Macromedia Bound
announcements
August 14, 2004, 05:27 PM
Well, that was a long silence, wasn't it? But a silent blog often implies a busy blogger, and I've been busy with many things for the past month and a half.
The most exciting news to come out of all that busyness is: I have a job! I just accepted an offer from Macromedia, a software company in San Francisco that makes these web tools doohickeys called "Flash" and "Dreamweaver", among other things. Maybe you've heard of them.
I'll be stepping into the position of Usability Specialist there next month, primarily working with the Flash product team. I'm really excited; there's a lot of smart, talented people there doing cool things that I'm looking forward to being a part of. The position they offered me is a perfect fit with what I want to do right now; I couldn't imagine a better opportunity at this point in my career. Oh, and I'll be in the same office as that Kenneth guy, which I'm cool with, I guess.
As for now, I'm busy finishing up a few things before I leave Pittsburgh, but hopefully I'll get a chance to post some retrospectives on our capstone project and other tidbits shortly.
Stay tuned!
Email Rob:
Goodbye, Comment Spam
announcements
June 26, 2004, 12:16 PM
Following an annoying comment spam flood last night, I've finally been pushed into installing the CAPTCHA anti-spam plugin for Movable Type. What this means for you, dear reader, is that there's now a little image that will appear in every comment entry form with a number on it. You'll need to retype that number into the text box next to the image in order for your comment to get posted.
The reason for this odd-seeming requirement is that most spam comments aren't posted by humans, they're posted by computer programs ("robots" or "bots") that crawl the web looking for comment forms and automatically submit junk comments so the spammer can sit idly by while his computer does all the dirty work whereas I have to manually clean up the mess. Not very nice at all, but spammers aren't very nice people.
The image thing prevents robots from posting comments automatically, since the robot can't read the number in the image like a human can (computers are notoriously bad at tasks that require recognizing words in noisy images, whereas humans are notoriously good at such things). If you're interested in getting more information, see the CAPTCHA project's web site.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but I had to take some measures to stem the tide, and this seemed to be the best option. Sadly, it's only a matter of time before any open system gets abused by the assholes among us.
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Rob Log Episode IV: A New Server
announcements
May 23, 2004, 04:32 PM
In the interest of improving my uptime and throughput, I've moved Roblog and everything else on the loki.lokislabs.org subdomain to Dreamhost, meaning I'm no longer entirely rolling my own webhosting. The changes should be transparent. There were some issues with getting everything set up (Dreamhost doesn't seem to let you set up an existing site and thoroughly test it on their server before throwing the DNS switch to make it live...) but it should be running smoothly again now. If you find any leftover glitches, please email me about them and I'll fix them ASAP.
The Labs is still up and running and will remain so for the foreseeable future, but at least now if I need to take it down for a bit, it won't take my website with it. Here's to hoping the improvement in service makes up for the (small) extra cost and the (marginal, so far) loss of control.
Posted by Rob on May 24, 2004 at 01:53 PM
Incidentally, the comment subscriptions (the feature that emails you when someone posts a comment to a post you have commented on) were all lost in the move, since they are handled by a plugin and not Movable Type itself. I figured this wasn't a big deal. If anyone really really wants to be subscribed to an old discussion, email me and I can add you.
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My URL Just Got Shorter
announcements
April 14, 2004, 03:48 PM
Because fewer characters to remember is a good thing.
I've set up a subdomain, so instead of typing www.lokislabs.org/~loki/, you can now just enter loki.lokislabs.org or, alternately, rob.lokislabs.org. No "www" is required, though it won't hurt to tack one on. The old URL is deprecated, although it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
Well, that was fun wasn't it? Maybe my next post will have some real substance to it...
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RSS Feed Now Contains Summaries
announcements
February 21, 2004, 02:00 PM
I've altered the RSS feed for roBlog to contain one to two line summaries of my posts rather than the entire content. My hope is that these summaries will help all of you out there in readerland decide whether the article is interesting enough to you to click through and read it, rather than throwing the long, hard-to-scan full content at you for every post.
If you prefer getting the full content, however, don't fret. The old version of the feed is still available as a full content feed. You will need to manually add it to your favorite news aggregator, however.
I've also deleted the RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 feeds under the assumption that nobody was using them anyway. Let me know if this presents a problem for anyone.
Posted by Patrick Barry on February 22, 2004 at 01:37 AM
BOOO!!! Hiss!!!
Full text feeds are the ONLY way to blog. Why do you regress to the primitive ages so?
Posted by Rob on February 22, 2004 at 10:53 AM
Mostly as a reaction to people telling me they wanted a more digestable summary of my articles before they decided to read the whole thing. The title alone wasn't always enough, I suppose.
If you read every word I write, then the full text feed may be better for you. Hence the reason it is still available (although no longer the default feed). If you would rather scan my feed for interesting content and skip those posts that aren't relevant to you, then summaries are preferable. Apparently not everyone finds absolutely everything I write interesting. Who knew?!
Email Rob:
Robotic Walker at CHI 2004!
announcements, life & times, usability
February 21, 2004, 01:29 PM
At Jodi's urging, Irina and Chung and I submitted an interactive poster to CHI 2004 on our social robotic walker interface design project. We found out just yesterday that it was accepted! Hurray!
Also, shouts out to Neema, Chad, Patrick, and Kevin for the acceptance of their poster on Apeer, their lightweight link sharing system, as well as to the CMU team for their acceptance to the design competition.
Email Rob:
roBlog is Printable
announcements
February 08, 2004, 01:03 AM
As promised, I've created printable versions of all the pages on this website. If you're wondering where the "printable version" links are, don't; the magic of CSS makes them unnecessary. Simply print any page on the site and it will be re-rendered by your browser to adapt appropriately to the new medium. In a nutshell, the print stylesheet removes the sidebar, forms, and other navigation and interaction page elements, changes the links to look the same as the text, and performs a few other tweaks to make the content appear presentable on paper.
For those of you who've always wanted to post my words of wisdom on your bedroom walls or lay them out on coffee tables for guests to read, well, now you can!
Posted by Dave on February 08, 2004 at 11:27 PM
W00t CSS!!!!
But hey...it still does't validate there buddy. I scoff at your standards compliance!
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Email Notifications are Operational
announcements
February 08, 2004, 12:41 AM
Some of you may have noticed the "receive new posts via email" option in the Syndication sidebar of roBlog. It's been there for awhile. Sadly, it hasn't actually done anything for most of that time; although you could enter your email address to subscribe, this didn't actually result in roBlog mailing you any posts. Movable Type, for some mysterious reason, requires the weblog author to manually request that notifications be sent out after each new entry is posted. Because I am lazy and forgetful, I pretty much never bothered to do this.
Happily, I found a nifty patch that modifies MT to always send out notifications automatically (and it's written by a fellow Pittsburgher, no less).
Bottom line is, if you tell roBlog your email address, the email notifications will work now. So those of you who claim you can never remember to read my weblog (or who just have a pathological fear of the web) have no further excuse.
Email Rob:
Meet Heimdall
announcements
January 15, 2004, 11:06 PM
As I mentioned earlier, I've been working for the past couple of weeks on a new design for this website. It took longer than I expected (as these sorts of things tend to do) but at long last I can finally say:
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Heimdall, release 1.
There have been a number of changes but for the most part I'll let you discover them for yourselves. There are also a number of things still to change; my most immediate task is to redo the categorization scheme to be more useful like I promised. Before I even get to that, however, I need to convert the static pages of this site over to the Heimdall look as well. That should happen shortly.
As always, comments, criticisms, and bug reports are welcome. Post them here or send me email.
Posted by Dave on January 16, 2004 at 09:21 AM
Your site isnt validating.
You have 261 errors: Check
Most are simple to fix...
Posted by Rob on January 16, 2004 at 12:18 PM
Yeah I tried validating before I deployed, but the validator is anal. I'm wontfixing that until someone can explain to me why I should care ;).
Posted by Dave on January 19, 2004 at 08:59 PM
I CARE!!!! I mean...uh...your not XML complient. What about that whole "unified document" thingy of yours. Get with it. It's the style of the times. Everyone else is doing it...(Cue after-school-special peer-pressure music)
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A New Year and a New Look
aesthetics, announcements, internet
January 01, 2004, 01:11 AM
The witching hour has come and gone and the year 2004 is now upon us. In this spirit of newness, I've been working on a new design for roBlog as well as the rest of this site, which I'm calling "Heimdall" (the name of the current design is "Odin", in case I never mentioned that). These changes will (hopefully) include:
- More useful categories
- Monthly and comprehensive archives
- The "looking forward / looking behind" feature I mentioned a long time ago
- Proper print versions of every page
- Numerous usability-related tweaks
The information architecture of the site shouldn't change much, but I have come up with a proposed new visual design template for the site. Note that this sketch is intended to give a sense of the visuals only, and thus I've left out some page elements like some of the sidebars and the comments sections. In the interests of participatory design, I humbly submit this sketch to you, dear readers, for comments and criticism. If you love it, hate it, or have thoughts on how it could be better, please leave a comment below or send me an email.
Heimdall, I should note, was the Norse god who slew (and was slain by) Loki at Ragnarok, the end of the world. In hopes that it won't spell the end of me, I'm making a New Year's Resolution to complete this project by this time next year at the very latest (and hopefully soon before); a feat which is far from certain since I'm at least as bad as Kevin at completing all the projects that I undertake.
Posted by Rob on January 02, 2004 at 12:50 AM
Today's Diesel Sweeties struck me as amusingly relevant.
Posted by Dave on January 02, 2004 at 09:41 PM
Oooooo....roundy-corner-type-dealies
Posted by Dan on January 05, 2004 at 10:53 AM
A few comments...from a man with a fairly ugly site himself. :)
I'm not sure the color palette works very well. The blue and green really clash. The top navigation links disappear. Plus, the colored bars overwhelm the page: your eye is drawn to them and not to what we're really interested in: the text of the entry.
I suggest you stick with the blue, personally, and make the top nav that blue and the side nav a lighter blue (#8AA8E6 perhaps).
I don't think you need two "previous week" bars. The one at the bottom probably would suffice.
How about moving the green bar to the very top of the page and moving the breadcrumbs below it? Breadcrumbs are awful big, btw.
I'd watch out from using those lines, too. They add a lot of unnecessary noise.
/time elapses...
Oh hell, I just did a quickie mock-up for you of what I'm talking about (with the exception of changing the color palette).
Check it: http://www.odannyboy.com/images/HeimdallDesign_ds.jpg
My rate is $75/hour. :)
Dan
Posted by Rob on January 05, 2004 at 09:22 PM
I uploaded a revised mockup that takes Dan's comments and others I've received into account. Right now I'm mostly working to get some css-ified Movable Type templates put together so that I can tweak the real thing.
Any further comments are still much appreciated, though. And Dan, your check is in the mail ;).
Email Rob:
The U&SA Book Chapter
announcements, software development, usability, writing & communication
October 10, 2003, 08:10 PM
I realized I haven't been posting much recently about what I've been doing for my actual job. For those of you that I haven't yet told, I'm in the process of writing a book chapter for an upcoming book on bridging the gap between usability and software architecture. You can even check out our preliminary abstract.
The chapter is about our experiences applying our U&SA technique to the NASA MERBoard project. It looks like I'll be first author for the chapter too, which is totally awesome. The current status of the actual writing is "completed first draft". If all goes well, the final, published book will be available for purchase next September.
Email Rob:
Newsable Beta: Getting Close...
announcements, software development
September 22, 2003, 09:53 AM
Apologies for the silence this weekend; I've been working hard on Newsable to complete it in time for a September 30th deadline I agreed on with Jim as well as to get it ready for a project I'm starting with Dana where we're gonna try to build a community around its design and development.
So far I have the entire harvester component ("Cain"; if you author a weblog I read you might have already seen him in your server logs) working, as well as the user registration and story listings. All that's left is site addition and removal, sorting and filtering, and some miscellaneous bug fixes. It's gonna be real soon now, boys and girls...
Here's a teaser screenshot while you wait:
Posted by neema on September 22, 2003 at 07:29 PM
i must say i'm curious to see what kind of interface you come up with. i like the idea of having my blog ship 'default' with the product! lol thanks robin
Email Rob:
The Borg Queen Awakens
announcements, design, people
August 19, 2003, 08:08 PM
My good friend Kerry Bodine has started up a weblog, Styleborg, that focuses on wearable computing and fashion. If you're interested in the new field of wearables, or especially if you're interested in the very new field of fashionable wearables (does this even qualify as a "field" yet?) her weblog is definitely worth checking out.
Welcome to the blogosphere, my queen. You have been assimilated ;).
Email Rob:
Newsable, the Usable News Aggregator
announcements, software development
June 18, 2003, 10:41 PM
At the risk of promoting vaporware, I've opened up the website for Newsable, the open source news aggregator I'm working on, to the public. Right now the only section that has real content is the About section, which describes the goals of the Newsable project and its aspirations towards providing techniques for developing usable open source software.
I've tossed this up so quickly (maybe too quickly; it isn't really ready for prime time yet) because Tristan Louis has started a Yahoo Group on Usability and Open Source called "UsabilityBazaar" and I wanted the project to have something visible to show for itself. The group's formation was picked up by Slashdot and MetaFilter (although I discovered it via Andy), so I'm hoping this early publicity will help turn the group into an interesting place to share ideas.
Email Rob:
Weblog Redesign Cocked, Locked, and Ready to Rock
announcements, internet, personal
June 11, 2003, 07:03 PM
As you have probably already noticed if you're reading roBlog dot org through the web interface rather than through a news aggregator, I've finally rolled out the new design I claimed "should be changing soon" when I started this damn thing over two months ago. Some nifty new features to note: the "active discussion" sidebar lists the top two most-recently-commented-on posts so you can see where conversation is happening at a glance, the archives have better(?) navigation controls, weekly archives are generated instead of the (overly long) monthly archives, the categories are finally reader-visible and category archives are generated, and the general look and feel of the weblog is consistent with the main site. The design isn't finished by a long shot; I still have a bunch of ideas I want to implement including the "Threads of Thinking" I mentioned awhile back. Most of these changes require modifying Movable Type, however, and since I have a few other projects that need my attention, these changes are going to need to move to lower-priority threads for the time being.
I've added some PHP code to the pages to handle the rotating quotes and taglines up at the top, which has unfortunately necessitated a file extension change that has un-perma-ed the permalinks. I put a mod_rewrite rule in place to hard redirect visitors from the old links to the new ones, but I can't guarantee it will be there forever so if you've linked to my site in the past, please update those links at your earliest convenience.
If you have any comments on or criticisms of the new design or find any lingering bugs, please do let me know. Feel free to comment on this post or send me personal email.
Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback about the mockups; I've tried to take everyone's reactions into account and I think that has improved my initial design tremendously. And special thanks to Mathilde and Kelly for their help with the visual design of the site. Everything that looks good about these pages is a result of me following their sage advice, everything that looks bad is a result of me ignoring it.
Email Rob:
U&SA Website Is Live
announcements, software development, usability
June 09, 2003, 03:20 PM
The Usability and Software Architecture project finally has a website. The front page has a nice short description of what the research is all about which may be of interest. All of our publications that we're allowed to put online or link to are available as well in case you'd like to learn more.
Feel free to send me any comments about the site or requests for additional information you may have. I can almost guarantee that any insightful feedback anyone sends us about the site will be brought up as a serious item at our next meeting, so don't hesitate out of fear that your email will only serve to further clutter Rob's already horrendously disorganized Inbox.
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Posted by Jeff on August 14, 2004 at 11:25 PM
Congrats Rob. Best of luck in California.
Posted by veji on August 20, 2004 at 03:47 PM
you the man!!
Posted by Kevin Lee on August 22, 2004 at 10:55 PM
Hey Rob,
Congratulations on your success landing on a great job at MM.
I'll personally look forward to seeing much user-friendly products from both Flash and DW.
Send my best regards to Kenneth guy as well when you see him in person.
PS I'll be in SF next February for business trip. Hope to see you and your office mate then.
Posted by Jed Wood on September 14, 2004 at 06:11 PM
Been a long time since I checked in, so this is a late congrats. Based on the lack of posts, I'm assuming you've been assimilated properly. After a drawn-out decision, I ended up staying here at ID. So far it's working out well.
Keep us posted. You probably remember from all my previous ramblings that I've been a Flash Usability evangelist for some time now, though it looks like you'll be making sure the IDE is usable, no (rather than what people create with Flash)? If so, say hi to Eric Pressman when and if you see him (based in Boston). I bump into him at various conferences-- cool fellow. I also met Deb Galdez at UPA 2003, though I don't recall where she's located.