Brian McNitt’s Blog

If you work in technology or a related field and are not Twittering, start. If you own a small business, be sure to reserve your business name on Twitter immediately; like your URL, it’s important that you claim your business name before someone else does. (Some organizations on Twitter.) Not updating your company site or blog as frequently as you should? Twitter. It’s the easiest way to start micro blogging and to stay top of mind with customers and colleagues, at the same time in a relaxed and social way. Want to know what others in technology and design are doing, eating, thinking about, or where you can join them for a beer at this very moment in time? Follow them on Twitter.

What should you be doing now? Twittering. I won’t waste any more of your time so you can get started. Oh yeah, and if you’re on a Mac install Twitterrific.

Need someone to follow? Start with me. http://twitter.com/mcnitt

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twitter, blog, business, marketing, social, networking, trendmedia, twitterrific, mcnitt

For the techies in the crowd, I have been playing with glTail.rb for the past few days, a new ruby-based log file visualization script. Installed locally on a PC or laptop, glTail.rb SSH connects to and tails multiple Apache, Rails, or IIS web server log files and provides realtime site traffic visualization. (Instead of trying to explain the interface, see the movie above or demo on the glTail site.) Installation and setup is easy. I use Locomotive as my local ruby environment so I opened an existing Rails project, launched the Locomotive terminal and completed the required gem installs which added the gems the Locomotive library.

Watching glTail is incredibly addictive. Most interesting is seeing the single requests for email forms and single site images, such as the Linux and Apache icons on the lower right of my blog, from places in the Netherlands and South America, and from various web forum sites. Needless to say I’ve been having fun with these would be spammers and bandwidth thieves. More on that in another post. In the meantime, give glTail a try.

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glTail, ruby, rails, web, open source, iis, apache, trendmedia, mcnitt

“Good boy!” TrendMedia and GuideDogs.com win the Web Marketing Association’s 2007 Non-Profit Standard of Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Website Development. Wow, that’s a mouthful. Bottom line, it was a fun project to work on and at the end of the day one of those projects that really makes you feel good about what you do. Three cheers for accessibility and a big tail wagging congratulations to everyone at Guide Dogs for the Blind for their efforts in creating such a great resource for the blind and visually impaired community. Award well deserved.

Learn more about the Guide Dog’s web project on Brian McNitt’s Blog — Guide Dogs, TrendMedia, Accessibility in News.

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dogs, guide dogs, blind, web, accessibility, usability, trendmedia, mcnitt

This for the web UI developers out there. One of the more difficult tasks in creating accessible websites based on scalable “EM” font sizes is calculating the font sizes for nested page elements. (For a tutorial on using EMS, see Richard Rutter’s How to size text using ems.) There is a simple formula for EMS calculation which is “Child Pixels / Parent Pixels = Child EMS” but tracing back through the cascade can get difficult and time consuming with more involved layouts.

Today I discovered Riddle’s Em Calculator which makes calculating relative font sizes a breeze. Start by defining a parent node with a pixel-size equivalent, then add child or sibling nodes; EMS values are dynamically calculated and updated for each element. Awesome. The current web application uses cookies to store session information which turns out to be a bit buggy (a user registration system would be nice) but this tool is a great start. Give it a try.

Technorati tags:
accessibility, css, web, design, trendmedia, mcnitt

In working with LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired and Guide Dogs for the Blind, much of my work centers around the accessibility and usability of web pages in screenreader software such as JAWS, Window-Eyes, and Apple VoiceOver. For those interested in screenreader software and accessibility, Doug Geoffray from GW Micro discusses the history and development of GW Micro’s Window-Eyes screenreader software and answers questions from developers in the two part presentation “From the Mouth of a Screenreader”. (Unfortunately, Doug’s a bit negative about Apple’s development of screenreader software native in OS X, but it’s to be expected since VoiceOver directly competes with Window-Eyes. Otherwise, it’s an interesting and informative presentation.)

Doug Geoffray: From the Mouth of a Screenreader - Part 1

Doug Geoffray: From the Mouth of a Screenreader - Part 2

More videos available at Yahoo’s YUI Theater.

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accessibility, window-eyes, jaws, screenreader, freedom scientific, gw micro, apple, lighthouse, guide dogs, trendmedia, mcnitt

TrendMedia recently completed work on a new, accessible web site for Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California. Today, Guide Dogs released a press release on PR Web which in turn appeared on Google News — Guide Dogs for the Blind Launches State-of-the-Art Website: a Model for Accessibility. You can read the complete release on PR Web.

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Was just going through my inbox when I spotted a message from Harmen Steele, a Ruby on Rails developer I met at RailsConf 2006. Harmen was easily the coolest person I met at RailsConf. (Harmen: I’m so sorry. I am getting around to answering your email from Aug. 24, 2006…seriously! Sorry it’s taking so long; I just never seem to get out of firefighting mode.) Anyhow, I clicked on the web address in Harmem’s signature and got the following…

I laughed and thought, ain’t that the truth? We’re all too busy to take care of our own marketing. Clients beware: never hire a web developer with an up to date website — it means that they are not working! Harmen: I hope your coming soon page never changes; I’ll know you’re doing well. Now on to answering your email…

All the best.
Brian

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railsconf, Harmen Steele, web development, busy, mcnitt

It was only a matter of time before Google launched it’s own code search engine. Having played around with Google Code Search for a bit, it is clear that Krugle.com currently has the better site with more advanced user interface and search features. Google of course has the Google brand and a 125 billion dollar market cap. Does this spell the end for the smaller search services? It will be interesting to watch the code search wars unfold.

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google code search, google, krugle, trendmedia, mcnitt, koders

Today web host Server4You announced a new customer service forum. This move follows a long history of lackluster customer service which I believe, with the explosion of blogs and independent web hosting discussion forums, finally began to catch up with the company. Until recently, a Google search on Server4You would yield a mix of canned company press releases and customer complaints of poor quality of service. As a consumer, which are you most likely to believe?

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After reading a user comment on one of Dave Winer’s posts about Second Life, I decided to check out Slackstreet — the location where Robert Scoble and his son are beginning to build their virtual empire. Wondering around the Slackstreet neighborhood I discovered a building called the Multimedia Center. I ventured inside and soon began to hear music. Inside was a virtual projection screen playing a music video by hip-hop artist Pete Miser. The video was called Scent Of A Robot. “This is great!”, I thought.

I haven’t discovered much new music lately that interests me. I looked up Pete Miser on the web and found his website. I watched a few videos then went to iTunes to see if his work was in the music store. Sure enough, it was so I purchased Pete’s latest album, “Camouflage Is Relative“. So there you have it — a virtual world experience that influenced a real world purchase! If your business is not in Second Life, perhaps it’s time to start thinking doing something about it.

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second life, mcnitt, business, slackstreet, winer, scoble, miser

For the PHP developers/bloggers out there, Ben Ramsey just posted a great article complete with code on how to dynamically generate a blogroll from del.icio.us bookmarks using OPML and the del.icio.us API. (Huh?) For the non-technical crowd, here is a slightly less geeky translation.

1. A blogroll is a collection of links to other blogs. When present, blogrolls are often found on the front page sidebar of most blogs. I have a short blogroll on the home page of my blog. Most blogrolls are a bit longer.

2. The website del.icio.us is a site to save and share bookmarks online. If you are still using the bookmark feature in your browser, it’s time to start using del.icio.us instead.

3. OPML is a format used to exchange lists of things, most commonly lists of sites or RSS feeds. For example, if I have a list of ten blog sites that I want to share with you, I could send you the list in an OPML file. You could then import this OPML into your news reader or blog software that understands OPML and view the list.

Nice work, Ben — a very useful script!

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opml, del.icio.us, ramsey, php, mcnitt

If you dismissed my post in March and cocktail party ramblings about business opportunities in online virtual worlds such as Second Life, maybe this will finally earn your attention — Second Life has made the May 2006 cover of Business Week magazine. (Thanks to friend John Murphy for pointing this out.)

Read the Business Week article, and check out a podcast interview with Business Week journalist Rob Hof. So what is your Second Life business plan?

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second life, business week, virtual, mcnitt

If you work in web design and development, you may be interested in this new resource — ThinkVitamin.com. Started by Carson Workshops, Vitamin is a magazine style site featuring industry news, training for designers and programmers, reviews of the latest software tools, interviews, podcasts, and workshops for web professionals. The Vitamin editorial and advisory board consists of luminaries in standards-based design, XHTML/CSS, AJAX, PHP, Ruby on Rails and other technologies defining new web design practices.

I recently subscribed to the Interviews and Training podcasts and listened to a great interview with Dave Shea, creator of the CSS Zen Garden site while grocery shopping at lunch today. Great stuff. The only thing I would add to my wish list (for you Vitamin editors if you are reading) is a master RSS feed of all site content. I look forward to following this publication in the future.

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vitamin, web, css, shea, carson, design, programming, mcnitt

It’s official. You can now run Microsoft Windows on Intel based Macs. From the Apple web site: “More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.”

Read more about Bootcamp at Apple.

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apple, os x, leopard, microsoft, windows, bootcamp, mcnitt

After seeing Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, and Emily Chang all blog about Second Life, and all three being sensible grownups (mostly), I figured it was time to check out the game. In a nutshell, Second Life is exactly that – a complete online virtual world where just about everything you can do in real life (buy real estate, build a house, start a business, etc.) has a parallel in Second Life. Of course, if that was all there was to it, who would go? After all, who needs a second or third job with virtual bills to pay? In fear of stating the obvious, everything in the Second Life online world is enhanced. For starters, you can fly. Second, you can control every aspect of your appearance. Have you ever seen a flying Elven supermodel? Well you will, and this seems to be a large part of the appeal of most all virtual worlds; very few people in Second Life are twenty pounds overweight or have bad hair days. Take Carinthia Sansome, a virtual skydiver for example. Carinthia is a player from Amsterdam and often frequents the scene around Abbotts Aerodrome, a functioning virtual airport complete with space age vehicles. You can communicate with anyone you encounter. (Yes, that’s my character in the hat.)

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