Category: AOL

Playing With Ficlets

Ficlets has been around for a few months now, and while it was a blast to build and launch, I honestly haven’t had a ton of time since it launched to actually enjoy my own product. I’ve been busy fixing bugs, responding to feedback or working on other projects (the nerve, people making me work). Building things is fun, but I forgot to actually use it.\
For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking time out to play with ficlets: write stories, play with inspiration, and explore other peoples’ ficlets. It’s been a nice surprise to find out that the experience I envisioned when we started building it is actually fun. I’m having a great time working on stories, getting feedback, and finding stories to continue. Here are some of my favorites:

Reelin’ in the Years in iTunes: The Year 2000

I recently created a bunch of Smart Playlists in iTunes to segment my music by year. I have the following lists so far: before 1990, 1990-1995, 1996-1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007. Today is Year 2000 day – full of techno, Eels, Phish and Lemon Jelly.\
Here are my favorite songs from 2000 (not in any order, and probably not the “best”, just my faves):

  • Name of the Game by The Crystal Method – This song kicks so much ass, I think it was on repeat in the car for at least three months. The rest of the album it came from doesn’t measure up to the standard set by Vegas, but it’s still pretty good.
  • Get Your Snack On by Amon Tobin – Another frequent repeat. Kicks almost as much posterior as the the first song in this list. Amon Tobin creates atmospheric industrial stuff that’s not for everyone, but I dig most of it.
  • Bewilderbeast by Badly Drawn Boy – The album this song comes from is spectacular, and this is my favorite song from it. One of his few instrumentals, it’s sweet, lovely and has a wonderful beat.
  • Daisies of the Galaxy and I Like Birds by Eels – I love Eels and am sad I didn’t discover them until recently. The whole album is great, but these two songs make me insanely happy. You won’t be able to listen to I Like Birds without giggling and singing along.
  • Dirt by Phish – From Farmhouse, what I consider to be the last great album by the band, this song is heartbreaking and one of their rare slow numbers. It’s gorgeous and unlike 99% of their other stuff.
  • Everything in its Right Place by Radiohead – This song and album were my first real exposure to the bad, and I was blown away. Painful and brilliant.
  • Diamond from the Snatch soundtrack – You’ve heard this song even if you haven’t seen the movie. Like Massive Attack‘s Teardrop, this one makes the rounds in commercials, sporting events, other movies, and even a few TV shows. Bouncy rockin’ techno.
  • Gravel Road Requiem by Walkingbirds – I don’t remember how I found out about Scott Andrew LePera and the Walkingbirds, but this song is an acoustic folky masterpiece. You can download it (and hopefully buy it) on his music page. It’s funny. I met him at SxSW a couple years ago and it took me three days to remember where I’d heard his voice before.\
    Next week, it’s on to 2001: Cake, Zero 7‘s first album, Constantines, David Byrne and Gotan Project.\
    Oh, and I’m going to be on The Biblio File tomorrow night. Details on their blog for how you can join in the fun.

The CSS Working Group and Me

I’ve represented AOL on the CSS Working Group for over three years now, and I’ve always felt that I’m not able to give enough time to it, or help as much as I wanted to, because of my responsibilities in my “real” job. With recent blog posts by Ian Hickson and Fantasai, I think it’s time to put up or shut up, especially since fantasai called me out in hers

For most of my time on the working group, the only representation we had from the web design community was from AOL: from Kimberly Blessing and Kevin Lawver. When Andy Clarke joined the CSS Working Group as an Invited Expert last year, I was really excited: finally some more web designer perspective. But Andy and Kevin are both too busy to be regular participants,and when they are around, they’re not technical enough to really follow the discussions and understand the impact some silly sentence in the spec has on what web designers are trying to do.


In my defense, even though it doesn’t look like I’m following, I usually am, except when the discussion veers into the bowels of typography, internationalization or we have six hour arguments about punctuation (it’s happened, don’t try to deny it): that’s when the blood starts seeping out of my ears. When we discuss layout or things I actually want/need to use, I’m right in there.


Now, it stings a little bit to be called “not technical enough”, but she’s right. I’m not. I don’t have an inside-out knowledge of typography, of how browsers are built or the reasons certain things are hard for them to do. I build web apps, not web browsers, and after sitting through over three years of meetings, I certainly don’t want to build browsers. It’s a hard, painful and thankless job. The folks who work at Mozilla, Opera, Apple, Microsoft and anyone else who works on browsers are extremely smart and I’m in awe of them. I understand that building browser is hard, but it’s extremely frustrating when features that web developers and designers need are shot down because they’re “too hard to implement”.


I share her concerns about the lack of designer input on CSS, and that the group is dominated by browser implementors. That’s why I asked Cindy Li to be my backup in the group, and when she left AOL, asked for designers to volunteer to join the working group. I got Jason Cranford Teague and Justin Kirk, two very skilled and experienced designers, to join up, and effectively tripled the designer population in the working group. In fact, Jason’s volunteered to work with Andy to design the group’s blog, which is great!


I think the CSS Working Group needs more designer and developer input. I think W3C member companies need to pony up some designers and developers to help out – even if it’s just to provide feedback on working drafts and proposals and provide use cases and real world examples of things we need.


I don’t know what the point of this is, except that I agree with both Ian and fantasai – something is wrong. The CSS Working Group is in jeopardy of becoming irrelevant, and unless the group gets new blood and can open up, we’re in real trouble. The worst part is, I’ve had to admit to myself that I don’t have the time or ability to do anything about it other than nod and agree with them. I’m hoping that by sharing my perspective as a web developer, bringing more designers into the group, I’ve done something worthwhile in my time in the group. It certainly doesn’t feel like enough

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Categorized as AOL, CSS

Insomnia-Fueled E-Mail Management Musings

I just saw Khoi Vinh’s post on managing e-mail and since I can’t sleep, I figured I’d tell you how I manage e-mail. I use OS X’s Mail.app for work mail and Thunderbird for my personal stuff (I like keeping them separate). I don’t get a ton of personal e-mail, but I get between one hundred and three hundred e-mails a day for work (during the week, 50-70 on weekends) between projects, internal listservs and CSS Working Group stuff. That number’s been as high as four hundred during the AIM Pages crunch last year, I was getting more than five hundred a day.\
I’ve managed that load for more than five years, and have found a couple things that keep me sane.

  1. I have a smart folder called Unread Messages that has only messages I haven’t read in it. Instead of peering at threads and a thousands-message long inbox, it contains only the stuff I haven’t read. I have another smart folder that has messages received in the last 36 hours. I almost never go into the Inbox view, because there’s just too much stuff there.
  2. Respond right away. If you can’t respond in a couple minutes, open the message in a new window and get to it after you’ve filtered the rest.
  3. Do your e-mail first thing. I spend the first half-hour of the day filtering e-mail and respond, and then get to work. I’ll check back every hour or so and filter again, depending on what I’m working on. If I’m coding and in the zone, then I might only check at the end of the day, but if I’m in meetings, it’s more often.\
    That’s pretty much it. My work day is an exercise in interruption management. Between e-mails and IMs from co-workers, I deal with hundreds of interruptions a day. It’s funny, but when I really have to get something done and don’t log in to AIM or open my e-mail, I miss the interruptions. I don’t know what to do with myself.\
    Sad, isn’t it?

Rules for Career Development

I’ve been asked to talk to a group here at AOL about career development (no idea when, or really what the topic is). But, Jason and I were talking about it, and came up with this list of rules that I think are worth sharing, even if they’re not fully baked:

  1. Don’t be a dick: Translated – be constructive, helpful and positive
  2. Teach yourself something new on every project
  3. Be passionate about what you do: If you’re not, find something else to do.
  4. Get involved in the internal and external communities
  5. Repeat step one
  6. Know when to run: No one talks about it, but you have to know when to get out of a bad situation. I’ve been very lucky at AOL to know when it was time to move on to a new group or challenge. Thankfully, I’ve always found a soft place to land with new challenges.
  7. Expect change, roll with it, move on: Working in a company means things will change. When you’re not in charge, there will be lots of stuff that happens that you don’t agree with. You have to know when to fight, when to give up, and when to move on. The quicker you can do all three, the better.
  8. Update Have a support system: This one comes from Jen’s comment. It really helps to have someone in your corner – a spouse, parent, best friend or mentor who you can turn to. My wife is, of course, my most important, but I’ve had lots of mentors and good managers that have helped point me in the right direction.
  9. Update Be someone who gets things done: This one is from Joe in the comments, but it’s a good one. People don’t care about excuses or reasons why things don’t happen. Be the one folks can go to and get things accomplished.\
    Cool, I think the presentation’s all done! Thanks, Jason!

The Coolest Thing Ever: Share Your iTunes Library Over AIM

The guys in the next row have gone and pulled off a truly killer app. I know the title gives it away, but it really works! Greg explains how it works, but I know you really just want to go download it.\
What does it do? It makes iTunes’ music sharing work over your buddy list!!! So, instead of being limited to sharing music across just your local network, you can now share your tunes with everyone in your buddy list who has the plugin. Unfortunately, it’s only for Windows at the moment… but I’ve promised a pizza to whoever ports it to OS X.

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Categorized as AOL, music

Web 2.0 Expo: Bridging the Gap, OpenAuth and Widgets

Greg and I presented at Web 2.0 Expo today in a presentation called Bringing the Gap Between Desktop and Web. It went well, although we were hoping to have some more announcements to make. There was a lot of discussion of the widget space, microformats (which 99% of the audience hadn’t heard of which surprised me), a little on OpenID and I got to talk about OpenAuth! I’ve had to stay quiet about it for months now, but I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s one of the things I’m most proud of AOL for doing.\
What’s OpenAuth It’s AOL opening up its authentication system to the web at large. We used it in ficlets instead of us having to come up with our own user system, maintaining all those passwords, writing code for encryption, sending those “oops, I forgot my password” e-mails, and re-inventing that wheel for the millionth time, I didn’t have to worry about it at all.\
I was able to integrate OpenAuth with Rails in about twenty minutes. And for those who don’t have AIM screennames, or don’t want them, we supported OpenID, which took about forty-five minutes to integrate.\
I linked to the presentation up there, but if you missed it, here are the slides. I mentioned my triple-headed widget that works in Dashboard, Opera and AIM Pages as well.\
Now, it’s time for me to go write some more stuff for the book and try to get caught up.

Web 2.0 Expo – Making Lemonade

It’s been a wonderful (italics = sarcasm!) week so far. My second presentation at Web 2.0 Expo got moved to Wednesday at the last minute, and I won’t be here, so I’m not giving it. It’s a long and sad soap opera, and I’d rather not talk about it. But, instead of giving up entirely, I’ve decided to make some lemonade. Instead of doing the presentation (Microformats for Web Services and Portable Content) in a hallway at Web 2.Open, I think I’ll go to the Mashroom and see if I can get some help turning it into a Rails plugin. While I’ve launched a product on Rails, I’m no expert. I’ve been meaning to play with plugins, but haven’t had time (oddly enough, working on this presentation). I’ve zipped up the Rails app if you want to play with it. You’ll need to install the mofo and ruby-openid gems for it to work correctly (and you need a database for the profiles).\
What does it do? The main demo takes OpenID and after you log in, it grabs the OpenID URL looking for an hcard and pre-populates your profile with some selected bits of info. It was pretty painless to throw together, and I’d love to turn it into a plugin to make it even more painless. I think this could be a great alternative to CardSpace and the OpenID 2.0 attribute exchange stuff that’s still in the works. With delegate links, you could have multiple hcard “personas” that all point to the same identity provider but contain different profile information. Wouldn’t that be cool?\
In related news, I’m tired of conferences. I’d rather stay home, work and spend time with my family, who I feel is getting away from me. I’m missing too many of Brian’s little developments, the little things that kids learn on their ride from babies to little boys. He’s already a toddler and well on his way to kid-dom, and I don’t want to miss anything I don’t have to. Max gets smarter every day, and I want to be there to help answer questions.\
Other than Mashup Camps, and XTech (only because I already agreed to do it), I’m done until SxSW next year. It’s a gigantic pain in the ass to travel, and conference organizers don’t make it any easier. You’d think they’d treat speakers better, but they don’t. Yes, it’s a privilege to speak, but it’s also a huge commitment – both in time and money. They move your presentations around (without warning, or checking to see if you’re available), the network never works, and no one will answer e-mails (oops, here I go, I’m dwelling on this conference again). I’m tired and I need a break.\
So, if you’re going to Mashroom on Tuesday, come help.\
Update: I ended up not doing the Mashroom because I wanted to meet John Allsopp and see his microformats presentation (which was fantastic, and mine would have been a great sequel to it). By the end of that, I was tired and didn’t feel like writing code so I went back to the AOL booth to help out.