Archive for July, 2004
In Review
July 4
I think I’ll save another discussion of the CMS built for my work until after the meeting this Tuesday. They’re coming over to show me/us how we’re using the product incorrectly. Yeah, that’ll be a fun day.
We’ve been busy, the last few days, in our personal lives; it’s been enjoyable, though. We went and saw Dodgeball last Saturday with Elaine’s mom after getting all-we-could-eat ice cream at the local Blue Bell ice cream factory. It was a fun movie; nice to see Vince Vaughn in something else. Apparently this got us onto a Ben Stiller kick, ’cause we’ve watched two more of his movies this week: Duplex and Along Came Polly.
We picked up a new toy for Poly this past week, too. It’s a furry, stuffed hedgehog. When you squeeze it, instead of the customary squeek, it moans. Poly loves it. It’s about a quarter her size, so she has problems carrying it around, but she does anyway. Crazy little dog. I’ll try to get a picture soon.
I started reading another Dean Koontz. This one is By the Light of the Moon. So far it’s about a pair of people (a man and a woman) who were attacked in their hotel rooms, injected with a syringe full of stuff by a kindly-looking older man (who was later killed in an exploding car by “agents” of some kind). They meet up and begin to flee the area, which the old man told them was a good idea (cemented by his fiery death) with the infected man’s autistic brother. The stuff gives them apparently psychic powers; she begins to see visions of birds and other ominous sights, he gets sensations about people off of things they have recently touched. I’m about halfway through it.
I’ve also started trying to help more people in Textpattern and web design in general. I’ve been helping Henry with his web site and I’ve volunteered my services over at the forum. I’ve also worked out a hack for using the article image function of Textpattern that let’s you specify an image to be associated with an article. If you specify a non-local image (one on another server), it doesn’t generate an alt attribute, which will invalidate your page. With my hack, it generates a blank one. Not any better for blind people or people who have their images turned off, but it does let your page validate.
Today is July 4th. It’s our first Independence Day as a married couple. It’s funny how that piece of paper and those two rings make everyday things seem a bit more special the first time around. We went up to Elaine’s mom’s house to blow up fireworks last night (we’re still there) and we’re going down to a friend’s house tonight to watch the city’s fireworks display, since they live just a block or two away from where they set them off. It should be fun and we haven’t seen them in awhile, so it’ll be nice to visit with them again.
There have been a few changes made around eyeheartzombies this week. I reworked the about section of the site so it’s a bit faster to get to the information you want, and easier to get around once you have it. I’ve also tweaked the CSS to display some things the way I wanted them to be originally, but hadn’t ever gotten them to be. I have a few other additions/changes I want to make, so things might be a little strange over the next few days, but it’ll all keep working.
Do It Well, pt 1
July 1
The company I work for hired a “web” development firm to build a new, more powerful web site about 2 years ago. The firm came in yesterday to demo to us the site and it’s accompanying backend. I won’t name any names. This is the most horrid example of application development I think I have ever seen.
The company I work for is a community newspaper. We publish six different papers each month. They go to doorsteps and businesses in the six surrounding communities. If you live in/near Tulsa, you’ve probably read one of our papers, or at least seen it in a restaurant newspaper rack. They’re free and they’re actually a pretty good paper; several color pages each month, a community calendar, and, if you care about the social elite in Tulsa, a lot of event photos. As a newspaper, we have a lot of content to get out. Articles with photos, articles without photos, photos without articles, advertisments (both for us and for clients), and, of course, information about ourselves–advertising and subscription rates, deadlines, delivery dates, and general company information. Also, there aren’t a lot of us (myself, my wife, the publisher/editor, the managing editor, a one-person sales staff/accountant, and a secretary of sorts). Of those who work directly with the content of the paper, only I know any HTML or CSS. My wife and the managing editor have some idea of how to use an FTP program. That’s it. It’s a very technologically-impaired office.
I have not been at this company since the contract was started for the web site. If I had been, I’m sure I would have just produced the site in-house and that would have been that. I came in late to the game and, as such, have gotten stuck with what’s been decided before me and what is to be delivered. Let me give a bit more background, though.
When I met with the company (we’ll call them Dev), their representatives showed me what had been done before (some templates/designs that my predecessor had built) and talked with me about what needed to come now. We talked about how no one in the office is very savvy when it comes to web technologies; how the office-side of the site needed to be as user-friendly as possible; how I could advance the site as needed at a later date, but it should start off pretty much perfect. I left the meeting feeling pretty good. I had promised to create a template for them.
After creating several templates, I finally had one to send them that the boss was happy with and that I didn’t loathe; most importantly, though, it worked in all major browsers. So I sent it to them and we waited.
A few weeks later, I get an email about a new meeting to further work out what the site needs to do. OK, I thought, no biggie. They’ll come over and I’ll just go through it again.
They came, we talked, things where drawn on the markerboard, notes were taken. They left and I felt it would all work out. This meeting had been primarily the backend of the site and I felt confident that I wouldn’t have to teach any old dogs any new tricks.
Some of the key points we brought up were that it would be a web-based interface. You copy & paste the story into a form, fill in a title and a byline and it generates a database entry with the story and other required bits (which paper(s) it’s in, how long it should run for, when it should start running, etc). There would also be a form to upload images and other accessory items (PDFs, video clips, whatever). This, I should point out, was against what Dev had wanted. Dev originally wanted us to just use a form to upload a PDF or a Word file and that would be the article. As anyone can see, that doesn’t work well for universal accessibility, much less screen-readers, translation services, and RSS feeds.
We get a working demo about a month later. When we log in to the admin site, it’s just a place to fill out details for an uploaded file: html file location, image location, cutline for image, tooltip (title to those of you who are HTML-savvy) for the image, headline, subhead, summary for the article, along with the article’s author’s name, email, phone and fax numbers, title, and web address. Also which paper it appears (as opposed to appearing in some mixture of the papers, say 3 out of 6) and what category of the paper and classification for the article (headline, feature, or standard). I’ve attached an image of the form.
This is the same form as in the newest version of the site. As far as I can tell, it’s main objective and accomplishment is to keep track of where an article is on the server. The server can do that on it’s own. The CMS should keep track of more information in a more controlled and useful way. This is just a bunch of runaround.
At the demo meeting, we explain that this is not the site we ordered, it doesn’t have the functionality we requested, and we’re frankly disappointed. They effectively say “It’s not our fault! We did what we were told!” (Even as it conflicted what was still written on the markerboard) And back to their office they went. A few days go by, the inform us that they don’t feel they can make the changes we brought up (the functionality that should have been there from the start) and still meet their cost demands, so we could either quit here or they’d take it to the finish they had planned and then give it to us. Apparently my boss decided to let them finish, because we now have a new “finished” product.
They sent the demo URL to me a couple of weeks ago. It was deadline time, so I didn’t get to check it out, but as soon as deadline was over, I opened it up. Within 10 minutes I had found a security bug; they left the $_GET array open–anyone who wanted to could stick in their own code. After a couple of phone calls and emails, they fixed it. I tried it again, and they had, but I’m not certain there aren’t other holes in the site.
In any case, Dev shows up yesterday (Wednesday, the 30th of June) to demo the site to us. They come in and proceed to show me the site. After they show it to me, they ask if I have any questions; I don’t, I’m choking on my own spit. They leave and I start to digest what I’ve been shown.
As I said, we publish 6 papers, once a month. That’s about 20–30 articles each month, not to mention photos that don’t have articles. The breakdown for adding an article to the site is something like this:
# Open up the article in QuarkXPress
# Open up a new HTML document in BBEdit
# Copy and paste the article text, including image cutlines, into the BBEdit document and apply appropriate HTML
# Upload the HTML file somewhere on the server
# Open up any images in Photoshop and resize appropriately
# Upload images to the server. Again, somewhere.
# Log on to the administration site and fill out the afformentioned form
I did one today. It took me an hour straight through. I’ve been doing web design for 8–9 years; I know what I’m doing. They’ve tried to say that this is a simple enough system for the other people in the office to use, people that have no idea what HTML is, much less how to FTP files to the server or give relative locations to files.
The whole point of this gigantic post isn’t to bitch and complain about the horrible product we were given; it’s not to claim that I’m better than them or that I wouldn’t have made any of the mistakes that were made. The point is that if you’re going to do something, do it well. Don’t promise things you can’t deliver.
I’ll write another post soon, a part two, explaining what I would have done differently. I’ll try to provide some pictures, so you won’t have to read so much.