WordPress mobile
While blogs and some simple social networking-type sites have become commodity software, far too much of the web still faces low-level development challenges that lead to lots of frustration for both the owners of those web sites and for their users.
About six months ago I did a cursory check of a bunch of blogs thought to be SAS — such as WordPress and Blogger — to see if they were iPhone friendly. They were not. Then, yesterday, I found by chance that my WordPress-powered blog is iPhone friendly. My blog being iPhone-friendly is quite a nice surprise, because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how web site creation is still far too low-level. Years ago I had a MovableType blog that I administered on my own, on a physical server that I owned. While I wanted to be blogging, sometimes I felt like what I was really doing was administering and customizing the blogging software, and not doing enough actual blogging. For non-technies, administration and customization tasks would have been insurmountable barriers to actually having a blog. And even as a techie, when I powered down the server, the blog disappeared forever.
This blog is different. I don’t do anything, and over time, its interface evolves with the changing web. In addition to being iPhone-friendly, WordPress also supports Google gears. The site I started for the Enterprise Rails online community is also SAS, and is powered by Ning. I don’t have to worry about either site, and they just run, letting me concentrate on the content in the sites and not their low-level implementation.
Expect to hear more from me on this topic soon.
blog.chak.org is iPhone friendly
Once I was greatly surprised when saw one message on an SMF forum which I’ve set up and administered (and am a bit administering even now). The user said to be happy with the mobile version of the site because it made possible for her to use it via mobile phone. And I never knew it had a special mobile face before that :)
SAS are great not only as blogs – for example, lots of code sit on GitHub these days which makes developers happy of not administering their own repo servers. At the other side, I think that lack of administering experience strikes developer skills a lot. That’s like “any web developer needs to build his own CMS engine, but should not use it”. And, BTW I’m still using my hand-built colocated solution for hosting photos instead of Flickr and friends – it’s just way more usable for me. Problem of many SAS is that they’re just overbloated.
Arthur,
I agree with you that every developer should build their own once so that they know how the internals work. In my freshman year computer science class at MIT, we created a compiler and an interpreter for a variant of Lisp. However, I’m perfectly happy to use other people’s compilers and interpreters these days.
The secondary point I’m hoping to get across is that the majority of content creators on the web are not techies at all. For this group, setting up a blog on a server (as opposed to using WordPress) is too much trouble. It’s like being required to be a mechanic in order to drive a car. These users will fall hopelessly behind as web technologies race into the future. Even for techies maintaining their own server-side software packages, the pace can be daunting. For example, does your hand-built Flickr solution support RSS? Are the images marked up with some kind of microformat that allows them to be easily indexed by other applications? Does it support Google Gears? Etc etc? These are the sorts of features that everyone wants, but which are tangential to the goal of uploading photos to share online.
As for all features you listed for photo sharing – that’s just the case when I don’t need any of them. I’m not greatly bothered by the fact that MacOS X lacks built-in functionality to change appearance of UI elements and use skins. And I actually don’t fetch any RSS from Flickr. Is it bad that Twitter restricts length of the text? I think it’s a feature :)
Excess of features can be as bad as lack of them. And I don’t remind when I sshed last time to that photo server to fix anything there, so it doesn’t take any of my time to get maintained. Although, I’d like to find time and add some features there. Anyway, Flickr doesn’t support most of them.
In general, I’d like some UNIX architectural philosophy to come into the web. I mean ability of building applications from lots of really simple bricks. OAuth is a good step towards this: you may (almost) seamlessly use some services from others. At the other side, it still lacks proper integration and a good UI approach. Facebook has applications to embed – that’s another step. Treat my idea like public SOA where anyone can connect services in the way they like and even build any service component themselves.