Field notes by Thor Muller

A breadcrumb trail towards aha!

My old piano

Who wants it? It is a beautiful old piece, though it needs a bit of work to get back to its old glory, and it needs to be picked up on Monday latest.

 

  • It has several chipped keys, though it is playable
  • It needs to be tuned
  • There is some slight peeling of the wood siding, and a hinge on the lid that needs repair
  • It has one sticky key

(download)

The login/signup process on Web sites is dehumanizing

In an post called Where Markets are Not Conversations Doc Searls writes convincingly that the way we ask our users to relinquish themselves up to legalese when they come our web sites and applications is fundamentally dehumanizing. We're so used to it as end-users, and web developers that we don't think twice about it. For the most part. I've been getting increasing pushback from people about the obnoxiousness of this process. 

It's something we're working on at Get Satisfaction for an upcoming redesign, but the answers aren't as simple as they at first appear. The lawyers wag their fingers about liability. The technologists want to observe well-worn conventions to simplify code. Marketers want better user data. But as guardians of the customer experience we have to move beyond this abject state.

You are not a human being on the Web. In fact, as Paul Trevithick put it (at one of our first VRM meetings at the Berkman Center), the Web has no concept of a human being. It is fundamentally an arrangement of files and connections between those files. Hyperlinks on the Web may subvert huaraches, especially when they are authored by human beings (such as here, in a blog, which is a human expression); but the Web itself is oblivious to that. We still lack the means, on top of the Web (and the Net) to form and maintain relationships that are anything more than a very crude, partial and highly distorted imitation of those we have out in the real, human, social world.

Lots of work to do.

Missing Buenos Aires

Just read Fred Wilson's post on Buenos Aires (thanks @robhayes for the suggestion): http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/12/thoughts-on-buenos-aires.html. It's such an unforgettable place that his top 10 list brought me right back. And his wife's gorgeous photos and writeups are luscious: http://www.gothamgal.com/gotham_gal/travel/

In the spirit of show-and-tell, here's a slideshow of Amy and my trip from October 2006. Oh how I miss it!

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Using Wordpress as CMS alongside our Rails app

Here's a tutorial about how to integrate Wordpress into a Rails app via a mod rewrite proxy. Something like this may solve our challenge of providing an easy separate CMS for marketing pages: 

Related blog posts:

An alternative is to run Wordpress on the same install as the Rails app like this:

...but I wonder what issues will occur by so tightly bundling the two.

Another question is whether putting the Wordpress pages on a subdomain is worth the SEO hit for the decoupling benefit. It would be nice to not worry about Rails having to route all those marketing requests.