrations wind up being more private.

I wrote a blog post the day the Kenyon College site launched, and had intended to do something more splashy. I still might. We at White Whale are all very, very happy with how the Kenyon site came out, and are very proud of Kenyon’s able Public Affairs staff, who did a great job of implementing our CSS/XHTML designs into a sometimes unforgiving CMS; we’ve been there to help, but most of the finishing work was done on their end. So— Shawn, Patty, Rebecca: congratulations again.

But I’m really writing to talk about something specific that is happening to the design, which in my view is the most exciting thing about it.

Continue Reading »

Tags: design, kenyon, launch, photo gallery, web 2.0

About a month ago, we reached one of those crossroads in the development of our (coming very soon) content management solution. Our development process is typically to develop a perfect standards-compliant site and then reverse-engineer a working Internet Explorer copy out of that–usually through painstaking pixel-by-pixel corrections of obscure bugs in IE-specific stylesheets, but also in rare cases where we had to make compromises with the design or markup of the page.

But IE stylesheets can only get you so far. When working with a public-facing website design you just need to get it right once: we make sure the structure is flexible and adaptable and forward-looking, but mainly we build to the best standards of the current day. But because development of our backend solution will be continuous (that’s a hint about a major feature, by the way), continuing to tie ourselves to IE6’s sundry limitations would be crippling down the road. Continue Reading »

Tags: 37signals, ie6, internet explorer, livewhale, lwblog

It’s a good thing that I don’t have a boss, because if I did, I would probably get fired for engaging in rambling, discursive IM conversations with White Whale clients when I should be doing actual client work.

The following IM conversation with David McKelvey of Lewis & Clark began as a discussion of their recently approved Web design final release candidate.  L&C uses the phrase “Uncommon Journeys” as a motto of sorts, and although many higher ed slogans are kind of lame, we all really like this one.  A discussion of its use in the home page design led to a discussion of one of my most beloved bands, Journey (beware: loud rockin’ flash intro!), and their new lead singer (who was found on YouTube).  Reviewing this information, David also noticed that Journey’s now got an island in Second Life.

David is an early adopter and a technology enthusiast (and is eminently Googleable, though not to be confused with his many imitators).  I, on the other hand, am more old school, and my love of technology is ambiguous and complicated.  I am, therefore, deeply skeptical about Second Life.  Once David mentioned it, I couldn’t resist engaging him in a conversation that wound up expressing my professional opinion about SL (or is it 2L?) pretty well.

The full chatlog follows.
  Continue Reading »

Tags: chatlogs, davidwmckelvey, lewis and clark, opinions, overvalued 1980s technology, second life