Last update: 6/9/01; 19:40:40.
Thoughts and ideas as they occur to me.
Tuesday, October 31, 2000
Jakob Nielsen's thoughts on content creation. Jakob Nielsen has some thoughts on content creation by average people, too. (Well, he wrote this before I wrote my article about average people creating content online, but I just now found this article on his site.)
I agree with what he says in this article. Most experts agree that the key to a successful website is maintaining current, useful information. The real trick, up until now, is knowing how to do that and where to find the tools.
It's easy to get sidetracked by technological parlour tricks (see his article about Flash being 99% bad) and forget that we're trying to help our visitors, not distract them by the fancy geegaws.
You can read more of what he says about designing for the web and creating a usable site at http://www.useit.com.
Nielson is the author of the best selling Designing Web Usability : The Practice..., available for purchase here from Amazon.com.
I just became aware of Mr. Nielson a few minutes ago, but I'll be a regular visitor to his site in the future.
JD 10:53:58 AMAverage people can create a great web site -- now. Do you program naturally in HTML without giving it a thought?
Have you mastered tables, or do you think they are something to eat off of?
If you're like most people, creating a web site is a daunting task. Yes, HTML is a rather easy markup language, but only to programmers or someone who has spent months learning to use it. To a beginner, HTML can be totally unintelligible.
Markup aside, most folks aren't graphics designers, either, and that's something I certainly don't claim to be. I've 30 years experience in programming all sorts of computers, so I took to HTML in just a few days.
Primarily though, I prefer to deal with thoughts, concepts, trends, and planning things. I like to conceptualize an idea and then manifest it in the real world, hence my email username 'wizard.' It's like real magic to have something blossom in your mind and then produce a working three-dimensional model that someone else can use without knowing all the technical background and spending months learning to use it.
I admire others who can do this, too. Someone who can spend years mastering the intricacies of a subject, bend it to his (or her) will, and then make it easy to access and use by an average person with different priorities.
Dave Winer is such a man. He's not always popular, and sometimes he can be rude, but I don't think those are necessarily bad qualities, when exhibited in moderation.
Dave is one of the early creators of outlining software for the personal computer, and now for the Internet. His early outliner, More was a very successful product that I used for years.
During the 1990s, he and his team at UserLand Software have been working on a database built on top of an outliner. This is a very simple description that doesn't even begin to do justice to what Frontier is. I've been using this software since the mid-90s and it's the way I structure and build my main website at http://johndilbeck.com.
About the time I burned out on computers and everything technological in mid-1997, Dave and his crew were starting to introduce team-built websites and this later turned into Manila in Frontier 6.0. To introduce Manila to the world, Dave provides free Manila servers at http://www.editthispage.com (where this site is hosted) and at http://www.weblogs.com (where my personal weblog will exist this afternoon).
Manila is designed to be used by average people to create a site with changing information in it, like this one will become. With only one or two technical people to handle the main site design and control the logistics, a team of people can build a site that combines all their efforts -- and it's easy to do. I created this site from scratch in just one day of concentrated effort.
I'm already familiar with Frontier 5, so it may take you a little longer, but I bet you can get a site up and working in a day, even though you will want to improve it over time.
Now that I'm able to deal with computers and programming again, I'm happy to see that Dave has introduced Radio Userland (http://www.radiouserland.com) in it's beta form. It appears to be Frontier 7 in beta form, and I've only played with it for a few minutes, but I'm impressed with its new capabilities.
Getting back to creating websites by average people. (sorry)
EditThisPage.com offers you a free website. You can create a simple brochure type site in just a few minutes. You can create a more interesting site with stories and discussions, or you can concentrate on producing news items. Even if you set up your site as a news site, you still have the full story and discussion features, and in fact, every news item you produce can have a link to a discussion area, such as this one does.
I think it would be wise to spend the time to work through the Manila-Newbies quick start tutorial, because Manila does things differently than you may be used to from working on other web sites. If you're a total newbie at creating a website, you'll learn valuable information from the quick guide that will save you lots of time in creating your new site.
I got away from Frontier just about the time this new content management system was being introduced, and I'm amazed at all the improvements they've made over the last couple of years.
If you want to concentrate on producing content -- rather than hacking HTML all day -- you may want to give EditThisPage.com a try. I'm happy I did, and I expect to be spending part of every day working to add information, news, opinion, and whatever else flows by.
Thanks Dave!
JD 10:25:06 AMPayPal has over 4 million users. In just about a year, PayPal, which recently merged with x.com, now has over 4 million users transferring about $6 million every day via email. They are also signing up an additional 140,000 users every week.
If you don't have an account, it's easy to get one.
This service was at first free, but now they're charging people who use it a lot, and all business accounts, 1.9% + 25 cents per transaction. I have a business account with them and feel this is a perfectly reasonable transaction fee.
Now, spurred on my their rival eCount (I suspect), PayPal is planning to offer a debit card to account holders in the near future so you can use funds in your account anywhere you can use a credit card. They have not announced that this is available, yet.
PayPal makes it simple to accept and send money via email. You make all transactions via PayPal's secure servers and never send your credit card information to someone you don't know.
If you have an email account, you can send money to, or request money from, anyone else with an email account and access to the web. I've used it. I like it. I recommend this service.
If you'd like an account, it's easy to open.
They'll even pay you $5.00 to open an account with them, as soon as you confirm your email address and a banking account. If you're a premier or business account holder, you can earn $5.00 by referring others to PayPal.
It's easy to open an account with PayPal.
I've received and sent money using this service, with no problems.
PayPal has three competitors now. For more information, you can go to http://www.payme.com, http://www.ecount.com, or http://www.clareon.com.
Ecount offers a debit card (for a $4.95 one-time fee) and I have an account with them, but have never used their service.
JD 9:19:13 AMNew FileMaker Affiliate Program. FileMaker has announced a new affiliate program working in association with LinkShare. Affiliates can earn 5% of sales by directing customers to http://store.filemaker.com.
FileMaker is the best general-use, cross-platform database I've ever used, and I've worked with everything from huge databases to tiny flat-file lists. It is easy to set up, it stores text in free form so you don't have to worry about field size, and the newer versions are relational. I highly recommend this product and the company that produces it.
FileMaker is not as powerful as a fully-programmable database such as FoxPro (before it was purchased by Microsoft and ruined), but you can script it to do many functions. If you're using it on a Mac, it can be programmed with more functionality using AppleScript. Data can be easily shared between PCs and Macs.
I stopped upgrading with version 3, since it does everything I need. The new version 5 has lots more features, but I feel that the developers are moving towards bloatitis/featuritis. That aside, I think FileMaker is the perfect database for home businesses and individuals. It's easy to use, both for entering data and creating reports, and it probably has more power and features than you'll ever use.
I just applied for their affiliate program.
JD 8:52:46 AM
© Copyright 2001 John L. Dilbeck, jd@johndilbeck.com.