Musings of a Trained Monkey: Tag design

Patterns are dead, Frameworks are for the lazy...

Steve Longdo — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:19:00 +0000

Patrick Logan offers an interesting take on the state of design doctrines in his post Code Shrink Programming Models of particular note was this bit:

By the way, the thought crossed my mind again recently… has “agile” killed “patterns” or did it die on its own? Are “patterns” the best way to present a new programming model? Does anyone really “do” patterns anymore, the way the original movement intended? Or do we just write some text and draw some pictures and call them patterns? Is there any point to the “patterns” idea anymore? I’m not sure either way.

This is a beguiling idea as lots of companies look for architecture documentation that explicitly states which patterns were used, etc. Yet I find myself agreeing with Patrick’s post. Good programmers inherently write good code, other programmers attempt to employ patterns to write mediocre code.

I forwarded this article to David Gifford, a friend of mine to get his perspective since he has been working in the industry as an architect for a long time. His response made me laugh for quite awhile.

Frameworks evolve so “lazy” developers don’t have to give much thought to patterns, instead everyone just thinks about all the multitudes of configuration files and should groovy or xml be used…

Anyone working on the web with Java in the pre-Struts days can remember when they didn’t have to make giant configuration files. Now I am wondering if “multitudes of configuration files” is recognized by the community as a pattern or as an anti-pattern? I know what the answer is for me.

Heat Maps and Usability...

Steve Longdo — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:44:00 +0000

I must confess I'd heard the term "heat map" in conjunction with user interaction a while ago, but never bothered to look into them in more detail. Usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen has examples and a definiton in this article.

Nielsen's heat maps track human eye movement across a web page. Today I ran across this magnificent posting. It demonstrates a "heat map", and also provides MIT licensed open source code to generate them. These "heat maps" are actually "click maps", but in some ways these are even more relevant than where a web site visitor looks.

Search nearly working...

Steve Longdo — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 23:39:00 +0000

I nearly have the search working the way I want. The word count it generates is based on words only. HTML is stripped as is any content between <code> tags. I notice that the current live search in Typo looks at the html content when making a match. So if you see any articles coming back with an empty Snippet block("") it is because your search matched something in a generated URL and no actual words in the article.
I am working on the best way to handle this behaviour. Maybe just list the links that appear in the article or provide a count of them.
Also I will be making hyperlinks in the balloons functional. I created new graphics for the balloon to see if IE will correctly display the new GIF (I knew PNG support in IE was bad, but this was my first personal encounter), I will know in a little bit when I get to work and can check it out in IE...
By the way the concept for this method of displaying search results is all Dunstan Orchard. I've just been making it work within Typo.