July 21, 2004, 2:42 AM ET
Extension questions
My friend Brian Dennis thinks my All Music Firefox extension might cause trouble and that "[l]awyers are getting lathered up somewhere". And Sylvie Noël is asking whether I'll be "safe from [legal] pursuit."
What?
For the record, my intent wasn't to offend or anger -- it was to help people use allmusic.com better. And to offer a proof-of-concept that a browser extension can add functionality to specific sites.
But anyway, Brian's and Sylvie's comments bring up some interesting questions.
What legal argument would AMG have against the extension? Copyright? Something to do with intellectual property? I dunno.
If it is indeed somehow unlawful, wouldn't that make the AMG-link-fixer bookmarklet I made a few weeks ago unlawful, too? It also alters page content. As do Jesse Ruderman's site-specific bookmarklets.
But that starts getting really hairy. Illegal bookmarklets? What? That's ludicrous.
Of course, the bookmarklet requires a user to click it each time the page loads. Whereas the extension removes that step. Is that the line? Automation?
This is some really interesting stuff to think about.
I see the All Music Guide extension as a sort of Web proxy. Kind of like those Web proxies that filter content to your liking -- like the ones that fix HTML and remove <blink> tags and stuff. The extension adds functionality to the site and, if anything, encourages people to spend more time there.
I can't see anything questionable in that.
July 19, 2004, 10:10 PM ET
Site-specific browser extension: All Music Guide
Lots of people are talking about All Music Guide's for-the-worse redesign. Here's an initial attempt at fixing it -- routing around the damage, so to speak.
I've written an extension for Mozilla Firefox that, when installed, alters the display and functionality of allmusic.com. Specifically, it does the following:
- It cleans up the horrible JavaScript-only links sitewide, thus enabling 21st-century browsing techniques such as tabbed browsing and opening links in new windows.
- It hides the annoying Flash spinner thing atop each page.
- It changes the functionality of the "Read more..." links on band and album detail pages. On the old AMG, band and album pages contained full reviews. Now, they feature only the first few sentences, with a link to "Read more..." on a separate page. The extension changes the functionality of that "Read more..." link so that, instead of taking you to a new page, clicking the link will dynamically load the full band/album review and insert it inline.
(If you have any ideas about what else the extension could do, please post a comment here or contact me. One idea I've had since I wrote it yesterday is to expand the length of the "Song title" table cell on album pages.)
To install the extension, just click the following link while using Mozilla Firefox 0.9+. It might work in 0.8, but I haven't tested it.
Then, restart your browser, and you're all set. Pretty easy, eh? You can uninstall it later in Firefox's handy extension manager.
A few tiny bugs exist -- namely that the extension makes the allmusic.com home-page link colors a bit funky -- but it's intended as a proof-of-concept more than anything else. To my knowledge, using browser extensions to "fix" Web sites, or add extra functionality, is unexplored territory.
There's a huge potential here. Site-specific Firefox extensions are an elegant, one-click-install solution to the problem of, well, lousy Web interfaces -- a problem Web users have had to shut up and deal with for as long as the Web has been around.
Let's do more of these things.
July 16, 2004, 2:44 AM ET
Required-user-registration debate continues
The folks on Poynter's online-news listserv once again are debating the merits (and, more importantly, demerits) of required user registration on news sites -- a topic I'm particularly passionate about. Here's a light rewrite of something I contributed to the list Thursday, in response to a defendant of user registration who wrote: "[T]here will always be an audience segment that opposes giving information about itself to read content on the Web":
It's not just the privacy issues. It's also the lack of value. Registration accounts are complete throwaways -- as very obviously evidenced by BugMeNot. Everyone I've talked to (techies and non-techies alike) sees this type of registration as an extremely annoying barrier with no redeeming value. There's no personal tie to a typical news-site registration account, no incentive to give accurate information or even care about who has access to your account.
Contrast this with community sites such as Slashdot, on which things like reputation and personalized features give people a heckuva lot of incentive to keep their account information private. Use registration where it makes sense, where the alternative (registration-lacking) product would be inferior -- and very obviously inferior, in readers' eyes.
(No, saying "Registered users get more highly-targeted ads!" isn't enough. Neither is saying "The benefit of registration is that you get the content." That's nothing short of arrogant -- and readers can and will get their regurgitated AP stories elsewhere.)
Slashdot is actually a decent example of how a news site registration system should work: Anyone can read it for free, but readers register to post comments. (Yes, anonymous comments are allowed, but they're discouraged by the brilliant social engineering of the "Anonymous Coward" label.) And, since the site has been this way for years, the community is mature enough that people actively want to register, because incentives, such as notoriety, karma, etc., are attractive.
June 29, 2004, 11:35 AM ET
Job: Web developer for World Online in Lawrence, Kansas
Alas, my friend and co-worker Simon Willison will be completing his year-long job placement and leaving our company in a few months to go back to school in England. We at World Online are officially looking for a Web programmer/developer to fill his position -- as soon as possible.
About the company
World Online is the Web division of the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kan. It's one of the most innovative online-news operations in the world. Our main sites are LJWorld.com (news), Lawrence.com (entertainment) and KUsports.com (sports). All three have garnered an impressive batch of industry awards -- and tremendous industry attention -- over the past few years.
If you're in the online media field, or trying to get into it, this is the place to be for innovation.
From a Web-development perspective, we strive for innovation, nimble development and the use of best practices. We have a near-religious focus on doing things the right way -- clean URLs, CSS, separation of content from presentation, accessibility, solid application design, etc.
From a content perspective, we pride ourselves on being hyper-local, converged across multiple media (TV, newspaper, Web) and focused on overkill. This is the type of place that doesn't just cover little-league baseball games with a story or two in the Sunday paper; it devotes an entire print publication and Web site to it, with cell-phone updates, weblogs and intensive team/league/field databases.
This is the type of newspaper that, unlike 90 percent of American newspapers, places less of a value on profit and much more of a value on the role of news in community. It is privately owned by an incredibly kind family who will probably know your name and say hello to you in the halls. The person in charge of the Web operation is Rob Curley, a visionary who will constantly challenge you, energize you and surprise you. And probably make fun of you, sometimes.
Please see the testimonials page of the upcoming online-journalism conference we're holding for more about our operation. Also check out Digital Journalist's article about us and Poynter.org's recent write-up about our conference.
About the town
Lawrence is great. To get an fair idea of it, take every negative stereotype about Kansas and reverse it. It's a midwestern college town with a nationally-renowned music scene and a thriving downtown that has put a mall out of business. It's close to Kansas City, too. See our own Lawrence.com or visitlawrence.com (which we developed as a commercial project over the past few months) for more.
About the position
Our Web-news operation relies heavily on custom development; pretty much everything is built in-house. The small-but-nimble development team handles everything technical for our network of sites. We're the people our newsroom comes to for implementing special features and workflow optimizations, and we're the people the online boss (Rob) comes to for building the frameworks for new sites and subsites.
We're looking for an expert Web programmer to join that development team. This person will work closely with me, the senior developer, to develop Web applications for internal and external use.
You are an excellent fit for this position if:
- You have significant experience building Web publishing systems/tools and managing dynamic Web sites.
- You have significant experience designing, maintaining and programming Web interfaces to databases.
- You have experience maintaining Linux servers -- preferably those of a Red-Hat-ish flavor.
- You learn new technologies quickly.
- You strongly value Web standards and other best-practice Web-development methodologies.
- You're full of innovative ideas and eager to implement them as soon as possible.
Experience with news and/or information sites is ideal but inessential.
We're open-source advocates. Our development platform is Python (mod_python) and PostgreSQL, so we will give preference to applicants who are experienced in those technologies. But we believe a solid background in, and understanding of, Web application design is more important than skill in a particular language or platform. So don't hesitate to apply if your Python skills aren't sharp but you think you could pick it up quickly.
How to get in touch
If you're interested and have some serious Web-development chops, e-mail me and Simon directly. I'm at aholovaty [at] ljworld [dot] com. Simon is at swillison [at] ljworld [dot] com. If you're just thinking about it, post a comment here with questions.
See also: Simon's blog entry on the topic.
The only bad thing
In the interests of fairness and honesty, I should mention this: There is one bad thing about working for World Online. After working here, you won't want to leave.
June 20, 2004, 2:42 AM ET
Accessing your Gmail contact list with Python
Many people have been wanting to import their existing e-mail address books into Gmail; address-book import is a feature the Gmail folks say they're planning but haven't released yet. To fill that void, I've updated gmail.py, my Python Gmail interface (see previous entry), to add methods to retrieve from, add to, and delete from your Gmail address book. Now importing and exporting is possible.
It's still raw Python code at the moment; it just needs a snazzy user interface and bindings to popular e-mail address-book formats. Any Python coders out there want to collaborate? Leave a comment or contact me.
More blog entries are in the archive.
Comments:
Posted by Chris on June 29 at 12:27 PM ET:
Well events have conspired against me recently which makes this position sound very tempting. Unfortunately I'd probably bump into your old co-worker in the airport - since I live in the UK and all.
I also don't have any experience with python, and very little with Linux, but I do have quite a bit with XHTML, CSS, Photoshop, Accessibility, ASP, VB, Lotus Domino, and a little PHP.
Maybe you could give me a low paid job, just so I can get out of this crummy place, and leave my troubles behind?
Well it sounds a fantastic opportunity.
Posted by Isofarro on July 2 at 5:33 AM ET:
Open to people in the UK?
Posted by Adrian on July 2 at 12:41 PM ET:
Isofarro: Yes, in theory. But I believe the U.S. government has reached its quota for visas until October (?), and we'd prefer to have someone right away, so it's unlikely.
Posted by Isofarro on July 5 at 6:12 AM ET:
That's probably good news about the quota limit on visas. For some odd reason I'm always finding myself one step behind Simon Willison ;-)
Good luck!
Post a comment: