I was watchin a video from Markus Sandy that featured an interview with Mena Trott of Six Apart. I often work while having videos playing on my second monitor, so I was just-barely watching, but as I was, I almost thought I was watching a White Stripes video. Am I the only one who sees a resemblance?

Luckily, the “Mena Trott Six Apart” text reassured me as to who it really was…

Did I say I was using osCommerce? I’ve switched to Zen Cart, which so far, is looking much better… I’ll post a review once I get deeper into it.

As for osCommerce, I started down the path of customizing the templates and layout, and started to get fed up. I’ve been using XHTML for over 5 years now, and when I have to move code from HTML 4 to XHTML that’s not much fun or a good use of my time. Since Zen Cart is a fork of osCommerce, which is much closer to a standards-based application (XHTML+CSS) I switched. More on this as we get deeper into it.

One of the strengths of WordPress has been that they say they “focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability” and while this isn’t always 100% correct, it’s mostly correct… enough to allow you to not worry about the details and focus on what you can do with the application.

Exciting times we live in, eh?

Good gosh, how could I have not recommended Human Dog before!

You know those goofy viral videos that are sort of funny? Well, Human Dog is like that, only well done, with good production values, and what appears to be good writing, and it’s actually funny and… Ok, I suppose it’s nothing like those goofy viral videos, except that they are “video on the internet…” done right.

I ended up wasting too much time today trying to add a feature to a CMS I wrote a few years ago.

See, between the code, the templates, and the database, it passes an id to keep track of each piece of content. I had to add the ability to write out static text files for a Flash application to read in. (What, Flash can’t read data from MySQL yet? On a sidenote, I actually thought about adding a feature like this years ago as a file cache that would use includes rather than dababase hits. I might still do that, but anyway, back to our story…) The application uses the id, but not the path, which is what I needed. My first attempt added about 10 lines of code, but didn’t work due to the path variable not being there. After much thinking about the code I’d need to write, I finally realized I didn’t have to write any more code than the 10 lines I already wrote! I just needed to add one line to a template file to pass the path data as a hidden variable.

I like to keep things simple, and use GETs and POSTs whenever possible rather than cookies and session variables which always seem to cause problems in the apps I’ve been given to work on in the past…

Anyway, that feature is done, and it’s on to the next one…

Over the years I’ve tried a number of TO DO lists. Some running locally, some online, some that output OPML, or RSS or some other crazy thing, but they all required some sort of work, and they still were not in my face enough. I scrapped it all and went lo-tech…

I’ve moved all my tasks to my Simple GTD Board. There is a magic marker, bits of paper, pushpins, and a few labels. It’s a simple system, but aren’t those usually the best? It’s right above my left monitor, and I can’t walk into the office without seeing it, so it’s in my face pretty much all the time. No site to visit, no app to launch and keep running. Simple is better, right? Now, back to getting things done…

Sometime between now and April 26, 2006, please head over to the mke blog of the week contest and vote for tinkernet. I mean, if you feel like it. I just think it’d be nice for a videoblog to win. Ok, thanks…

I’ve got two old beige G3 Macs in the home office, which are mainly used by the kids. Since they’re Apple hardware running Mac OS X, they’re pretty solid, even though they’re going on 8 years of use…

So today one of them had some problems starting up. Blank screen. We rebooted a few times, tried to start from a CD, and then tried all those things again. Finally, we switched monitors and determined it was a monitor problem. I can fix Macs, but fixing monitors? I don’t do that.

We though all was lost, but if you’ve ever fixed things, you know the last (or sometimes first) method you can try is the old “hit it” method. I gave the monitor a quick smack on the top, and it came to life. Success! It’ll probably die soon, but for now, it’s working just fine…

I recently walked in to a room of people voicing their complaints about Windows. One person said that their hard drive got wiped, and they lost everything, someone else said their computer ran slow, and I’m not sure, but someone may have even mentioned a virus…

It felt good to say “All of my computers are fine and running quite well!”

Of course, none of my computers run Windows. ;)

(Ok, “technically” my G4 does run Windows via Virtual PC, but it’s pretty simple to trash a disk image and copy a new one into place…)

We took the canoe out to Aztalan State Park for a short trip down the Crawfish River…

It was a great day for it, being about 70 degrees and sunny, in fact we even got a bit sunburned (which was not good.) The river itself was muddy as heck, and you couldn’t see into the water at all. We did manage to see a bunch of turtles, including a huge snapping turtle.

As far as a canoeing river, it was ok, but not great. I prefer a lot more twists and turns and clearer water…

(Oh, this was also the first attempt at strapping the canoe on top of the CR-V and I’m glad to say that worked out fine as well.)

Do you watch or create videoblogs? Help Andreas out with the Great Videoblogger Documentation ‘06 survey. If enough people fill it out, it might just mean more cat videos on the internet…

I’ve been working on a site that will use osCommerce, which seems like a nice package, but ugh, the old HTML 4.01 needs to go… Aren’t most of us using XHTML 1.0 by now?

Other than that, I’m getting somewhat used to the way that osCommerce is structured. I’m not saying I like it, but at least I’m getting used to it. (Oh, and the Javascript really needs an overhaul!)

I’ve seen too many organizations put usability last. They treat it like an afterthought. Functionality comes first, right? While having something that actually functions is important, having something that actually works is just as imporant…

What is the difference between something that functions and something that works? I think it’s usability. For instance, if you’ve got an approval system that sends an email to someone, requires them to log into a system, navigate to the proper place, type in a name, and do a search, all before they can approve (or reject) something, that might be a process that is functional, but it sure isn’t very usable. Sure it works, but it is too much work!

Harness the power of the information that you have. When you send the email, provide a link. This link should take the user directly to a page where they are presented with the information they need to approve, reject, or defer something. Does this seem like common sense? Many systems do this, yet many systems fail here, and it’s the users, not the developers that suffer.

The developers write the code, and hope that they do it right, and that is it. The users have to actually use these systems, day in, and day out, and if anyone feels the pain, it’s the users, not the developers. And believe me, the last thing you want is a group of users complaining over and over about how much work it takes to do a simple task in the system you built. Bad developer! Change your ways…

Podcasts are great. We’ve know this for years. Some of us more than others, but I digress… This is a request for people who speak at conferences. Please repeat the question!

Here’s the problem. I’m listening to a podcast from some conference where some smart person is talking, and they are taking questions, and you suddenly hear 30 seconds of near-silence, and then you hear the speaker answer. This isn’t always the case, but often the folks in the crowd asking questions are not mic’d, or you just can’t hear them. So you get something like this:

(whispers…)

Followed by:

RSS. Definitely it has been RSS…

Of course you don’t know if the question was “What is the most important part of your application?” or “What has been the biggest headache to deal with?” So you’re left guessing. This is easily solved if the speaker repeats each question before answering it.

I know, I should probably just attend all of these conferences instead of just listening to them. If you want to sponsor me, just get in touch…

I first heard of Mint when it came out, but I never really looked at it too deeply. A few months ago I heard about Mint again, and heard about Peppers, and wondered what the heck Peppers were… Well, Peppers are plugins for Mint.

Pepper is a cute name for Mint plugins. Pepper. Mint. Peppermint! There is even a 3rd party plugin site named Peppermint Tea.

Maybe it’s just me, but I sort of found the name ‘Pepper’ a little goofy. Yes, it distinctly says that we are talking about a plugin for Mint, but why not just call them plugins? Maybe since Mint is aimed towards web geeks, it’s ok, and if you are geeky enough to know that a Pepper is a plugin, it’s all good.

Still, should the WordPress folks have called their plugins “Papers” or “Letters” or something? Should the Movable Type folks call their plugins “Typefaces” or something? They we’d have to explain that a plugin for application X is called a “Foo” and a plugin for application Y is called a “Bar” and so on…