Experimenting with Tumblr

I have recently hived off a few bits of posting that used to be in this blog to Tumblr, a startup that ValleyWag described as being, like Twitter, “unencumbered by revenue”. It’s been an interesting experience.

As this blog has become a bit more work-focussed and more formal I was feeling like writing about Doctor Who wasn’t quite the right thing to mix with the more esoteric tech stuff. I like WordPress a lot and I thought about starting up a second blog here. However I did feel that I wanted something that was a little bit lighter and light-hearted as the topics were going to be relatively trivial.

Signing up was easy (all very Web2.0: massive fonts, custom urls, etc.) but when I saw that you could use Markdown to write up posts rather than WSIWYG editors I was sold. Since I know it anyway it saves me a lot of time not frigging around with generated HTML. I also liked the AJAX UI that made it seem quite easy to just post a few thoughts.

In my mind Tumblr fits a kind of position between Twitter and WordPress. Where you have something to say that is more than a sentence but it isn’t a whole lot more than a paragraph. It is the kind of thing that Blogger should have become after it was clear that WordPress had completely whupped it on almost every front.

I have found Tumblr to be fun and also something that entices you into just jotting down a few thoughts. In terms of the experience it is all light, responsive and dynamic up front but you can dig around behind the scenes to take control of the visual aspects of your site via CSS and HTML (something that is paid for in WordPress) as well as get more options for posting.

So what do I miss from WordPress? Well the first thing is the Stats crack, obviously. WordPress has a killer feature in telling you exactly how many people are reading your articles and how they came to read them. There are also a lot of features that surround this like auto-promotion of articles to Google, the related articles list and the Blogs of the Day. Publishing something in WordPress feels like launching it into the world, by comparision Tumblr posts are a much more muted affair. It feels more like a secret club. I know Tumblr does the promotion as well but I guess WordPress does a better job of closing the feedback loop.

Not having comments on Tumblr is also part of that. Given that comments on your blog can be a very mixed bag I was surprised to find myself missing them. Somehow I must have gotten used to them and their lack now feels like silence. I know some people have used Intense Debate to add in comments but if I was really that bothered about it then I would probably have gone back to WordPress.

So I’m enjoying Tumblr but I am also hoping that they keep it simple and don’t get tempted to add every feature there is from other blogging software.

Important! !important is a danger sign

Until recently I had never seen the CSS keyword !important used in a production site. However just recently I have seen it in use and also had to use it myself to fix a few cascade issues.

CSS selectors work by assigning a “magic number” that indicates how specific the selector is in relation to the other selectors. Important works by boosting that number by a magnitude or ignoring all other selectors entirely. You can read the exact rules in the specification.

Important is really powerful and as a result you never want to use it. It’s kind of like the CSS A-Bomb, if you ever have to use it, something has gone wrong. The biggest problem with !important is that it can “lock” a style element and make it hard to override it in other cascades. Inevitably this becomes a problem because there is pretty much nothing in CSS that can be regarded as universal in the appearance and rendering of a website.

This then leads to other stylesheets also using !important in their selectors to overcome the earlier !important. This limits their reuse as they now, in turn, export their overly powerful rules and therefore require yet more !important use and so on and so on until every selector has !important on it.

Stylesheets should try to have as weak as possible selectors (without going overboard and perhaps applying some styling information too liberally). This makes them more generally useful as often people only dislike a few elements in a style or an individual page only has a few components that do not gel well with the general style.

I think !important should never be used when creating CSS. There are perhaps two exceptions I can think of: firstly client styles, you know best, fill your boots; secondly, stylesheets that you know represent the real bottom of a cascade. For example an optional stylesheet that renders the site in monochrome can reasonably be expected to represent the final word in a cascade.

Who is I?

Want to take a new look at news feeds? Whoisi is a feed aggregator with a few distinctive features, firstly it is orientated around people, secondly it allows you to associate an individual with pretty much anything that provides an RSS feed, it is also an experiment with anonymous collaboration.

News feeds are organised around people (e.g. John Resig) and for people who just have one blog it isn’t very exciting but if someone has a Twitter stream, a blog or two, Flickr and a LiveJournal then suddenly you are looking at a consolidated view of everything that person is up to.

Which is either really cool or is the behaviour of a demented stalker. For people who have a strong web presence and are generally pretty cool and interesting then it is really useful to get a single view of them. For example John’s JQuery conference posting works better when you combine Twitter and the photostream.

I think I kind of prefer Whoisi’s liberal anarchy to most of the other sites I have seen. It asks important questions as to how the web should work. Why do we need accounts and passwords? If information is public then do individuals get a say in how they information they provide is organised?

The death of MVC

The MVC pattern is so embedded into the concept of modern web development I feel quite the heretic for declaring it over. Yet more and more I think we are moving away from it as a pattern. Views have been boiled down to a special case of templating and now Controllers are the next under the microscope. What does a Controller do? Well it marshalls the model and exposes it to the view.

However with the relentless march of REST how much controlling is the Controller really doing? The HTTP request tells you the format of the data, identifies the resource it is interested in. How much need is there for a controller for each request type? Surely the Uber Controller that responds to the HTTP request is all that’s required.

I have also been using Groovlets recently and when using them I feel like “why not mix your model lookup with the ‘view’”. In my Groovlets I essentially lookup the data for the view either directly via Groovy SQL or via the Service layer that is injected out of Guice. The view is then created using Markup Builder.

Since my scripts end up at around 50 lines of code I think that any benefit I might have in separating things is outweighed by the fact that the entire interaction is in one place and can be found, read and changed very easily.

MVC saved us from really painful web architectures but as we grow more sophisticated in the way we handle HTTP Requests and the more we understand the implications of HTTP and the less ceremonial our languages becomes the less benefit we get from it.

Try our new, new services!

So on Friday not one but two long awaited beta service invitations arrived. The first was the announcement of the addition of Jotspot to Google Apps (finally) and the other about the Amazon Simple DB service. Typical buses…

I didn’t have a lot of time this weekend so I plumped for signing up for Google Apps and trying the new wiki functionality as I was hoping for a beefed up version of Pages. The Simple DB service also needs me to beef up my Web Service scripting fu.

It is too early to say much about either service but after signing up for a Google Apps account (apparently you cannot simply drive one off your regular Google Account). I was slightly underwhelmed by the new Google Sites service. It has taken how long to make a basic and acceptable wiki service available?

Still you can have a lot of separate wiki sites and you have a lot of flexibility on how you share and collaborate on them so maybe I need to build up some content first and then try to share it around. I would like to know whether you can hook Analytics up to some Sites content. That would be useful for some of the content that otherwise would go on something like a WordPress page.