Multimediatreff und Workshops am 23. und 24. März

Am 24. März findet der nächste Multimediatreff (MMT) in Köln statt. Die Konferenz gibt es schon länger, das hier wird immerhin Ausgabe 29, es ist aber erst der zweite mit Schwerpunkt HTML5. Das Programm ist zwar noch nicht ganz fertig, es gibt aber jetzt schon einige interessante Themen. Am Nachmittag werde ich dort auch über “Pitfalls and Opportunities of Single Page Applications” erzählen. Im Prinzip derselbe Vortrag den ich auf der jQuery UK Konferenz gehalten habe, allerdings ist hier doppelt so viel Zeit, es wird also einiges mehr abgedeckt.

Am 23. März, den Freitag vorher, gibt es ebenfalls im Mediapark drei Workshops, die im Rahmen des Multimediatreffs angeboten werden. Neben “CSS3 und Tools” von Jens Grochtdreis und “Web Application Hacking” von Mario Heiderich, gibt es dort “JavaScript Application Development” von mir. Plätze sind limitiert, die ersten 10 gibts zum Early Bird Preis. Wer also z.B. etwas über Handlebars und socket.io lernen will, sollte die Gelegenheit nutzen!

About planning

“[…] plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, [they just don’t work in practice]” — from Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

This provides a nice answer to the odd notion that being agile is an excuse to do away with all planning. It explains the intuition that planning itself is useful, even if plans aren’t.

I’ve only just started reading that book, but odds are good that there’s plenty more gems in it like this one. Thanks to Glen Lipka for the recommendation.

PS: I had to cripple the quote a bit, especially at the end, for it to make sense outside of the book’s context.

Ranting on Redirects

Redirects are a good to refactor the web: Instead of never changing anything, you can migrate to new URLs, and put redirects in place to keep old URLs alive. As anything, it can go very wrong.

As a recent example, I just clicked on this particular link: http://yuilibrary.com/theater/nicholas-zakas/zakas-architecture/

I found that link in a post elsewhere. When I click on it, I’m getting redirected to this page: http://yuilibrary.com/theater/

That’s not what I was looking for. To add insult to injury, when I search for “architecture” in the search field on that page, the first result is exactly the same, that I started with, again redirecting me to the latter useless one. And no, I’m not going to page through 10 pages looking for that one video, f*** you very much. (PS: YouTube channel search worked)

Speaking of redirects: If you own some smartphone, you may be aware that certain websites redirect you to their mobile site once they detect that you’re using a mobile browser. For example, when you open this link on an iPhone or Android phone: http://soundcloud.com/bassistance

You end up here: http://m.soundcloud.com/bassistance

But when you open that mobile specific page in a desktop browser, there’s no redirect happening, that would bring you back to the non-mobile page. There’s only an opt-in, as with many mobile specific pages.

At least the Mobile SoundCloud page also works on desktop browsers, but there’s a lot worse examples. Amazon for example gives you only a very crippled site, so if I share an Amazon page from my smartphone with someone, they end up on that same mobile page, lacking 80% of what Amazon normally has.

Mobile YouTube just screws it up completely. Whenever sharing a link, you end up on the mobile front page, losing all context you had.

I’ve got one more. Mozilla, not exactly on the evil side of the web, can of course screw up redirects just like anyone else. In this case, I attempted to open this page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/aria/widgets/spinbutton

What I end up on is this instead: https://developer.mozilla.org/de/

What’s going on? Even though my system and browser is set to English, I’m getting redirected to a german site. I didn’t ask for that, and worse, it looses the deep link, as it redirects to the start page, not the one I actually wanted to open. So is it my fault for having added “German” to my list of preferred languages in my browser, as I need that for a specific project? Even though its set with a lower preference then English? I don’t think so.

So please, the next time you implement a redirect, think! Thanks for reading.

Drafts

Here’s a list of post drafts I got saved in WordPress and didn’t publish:

Alhazen, Rasputin, North Korea, Meta Humor, HR Exploitation++, Security Trolls, Introduction to JavaScript unit testing, Advanced JavaScript Basics, Things we don’t know, Node.js and cooperative multitasking, Chevelle, Silversun Pickups, Favorites: Opeth, Favorites: Tool, Favorites: King Crimson, Scala on Google App Engine, Automated Testing

17 in total, with anything from music recommendations to tech stuff to articles about certain figures. Oldest from 2009, newest from just now.

Based on that, anything you’d like to see published? Something you’re interested in? Pick any three!