How to Screw-Up Your Web2 Application

If I were a marketing guy, I would keep you in suspense right up to the end of this post.  I would waffle on for ages about how and why I'm going to tell you "the secret," and what a super guy I am for letting you in on this.

But I'm a programmer, and time is precious.  All over the web I see this particular piece of egregious stupidity:

Apps that use email addresses as user-ids.

I strongly advise against the use of email addresses as login ids.  Consider the following 2 common cases:

1. The user changes their email address (due to changing provider or whatever). 
2. A user leaves the community.  Months/years later another user joins; they have the same email address as the old user, but are not the same person.  Are you going to refuse them entry?

In the former case, if you allow them to change their login to correspond to their new email address, you lose the trail of what they've done over time, since you've essentially changed their identity.

Worse, yet, if you're doing any kind of app that allows the user to build up a history, karma points, reputation, whatever, since you force them to throw away their entire investment in your site.  They may as well go elsewhere.  That history took the user time, energy and effort to build, and constitutes your only real barrier to entry against competitors who want to eat your userbase.

In Summary:

A login-id is an identity.  An email address is not an identity.  It is an address.

Why is CSS so damn HARD?

Seems to me that the whole CSS model is pretty poorly designed.  It shouldn't be so damn hard to implement a website design.  I'm not talking about bleeding-edge Zen Garden stuff; I'm talking about very simple layouts.

For a start I prefer liquid layouts: That graphic designers coming from more traditional media hate fear and loath the concept, I understand.  Its a mindset - the user has partial control over how a thing looks - and many graphic designers have trouble dealing with their inability to guarantee pixel-perfect alignments.  Perhaps the user wears hectic prescription glasses, so 18pt fonts are a reasonable default for them.  Get over it.

Secondly, I'm no n00b at CSS.  Whilst I'm hardly a professional CSS designer, I think I understand the concepts and details pretty well, and I've fumbled my way around a fair number of web designs using CSS with results that have attracted fair compliment from people who do that stuff professionally. (No, this blog is not currently an example! That's what I'm working on.)

But its still so damn hard!

One of two thing I think are needed: either

1. a redesign of CSS that works to a "springs 'n' struts" layout model, or alternatively a "springs 'n' struts" model that can get compiled to CSS2 (possibly on the fly as a filter), or
2. the additional of another "position" mode in CSS - "absolute-relative" positioning - absolute positioning of an element, but relative to the containing box.

Number one is unlikely (except maybe as a translated/compiled language), but number 2 is possible without breaking existing CSS-based layouts.

It would sure make simple layouts a hell of a lot simpler to implement.

Anything New Takes Time

I recently added "Crossroads Dispatches" to the ever-growing list of blogs I keep an eye on.  I liked the fusion of touchy-feely and hard-nosed reality.  Something like my lifestyle that attempts to fuse web entrepreneurship with self-sufficient living and growing my own food.  Something like Sushi - the blandness of Rice with the Bland/Salty fish and the BITE of Wasabi.

In Crossroads Dispatches: Living Takes Time, Thinking Big Takes Time, Ms Rodriguez writes about how many fast-paced people discover that going more slowly really enables them to go faster, but only after some (often severe) personal crisis.

This brings to mind the oft-touted common wisdom of Internet startups: "If you can't get something up and running within a couple of (days|weeks|months) you probably don't have anything. You probably don't understand what it is you're wanting to build."

What horse-shit.  Frequently this comes from people who are not programmers, and who have no clue of all the intricacies and complexities involved in designing, building, debugging, deploying, managing and enhancing an application; least of all a distributed application.  Now try this all by yourself. You get to do everything yourself.  There's nobody else to lean on to put together the graphics or to install the database or to spot the stupid mistake that's going to take you half a day to figure out by yourself.  There's no-one who will listen to your ideas and tell you when you're spouting crap or just in love with the smell of your own shit.

Its hard work, and it takes time.  Lots of time.  And you're better off going slowly than trying to meet the bullshit expectations of some alleged common wisdom. 

As you may gather, I have been working on a new New Venture for some weeks now (which also accounts for the sporadic and irregular blog posting) and am about halfway through the development cycle.

What I Really Want In a BlogSystem

Now that I'm getting the hang of this "blogging" thing (humour me in my misguided belief :-), I find myself writing more than I ever did - and that's great!  But for a couple of misguided influences and accidents as a kid I might have ended up as a writer, so perhaps this is my way of playing catchup.

Prompted by the provocative "What would I do different if I had to start my blog over?" I started to mull over what I would really like to see in a blogging system.  In fact I was discussing this just the other day with "Lemnik" who tells me he is thinking of writing a new (probably Open Source) blogging system.

Tags vs. Categories

Firstly I want every post to have a set of tags associated with it, rather than having to pigeon-hole posts into categories.  Categories may work for some people, but not well for me, and tags can certainly fulfil the same function.  They also allow you to put a single post into multiple "categories". So away with Categories, and in with the Tags.

Multiple Authors

Many blogsystems do this.  Just not Blojsom.  There are a number of good reasons why Blojsom is the software that suits me best, not least are its awesome integration capabilites.  It sports just about every kind of API for blogging, but the one serious shortcoming is that it pretty-much assumes  "One Man, One Blog".  "Person" if you're feeling particularly politically sensitive.

All the Right Pinginess

Blojsom really scores here.  It will ping any blog aggregation service or search engine whenever you update your blog, and its as easy as entering the notification URL of the site into the blog settings.

Comments and Trackbacks

Of course. With spam-controls. Optional, too - some people want to turn them off, and with good reason.  On the other hand the comment setups could be a lot better - much more like forum systems.  Mostly its just a linear list of comments, and needs something much more "conversational".  And should include something from all those trackbacks, too.

Built-in Ratings

Yes, there are an ever-growing number of "rating" sites and tools out there, but how hard would it be for my blogsystem to have one built-in?

Easy Linkiness

Again, there are lots of services that do this.  I use a few of them to keep my various blogrolls, but its not difficult to provide an easy way to capture the URLs of blogs I want to list in a blogroll, and could easily include the sort of OPML/Atom feed capabilities that allow integration with the wider world.

CSS and Templates

Open up the CSS.  Most blogsystems seem to hide it away.  Blogger is a good exception, where its right out there in the template.  But god help you if you screw it up!  No going back!  Good way to make not-too-confident-in-the-first-place users really, really nervous about hacking the look&feel of their site.  Some goes for templates.

Summary

Two themes, I think:

1) Enable a much more open, multi-way conversation with my readers.  Enable them to help me articulate this stuff I'm blogging (whatever that ma be.)

2) Give me more choices in how I structure the thing - make the structures flatter, more open to integration (if I want it.)

No doubt I'll think of many more features the moment I press the "Publish" button...

Front Door Syndrome

Ever on the lookout for god and bad ideas in software user-interface design, here is one on LinkedIn really blows me away. Its a classic case of what I term Front Door Syndrome.

Front Door Syndrome is a website misfeature most often designed-in by web designers who come from the conventional advertising or conventional media world - a world where there really is a Front Door - a single point of entry.  Somehow they try to keep hold of this idea in the web, where it really doesn't apply at all.  They forget, or never absorbed the fact, that every page in a website is a Front Door.  And, in a world of such abundance that the only realistic way to navigate to content we seek is through search, every page is guaranteed to be used as a Front Door: A First Point of Entry into a website.

We've all seen those sites; if you're lucky its just a big page saying "Welcome to Fubar.com.  Click <here> to enter."  If you're less lucky it is a great ugly Flash animation.  Personally I never get further - my mouse finger has reflexively clicked me away to somewhere safer and more pleasant in the 'net.

So what has this to do with LinkedIn?  I searched for the name of someone I knew long ago, and their name turned up on LinkedIn.  I clicked the link from the search-results page to take a look whether this page really belongs to the person I was looking for.  Something like http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/801/801 (I'll use my brother's LinkedIn page to illustrate, firstly to protect the unwary, and secondly because I know he won't mind some publicity). 

Go ahead - click the link.  I'll wait here for you....

...Good!  You're back.  If you're using a decent browser you can have both pages open on different tabs so you can see exactly what I'm about to tell you about.  But I digress...

On the destination LinkedIn page, there are a couple of links enabling non-members of the LinkedIn network to Join Now.  Very good.  Very viral.  But I am already a LinkedIn user.

Where is the link allowing me to log in?  Where is a link to a login page?  Nowhere.

No wonder LinkedIn is seen by geeks as a tool purely for spammers and fools.