Runester

I leave for Michigan tomorrow! How exciting!

Though I’ve made this trip five or six times (both ways),
and done fine with maps and trip-tix, this time I am going
high tech. I bought a GPS-mapping unit and loaded it with all
of the maps I’ll need for this trip, as well as all of the
routes I’ll be using. Let’s see how this new toy keeps me
firmly on-path. I also hope that it reduces my drive time.

On another issue …

Hey, remember my
comments about the family who brought their young children
to see a violent, R-Rated movie? Well, apparently I’m not the only one who
feels that way. Here are the comments of my friend, Midge, who is also a
mother of hour (4) and has something to say about families and movies.

It’s good to know my views aren’t so conservative. Thanks, Midge!

My trip home starts in just five (5) days!

Movie Review: Matrix: Revolutions

OK, Lisa & I saw this the day after it premiered. And, I have since heard several critics describe the movie as "adequate" … I have to agree with them. I was really looking forward to more mind-blowing revelations (like the first and second movies) but there was nothing of the sort here. Further, the action was good (GREAT! compared to any other movie you could name) but not nearly as good as the shock of seeing it the first time in Matrix_I or watching that incredibly unbelievable "highway sequence" in Matrix_II. This is hard to say, but I think they did too well in Matrix_I, because it was, apparently, impossible to do better with the next two. That’s sad … because II & III were great sci-fi, action films in their own right – but, I will never forget the feeling I had the first time I walked into the theater and watched Matrix_I. "Blown out of my seat," is a massive understatement.

Now, a point about the ending of this movie. I found the scene, where Neo is laid out (cross like) on a floating barge and drifts away into the heart of Robot City … reminiscent of Morte de Arthur. Replace floating platform with a boat piloted by faery folk, and the robot city with Avalon and you get a pretty good idea what I am talking about. This also implies that he may return someday – perhaps "The once and future Neo?"

Movie Review: Mystic River

I have to give Lisa a word in, on this one. It really bothers her to hear west coast movie stars try and sound like they are from Boston. In her words, "They make us sound like drunken, Irish, Southie, thugs." Aside from the poorly done accents, this was a great movie. The characters were both interesting and very complex. The plot was a mix between a character drama and a murder mystery. To their benefit, it kept us guessing until the very end. Lisa figured out who-done-it, well before it was revealed, kudos to her!

The most fascinating thing to me, was how the man who had been victimized as a boy, becomes victimized as a man. It’s as if predators (over a span of decades) always detect and attack the weakest. What a sad, true sentiment.

New Golden Age of Hollywood?

I have recently heard this recent batch of movies (last few years? this last decade?) referred to as the "new golden age of Hollywood." Usually I just disregard crap like this as self promotional junk. But, I think, this time, they may actually be right. Not only have we had several REALLY GOOD movies come out every year for the last few years, but Hollywood is making more of the giant epics they used to. Two are coming up (I have the posters and links on the left): Alamo, and Troy. Add to those the growing list of giant sized epics like The Lord of The Rings trilogy, the new Star Wars movies, the Matrix trilogy, the X-Men movies, the Spider Man movies, The Hulk, etc. I guess it is a good time to be a movie fan!

The Halloween Pictures are here!

Yes, I have finally gotten the Halloween pictures from last weeks party, on line. [We may be getting some more soon, they have to be scanned in.] Anyway, check them out and see how much fun we had. Here’s an especially good one of Lisa & I dressed as Christmas Trees! [BTW: The party wasn't really as bright as it looks in those pictures. In fact, it was nice and spookily dark! The camera flash makes everything look much more well lit then it actually was.]

Website navigation rant, Part II

I said a lot, in my last post about the challenge of correctly and thoroughly linking web pages into a coherent navigational structure. This time I’d like to address the reasons this problem even exists.

First, when Tim Berners-Lee first cooked up the web, each HTML page was considered it’s own document. In other words, each website was like a library, and each page was like a book in that library. They were expected to be long (thus the scroll bars at the side of each page) and there was a mechanism for internal navigation (the seldom used anchors, or internal hyperlinks). As originally imagined, the web would be a way for academics to share scholarly papers in a platform independent way (i.e. no special hardware / software combination needed). What’s actually happened with the web, is another matter entirely.

Now, most people view a website as a book, and each HTML document is one page within that book. Pages are, generally, shorter (about one screen full of info), and instead of a few inter-page links and many intra-page links, there are very few intra-page links used at all and dozens of inter-page links. Because the web has become something that it was not designed for, there is no automatic, built-in way to navigate a website … nor is there a universally accepted navigational convention.

Let’s look at some other, similar, media and see how navigation is handled.

Books: There is a “physicallity” (you can touch it and feel how far you’ve gotten in your reading) that offers many cues as to where the reader is; where the beginning is; and where the end is. Books have covers, table of contents (TOC), indexes at the back, page numbers, and sometimes word glossaries. All of these features are “standard” and can be expected to be found in any book, anywhere. Of course, books are many hundreds of years old … so the technology is mature.

Newspapers & Magazines: These are almost the same as books, except that articles are almost never contiguous. Instead, articles are continued on another page, and there is the print equivalent of a hyper link at the bottom of the article – “story continued on page 112.” Again, printed medium is hundreds of years old and people have expectations on how the information is organized and how they are supposed to navigate the instrument.

Websites: With websites, there is no standard navigation scheme. Some people put menus on the top, or the left, or the bottom, or the right side of the page. Some don’t even use a single menu location but bury links within the content of each page. Some pages are whole and self contained, while others are only one of several parts of an article or collection. Some websites are collections of articles, others are more like books, with collections of pages, and still others are more like computer applications with various screens managing inputs and outputs.

The lack of a standard in use, is why there is no standard in design applications. For example, if you write a book using a word processor like MS Word, the program will automatically number all of your pages, generate a table of contents, and even (if you want) generate an index with keywords listed with the pages on which they occur. How did Microsoft know that writers would want these features? Why not assume that books would be read like papyrus scrolls or a collection of index cards? Because book navigation is well established, understood, and commonly expected. Microsoft also makes FrontPage, a website design application. In this application, there are several menu schemes you can select, and the ability to link pages in different topographies is supported, but on single topography is assumed. So, the same company that can safely assume a navigation scheme for books (and build it into their word processing application) can make no such assumption for websites, so has to make several different options available as well as “none of the above” (i.e. full customization).

Interestingly enough, this may be slowly changing. Already, left hand navigation menus along with clear page headers and footers are so common on the web as to be de facto standards. They are certainly not universal, but common enough for even novice users to easily grasp and navigate. Perhaps, like Microsofts FrontPage, this navigation style will become so accepted that most web design tools will come with this feature built in. Then, maintaining a large, fully connected site will be obvious and easy.

Actually, we are no where near that point now. I have seen (and tried) countless web page editors. Even the smartest ones treat each page as if it were a separate island of data. Adding hyperlinks between documents may be push-button-easy but they are never automatically added nor updated. So, even using fancy editors (as opposed to hand editing with NOTEPAD) would not solve the problem of creating a consistent and useful navigation menu. FrontPage seems to do this pretty good, if you don’t mind the $150 price tag and the other crap it puts in the page code. Beyond this, you’d have to buy some big CMS (Content Management System) and build your own templates to have navigation added to your pages.

Maybe this is a good idea for a shareware app? [I call dibs! Don't steal this, or else ...]

Halloween w/ Pictures

Well, it’s been a week since Lisa & I went to the Halloween party. We had a lot of fun! I drank some Tanqueray & Tonic; introduced some new people to “Bumble Bee” shots (1/2 Jagermeister & 1/2 Barenjager). Lisa & I danced like idiots (in the having tons of fun and not caring what other people thought about, sense) to a lot of “oldies” (i.e. music from the 70’s & 80’s)!

BTW: we both went dressed as Christmas Trees! [As soon as I get my hands on the pictures, I'll post them here for all to see.]

Web Site Navigation Automation

On a slightly more technical subject … I have been fretting about the correct (and easiest) way to build proper navigation schemes on multi-page web sites for some time now. After reading several articles, and seeing what other people have been doing – I can confidently say I am doing A-OK! Take a look at this site (one of the site’s I maintain as a volunteer). Though it looks pretty darn plane, the truth is I use a custom templating script (written in PERL, and heavily relying on the TEXT::Template module).

The part I am most proud of, is the left-hand navigation buttons. Believe it or not, those are auto-generated by my script! I have a special page description file, which lists what pages are in the web site, and which ones should be included in this navigation bar. Then, a little bit of PERL coupled with some simple JavaScript and … ta da! Looks as good as those FLASH or JAVA embedded object navigation bars, but it only takes seconds to load and should work in 97% of all browsers.

Still, just in case someone browses the site with a text only browser (and you LYNX users know who you are!) or perhaps a browser designed with special needs (such as Braille, or text-to-speech) I also include a simple list of links at the bottom of every page. Not only is the simple link list there for special clients, but they are much easier for most web spiders &/or search engines to navigate … as opposed to the JavaScript reliant buttons.

Some of the criteria I strove to achieve (for BOTH types of navigation menus) are:

There had to be some way to show the user where they are.

So I disabled the link that brought them to that page, and made it look different.

There had to be some way to show them which links were “active” or “clickable.”

The simple links were easy, normal HTML hyperlinks, and with the usual colors (blue & underlined).
For the JavaScript buttons, I used the standard “roll-over” effects to show the user what button their mouse was over, and which buttons could be pushed. [Again, this also reinforced which button was deactivated, thus suggesting what page they were on and how it related to the rest.]

It had to be easily usable by 99% of web users.

Well, I tested the page in both IE & NN, and have those simple hyperlinks at the bottom of the page incase any of the JavaScript stuff gets rejected … so everyone should be able to navigate from any page to any other page with ease.

It may not even be obvious to some readers why site navigation is such a big deal! Let me explain …

In every web style guide and interface usability guide I’ve read, offering clear, easy, compatible page navigation is emphasized as ABSOLUTELY VITAL. Further, they use statistic to make some recommendations. For example, “don’t rely on multi-frame pages. They are not as easy to print or bookmark, and may not be usable by people with older browsers.” So, one of the single easiest ways of building consistent, easy to maintain navigation menus (using a FRAMESET) is frowned up by the experts. And, while simple HTML hyperlinks are the easiest to create, use, and understand … they don’t look that pretty – especially when people are using FLASH &/or JAVA plug-ins to generate fancy roll-over effects, sound effects, or collapsible navigation trees.

For years I just stuck with HTML … and my sites looked plane (i.e. amateurish and ugly). This was frustrating, because I was following the usability guides! So, I believe the combination I describe above (JavaScript powered buttons, with simple HTML links as a backup) offers me the best of both worlds. Hey, it tastes great & it’s less filling!

A far bigger problem, then just the way navigation menus look, is keeping all of the links up-to-date on all of the pages. I remember, many years ago, trying my hand at a web diary … long before the BLOG craze (with it’s endless list of super-easy-to-use BLOG software) came along. I was just coding my web site, by hand, with NOTEPAD. My diary had two main navigation systems. There was an introduction page telling a little bit about me and my goal, with a nice calendar at the bottom (HTML Table), with each diary entry represented by a hyperlinked date. This was the “random access” method, you just clicked on the date and went straight to the diary entry. But, I also wanted a “sequential navigation” system, so I put links on the various diary entries. One link to jump to my home page, one link to jump to my diary welcome page, one link for the “previous” diary entry and one link for the “next” diary entry. [This is all very standard, and very easy with today's BLOG software including my own favorite: Blogger.com.]

If you are following along, you may realize, first, that my first diary entry would not have a “previous” link (how can it, there were none!) and, second, that my last page could not have a “next” link. But, of course, every time I added a new entry, the last entry would have to be updated to include a “next” link (pointing at my new entry). Further, my welcome page had to be updated so that the next calendar date became a link to my new entry’s page. So, every time I added a diary entry, I also had to edit my diary welcome page as well as edit the previous diary entry. All to maintain proper navigation between web pages!

This was the first time I realized that maintaining navigation links was a harder and more time consuming part of web site creation, then actually creating the content! I found this out, again, on a later project-based web site I tried to maintain. That web site had a hierarchical link structure, and adding a page meant I had to edit (and add links to) each page up the hierarchy. For example, take the outline below.

Now, suppose I want to add one more page to “Sub Area One Two,” like say, “Page Four.” Because of the strict hierarchy, and navigation on this site, I would have to also update the links for the sister pages as well as the mother page (as highlighted below). This means, add one page (with correct navigation links on it) and update four others! Of course, the more pages you add, the more you have to edit with each additional page, the more links to check and possibly break.

Ironically, none of these schemes are the worst. The single most common navigation scheme, especially for small web sites, is the “fully linked” navigation system. In this system, every page has a link to every other page. This method is what I used at the CBD web site. If I had to maintain all of these links, on all of these pages by hand … the task would quickly become unmanageable.

Note: This assumes that every page links to every other, including itself. That last option would also describe a “disabled” link used as a navigation aid to show users where they are on the site.

Did you notice that the total number of links grows exponentially with the number of pages on the web site? Each link is one more place to make a typo, and one more worry if you move, delete, or rename pages. I wish there was some magic bullet you could use that would just take care of this for you, and was easy for anyone, anywhere to use. And perhaps, with a full CMS (Content Management System) like Zope there is. But, for me and for now … I’ll stick with PERL and TEXT::Template. At least until I outgrow it.