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Archive for the ‘services’ Category

An award shouldn’t be a punishment

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

What caught my eye today while having lunch was a promotion flyer from a Slovenian investment company advertising a new “product”. They will be awarding prizes to anyone joining their investment plan – everybody gets something. And that’s not all – if you write a sentence about the fund you’ll be included in a draw for five major prizes. Unfortunately they were thinking about the money too much (and on the other side thanks god – they’re an investment firm) and made the main prize a true punishment. The winner will get a one week vacation in Sharm el-Sheik for ONE person. It’s not the history of the place that’s the punishment but the fact that it’s only for one person. Since they’re not targeting hard core investors (that are by definition closer to the “unrealistically selfish” homo economicus) there’s about zero probability that the winner won’t have anyone that she’d want to share this prize with. You can belive me that’s not gonna be one happy winner/user. So she’s got a “simple” choice – go alone or invest in another ticket & accomodation (if available at all). Or maybe she can sell it on eBay or the local Bolha for that matter.

The company probably doesn’t care about my opinion or my money (that’s not going to be invested in their funds) but I hope they change their attitude anyway. Maybe someday…

To prove this can actually be done I’ll share a story. I was at a meeting with a client when we were deciding about a prize in a prize winning game. Not the actual prize yet but the type of the prize. What somebody mentioned a trip to Paris what really made me happy was that the first thing they said was: “The award should be a full package – no additional expenses required.” It’s in such small things you really see a companies attitude towards the people that make them possible/profitable.

Posted in services, thoughts | No Comments »

The avatar fun

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

I’ve had a Gravatar account for some time now but there’s a problem with it – I don’t always want to leave the same email on all blogs. There’s another problem with the service – it’s offline currently, not accepting new users. Another problem and probably one of the reasons the service went down is also the centralized hosting of images.

For the reasons above I think Pavatar is a better solution. The idea is to retrieve the avatar image from the URL, not the email. You have a few options to provide a Pavatar link (http header, link in the html or simply /pavatar.png). The image is always downloaded from your site which might be a partybreaker if you’re a heavy commenter but better since you control the image at all time.

Today I stumbled upon MonsterID as a fallback for Gravatars. I loved it. I had to do something with it. I downloaded the script written by Andreas Gohr, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License and changed it a bit. Well actually a lot. I added local caching and the possibility of adding other templates – I work at an interactive agency so I think I’ll be able to find a few characterbuilding image sets lying around.

The MonsterID service is here for anybody to use. It’s probably going to be as popular as the Pingerator.

Posted in general, monsterid, php, services, technology | 2 Comments »

Authentication panel

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

Tomorrow I’m hosting a panel about authentication at our local web-related talks. To make thing a bit more interesting I invited more than just coders and security experts – we have a designer and a usability expert on the podium. I think the whole talk will be enlightening to everyone, since hardly anyone knows all the areas covered by our panelists.

I’ll introduce the panelists here in more detail:
Ozren Škondrič is a friend who dedicated a big part of his life to designing web interfaces. He uses a bunch of web based services and applications and is probably the person who filled the most registration forms amongst all the people I know.
Duška Mervar is probably the most famous around here for a great booklet about writing for the web which a lot of people don’t respect enough. As an expert for the user perspective I’m sure she’ll show us a new meaning to serving customers based on their personal preferences.
Tomaž Cerar works at the same company I do – Parsek. He is a coauthor of the infamous CP2 platform – a Java based CMS system we use and also the lead developer of many e-commerce sites we created.
Marko Perme works on e-banking and e-insurance and other e-solutions for one of the biggest Slovenian IT companies – Hermes Softlab. They created and support a few of the biggest and the most used e-service platforms in the country.

The moment is right for us to reflect on what the internet knows about us and to think about what we want from it. The panelists will help us understand what the trends in this area are and shed some light on the matter that is becoming one of the most important problems of the current wave of web services and applications.

Posted in events, services, spletne urice, technology | 1 Comment »

Online communities

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Spletne urice #34 served its audience with a nice talk about what online communities are and a quick reality check that hardware or software are not key components to the success of a specific community. Some of the more advanced visitors were a bit disappointed since the talk did not serve any points one could really work upon or any numbers or more direct lessons to be learned from studying them.

I was fascinated at how Jure has shown us that even a geek crowd can engage in a more active conversation with the person giving the talk – not only with mumbling and nodding. His way of delivering information is really amazing – it shows he has a lot of practice at Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana (which recently got Equis accreditation) where he recently graduated and is also a demonstrator there.

At the same time Tim Berners-Lee seems to have discovered that internet has grown out of the computer science and needs some more formal research done.

After the talk we also had a short talk from mozdev admin and Mozilla developer Brian King about the new Firefox 2.0 features. Since he spoke about most of the important features Marko just quickly reviewed the ones that developers should know best. The Firefox launch party then moved to a nearby pub where we continued with pizza and beer.

Posted in events, services, spletne urice | No Comments »

Web mashups – LIFFe

Monday, October 30th, 2006

A few days ago the local film festival LIFFe launched its programme. Again it was not an exceptional work of IA or UX. You can access the whole list of movies that leads to individual movie pages that contain details and the showing times. You can also check the schedule by individual date that unfortunately contains almost no details about the movie – just the title. Sections of the festival do not have a page where you can see all the movies that compete in that section.

So I decided to create a quick mashup of all scripts that have been lying around my disk for some time now. This proved to be a quite difficult task because of a lot of reasons. The first one was that the code behind the page is incredibly ugly – table layouts in table layouts without ids, classes or almost anything you can use to find your way around it. The next problem was the encoding and my use of php that is not too friendly to windows-1250 encoding used on the source page. Eventually I did it in a bit less than a day – it’s not perfect, but I think it shows that it can be done better and it does not take more time.

I have some stuff to add but since the festival is getting closer and closer I present Program 17. LIFFe festivala.

The page uses some AJAX (XHR to be exact), DOM parsing of the source data and SortedTable to present the data.

Posted in ajax, events, javascript, liffe, services | 4 Comments »

Triptracker

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Spletne urice served its visitors a great talk from one of the founders of a Slovenian company called Klika. It’s primarily a software company that specializes in tracking software with GPS and then mapping the data to support sporting and other events (like the Ljubljana marathon that’s on tomorrow).

But the talk wasn’t about their programming but rather about the first global Slovenian Web2.0 website/service – the TripTracker. In short it’s a website that allows you to upload positional data along with pictures, matches them all up by time, draws a map and more or less creates the whole trip into a nice little presentation that you can use to show at meets or just send to your friends. It’s also a good resource for travelers that want to travel to places they know almost nothing about – you can check other people’s trips and see where they went and what they saw and see any comments they might have made.

The most fascinating thing about all this is that they created all their mapping data themselves – all the JavaScript and html for the mapping was written for this site exclusively and all the images converted from NASA sources (I hear Google has exclusive rights on HQ satellite photos so no other mapping service can use them). As the talk progressed questions were popping to my mind but were soon answered – the API is in progress, the service can use Flickr as the image resource and they might even switch their own mapping tool with Google Maps. One thing that came as a surprise is that they’re not using Microformats even though it clearly supports stuff they present on their site. They do allow export to KML though. As all true Web2.0 sites TripTracker also has a developer blog so check it out to see when they release the API to the public.

The slides will probably online soon.

Posted in ajax, events, html, javascript, microformats, services, spletne urice, technology | No Comments »

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