simple things
This is not really what I wanted to do with this blog, but I have to give a shout-out to three lovely things that already exist. (I wish I’d invented em, I guess.)
Thing one: tinyurl. An excellent way to take a big thing, make it little. Minimalist interface. It stays out of your way. It is, in fact, the only way that I can post my official course syllabus url for a file in my official university webspace onto the official university course directory. Because the interface to add a URL to a course can’t accomodate URLs as long as the ones our personal space has (unless you use ridiculously short filenames and no folders…)
Thing two: doodle.ch. What a boon! What a simple idea! joint scheduling where nobody needs accounts, priority access, views of other people’s calendars, etc. I’m considering having some students do usability evaluations just to see if it is, in fact, perfect as is.
Thing three: my signup page. Joel Galbraith, in a panic, needed a way to sign up people for sessions in an experiment. Only so many people per session, etc. etc. I’ve used two online ways to do this: one is to repurpose a ‘resource’ calendaring system to try to create resources for each slot of something. The other is a custom built application they have at our university for things such as signing up for flu shots or yoga classes, which requires authentication with your campus account (heaven forbid you don’t have one yet.) Then I found this completely useful set of scripts called My Signup Page from Fuzzymonkey.org. The bummer was I had to be an actual geek to install the scripts on our server, the biggest hassle of which was figuring out how the ISP had to have Perl scripts set up. No debugging of any software per se, just configuration. (Grrrr.) The interface is nearly perfect, except for the stuff you need to do on the server end. Another potential student project, methinks? Build the interface to allow it to be completely webified, so some ’signuppage.org’ does the right thing.
Lightweight. Minimal. Beautiful.
What this reminds me of was a lovely talk given by a friend of mine, Deborah Tatar. She tried training programmers to design groupware, in the form of games for portable, handheld computers. Groupware by nature has to be flexible, with distributed control over activities. People should be able to pick it up and use it a thousand ways. BUT what she found was that although programmers inevitably value this when they are the user, when they start designing/building they become brutalist control freaks. It’s easier to design a Stalinesque groupware system than one that is minimalist, flexible, distributed.