Xaprb

I’m going to present at the EdUIConf conference 2009. This is a conference focused in two directions: Web professionals in higher education, and higher education for web professionals. I believe it’s going to be comparable to, or at least in the same vein as, some of the more popular conferences about user interface design, Web standards, and the like. (It’ll also be much more affordable.)

The speaker lineup boasts a number of heavy hitters. I’m guessing those of you in the Web design profession will know the following name: Molly Holzschlag. If you don’t, crawl out from whatever rock you’ve been hiding under!

My own session at this conference will be on the topic of Web front-end performance. I’ve dubbed it High-Performance Web Interface Design, and I’ll focus on a practical approach to performance. Nothing I’ll show you is revolutionary. The problem is, even though it’s not revolutionary to get good client-side performance, people don’t do it, and users suffer terrible interfaces that don’t download, render, or interact in a snappy fashion.

This will be a relatively fast-paced overview of Web front-end performance, and I’ll show you a demo of a badly performing website (such as the type I see often), make some changes to it, and let you see the performance difference.

If you register, I would appreciate you entering my name in the “how did you hear about this” text box. That will give me a chance to win a laptop. *grin*

My brother sent me these thoughts, slightly edited:

Recently I looked at the [Wikipedia] Linux page. To my surprise it’s not about the kernel Linux, it’s about the “OS”. I looked at discussion and it appears that by general consensus the term Linux applies to the unix like operating system, and so it is correct for Wikipedia to follow that consensus. So, instead of providing information, they are deliberately misleading folks… Often what the majority does is wrong because the majority of people are not the experts. By definition, the experts are a minority.

You’d expect a higher standard from Wikipedia, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? Aw, come on, surely you don’t mean to imply that Wikipedia is a place where things become true because most people say so, do you?

Consensus, when used in this way, is nothing other than mind-rot for the masses, group-think at its worst. There is a valid use of the word when it applies to decision-making. But this isn’t about decision-making, it’s about out-voting or out-discussing.

What’s interesting to me is that I heard a radio interview with Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, and he was extremely careful to say GNU/Linux when discussing the operating system that runs the website.

Saying that Linux is an operating system has not, does not, and never will make it true any more than saying that a steering wheel is a car makes it so.

I just adore Google Code. But the default wiki view (a list of pages, sorted by last-modified) is lacking something. Fortunately, it’s fixable. Here’s the before:

Default wiki list

And here’s the after:

Wiki with sidebar and default page

Here’s how:

1. Create a wiki page called TableOfContents, or something like that. Using normal wiki syntax, enter links and text for your table of contents. The best way to do this is to use bulleted lists to organize and outline the pages. Keep in mind that we’ll use this same text for the sidebar, so keep it brief.
2. Go to Administer/Wiki and enter that wiki page’s name in the “Wiki Sidebar” box. Save the changes.
3. Go to Administer/Tabs and enter the same page in the Wiki box. Save the changes.

Now both the wiki “homepage” and the sidebar will contain the page you created. No more ugly list-of-pages. And as you navigate through the wiki pages, the sidebar automatically expands and closes the outline to show where you are.

If you want, you can use a different homepage and sidebar, but I’ve found that it works well for me to use the same page for both. It’s a preference, that’s all.

There’s one more trick I’d like to share: you can add the text <wiki:toc /> at the top of any page to create a small table of contents for that page. There are ways to customize it — check the documentation for more options.