Chasing My Own Tale
A concept that’s been rolling around in my head for a couple of years has been this concept of “Motivation” and how it relates to web design and web site architecture.
Below is a story of Motivation from the perspective of a web site’s owners.
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My mom sent this to me… Is she trying to warn me off?
On Children
1. You spend the first two years of their life teaching them to walk and talk. Then you spend the next sixteen telling them to sit down and shut up.
2. Grandchildren are God’s reward for not killing your own children.
3. Mothers of teens now know why some animals eat their young.
4. Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn’t have said.
5. The main purpose of holding children’s parties is to remind yourself that there are children more awful than your own.
6. We childproofed our homes, but they are still getting in.
Advice for the day: be nice to your kids. They will choose your nursing home one day.
And finally, if you have a lot of tension and you get a headache, do what it says on the aspirin bottle: “Take two aspirin” and “Keep away from children.”
Wow, that’s about as cut and dried as you get: Claims vs facts regarding Dr. Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
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I was calling tech support for a large web hosting company (let’s call them “LarthEink”) trying to figure out the access information for a new client who knows nothing about their 5-years-old account. In the course of trying to get simple information like the name of the FTP server to use, I came across a spilt-brain situation.
You are about to see a prime example of the split-brain. First we have the trained-to-do-these-steps part of the brain setting up the start of the sentence “Can you give me the last four digits of the credit card…”
But the other part of the mind which I’ll call the what-did-that-person-just-say part of short term memory came up with the ending “…that was lost?”
After that my what-did-that-person-just-say section of brain just crinkled up and spontaneously combusted.
Reading and reading.
Reviewing the numbers again.
Everything’s “normal”.
—
I keep going through the list’s archives and recent digests. I see others with far worse symptoms, but everyone with a real name for their malady.
Comparing to others’ situations, mine is easy to live with physically. But add in that idiopathic term and it’s like I get stuck in a loop. Effect without a Cause.
“Seek and ye shall find” indeed.
Here’s a framework for conflict resolution. I’m thinking of expanding this further.
The four R’s here are stges that you can use to work through conflicts in ideaologies, methods, or other issues. This framework scales well from person-to-person conflicts up to small and large group conflicts and beyond.
Recognize: The first step is two fold: Recognizing that there is a conflict and recognizing the individual elements that are part of that conflict. Whether it’s a difference in background, vocabulary, or group or personal history, everyone brings to the table a certain amount of baggage.
Respect: Do what it takes to understand how the opposing side has come to this point: each of the elements from the above step will lead people to different conclusions. Respecting these conclusions is the important part of this step. You do not have to agree with them, simply understand that this is where the other side is at.
Relate: Taking that respect to the next level means understanding it personally. Relate the context and the conclusions from the previous steps to examples from your own life: some issues such as abandonment, frustration, and resentment are nearly universal. Putting the opposing parties’ into perspective can give you the start of understnading, but stepping into their role or situation can provide clarity in the perspective.
Resolve: Now you have the foundation for communicating in an open and understanding manner with the opposing side. By having gone through these steps each side can express themselves through their own words and understand shared concepts that trancend the specific situations.
Finally someone has updated the whole “If cars were like computers” meme and brought it to be more than just humor, but actual lessons that can be learned by neophytes.
{{link http://mirrorshades.org/wc/archives/002796.php It’s an appliance, right?}}
People accept it as a given that in order to own and drive a car (and expect it to actually work), there are things to be learned, procedures to follow, and maintainance to be performed. You have to learn the rules of the road and how to operate the vehiecle. You have to get the oil changed every so often. If you see the “check engine” light come on, that probably means something is wrong. If your car is making an odd noise, that probably means something is wrong. You have to put gas in the car, and the gas goes in a certain place. If you want to avoid getting screwed, you should know a few of the very basics of how cars work, if for no other reason than you’ll be able to accurately describe the problem to the mechanic. The list goes on.
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Today, thanks to the upgraded layout system, I added a significant function to OrderSomewhereChaos.
Along with the ‘choose a layout’ selector, there is now an option to show the Wiki page that has been attached to that web page. using an iframe tag, I’m actually pulling the page up using the same old link I used to use (that’s simply labeled “Read and Write Comments”). Now it’s in-line, on the page (or off!) with just a click.
There’s a ton of different pieces that make this happen:
A) JavaScript sets a cookie when the checkbox is clicked.
B) JS also re-loads the page when that happens.
C) When the SSI commands (at the proper point in the page template) see that the cookie has been set, they assign a couple of height and width variables and then
D) call the “commentary.shtml” file to be included.
E) This Commentary.shtml file makes an iframe (with the height and width set by the template) and
F) calls a special little tool called “wikilink.cgi”. WikiLink will take a URL (or a phrase) and convert it into a WikiWord.
G) The Wikilink script then redirects the browser to the actual wiki “wiki.pl” with the appropriate WikiWord tacked onto the request.
Here’s an example page that you can check out. Surf on over to OSC, check the “Comments” checkbox in the navigation bar, and you’ll see the comments box come up with the page when it refreshes the page. Some pages already have comments on them. Now more will probably have them as well.
Also note that the comments box may appear at the bottom of the page, depending on the layout you are using. (If you click on the link above, did you notice that you were set to the Aqua layout?) You can compare it to this version which is the Grey layout. It’s nice to be able to set a specific template to show up, even if it’s just for the first link.
The end result is that the Wiki will have much higher visibility on the site. I still have to consider whether I want to add it more prominately to this journal. Maybe next weekend.
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Isn’t interesting that just as school starts up, I decide to go all quiet like on my journal?
In the mean time, a new layout is available over at OrderSomewhereChaos.com called DitDot. Just a new header and a background color change.
Less visible is the fact that there is a max-width attribute stuck on the main column of text. Compare and contrast the pages with a lot of text between the Aqua and the DitDot versions. I’m trying to decide if the DitDot version is inherently easier to read, and if I should expand the max-width to a size that feels just a little bit less than comfortable. Also note that the max-width gets wider if you have your fonts set to a larger size.
Which reminds me, since I’ve moved from the white backgrounds, I really ought to convert the images on the site from GIFs and JPEGs to PNGs with appropriate alphas. I did that on one image. Now that iBook image blends properly on all of the layout choices.
(Now that I’ve turned on “Check my spelling as I type” in Safari, I’m more confident about using my full vocabulary. Interesting… or should I say Intriguing? )
Sometimes life feels like it’s teetering on the edge.
The site this photo comes from has all sorts of interesting, scary, funny and awful photos, including one that I saw on Bo’s Xanga journal the other month.
Poor Kitty… The Joker… Landing on Lake Notsofrozen