Tim Kadlec's Blog, page 2

More shovels

There is no shortage of information floating around today. There are a multitude of books, magazines, newspapers, blog posts, articles, videos and podcasts just clamoring for our attention. It’s an incredible thing, this wealth of information we have at our fingertips. Never before has so much knowledge been so easily accessible.

We’ve responded by creating a lot of tools that help us collect this information. We can easily store quotes, snippets or even full articles in any one of a hundred different sites and services. We can save links to the videos and recordings that moved us on some level. RSS feeds make it incredibly easy to consume massive quantities of online articles and blog posts. Tools like the incredible Ifttt help make our many online services interact with each other, further easing the process of collecting information.

But what happens to that information after it has been carefully tagged and stored away? The more new information we collect, the more old information gets buried. That post we read that sparked an idea, that quote that stirred something deep within—lost and buried. Forgotten amongst the piles of all the other information we’ve collected.

Certainly this is nothing new—the issue has merely been amplified. Technology, though, is supposed to work for us. It’s supposed to help us solve issues we’ve had in the past. Why not push our tools to not merely collect, but to remind us what is already there?

We need more services like the Kindle Daily Review and Timehop. Kindle’s Daily Review delivers “flash-cards” of a book you’ve read in the past. It displays notes and highlights that you made. It’s fantastic! I love seeing a passage from a book that I had forgotten all about, but that still sparks something within me. Timehop is similar—it lets you know what you posted on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or Instagram a year ago. I’ve only been using that service for a short time, but already I’ve found several articles and conversations that I had forgotten about.

Why is this important? Because serendipity is a stimulant. In his book, “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work”, Douglas Coupland had this to say about Marshall McLuhan, one of the most prescient minds of the last century: “For Marshall, the fun of ideas lay in crashing them together to see what emerged from the collision.” When you rub two stones together, you can make a spark that starts a fire. Put two seemingly unrelated ideas next to each other and the effect is the same.

Searching, for the most part, eliminates those kinds of serendipitous discoveries. It’s a more or less direct path to the very specific type of information we are looking for. A service like the Kindle Daily Review, a service that provides automated nostalgia—that’s the kind of tool that encourages the mixing of ideas, the friction that causes the spark.

We have enough piles. What we need are more shovels.

Work to be done

Smashing Magazine just launched their newly redesigned site. Personally, I think it looks pretty great. The ads are a little distracting perhaps, but other than that, the side content mostly gets out of the way leading to a pleasant reading experience.

And of course, it’s responsive. That adds another level of loveliness. The navigation adjustments in particular are kind of interesting to watch. My favorite layout is the last one to kick in before you hit 1020px. It’s clean, easy to read, and the ads are not yet there.

But….

There’s a catch here. For as lovely as the site looks, there’s a lot going wrong from a technical perspective.

Performance

For starters, the size. Even on my phone, the site weighs in at a massive 1.4MB. A large part of the issue is that those ads, the same ones that don’t display below 1020px, are still being requested and loaded on smaller resolutions. They’re just being hidden with a little touch of ‘display:none’.

When I tested, the site also made about 90 requests. That’s an awful big drag on page load time—no matter what device or network you are viewing the site on.

Advertising

Another potential concern is the advertising. I’m not sure exactly on Smashing Magazine’s business model, prices, etc., so it’s hard to criticize their advertising efforts too much. I do find it interesting that their ads are all hidden below 1020px though, leaving their ads visible to only a portion of their audience.

One reason for this may be the high number of ads they display. In their sidebar, I count 16 ads. They are distracting at large resolutions, so I imagine they got to be very overwhelming on smaller resolutions. Having to re-orchestrate 16 ads onto a small screen layout would be a very tall task.

Again, we’re talking business model here so there’s obviously much more at play than what an outside perspective grants, but I would love to see fewer ads. Not just for Smashing Magazine, but across all sites. Less ad spaces, more money per slot. (Roger Black talks about this in detail in his posts The holy grail, part 1 and part 2.) The result would be three key improvements:

You would have a lighter, cleaner experience.
The ads would provide more value to the advertisers—less ads competing for eyeballs per page.
The smaller number of ads would be much easier to manage across resolutions.

Bigger picture

Now, having said all that, I could be guilty of premature condemnation. Perhaps this is the interim solution and a fix to these issues (performance in particular) is forthcoming.

Jason Grigsby put it nicely in two tweets:

When I have guests and don’t have time to clean, I shove things in a closet. No biggee. Everyone does it. But the house isn’t really clean.

The key is following through and cleaning the closet as well. Let’s hope others are better at it than I am at home. :-)

Of course he’s right. In fact, I have a few messy closets myself. (Both literally and metaphorically.)

And I don’t mean to pick on Smashing Magazine. They are far from the only site making these kinds of mistakes on the technical side of things and from a business perspective, the discussion about how to handle advertising is far from being resolved. And again, from a visual perspective I think they did an awful lot of things right.

We simply need to ensure that the discussion broadens. Responsive design is a fantastic approach, one that brings us closer to taking advantage of the inherent flexibility of the web. But simply being responsive is not the destination. To maximize the potential of a responsive approach, we need to focus not only on the visual components, but on the technical execution and business ramifications as well.

I’m Writing a Book

So, I’m writing a book on responsive enhancement for New Riders.

To say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement. I love sharing what I know, and writing a book has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’m not sure of the exact publication date yet, but it looks like the book should be out sometime in the second half of the year.

Uh…there’s already an awesome book on responsive web design

Why yes, there is, and I wholeheartedly recommend buying a copy. Like, now. Ethan’s book is a brilliant read. I even wrote a glowing review shortly after finishing it. In that review, I said I was pining for a sequel—something that would build on the core principles Ethan discussed. When Michael Nolan of New Riders got in touch a few months ago and asked if I was interested in writing a book, I saw it as an opportunity to get that book written.

More info, please!

The book will be an exploration of how a responsive approach can be integrated into the workflow—from planning and early mockups through to the actual development of the site. In addition to fluid layouts, media queries and fluid images, the book will discuss topics such as design deliverables, structured content, feature detection and server-side enhancements.

If you want to keep up with the progress, your best bets are to follow me on twitter, stay tuned to this blog, and sign up for the mailing list at responsiveenhancement.com.

I’ll keep you posted!

What I Read in 2011

A new year has begun. That means that it’s once again time to take a look back at what books I read over the past year. Unfortunately, it appears I’m trending entirely in the wrong direction. While I managed to read 38 books in 2009 and 33 in 2010, I only made it through 29 this past year. Hopefully I can reverse that trend in 2012.

One interesting trend—at least to me—is that I returned to reading a lot more web related books (10!) this year. This is in no small part related to the A Book Apart series. If they keep churning out quality books like this, that count is likely to stay very high.

As always, if the book made this list, then I enjoyed it on some level. There are far too many good books out there to suffer through one that doesn’t interest me. If I’m not enjoying it I set it aside.

If you’re looking for specific recommendations, “The Invisible Man” (which I had read before and will read again) and “The Demolished Man” top my (short) list of fiction. “Obliquity”, “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” and “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” are at the top for non-fiction (excluding the web-related ones).

Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Linchpin by Seth Godin
Pull by David Siegel
The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith
Obliquity by John Kay
Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte (See my review)
Adaptive Web Design by Aaron Gustafson
CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm
The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
The Invisible Man by HG Wells
The Filter Bubble by Eli Parson
Big Deal by Robert Hoekman Jr.
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
The Information by James Gleick
Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski (See my review)
Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walter
Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halverson
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland
Mindfire by Scott Berkun
Simple and Usable by Giles Colborne
Loose by Martin Thomas