Bread and Roses Blog

New B&R Website Coming

// July 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Just a short note to let people know that the long-overdue 2010 version of the Bread & Roses website is coming into form.

We should have a new website up and running within a week of this post.

As 2010 is almost over, we’ll have to get started soon on the 2011 version, which we plan to add all the bells and whistles to.

-William

The Necessity of Windows XP + IE (With some Open Software add-ons)

// March 10th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

I never thought I’d be happy to finally have XP+IE running in the computer room.
But here I am.

I went down to the basement and dug up a really old computer with a really fat-boy tube screen. It has a whopping 350 mb Hard drive with 700Mhz Pentium III processor.

I previously installed Puppy Linux on this guy, since I was so worried about Memory use. But…Let’s just say my wife isn’t a Techie and when I saw her crying because she couldn’t use it, well, my heart went out to her and I immediately installed XP pro. She’ll have Ubuntu on the laptop, but in the meantime we need something we can both use.

She needed a computer while she waits for a new laptop.
And I needed to be able to troubleshoot IE.

So here we are. I must have installed or formatted about 10 times in the past two weeks.

I do like Mozilla’s Seamonkey, which uses the same database for Mail and Browser.

I also set up Sunbird (it was on the same CD).

Although it’s no longer supported, I downloaded Multiple IE’s which allows me to see IE.4 and 5, which is a great tool for working through Browser compatibility problems.

Adjusting Column Height Using CSS

// February 20th, 2010 // No Comments » // CSS, Design

by Chuck

If CSS was supposed to be a big improvement over the early years of HTML-based websites, why is it still so challenging to design websites using CSS? Some of us who have been making websites since the early days of the web are often left wondering why CSS doesn’t easily do some layout tasks. CSS is supposed to separate the layout and style of the pages from the content of each page and for the most part CSS is a welcome standard. But CSS does a poor job of handling some obvious layout tasks, such as making the height of columns in a multi-column layout match. I know I’m not the only one who has been trying to figure this out.

This blog will be featuring tip and techniques that address annoyances like the CSS column height problem. Today, we’ll share a link to a tutorial at TutWow about this problem: CSS 100% Height

Several Notes About Word Press

// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blogging, Word Press

Over at his personal blog, Chuck writes some of his thoughts about Word Press and shares a few hints. He gives some tips about how to move a production blog or website into live mode. He also explains how to configure the permalinks options so your blog will display the name of pages and posts in the URL.

Facebook’s October 2009 Changes

// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Facebook, Social Media

This criticism of Facebook’s October 2009 changes was left in a draft status for several months, but we share it here to bring up our criticisms of Facebook design changes.

Last Friday Facebook rolled out significant changes to the functionality of their popular website. This is the biggest overhaul they’ve made to their site since earlier in 2009. It’s not surprising that the latest round of changes have pissed off many Facebook users. It’s not easy to please over 300 million users, but this round of changes could have been implemented better and pleased most of their users if Facebook had spent more time listening to users and web designers instead of the idiots in their marketing department. If you are doing something right–you run one of the most popular sites around–then it stands to reason that you’d be careful making changes. And it just doesn’t make sense to ape what your competitors are doing, especially the over hyped Twitter.

The biggest change Facebook made is to the functionality of the Live Feed, which is the page that most people use when they use Facebook. The Live Feed is typically accessed by clicking the “Home” link or Facebook icon at the top of any Facebook page. The Live Feed is where a user finds status updates of friends, links, posted media, and the annoying flood of application and quiz updates. The Facebook update to the Live/Status feed earlier this year added more pictures. information and user profile icons, but took away updates that shared which events people were attending, which friends and pages they were adding, and more. It’s a welcome development that Facebook brought back these updates in the new Live Feed, but they implemented the functionality poorly. More on this later in this article.

Facebook also added a “News Feed” which evidently takes the place of the “Highlights” box that was in the right column. The “Highlights” box always seemed to be Facebook’s concession to users who were upset about the main feed changes in early 2009. The ironic thing about the new Facebook look is that the Highlights box should have been kept simply because users need a concise overview of friend updates. The new “News Feed” is supposed to be an enhanced version of the Highlights box, but it provides too much information that duplicates what is in the Live Feed. One of the problems with the old Highlights box was that the formula for picking which friend updates was downright mystical. This problem could have been addressed by giving users options, but one of the problems with the Facebook update is that they won’t give users options.

Facebook explains the reasoning behind these changes:

“Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent.

Ultimately, Facebook believes these changes will increase engagement on the home page by surfacing more relevant stories to users.”

One of the things that should be obvious when one reads between the lines of the marketing department prose is the assumption that Facebook is assuming that there is only one kind user experience. What is Facebook thinking when it says “for the first time in a while”? The typical Facebook user is somebody who logs in once a day or more. It sounds like Facebook has created the News Feed for users who log in every few days or just weekly. Daily users aren’t going to care about what their friends posted yesterday. If they want to catch up with all the updates since their last session, the Live Feed should be designed in such a way to accommodate this. The News Feed is pretty worthless to power users who use Facebook frequently throughout the day.

Let’s look at some of the Facebook changes, both good and bad, and look at how Facebook could have implemented these changes without pissing off most of their users.

The Live Feed vs. the News Feed

Facebook did the right thing by adding events, friend updates, page additions and more, to the Live Feed. This is what many folks complained about after the early 2009 changes. For a social networking site, Facebook’s decision to remove these elements from the live feed was downright bizarre. When these updates are part of the live feed, users can see which events their friends are attending and they can learn about new pages and discover old (or new) friends. Since these updates were taken out, I’ve long wondered how much Facebook’s decision impacted people who were organizing events. The beauty of the old live feed is that you could see events that friends were attending and then you could RSVP to the events (and attend them). After the early 2009 change, Facebook took away this organic way of finding out about events. You still could learn about events when people posted them to their profiles or when you were inivted, but the removal of events from the live feed was pretty stupid.

While Facebook did the right thing by adding these things back to the live feed, they failed the implementation in several ways. They failed to give users better, more visible options, to control what types of updates appear in their Live Feed. The presentation of the information in the feed lends itself to information overload. This information overload will piss off typical users and even power users who refresh the live feed throughout the day. This will prompt some users to hide more friend updates, which clashes with Facebook’s goal of getting people to interact more. At worse, many more users will simply give up on Facebook.

Let’s get into the nitty gritty of what Facebook gets wrong with the new update and let’s look at some possible improvements.

One of the worst problems with the new Live Feed is that some types of updates take up more screen real estate than is necessary. The early 2009 version of the Live Feed had simple one line updates. When the updates take up too much screen space, they give users the impression that they’ll have to scroll through multiple pages of updates to catch up with updates.

Solving Once and For All Cross Browser Compatibility

// October 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // CSS

by William

I’ve done some thinking about how to approach this better…Here’s what I’ve come up with. It starts with the worst and gets better, not the other way around.

This method also accounts for browser usage stats.

1. Get a workable second computer with IE installed. Nothing special. Just something that turns on and loads/reloads Explorer.

2. Create 1st Design on/with IE. Go for 6 (19.6%). Now you can finally >:XX (get rid of designing for) IE5 (0.1%). By my quick calculations, IE6 could be with us for another 3-4 years. Unless usage trends change dramatically with Firefox/Chrome/Other new Browser. Kinda depends on the rate at which people are buying new computers.

3. Check to make sure code validates.

4. After first version is done/concluded, name the CSS “explorer.css” and put it away. That’s your IE version and should only be changed when absolutely necessary.

5. Create filter system for CSS to steer IE to explorer.css (Watch out for Linux going to that file). May need javascript. When loaded with other OSs, the page should be unstyled.

6. After transferring file, turn off old computer. Design now for firefox (44.4%), with all the bells and whistles you want. Css Code can be new or different or whatever you want. One programmer even creates different versions for “modern browsers” and provides a basic/less-pretty version for IE6 (Transcending CSS book).

7. Check again that new code validates.

8. Check for Safari (2.7%) and other OSs like Chrome (3.6%) and Opera (2.4%). Some give and take might be necessary here, but tweaking should be minimal, since they’re all good browsers.

9. Final check for IE7/Vista (Find a machine that runs it). If it needs tweaking, use IE conditional comments. Could just skip to #10 if you can’t get it.

10. Go to browsershots.org and cross your fingers.