Why? Because WordPress 2.5 came out, and I pine for Blogsmith every time I use it.

This was supposed to be the be-all, end-all, Mr. fixit version because it changed so much design-wise in the CMS/backend portion. Well, it did change. Let's look at some of the benefits:

• Improved image handling: I won't lie, this is an improvement, and something that we need to work on as well. The biggest improvement is a Flash multi-upload, but I think Blogsmith proves that you can't end there, we've had it for ages but still have work to do.
  Note to all WordPress users: "Full" size does in fact resize your images, to the width defined in wp-includes/media.php. I use the image caption easy plugin, so I need two "full" sizes - one for with captions, one for without. I have to change that setting in that file every time? I'll work on it and see what can be done.
• Better tagging: looks a lot like ours now. But that's ok, with the exception of the auto-complete (really the big thing and we finally got around to it only a short time ago ourselves), we got the interface style from Flickr.
• "Improved" dashboard: Wastes piles of space.The same information, except I can only see some of it without scrolling.
  
• "Improved" post editing screen: Approximately 480 pixels down from the top of your browser viewport lies the top line of content in your WYSIWYG editor. I thought our 300 was bad, and we have a logo and two rows of navigation showing at all times. On my Macbook, I have a hard time blogging because I can see about three lines of content. I could scroll down, sure, but hitting "enter" in your post will re-scroll the page back to the top. Just a frustrating bit of unneccessary nonsense. All of the options, except the publishing options, are underneath the post, which I suppose doesn't technically bother me but why not use all that empty space on the right? I'm not sure I get the reasoning behind that, 2.0's collapsible side boxes were great.
  

I don't mean to insult what are basically my people, and I certainly am not trying to be on a high horse, but WordPress 2.5's CMS was quite obviously designed by "designers" who seemed to be striving for aesthetics rather than useful software. White space is very pleasant to look at, but a calming effect is secondary in my writing environment to the ability to do my writing.

I hope someone out there does a reworking of the back end a la the "Tiger" version from a while back, but frankly a little CSS work isn't gonna hack it. Maybe we'll do it...

It's that time of year again. Time to hit some warmer weather and hang out with a town full of geeks off the leash. It should be crazy, fun, and yes, even edifying. Maybe I'll blog my thoughts on some panels, but time can get away from you around there.

If you see me and the Blogsmith crew, stop by and we'll hoist a nerdy beer for Gary Gygax.

The Veranda, Orlando. With French doors. A romantic place for a codejam.

Hello World. That's programming speak for howdy! It's been a while since I showed up in the blogosphere (I know, my Bloglines vanity search tells me so), so I thought I'd throw out an update. A big one. The big news was a trip to the windy city sunshine city the big tomato the City by the Bay for TechCrunch 40. Of course, I had to get the obligatory iPhone before they'd let me in the conference, but I snuck by with the now-discontinued 4GB model. Maybe I can give some more coherent thoughts later (I'm full of empty promises) but the main things that stood out:

• Silicon Valley has obviously already forgotten web 1.0. We need revenue, people. How are your ideas, even the shamefully few good ones, going to make money? And what's more – the buyout craze is a lot like the IPO craze that cost me my first job in the biz. These days, people seem to be building companies to flip them like an old lady's bungalow. Let's add value to the world, not just our pockets. Let's make something people need instead of solving made-up problems that barely exist in the valley, let alone the Real World. In the swag bag, we got a stress ball emblazoned with the mantra "Stress Free Tagging." Class project: point out everything wrong with that.
  
• When a programmer/CEO who shall remain nameless wanted to make fun of bad ideas, he used the words "video wiki." So did at least three actual companies presenting (including the "people's choice").
• I actually knew one of the presenters: John Manoogian of Zivity, a company with a real business model (based on models). I promise not to tell the world the last time I saw him was at a Sisters of Mercy concert.
• Panelists need to be harder, or maybe they have odd ideas about what should get funding. Maybe I should be in the Video Wiki business. Only a couple companies got hit, and it was for their names? Extreme Reality had a dated name, but I really thought it was a brilliant idea (panelist question: "What's wrong with the mouse?" What someone probably asked the mouse inventor: "What's wrong with the keyboard?"). And Xobni... Yeah, the name is silly but other names were sillier and the idea was solid – Guy Kawasaki seemed to be playing it for entertainment rather than really hardballing it. And he was the only one coming close to hardball. One word: Truemors. Reverend MC Hammer, as expected, did not hurt 'em either.
  
• Cake Financial was a swell idea, but if everyone in the US used it wouldn't it crush the economy? Mint, on the other hand, is a super swell idea that I'm already using. I'm pretty sure I can already recommend it, although I hope the 50k they won goes toward as much security as can be had, since they're taking our credit card and bank logins. I have been saying for a while (to my dog, of course) that financial management's time has come on the web. My ideas didn't really encompass automagic management, but it sure seems good so far (if dependent on when your banks update).
  
• San Francisco has great great sushi, seafood, and Chinese – and amazing scenery. I hope to come back sometime.
• We had a great brainstorm session with Brian and Craig in their stylish but roach-infested boutique hotel about what we would do for our next big ideas. Here's a sample of what that looked like, in chronological order:

As you can see, we are ready to excite the world at the next TechCrunch40. Thanks to Jason and to Michael Arrington for putting on a good show, minor execution issues (and a slight desire to see it rolled back to TechCrunch20) aside. Thanks to San Francisco for being nifty.

Celly sent this lovely link out last week. It's called Top blogs fail W3C markup validation. It got 800-something Diggs. The first comment on Digg was "What's W3C markup validation?" I LOLed.

Here are my thoughts, in my all-time-favorite format, bullets.

• Browsers must fully support standards before developers should be expected to. I write for the browsers, not the validator.
  
• The W3C validator tool will report the number of errors based on a domino effect. It will take an unencoded URL (for instance), turn that into an unclosed tag, and from there on all other tags are improperly nested. I have seen this plenty of times. If that initial error is in the beginning of the site code, and isn't easily rectifiable, you could end up with hundreds of errors on a site the size of Engadget.
• We do have traffic code that is outside the closing HTML tag. Our bad, yes. Go yell at Gavin if you think it's that big of a deal (you're welcome, Gavin).
  
• Our WYSIWYG is not fully compliant. Why? Mostly because it's easier to align images using the ALIGN attribute, at least as long as browsers support it. Yes, I understand that WordPress and now Blogger use floats, and the result is pretty much the same, but upgrading a WYSIWYG on the scale of Blogsmith is a pretty big deal – and standards compliance is low on the giant list of requirements. Higher on that list are blogger acceptance and the "does it work" factor. It works. In all browsers, in fact. It's also the big reason why we don't use a strict doctype. You want to see validation errors, let me switch that out.
  
• Here's the big kicker: External factors beyond our control, usually Javascript ones. As WIN has been criticized for in the past, our pages have a shit ton of ads (this is a royal shit ton, not metric), and every last one of them throws at least one validation error.
  
• I hate to make excuses for myself or any of our other people, but the fact is if you're sitting around counting others' validation errors, you aren't spending as much time actually making high-traffic sites on a quick turnaround time as we are.

I could probably make up more, but that's five big things right there. But in the blog post itself, I think the answer rears its undeniable little head, right after the completely laughable assumption that "they have all the money and all the resources to hire someone just to take care of this matter."

I guess what matters most is that all these blogs can be accessed and viewed correctly (whatever that means) with the most popular browsers.

If that doesn't say it, I don't know what would. Our readers don't have any idea what the validator is, but they will certainly know it if the site is broken in X/Y browser. If anyone disagrees, I'd love to debate the subject so feel free to leave a comment.

While Gavin's been linking people's names to their profiles in his comments for a long time, Blogsmith profiles really haven't done much. Until now! Fun and exciting options like profile pictures, website links, and comment history are all there. Check it out on Joystiq for now, but Engadget, Autoblog, and of course this site will follow soon.



Some notable profiles include:

• Brian (not bothering to link because he's set it to private)
• Gavin (huh.. also private)
• Celly (spotting a trend here)
• Hard Gay (um, not the real one)
• Me!

It's not that Alex's apartment isn't nice (it's actually very nice, with a great view of many other condos), but it's no Grand Floridian. Thankfully, the Blogsmith clan seems to thrive in reduced space and comfort. And we've done our best work since the days of the White Plains Code Crunches. I'm confident that we've yet again revolutionized the blogosphere in a way that unfortunately only a relative few will ever get to benefit from. Suffice to say that graphic designers/html guys have never had it so good for building blogs. You can thank me later, Matt.

What else happened over the week?

• I managed to sit next to both Sir Richard Attenborough and an unnamed member of Lynyrd Skynyrd on the plane ride back. I also was on two flights that took off and arrived pretty much on time. This might be a first.
  
• I played a Wii. Now I really want one. (Did you see me resist the temptation to say "I played with Alex's Wii?")
  
• We provided a textbook case of our work process for Alex to document for his talk at the AOL developers' conference this week.
• Gavin managed to perform his new managerial duties while still getting a bit of slick code written.
• I met Celly's fiancee and Gavin's new lady friend as well.
  
• We got to hang out with Brian on the first day of him being someone else's boss.
  
• I got a great idea for starting a business by ripping off drunks and letting them pretend to understand/enjoy wine (annoying flash site warning. To sum up, dispense single ounces of wine for 10% of the price of a bottle, enjoy your profit).

Oh, and I started refining my new startup idea. I can't wait to tell everyone!

No April Fools jokes or hints and allusions, this time it's for real: Brian's out like a Detroit streetlight. Looks like Gavin will take over, so we're not breaking up the band yet just because David Lee Roth is gone. That makes parallel #2 for Gavin and Sammy Hagar. Number one? He can't drive 55.

Thankfully it's on to something Brian seems really pumped about: bringing comic books to web 2.0. If that doesn't pan out, though, I know of a pretty good place to host a resume. I mean, I heard about one.

Anyone should be so lucky to work for someone like Brian. From the first trip to the Trump-hole, to the nail-biting evening waiting for this post to come true (and wondering if there were still jobs on the other end of it), to Bowling Incident 2007, it's been a blast. I know I did a lot of things in this job I wouldn't have if I'd worked for someone I didn't trust as much (Did that make any sense?). Thus ends two years of working with Brian, hopefully the future might hold a couple more of those years sometime. Good luck!

I find Thomas Baekdal at baekdal.com to be an interesting read whenever I manage to get through some feeds. His recent article "Stop making it look like a system" struck a particular chord. Anyone interested in doing interfaces for any kind of software – web or otherwise – would do well to take a look at that. It's basically what my entire job was during the design of Blogsmith.

He does a great job clarifying and quantifying a process that we ourselves didn't describe with a whole ton of sophistication: Gavin is fond of saying "this looks like a programmer did it." It's easy to spit out tables stocked with data, the barely formatted result of a database query. It's not as easy to turn those into human-friendly formats. We were fortunate enough to have the "real" data Baekdal talks about in his article, so we knew what we were working with. But more importantly, I have been fortunate enough to have a team that won't accept these "system" style screens.

How now?

It's not easy. Not in the least. It requires a lot of thought before you even get to the whiteboard, but there are two big things I like to try:

1. Imagine turning it sideways. It seems dumb, and actually turning a table sideways gives you the same crappy table on its side. But it gets you thinking in a different direction.
2. Take out the table headings and try to convey that information without those keys. This seems overly fundamental to what I'm saying here, but I guess that's the catch: you can't get out of this paradigm unless you can explain your data without explaining it. Grouping, weighting, and maybe a contextual word or two – like a well placed "at" or "and" – will go a long way toward making something easier to understand.

I was going to put some before-and-after screenshots in here, and maybe I still will, but I'm debating, considering the proprietary nature of Blogsmith.

The reference is for Gavin, but the feature is for everyone. If you're not someone who lives entirely in a feed reader, you may have noticed something neat on Gavin's site or, more significantly, on Engadget. Instead of a list of recent posts after the post content (and ad), you'll see a list of related posts.



A lot of people have mused that other blogging systems have had this feature for a while, but we were just holding out for one worthy of our blogging system. Not just based on tags, categories, or titles, these links combine tag frequency, post date, and a slew of other criteria into a complex algorithm that I can't begin to understand. But it works. And hopefully, it'll drive traffic around different parts of Engadget and other sites. So... go check it out and enjoy the wanton surfing that's bound to ensue.

And there we are. It arrived on my birthday, so I suppose that means it has the same birthday as me. Go on, have a look. It's got warts still, but it gives you a pretty good idea of how widespread the use of our little blog platform has gotten not just at WIN, but AOL in general.

Brian marks the date today — two years since I saw this ad and said Hey, that looks like me. Well... me with mail server administration. Anyway, you can see that post was from late '04 and it took a while to actually hear from Brian, in fact I forgot about it entirely by the time he called (he was busy then too).

Been a crazy ride since then, since the halcyon days of ASP 3 and imprisonment in stark White Plains hotel rooms on a startup budget. Thanks a million Brian — I wouldn't trade the past two years for any job. But I could really go for one of those Buffalo chicken sandwiches from Candlelight.

At Adaptive Path's blog (link via Webreakstuff), Jeffrey Veen interviews the director of user experience at Google, who says (with a lot of leading from Veen) that Google is semi-unique in that they have a designer present at every stage of the application design process. That's really awesome of Google I suppose, but I realized it's not that impressive to me because we've been doing things that way for a while now. And I can't imagine how you could come up with a decent product if you didn't do things that way. Trying to dress up an "un-designed" interface is like tossing an aftermarket spoiler onto the back of a compact car.

Both Blogsmith and Emurse had a designer present during the early stages, and whether that designer was me (in this case, yes) or someone else, the end results benefit greatly. It also helps, of course, that we have experience-minded programmers rather than what you might think of as traditional software engineers. When Gavin sees something that needs work but doesn't have a specific problem in mind, he's fond of saying "this looks like a programmer did it." That probably sums up why a designer is needed in application work.

Between bottles of cough medicine, I've managed to get some work done. One of those projects has been expanding my knowledge of Blogsmith's galleries features. They were created almost especially for TMZ, but have since been rolled out to popular Weblogs, Inc. sites like Engadget, Autoblog, and WoW Insider. Current galleries are fairly simple, so I'm trying to see where we can go with them. Have a look at my portfolio and witness me pimping while simultaneously witnessing Blogsmith galleries.

About a week ago, the blogosphere exploded when "news" came out of Blogsmith going out to the public. It might be the first time I could search for "Blogsmith" on Technorati and not get a bunch of results from people I already know.

By now, most people have (hopefully) read Brian's response, which is basically "news to me." He also cited this post wherein Duncan Riley called it a "Jason Calacanis designed blogging platform." The comments there are a good read. Knowing peoples' usual reaction to Brian's quips, everyone's scrambling to find evidence of his secret plans for a Craigslist killer.

Anyway, all speculation of a consumer-oriented Blogsmith aside, the original article somehow got the logo off the corner of our current CMS. That means two things:

1. Someone tipped them from the inside, regardless of accuracy.
2. We need a better version out there since I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.

You might be wondering where the hell this came from. It actually took a fairly odd path from futurism (for some reason, something made me think Soviet propaganda posters) into art deco. But the primary goal was to stand out from Web 2.0. There are no reflections, no glossy Apple surface, and no rounded letters. Futura, baby. It's retro time.