Campaign Monitor is an online email marketing application that enables designers to create, send, manage and track branded emails for themselves and their clients with ease. Freshview, the company behind Campaign Monitor recently updated the software, adding additional functionality that enables designers to not just run campaigns but actually re-sell it as if it were their own product. They’ll even let you rebrand the application interface and set your own mark-up on the pricing!

37signals uses Campaign Monitor for their HTML emails

HTML email? No thanks!
Along with every other designer I know I’m not exactly the biggest fan of HTML emails. The sheer number of email clients and their sketchy CSS support dredges up memories of web development in the late 90’s. Tables? Inline styles? …and that’s just to get it displaying correctly across the many (many!) email packages, not to mention managing the recipient email addresses and tracking the campaign results. It all sounds far too complicated, expensive and not at all what I got into this web design malarkey for.

Clients do love those branded emails though, so it looks like they’re here to stay. Let’s be thankful then for Campaign Monitor.

First impressions count
Two things struck me immediately about Campaign Monitor (before I had even signed-up for an account). The first was the pricing and just how much you seem to get for very little cost (you can actually do an awful lot for free). Unlike many other internet applications there’s no sign-up or monthly fee; you simply pay whenever you send emails to more than 5 people, which means you can thoroughly test almost everything about the service before committing. The pricing structure is very straightforward – you pay $US5 plus $0.01 per recipient, so sending an email to 500 people would cost $5 plus (500 x $.01) = $10. You also have the option of invoicing clients a marked up cost.

Get paid when your clients send html emails

The other thing that really stood out was the wealth of resource and support information offered across the CM website. Rather than just promote the product it offers information about best practice for designing and sending HTML emails, a run-down of CSS support offered by various email clients as well as tips on how to pitch and charge-for email marketing campaigns. The content across the site is really well written and leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling that ongoing support from these guys won’t be a problem.

Sounds Great, but What About the App?
Once you have signed up to use Campaign Monitor you are provided with a personalised ‘mycompany.createsend.com’ domain name. This is where you manage your clients, email campaigns, billing for each client and your own account settings which includes the white label customisation settings for the interface. You can choose from nine different colour schemes, add your own logo, add a log in form directly from your own site and even change the createsend url to your own domain if you want.

Just like the CM website, the app itself is beautifully designed with a clear, simple interface, that makes it easy to find your way around (which is no small feat given the amount of functionality it’s packing). It’s testament to this intuitive design and the friendly, succinct copywriting, that I never once felt lost or confused while using the application (there’s a good spattering of in-context advice and help links in case you do need assistance or further information as you go though).

Clients and Billing
The first page you’re greeted with is a simple dashboard which lists your clients and a run-down of latest activity. Adding new clients is very quick and easy with a short one-page form where you can set exactly how much access they can have to the system, what they will be able to see and do, as well as their billing details. You can choose to run things exactly as you please, from allowing no client access and sending your own invoice outside of the application, to allowing your client to do everything themselves and have Campaign Monitor charge them and send you your mark-up profit automatically.

Sub-accounts for each client are automatically generated. This is where you can track each client’s campaign, add email templates, create and send emails, manage their subscriber lists and view related campaign reports. These are also the pages that your client will see if you’ve provided them with access to their account.

Sending and managing campaigns
Sending a new campaign is straightforward, and presented as a four-part linear process that you are guided through step-by-step in a clear and logical manner. Once you’ve set the campaign title, subject line, sender and reply-to addresses you import your email design and content. Depending on how you choose to mark-up the html (don’t worry – it’s easy and explained clearly on the Campaign Monitor website) you can invoke a fancy new WYSIWYG editor that you or your clients can use to add content to the email and see exactly what it will look like in real time as you type.

Let clients add and edit email content in real time using the super-simple WYSIWYG editor.

Next you add your list of recipients and send it off. One of my favourite features was how you can choose to have Campaign Monitor test your email design and content to ensure it renders correctly in most email clients and will pass through spam filters and firewalls. This really stood out for me as an amazingly useful feature. As designers we all know what a nightmare it can be making sure our sites render correctly in all browsers, but all of the email clients; web-based, desktop and mobile too? No chance. The only complaint I have was that I found this to run a little too slowly (about half an hour) and still not all of the results came back. The guys at Freshview ensure me that this is being improved however, and I still think it’s well worth the extra $5 they charge for the hassle it saves regardless!

There’s a lot of little extra features associated with sending out a campaign such as automatic archiving of campaigns within each clients’ sub-domain but two nice little touches that really caught my attention were the ability to automatically convert your email’s css from an external sheet to inline styling at import, and automatically generating an online version for those recipients to whom the email doesn’t look right. I had assumed these were both things I’d have to take the time to implement as the designer, so was pleasantly surprised to find them built-in. In fact, I was hard pressed to find anything missing at all, and instead was frequently surprised by handy, unexpected little features like these.

And the Rest
When I first looked at Campaign Monitor I assumed sending branded html email was pretty much it, but that’s just the start! Once your campaign gets sent you can track all manner of information about who opened it, what they clicked, who marked it as spam and who unsubscribed, all presented in a nice Google-Analytics style interactive report. In fact, there’s integration with Google Analytics too, so you can track where on your site recipients go after reading your campaign!

Real time, interactive campaign information presented in a clear, familiar ‘Google Analytics’ style report.

There are a number of other notable features, and improvements over the previous version worth mentioning that I came across while trying out the system but didn’t get to explore fully, particularly around targeting subscribers, generating sign-up forms, subscriber management and the Campaign Monitor API. You can find the full list of features and find out more about them over at the Campaign Monitor site.

Is it Any Good?
You can probably tell by now that I have become a fan of Campaign Monitor. In the course of a week I’ve gone from dreading a client asking for a HTML email to being a lot more interested in the potential that branded email marketing has to offer both my business and my clients’. Campaign Monitor removes so much of what was a hassle before that I’m even starting to think I might start promoting it as service to my clients. I could even make some cash out of it too!

Software name: Campaign Monitor (White Label version)
Developer: Freshview
Price: $US5 plus $0.01 per recipient (but you can set your own mark-up)
Rating (out of 5): 5

A New Type of Gorilla is Born

Clearleft is comprised of skilled professionals who have a passion for the processes used to create usable websites. It was that passion that led to the birth of Silverback, a usability testing application for the Mac. Usability testing is something that is often overlooked for an array of different reasons:

• The cost and time is perceived as too high, and therefore left out of the scope of projects.
• Not enough staff to administer and process the tests.
• Lack of the proper equipment or tools.

So, assuming you don’t have thousands of dollars, usability experts, and testing labs at your disposal, what are you to do? Enter Silverback.

What is Silverback?

Simply put, Silverback is beautifully simple usability testing software that utilizes your Mac’s built-in iSight webcam and microphone. With its simplicity and its affordable price point ($49.95), Silverback allows anyone to perform usability testing with little or no budget. The best part about Silverback is that it comes ready-to-use right out of the box. There are no large configuration files or settings, it just works. Jonathan Christopher of Monday by Noon says it best when he states:

My favorite applications do one thing and do it well. Silverback will be one of those applications.

Clearleft are known for their elegant interfaces, and it is immediately apparent that they paid close attention to the interface of the application itself. The interface eliminates the cruft and gets out of the way, allowing you to run the tests and parse the results without sifting through an intense interface. It is this attention to the little details that allow you to keep your usability tests simple and focus on the user interaction, versus setting up the application and learning the interface.

How Does it Work?

Setting up projects is a quick and painless process, and setting up the profiles is just as easy. Silverback utilizes the iSight camera of your Mac, which can turn your laptop into a portable usability lab. Once you create a project and a profile, you can start recording the session. While the test is in progress, Silverback is completely transparent to the user. It records the video and audio of the user, as well as highlighting the clicks of the user. You can control the recording process via the Apple remote, setting chapter markers while the test is in progress. The participants of the test only see what they need to see, and nothing more.

Once the session is completed, you can make notes on the session and then export the test. Once you are ready to export the test, there are options that allow you to place the video in any corner of the screen. Along with the placement of the video you can change its transparency. I see this as one of the greatest features, as you can see the video and watch the user interacting with the interface or website, and make it semi-transparent so that you can still easily see all possible clickable areas. Depending on the time of the session and your exporting options, you may want to go make yourself a cup of coffee while you wait for the test to finish exporting as it can take some time. The final exported video can then be stored for later review, and you can use the interface to make notes about the test.

Is it For Me?

In the beginning we looked at some of the different reasons that developers overlook usability testing. Silverback addresses those barriers with:

• Cost. The cost of the application is $49.95, with 10% of the profits made on the software going to save the gorillas. This makes the application affordable no matter what the size of your organization.
• Staff. The simplicity of the application makes it easy for anyone to use. While it may take a more skilled individual to process the results, it is very simple for anyone to setup and administer.
• Equipment. The only hardware you need is an Apple computer equipped with an internal or external iSight camera and a microphone (if you choose to record the audio and video).

Many developers are familiar with the different analytics tools available to them. Analytics are a vital part to understanding a website. They allow you to see the quantitative data associated with your website. However, analytics fail to show you some of the qualitative data associated with your website. Performing usability tests give you a glimpse of that qualitative aspect, as you can setup and execute tests and see how a user responds. You are seeing first-hand how a user navigates and performs different tasks on your website.

It is important to note that, just as with anything else, it takes professionals to analyze the results and then plan for a proper course of action. This does not replace usability experts. Silverback is just another tool in a web developer’s toolbox. When used properly, it is a very powerful and lightweight application. Silverback comes with a free 30 day trial, but I will admit that it only took minutes for me to realize that this is a must-have tool. If you are looking for a tool to help you perform usability tests on a smaller budget and minimal staff, then look no further than Silverback.

Software Name: Silverback

Maker: Clearleft

URL: http://silverbackapp.com/

Price: $49.95

Rating out of 5: 4

Ajax has been a hot topic for quite a while now, and there seems to be a new book with the eponymous Greek warrior in its title pretty much every week. Coming in at just 207 pages, Jeremy Keith’s new book, Bulletproof Ajax, is the latest to join the fray. With only 200 odd pages how does he plan to cover such a complex subject you may be asking? Well, here’s the secret – Ajax is really quite simple when you get down to it.

Jeremy’s previous book, DOM Scripting, stands as a fantastic introduction to JavaScript in general and DOM Scripting in particular and Bulletproof Ajax follows on from that title to some degree. Although you get a short introduction to the JavaScript language it’s just enough to understand the examples (I’d recommend you have at least a passing knowledge of JavaScript before reading this book). Also if you are coming to Ajax as a server side programmer then this book is probably not what you’re looking for, but worth reading at a later date. Given the client-server nature of Ajax there are server-side code examples (in PHP) but these are generally brief and serve only to support the examples rather than look at real world usage. Again, it would be useful to have at least a passing familiarity with a server side language and to be able to know if you already have a web server handy to experiment with.

The book features plenty of sample projects – for instance a simple address book is built up, showing off how to use XML, JSON and HTML as data sources and introducing the central XMLHTTPRequest object. There’s lots of focus, as you would expect, on making these examples bulletproof, in this case making sure they work even if JavaScript is unavailable using a method called Hijax.

To go from simple inline event handlers through to completely unobtrusive, object-based code and discussions of closures in JavaScript would be pretty good going for a book twice the size. It’s testament to the clear, no-nonsense and eminently readable writing style that this never bogs down the examples. Some people are bound to complain about the use of the proprietary innerHTML property and the minimal coverage of XML and JSON in the larger examples. This seems to be a facet of the scope of the book and a pragmatic approach to the problem rather than an unintentional oversight. If you’re looking for an A-Z of building an enterprise Ajax application then you’re probably looking for another book (but you should read this one first anyway!).

An entire chapter is dedicated to Accessibility and Ajax, a hugely important subject and one I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere else to date. Although the chapter lacks equivocal conclusions (mainly because no one seems to have formed any yet) it raises all the important issues for discussion and debate and provides a solid set of references for further reading. Throughout the book everything is anchored on the importance of user experience, rather than simply using technology for technology’s sake; this makes Bulletproof Ajax stand out from the crowd of more technology-focused tomes on the subject.

As a standards savvy developer if you want to get up to speed quickly with the hows and whys of modern Ajax but don’t have the time to wade through an awful lot of blog posts then Bulletproof Ajax is worthwhile reading. If you already know what you’re up to then it’s a perfect book to recommend to your unenlightened colleagues. A perfectly digestible read for one of those long train journeys!

Book Name: Bulletproof Ajax
Publisher: New Riders
Author: Jeremy Keith
URL: http://bulletproofajax.com
Price: $34.99 USD Buy Bulletproof Ajax at Amazon and save 34% off the cover price!
Rating out of 5: 3.5

The cascade, inheritance, contextual selectors. As someone who has been using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in the real world for a while it’s sometimes easy to forget it can be tricky to get started. Beginning CSS Web Development, written by Simon Collison, aims to get you on the road to creating usable, compact, good looking, well structured, and easy to maintain websites.

Anyone familiar with Simon from his long running blog, collylogic.com (now found at colly.com), can expect the same easy reading tone and witty repartee. Colly’s long-running obsession with music proves useful too; with the obligatory case study and examples feeling more real world than in most web design books. Although on second thoughts a band featuring Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix and Simon himself may be too good to be true…

The book progresses through using CSS to style all the basic HTML elements, concentrating on the sorts of things that real world designers get up to most of the time; there’s an entire chapter on lists for example. A few excepts stood out as particularly well placed; a good discussion of typography on the web with some practical alternatives to the oft used web safe fonts, details of the most common image formats and when to use them and a particularly clear explanation of the complexity of floats.

Coming from someone like Simon it should go without saying that the book is up to date. Fixed vs liquid vs elastic vs variable fixed width layouts, faux column and large footers, accessibility and even IE7 are all mentioned at some point. Links are provided where relevant to helpful sites which should help minimize the inevitable impact of print going out of date.

As well as practical examples the book provides a useful compendium of the state of the art when it comes to CSS; coding styles, Douglas Bowman’s flags, commenting, indenting, modular style sheets, ideas for organizing style sheets. This information is available online, but would require wading through scattered blog posts from the last several years or reading the css-discuss archives from end to end. In short if you’re just starting out then Beginning CSS Web Development will save you time.

The only problem I have with Beginning CSS Web Development stems from the title, specifically the CSS part. Web design and development is a multi-tiered discipline, and CSS often stands or falls on the strength of the underlying markup. The book assumes the reader has a good understanding of modern, semantic, markup practices and as such is not ideally suited for everyone. It also doesn’t provide that much material for the experienced designer or developer that they probably haven’t seen before.

In short the book is a sign of a maturing industry. It is ideally suited for use in teaching, either students or other professional developers, the joys of CSS. It probably won’t be your first web design book, and neither should it be your last but it will provide a constant companion and reference for those starting on the road to becoming the next web design rock star.

Book Name: Beginning Web Development
Publisher: Apress
Author: Simon Collison
URL: http://csswebdevelopment.com/
Price: $34.99 Save 30% on Beginning CSS Web Development at Amazon
Rating out of 5: 4

Having reviewed Microsoft Expression Web back in June 2006, giving it rating of 3 out of 5, I was glad of the opportunity to have a look over the final release version of the product, to see how well it supports designers in creating sites using CSS. Opening the boxed version I liked the enclosed guide to CSS selectors and the fact that the product actively markets itself on support for standards. Page 3 of the Quick Start Guide opens with the words,

“Standards-based websites

Expression Web solves a problem facing all web designers today: how to build websites that fully adhere to published standards, including support for XHTML.”

The product

Expression Web will only install on machines running Windows XP Service Pack 2 and newer versions of Windows. Once installed, the product looks slicker than the technology preview I reviewed in June, and it seems quite light on its feet. The rendering engine at the time of my last review was based on Internet Explorer 6, in this release the product claims to be using a non-browser based rendering engine and it certainly seems very accurate with the fairly complex designs that I tested in it.

The rendering engine picks up, from your DOCTYPE, whether you are aiming to render pages in ‘Quirks Mode’ – rendering as in Internet Explorer 5, or in ‘Standards Mode’. On removing the DOCTYPE from my XHTML page and then returning to Code View, the rendering engine switches from ‘Standard’ to ‘Quirks’ alerting me to the fact that my layout will now be rendered using an outdated rendering engine.

As a hand-coder I really like the real-time “as you type” validation of mark-up. Forgetting to close an element in XHTML for example will immediately cause the problem to be highlighted in the mark-up. Expression Web will also highlight non-standard elements according to the DOCTYPE you are using.

There are a whole host of CSS tools included with Expression Web and in this product designing using CSS is just how it is done, which is great to see. My personal favourite tool is the CSS Report. Running a CSS report on a page will locate all of the CSS rules you have used on that page – whether they are inline, in the head of the document or in an attached stylesheet – and list them in the Reports Window. Clicking on the Definition Location for that style jumps you to the actual location of the CSS. This is such a useful little tool – I wish I had something similar in the editors I use day to day, especially when working with other people’s CSS!

A puzzling issue

Things are going very well thus far, but in addition to looking at the product as an experienced developer I wanted to see how it might function to someone who has just purchased a copy because they want to build a website, without any prior experience. What better place to start than with the Quick Start Guide tutorial? The tutorial takes the user through setting up a site and then creating a new page using one of the CSS Layouts included, selecting a layout with Header, nav, 3 columns and a footer. This can be quite a tricky layout to achieve using CSS and so I was interested to see how it was implemented here.

In the next stage of the tutorial I used the Apply Styles Task Pane to add background colors to the sections of the layout, and to this point everything was going along swimmingly. Then I tried to add some content to the design, and things didn’t look so great with the sidebars laying over the footer. I had a pretty good idea what was going on before I looked at the CSS – the columns were absolutely positioned and so there was no way that this layout could work!

It is a strange enough fact that broken layouts were included with the product, what is even more puzzling is the fact that one of these broken layouts was selected for use in the Quick Start Guide. The screenshot in the guide even shows the sidebars overlaying the footer.

While these layouts being broken is not going to be an issue to the experienced developer who will already have their own favored methods of achieving them, it is a shame that what may be someone’s first introduction to using CSS layouts is going to be a problematic one.

Conclusion

Expression Web is an enjoyable product to use and for designers working on Windows XP it is certainly worth evaluating the trial download. For those working in a team with developers using Visual Studio the integration between the two products and the ease by which you can create and preview standards-based designs within Expression is going to be a real benefit.

For experienced developers who are happiest working in the code, Expression Web doesn’t get in the way. Unlike its predecessor Frontpage it doesn’t try to change your code to suit itself and the excellent rendering engine seems capable of rendering most layouts. As with any visual environment, working out how to create CSS visually takes a little effort, but if you are someone who enjoys working visually it would be worth the time spent as the rendering engine is very faithful to the view in a modern browser.

There are many features of this product that I do really like, and I think will be of real benefit to many designers. However it’s a shame that oversights such as the inclusion of non-working CSS layouts take the edge off the great work that has been done on this product.

• Software Name: Microsoft® Expression® Web
• Maker: Microsoft
• URL: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/
• Price: $299 USD (save $50 at Amazon)
• Rating out of 5: 3

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During the day I work on a Linux desktop, at home I use OS X. The main language that I develop in these days is PHP, however I also work in other languages as well as XHTML, CSS and JavaScript and I’m always keen to try out code editors, especially those which promise to support multiple platforms. So I was really happy to try out SlickEdit v11 which indicates on its website that it is a,

“… multi-platform, multi-language code editor that enables power programmers to create, navigate, modify, and debug code faster and more accurately.

Sounds good! As I’m at home I install SlickEdit on my G4 Mac Mini, on opening the CD I’m impressed to see the large number of supported platforms. That is definitely a plus in my opinion as it’s great to be able to use the same code editor no matter which box I’m sat in front of. On running the installer however I am disappointed to find that the software isn’t a native OS X application and will need to run under X11. This means that it can’t take advantage of inbuilt features of the OS and, to be honest, isn’t the most attractive application to use. Given that I didn’t want to judge the product on looks alone I also installed it onto Windows XP, where it looks far more at home.

As a coding editor SlickEdit has the usual features one would expect from any professional environment – code completion, syntax highlighting and so on. There are also some features that, once you got used to using them, could really speed up development. The Syntax Expansion – expanding block structures such as if, for and so on when you start to type – and ‘Surround With’ which will wrap a selection with a structure, works well, and you can define additional structures to those supported out of the box.

I particularly like the concept of ‘Backup History’, this isn’t a replacement for proper version control but instead, a feature which saves a backup of your file when it is saved and allows you to compare versions. This creates a backup of files that aren’t ready to be checked into your main version control – and you can compare versions – I can see this being a handy tool for many developers.

I think the best feature of SlickEdit is the ability to customise it, to shape the application to fit your own way of working. If you are a developer who is going to use this product as your primary development environment and is able to invest the time to learn it and to customise it to your needs, it looks to be a good choice, and certainly one worth looking at.

This customizability however, comes with the downside that the application is at first use quite difficult to get into and use. This was a difficult review to write as there is no way I can do justice to the product in a few words and after having spent a short while looking at it. However, the tool is designed for the professional developer, and so having some barrier to entry in the requirement to learn the environment shouldn’t be a problem given the features available once you are comfortable in using it. Also, there’s a dedicated community available to help with product questions.

If you are looking for a highly customizable development environment, or need solid support for a large number of languages in one editor then SlickEdit may well be worth a try. However if you just need a simple code editor, or are the sort of person who tends not to use many features in a development environment, then you might find that it is more complex than your needs dictate.

• Software Name: SlickEdit v11
• Maker: SlickEdit Inc.
• URL: http://www.slickedit.com
• Price: from $284 USD for a named user license
• Rating out of 5: 4 (for the professional developer willing to invest time into learning the environment, however lack of native OS X support – especially given the cost of the product – would lose this a point for Mac users)

Documentation. Makes you want to call it a day and start with some real work tomorrow. Or at least that’s the reaction that you often come across in web design, even with seasoned developers and designers. Yet the biggest problems we often come across in our work are ones related to communication; problems with people from marketing; clients with bad ideas; management with worse ideas. What if you could make them understand your vision? Documentation is the answer.

Communicating Design, by Dan Brown is one of very few books that address the subject of documenting a modern web design project. With chapters ranging from personas and usability testing to content inventory, sitemaps and wireframes, the book covers a lot of ground, with something for everyone; from project managers to interface designers.

The chapters each follow the same general format, and can be read in pretty much any order – making the book an ideal reference to have lying around. Each chapter breaks the chosen deliverable into three layers; essential, enhancements and contextual information, which makes getting started easier and further adding to the book’s reference potential. The chapters also include tips on presenting the various documents, and useful information which places them in the wider context of a project.

Dan Brown does a very good job of describing a potentially dull subject in useful ways. As a long time contributer to Boxes and Arrows and an active member of the Information Architecture community his experience comes through in the examples, and in particular the real world problems you may encounter when using the proposed deliverables. These sections on when, how and what to deliver to clients really raise the book into must-read territory.

The most impressive aspect of the book though is the up-to-date discussion. Not content with describing what makes a good site map and how to present it we get the author’s well-thought out ideas on whether sitemaps are indeed up to the task in a world of user-generated content, search and non-hierarchical site structures (probably not apparently). In another chapter a disussion of the problems involved in carrying out a large content inventory are accompanied by details of why the perfect tool for the job is difficult to come by.

A minor issue is that the book focuses on the documentation of the interface design aspects of a web design project at the expense of including chapters or comment on documenting the more technical, functional, aspects of development. In fairness it doesn’t set out to plug this gap in the market, although personaly I’d love to see a follow up in the same style. Communicating Development anyone? With all the diagrams throughout the book full colour would have been nice, but these really are minor points.

Overall Communicating Design is a good read, covering techniques that you can jump right in with, and providing hard earned, real world knowledge in digestable chunks. For anyone interested in improving their design documentation this will be a solid purchase, for anyone not interested in creating better documentation this should be required reading.

• Book Name: Communicating Design
• Author: Dan Brown
• URL: http://www.communicatingdesign.com/
• Price: $39.99USD Save 34% on Communicating Design at Amazon
• Rating out of 5: 4
]]> http://carsonified.com/blog/design/communicating-design-by-dan-brown/feed/ 31 http://carsonified.com/blog/dev/%e2%80%98using-microformats%e2%80%99-by-brian-suda/ http://carsonified.com/blog/dev/%e2%80%98using-microformats%e2%80%99-by-brian-suda/#comments Wed, 25 Oct 2006 08:36:46 +0000 Gareth Rushgrove http://www.thinkvitamin.com/reviews/dev/using-microformats-by-brian-suda/ Gareth Rushgrove
Microformats are cool. Every time you get a few savvy web developers together and start talking about what’s interesting at the moment, someone will mention microformats and everyone else will either get overly excited or nod sagely. Using Microformats by Brian Suda is for the latter group of people. You might have visited the website [...]]]>

Microformats are cool. Every time you get a few savvy web developers together and start talking about what’s interesting at the moment, someone will mention microformats and everyone else will either get overly excited or nod sagely. Using Microformats by Brian Suda is for the latter group of people. You might have visited the website a few times, probably marked up a couple of contact details for your last project using hCard and installed the Tails firefox extension, but you don’t quite have that zen feeling yet, you don’t know all the class names off the top of your head and you’re not constantly checking for new microformats or writing your own.

With just forty five pages, Using Microformats is part of the O’Reilly Short Cuts series of PDF books; you get a solid history of microformats, the background behind the idea, a run down of several microformats as well as example implementations and future ideas. The short format works really well here, anything more and it would need padding out and the price ($9.99 USD ) is about right too. (The Short Cuts series could maybe do with a little more work with regards to the typography and layout, but this is a minor bugbear.)

The author, Brian Suda, does a good job of covering a lot in a short number of pages. As one of the authors of hCard and creator of several microformat-related tools, including X2V and the essential Microformats Cheat Sheet, you know you’re getting information from the front line.

The book covers Rel-License, Rel-Nofollow, VoteLink, XFN , Rel-Tag, Rel-Directory hCard, GEO, ADR, hCalendar, hReview, hResume, hAtom and xFolk, which is pretty good going! It also makes a good, sensible, division between elemental and compound microformats, as well as discussing some of the design patterns. Each section gives you a good idea of where to use it, as well as how to add the markup and relevant classes to your site. A section on styling microformated data also adds to the real world feel. This is all the information you need to know to get going.

My personal favorite bits were the ideas; things that could be just round the corner, especially if someone reading this wants a pet project. Microformats and Javascript libraries, microformat-enabled search, microformat aware applications (oh and hRecipe) are just a few of nuggets in the book. Throughout the book you get a good sense of why microformats are a good idea, and a sense of why so many people, obviously including the author, are so passionate about them.

The only real problem is the subject. Microformats are moving so quickly a book like this will go out of date in relatively short order. This would be a major problem for a printed book, but the low price and PDF format make this less of an issue here.

Using Microformats is a good evening’s read and a useful reference – although you’ll likely gravitate towards the Microformats Wiki and community over time. It can be a little technical and hard going in places, the typography doesn’t always help here, and it can come across like a series of high quality blog posts in places which, depending on your point of view, could be a good or bad thing. Overall, I learnt quite a bit, picked up a few ideas along the way and was busy reading it moments after paying my money. Recommended.

Book Name: Using Microformats
Publisher: O’Reilly
Author: Brian Suda
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/microformats/
Price: $9.99 USD
Rating out of 5: 3

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]]> http://carsonified.com/blog/dev/%e2%80%98using-microformats%e2%80%99-by-brian-suda/feed/ 0 http://carsonified.com/blog/carsonified/reviews/ruby-for-rails-by-david-black/ http://carsonified.com/blog/carsonified/reviews/ruby-for-rails-by-david-black/#comments Sun, 30 Jul 2006 07:55:30 +0000 Tom Armitage http://www.thinkvitamin.com/reviews/coding/ruby-for-rails-by-david-black/ Tom Armitage
Tom Armitage from Infovore.org reviews a recent titled aimed at Ruby on Rails beginners]]>

There’s no denying the stir that Ruby on Rails has caused in the web development community. Since its release in 2004, it has gained a rapidly expanding user-base through its lightweight, elegant code, and marked benefits for productivity. It has also raised the profile of Ruby itself, the dynamic, object-oriented scripting language first released in 1995 by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. Ruby has been hugely popular in its homeland of Japan for a long while, but only began to gain popularity in the West in the last six years.

So not only are users coming new to Rails, but also to Ruby itself. David Black’s Ruby for Rails aims itself squarely at that sizable audience. It is not so much a book about “Ruby specifically for Rails” as one about “Ruby for people who have come to it through Rails”. Whilst many Rails users quickly get their heads around its clean-cut, minimal syntax, the first problem they often run into is Ruby itself. Ruby is a highly idiomatic language, and does not resemble the C-like languages most people are familiar with. Given the ever-increasing popularity of Rails, this book could not have been published at a better time.

The book takes the form not of a reference, but a linear tutorial. The first handful of chapters look, in turn, at the very basics of writing and running Ruby scripts (along with a quick guide to the Ruby command-line interpreter), the very basics of getting a Rails app up and running, and concludes with a look at beginning to use simple Ruby scripting techniques to enhance you application.

The book then takes a marked turn away from Rails, and concentrates on getting down to the nitty-gritty of Ruby itself. These chapters are the real highlight of the book – not for the keywords and methods they teach, but for the way in which they explain Ruby’s core and abstract concepts. Ruby’s real strengths – its highly dynamic nature and complete object orientation – are potentially its most confusing concepts, and yet Black’s methodical, plainly-written approach lays their complexities bare. His explanations of Objects, Classes, Modules, and how inheritance works are probably the best I’ve seen yet for Ruby, and coupled with an excellent chapter solely devoted to scope and self (the default object), get the complex underpinnings of the language out of the way in a very accessible style. (The sample chapter, on the basics of objects and classes, should give you a feel for Black’s clear, authoritative tone).

After that, the book moves on to cover control flow, devoting a good number of pages to the key concept that is code blocks, and then some slightly less complex chapters cover variables, scalars (strings, numbers, and symbols), collections (arrays and hashes) and regular expressions; these share more in common with languages the reader may be more familiar with. Still, just like the very first introductory chapters, they are all worth reading to the end – whilst they may start with common concepts, by the end, every chapter touches on the aspects that make Ruby unique, and explains some of the deeper complexities.

The Ruby language section ends with another fine, complex chapter, looking at Ruby’s capabilities as a dynamic language. In this chapter, as well as getting a handle on some really idiomatic Ruby concepts, the ‘magic’ present in Rails really starts to fall into place. Throughout the language-oriented chapters, Black always refers back to concepts within Rails, often in ActiveRecord, using what has just been learned to explain the more ‘magical’ aspects of Rails.

With the language-focused chapters out of the way, Black returns to the Rails app he began at the very beginning, and enhances it with the Ruby skills we’ve learned throughout the book. It’s here that a great deal falls into place – not just from a greater appreciation of what’s going on under the hood, but also through a new-found appreciation for Ruby idiom, and how best to work with (rather than against) Rails.

If there are faults with the book, they are few. Black consistently gives his example database schemas as SQL. Whilst I have no problem with this personally, it’s becoming more common in the Rails community to list them as database-agnostic Ruby migrations. Also, some of the code examples in the book may seem a little confusing to begin with – one early example features a lambda function, a concept not really explained until a good few hundred page later. And the initial chapter on Rails seems perhaps a little rushed, trying to cover much of the ground that many may have read in Agile Web Development with Rails.

But these are minor gripes. Ruby for Rails is an excellent guide to the Ruby language, especially for anyone coming to it afresh. It’s exactly the book that many in the Rails community have been waiting for, and it’ll improve your pure Ruby skills no-end. Certainly a book that I’ll be returning to many times in the future.

• Title: Ruby for Rails
• Author: David Black
• URL: http://www.manning.com/black/
• Price: $44.95 Buy Ruby for Rails at Amazon and save $15
• Rating out of 5: 4
]]> http://carsonified.com/blog/carsonified/reviews/ruby-for-rails-by-david-black/feed/ 13 http://carsonified.com/blog/carsonified/reviews/microsoft-expression-web-designer/ http://carsonified.com/blog/carsonified/reviews/microsoft-expression-web-designer/#comments Sun, 18 Jun 2006 08:02:21 +0000 Rachel Andrew http://www.thinkvitamin.com/reviews/dev/microsoft-expression-web-designer/ Rachel Andrew
Professional developer and Web Standards Project member Rachel Andrew takes a look at Microsoft's web authoring product.]]>

One of my roles at The Web Standards Project is on The Dreamweaver Task Force, and as such I have a great interest in authoring tools and particularly in how they can assist those who prefer to work visually to develop standards compliant websites. The beta release of Microsoft Expression Web Designer gave me a chance to have a look at how this new contender in the marketplace stacked up – is it just FrontPage with a new skin, or actually a real competitor to Dreamweaver 8?

Installation

You can download a ‘Community Technology Preview’ copy of Microsoft Expression from http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/wd_free_trial.aspx. You need to be running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 to install and there is no OS X version. Launching Expression displays the IDE with a default valid XHTML Transitional document – which is a good start.



As in Dreamweaver 8, Expression enables the developer to switch between different DOCTYPES when creating a new document. To create a new document in Expression select File > New > Page, in the dialog that opens click on ‘Page Editor Options’ and you will find that you can select from a range of DOCTYPES.



The IDE will be familiar to anyone who has used another visual development environment, however it also feels like a Microsoft Office Application – meaning that I approached the Formatting Toolbar with some trepidation unsure exactly what it would insert into my document. In fact, the Toolbar performs a similar function to the Properties Inspector in Dreamweaver when formatting an element, adding a class to the selected element and creating that class in an embedded stylesheet in the head of the document.



Code editing

As in Dreamweaver you can work in Code View, Design View or Split View. As a code editor Expression seems capable with the sort of features that one would expect – line numbering, code completion and auto insert, all of which are configurable in the Preferences. You can create your own “Code Snippets”: select a section of code, right-click and choose Create Code Snippet from the context menu and the give the item a name and description. Hitting Ctrl-Enter while in Code View brings up your list of Code Snippets to insert.

Design View

As I have already mentioned, formatting elements while in Design View results in the addition of classes to the elements and a class being created in an embedded stylesheet in the head of the document. While this is likely to lead to an attack of ‘classitis’, I’m not sure what the alternative would be and this is an almost identical method to that which Dreamweaver uses.

I was pleased to see that despite its similarities to Dreamweaver, my long-time Dreamweaver irritation hasn’t made an appearance in Expression. In Dreamweaver, if you select some text and click ‘Indent Text’ in the Properties Inspector you get a blockquote – want to ‘indent’ some more? You end up with multiple, nested blockquotes! Expression goes a more preferable route by giving the element a class and adding a 40 pixel left margin.

You can add (X)HTML elements to the document by selecting Insert > HTML or by double-clicking the elements in the Toolbox Panel. The strangest discovery here is that Expression has included a Layer button that, as in Dreamweaver, inserts an absolutely positioned div with inline styles. Why Microsoft has chosen to include this feature is a mystery. Dreamweaver Layers are really a throwback to older versions of the software, the cause of much confusion and in recent versions have been somewhat buried in the interface.

I was disappointed to see that inserting an image using either method does not also include an alt attribute or any prompting to add one. You need to add this essential attribute yourself using the Tag Properties Panel or directly in the code.



CSS Layout Rendering

Rendering of pages laid out with CSS is something which has improved with each version of Dreamweaver and I was interested to see how a relatively complex layout would display in Expression; from the tests that I did documents seemed to render as in Internet Explorer 6 but were editable in terms of adding content and in editing the attached stylesheets using the CSS Properties Panel. You do need to take care not to drag or resize positioned elements as Expression will then add inline styles.

Conclusion

Expression is certainly no FrontPage with a new skin, this product feels up to date and relevant to how professional designers and developers are working currently. Probably my main issue with the software is the strangely disconcerting feeling that I am developing a website in Microsoft Word. There being no OS X version and the software only being available to users of the most up to date versions of Windows will limit take-up of this product. That said, as a standards advocate and someone who has some understanding of the inherent difficulties in creating a CSS capable visual editor, I think this is a worthy competitor to Dreamweaver. I think competition in this market will be a good thing, especially when both competitors are using standards compliancy as a main selling point.

• Software Name: Microsoft Expression Web Designer
• Maker: Microsoft
• URL: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/
• Price: Currently free to download Beta
• Rating out of 5: 3 – could well make a 4 by final release

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