March 31, 2005
Shiny tools
I'm somewhat taken aback by an unexpected piece of flamebait from David Heinemeier Hansson. And I always thought what distinguishes a caring craftsman was the love for his trade, not the whiteness of his tools. Silly me.
March 27, 2005
Accessifying the Ajax magic in Rails
The Ajax magic in Ruby on Rails 0.11 is nothing short of amazing. With only a few simple helper tags you can now jump on the Ajax hypewagon without writing a single line of Javascript, how cool is that?
Now it's time to add some polish to make the whole process more accessiblish. Right now our Ajax powered links and forms are nothing but dead dummy widgets without the Javascript pixie dust that powers it all.
Here are some ideas for you to tear apart:
What if we let every Ajax form and link point to a second controller action that would handle any server-side changes and redirect the client to a whole-page representation of the new state in a non-ajaxified environment?
Since a second action might lead to a duplication of controller logic, how about using the same action for both Ajax and vanilla requests? The controller would need to be able to test whether the current request was called in an Ajax context and then either render the partial for Ajax remixing or do a vanilla redirect to the whole, updated document.
Please do post your comments. This accessiblity thing is dear to my heart. Also maybe 37 Signals could be more relaxed about supporting non-mainstream browsers if we could solve this in a gentle manner.
March 18, 2005
Marketing for alternate realities
There is a single but elementary thing I do not understand about the online marketing business: Its target audience is made up of people who feel like buying stuff after they've been tricked into opening a website they never intended to visit.
IntelliTXT is the latest in a series of hints that I might live in an isolated bubble of space-time warped around itself. Now employed on major content sites around the globe, "IntelliTXT" hijacks single terms in mid-sentence and links them to their advertising partners. The fake links are "marked as advertisement" in form of a tooltip appearing after hovering the cursor over the link for a second before clicking, as everyone does. Joy ensues on sites like GameSpy where you thought you were following a hyperlink to a game review but (ha ha fool!) ended up somewhere completely else. It is this sort of experience that makes me reach for my credit card every time.
How about another theory that doesn't involve warped bubbles of space-time: Content providers and advertising networks don't give a flying fuck because they're getting paid per click. They're simply passing along a steady stream of pissed non-customers and then charge for it. And this is good for businesses advertising with IntelliTXT because... wait. Space-time bubbles all over again.
