The First Web Site Building Tool that Works

Web site creation got legit easy, and I only just heard about it (thanks to friend-of-slog Paul Trapani for the tip). Google Sites is the 300 billionth attempt to make web site creation simple. And it's the first one that actually works.

It snuck up on me. We've had so many junky tools for this for so long that no one believes a good one is possible. What's more, companies like Squarespace have been hyping so loudly for so long that anyone claiming easy web site building comes off sounding like a Squarespace ad. And Squarespace sucks.

I learned HTML in 1997 (thanks, Lynn LeMay), but, alas, everything I build still looks like 1997. I didn't keep up. I've puttered around with "modern" easy site creation tools over the years, but all were excruciatingly awful and spat out super ugly HTML - gobs of crappy, buggy code for every decision. I never managed to build anything with any of them.

My stopgap solution - which I used, for example, on my homepage and on the page for my app, Eat Everywhere - was to get a non web designer to design a look and a flow, and then hire hardcore devs to replicate the design in HTML/CSS.

But with Google Sites, I was able to build a professional-looking and modern site in two hours flat. And, yes, I realize this sounds like a Squarespace ad.

The tools make sense, the whole thing "just works," and while I did need to dive into the manual (and, for a few issues, into previous user discussion), the answers were always findable. It can't do absolutely everything, but what it can do it does well and results look good without needing to make a zillion fine-tuned design decisions.

Our long national nightmare is over.

Playing With My Toy Cars

Am I allowed to link a funny video just a couple times per year (I think this was the last one)?

In case you don't know. Vine is the hip video sharing site right now. All the videos loop, and users outdo each other thinking of clever new things to do. Like this:

Sweethome

In the past three days, I've gone from supermarket to supermarket searching out an obscure variety of toilet paper, I've run to cookware stores in search of a certain frying pan, and ordered wiper blades and a slew of other items from Amazon. I'm actually going to return the frying pan because once I settled down and my eyes cleared I realized I don't even really need it. I've gone completely out of my mind in a consumerist frenzy.

Such is the power of the terrifyingly sticky web site The Sweethome, which reviews household goods. It's hardly an unusual proposition, but these guys have hit upon the perfect formula, by:

Reviewing a catchy assortment of products not already reviewed to death
I don't need more opinions on Roomba, Game of Thrones, or Toyota Camry. But motor oil, ice cube trays, and LED bulbs? You bet!

Providing a meta synopsis of the usual web dross reviews
I can (and do) spend two hours surfing and weighing web and other reviews before buying stuff, but Sweethome does this for me - and, importantly, seems to do a thoughtful, thorough job of it.

Striking the right tone of smart, level-headed reviewing
There's a temperate, methodical approach here, and the reviews go fairly broad into the constellation of options. What's more, there's a good balance of science and subjective opinion. Consumer Reports is too left-brained, and most web reviews are too right-brained. This one's a "just-right".

Relieving consumer frustration
There's so much hyper-shitty Chinese merchandise on the markets to cut through that it's easy to feel a sense of hopelessness as one shops for household staples. Remember those stainless steel steamer baskets that last forever? You can't buy a decent one anymore.

I actually hate to send you there at this moment, because their featured review, "The Best Sponge", is the only bad one I've seen. Scotch Brites are too soft on one side, too abrasive on the other, and they clog up and fall apart (all over your dishes and pots) in no time. I've found perfection using a Dobie Pad for most tasks, and a copper Chore Boy for killer ones. Of course one of the innate problems with these sorts of reviews is that when your task is to review X, you're necessarily tunnel-visioned from offering solutions of X + Y. That's what leads to anointing tepid compromises such as Scotch Brites.

I can remember my excitement when I first came across Consumer Reports as a teenager, and Sweethome feels a lot like that. Only this incorporates the chaotic Web Hive Mind, while reflecting the judgement of a smart person who's put the time into doing exactly the research I myself would do...as opposed to a panel of CR geeks performing weirdly arcane tests. If you followed CR advice over the years, you'd have made out pretty poorly. But most of the tips on Sweethome seem canny. Except those sponges.

Cool Google Doodle

Don't miss today's cool Google Doodle tribute to Saul Bass, the brilliant designer of film titles for Hitchcock, "Man With the Golden Arm" and more.

A Google Doodle is the image appearing atop Google's home page, which sometimes pays tribute to the quirky, the legendary, or the quirkily legendary.

Web Design Finally Trends to Simplicity

Chowhound, before it was redesigned by CNET, had a look and feel that was widely considered dowdy. And I remain a dinosaur to this day. Consider my home page, which has the same 1997-ish, typewritten look.

It's intentional. I like that approach. I still think of the Web as a place to go for ideas, data, opinions...stuff. I'm thirsty for data, yet most Internet data is doled out in distracting and inaccessible ways in order to serve design, which has become a tyrant. As someone who remembers an Internet surfed entirely via text prompts, this exasperates me. The vast majority of web pages strike me as gussied up beyond recognition. That's why I've retained my curmudgeonly fixation with the typewriter model.

But, as I noted a few years ago, "Just because people keep proposing really bad solutions doesn't mean there isn't a problem!" There's finally a new movement, and it makes me very happy...and also abashed. They're calling it "flat" interface design. The LayerVault Blog describes the credo:

"Well-loved products on the web share a similar design aesthetic, with roughly the same kinds of bevels, inset shadows, and drop shadows. For designers, achieving this level of “lickable” interface is a point of pride. For us, and for a minority of UI designers out there, it feels wrong...[so] we stripped the design down to the bone. It looked closer to a wireframe than a final interface — but it was a start, and it was damn honest."

Count me in. Unless I'm shopping Ben & Jerry's site, I don't want lickability. I want a personal voice conveying data in a lean and forthright way. Click that last link for an example. It's my beloved typewriter model....with deft touches, nudges, and decisions making the page also look inviting. Snipping examples from the bottom of that same page, have a look here and here and here.

Whether graphical or text-based, web pages from this new vanguard share these traits: 1. simplicity, 2. directness, 3. accessibility and 4. tiny cleverness (by which I mean that design decisions are subtle and unobtrusive; they support, rather than override, the message). Plus, they're elegant. There's been no shortage of pretentious, fussy web design in the past twenty years, but there hasn't been much elegance.

All these pages fit my bill. But I'm abashed, because I see that typewritten was never enough. Data-accessible, lean, simply accessible sites can also be extremely attractive if you're willing to apply tiny cleverness. So I shouldn't have been so dismissive. Design's not the enemy....just ditzy, inappropriate design.

More on this from John Gruber

Really Cool Web Sites

I burned out on "really cool web sites" (RCWs) back in around 2000. A number of factors contributed:

1. More and more RCWs seemed to have been devised solely to get placed on RCW lists, inevitably resulting in less genuine wonderment and more shticky desperation.

2. The sites devoted to recommending RCWs (Digg, Reddit, etc.) were too heroin-like, and I had to stop visiting them.

3. I'm increasingly out of step with the mainstream, which means many supposed RCWs don't strike me as being all that cool (I still don't get Facebook, for example...and, conversely, no one besides me seems to derive the least joy from my profile picture there.)

4. Even novelty itself eventually stales (I've been through periods where my palate has grown so jaded that stuff like unsalted, unsweetened oatmeal and steamed kale tasted exciting).

That said, these are some damned cool web site tips (disregard the shticky/desperate mousetrap crap), none previously known to me.

There's no need to take notes during the video; links are offered just below the frame.

Whole Earth Catalog Lives (and Why We Get Hippies Wrong)

While the term "hippy" carries a strong negative connotation these days, much of the hippy ethos was quite worthwhile and way ahead of its time. Things like environmentalism, yoga, disrespect for authority, premarital sex, and organic farming have been subsumed by mainstream culture, leaving hippies stripped down in the popular imagination to a cliche of long hair, granola, and body odor (actually, granola's now a burgeoning mainstream craze, so they'll be pulling that one out, as well). The reality is that the agenda hippies pushed for, against great resistance, has largely won. It's part of who and what we are.

Hippies, for one thing, invented online communities. The Well in San Francisco was the original, and communities like Chowhound would have arrived much later if the precedent hadn't been set way the hell back in 1985 by the Whole Earth Catalog folks (specifically, publisher Stewart Brand).

If you don't know about the Whole Earth Catalog, it was amazing. Along with Vonnegut and Salinger, it was one of my formative childhood influences. The catalog was an earnestly savvy mother lode of Good Stuff. "Tools" was their buzzword, encompassing tips for great chainsaws and potter wheels as well as radically thoughtful books, unconventional music, and amazing newsletters. Plus much more. This wasn't just a guide to empty consumption, but a meta-tool for sussing out ways to improve life and work in meaningful ways.

The people who ran it went on to become integral in the Internet and tech phenomena. In the popular imagination, credit for all that goes to geeks and nerds, but the groundwork was laid by hippies who either edited or loved the Whole Earth Catalog. Steve Jobs said, in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech:

"When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." He was also fond of quoting the back cover of the 1974 edition of the catalog: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

The Whole Earth Catalog was succeeded by a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly , which, in turn, gave rise to Whole Earth Review, which covered, along with composters and yoga books, impassioned tips and articles about computers and connectivity. And this was back in the 1980's!

I loved both magazines so much that, in the early 90's, I bought a full set of back issues. They, alas, didn't survive one of my many housing moves, and I've deeply regretted that loss. But, good news! They're digitizing the full runs of both magazines and offering them for free on the Whole Earth Catalog web site. If you missed it at the time, or were born too late, please, go dive in, and prepare to get very, very lost. It's like Chowhound for Everything.

They're also selling the final (1994) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog as a PDF for a mere $5. Go for it! Support a good thing! (Also, if you own back issues of the magazines, please consider contributing to their effort to scan in all of them.)

P.S. Last year, during the Japanese nuclear disaster, I noted that I'd turned pro-nuclear following the lead of Stewart Brand. I also expressed curiosity as to whether the Japanese catastrophe had affected Brand's outlook. The answer is no.

Web Site Idea

When I hear about a great film or TV show, I look it up to see if it's available on Netflix "Watch Instantly" (which I route to my TV via my Roku). If not, I check Amazon Streaming (which comes free with my Amazon Prime subscription, and also routes via Roku) and Apple iTunes (which I view on my iPad, 'cuz I don't own an Apple TV).

If not, I start looking for DVDs (preferably second-hand) on Amazon, Half.com, and Amazon UK. If that fails, too - i.e. the producers have given me no way to legally purchase their product - I will search for torrents*.

* - I've left out a step: if it's a small indie film, I'll write to the director and ask to purchase a one-off DVD burn, swearing to never copy it for friends.

But why am I (and millions of others) doing all these separate searches? Someone should build a database tracking and linking to a given title's presence in all these places...and more. There'd be revenue from referral commissions, plus it would be a beau coup advertising platform.

It perplexes me that no one's done this yet. Or has someone done it and I've missed it?

Update - you may want to follow the discussion in the comments section.

Facebook Ain't It

Facebook's going IPO, and we'll all soon be able to invest. I believe it's a sucker's bet, and here's why.

Facebook's valuation is so ginormous that they've got to grow their advertising market by something like 30% over each of the next ten years. That's just to break even with expectations. To actually make profit for investors, results must exceed even that!

Such a future might, in fact, be imaginable if this were the Ultimate Web Phenom everyone's been waiting for. Netscape wasn't it. Yahoo wasn't it. AOL wasn't it, nor was MySpace. A number of increasingly large companies have been anointed Ultimate Web Phenom, only to be swept aside in turn. Facebook seems different because of its immense userbase, cultural ubiquity, and thriving revenue (something none of those other companies enjoyed). But it will be another transitional player, because it's still not the optimal model for matching viewers and ads.

Facebook makes its money by selling eyeballs to advertisers in highly specific bundles (teenaged dance enthusiasts, 40-ish female tennis players, etc). Marketers love this specificity, and pay through the wazoo for it. But while Facebook, and its vaunted data, allows much smarter advertising than the old gambit of sticking big banner ads in front of everyone en masse, it's still not optimal. In fact, it's pretty damned primitive, and may never mature within Facebook's framework.

Facebook categorizes us via our stated interests. But we state as our interests those areas in which we're already experienced - the realms we're so deeply into that they define us, and are therefore labels we publicly don. For example, several of my stated interests are yoga-ish, so I get flooded with ads for yoga sticky mats and hatha yoga books. But I'm already into yoga, so I don't need Facebook to tell me where to buy sticky mats and asana books. I'm the guy other people ask for tips on that. I never click on yoga ads, just like you never click on ads for things you know lots about. Facebook knows what we're knowledgable about, but knowledgeable people don't click random topical little ads. They're for saps and neophytes.

The areas where I'm more receptive to ads are ones where I'm a sappish neophyte. For example, I'm considering taking up Chinese cookery. So I'm open to ads for woks, stir frying classes, etc. If I were a seasoned enthusiast, I'd already be tapped into all that, and spurn such ads.

The problem is that we don't list our new and passing interests in our Facebook profiles. And while Facebook may eventually encourage us to do so, none of us would keep that up religiously. I put care into listing interests which define me. They're solid and static; in fact, they're the things that solidify me. But I really have to think to come up with a list of things I'm toying with being interested in at any given moment. That stuff's dynamic, semi-conscious, and volatile - not the sort of thing we proudly broadcast in a static profile.

Facebook will likely never be the vehicle for tallying fresher, more impressionable interests. It's just not what it's built to be. So I will continue to smirk at its ads for yoga, trombone, beer, travel, and art, knowing none will hit the vanishingly small sweet spot of interest for a devotee like me.

So, unless Zuckerberg has something remarkable up his sleeve (not that it's easy for monstrously huge public corporations to make dramatic shifts), Facebook's not the final word.

(Obviously, not every Facebook user is a deep expert in every listed interest. And, obviously, lots of ads are being clicked on, hence Facebook's $2B annual ad revenue. But my point stands. The ability to advertise to groups via "interests" is heady and new for marketers, but Facebook's deeply dug in to the wrong end of that continuum. Yes, people are clicking - more than they ever did on mass banner ads - but they could click a lot more. So, like Netscape, Yahoo, AOL, and MySpace before it, Facebook may be bigger and better than what's come before, but it ain't the final word, either.)

(Also: I do realize that, ideally, Facebook would sell demographics, rather than individual interests. But most people don't tell Facebook their age, their job, their income, their religion, their race, etc. The demographic info is actually quite weak. The data hinges on interests, which is why, for all their prowess and advancement, I'm still seeing slews of frigging sticky mat ads whenever I surf in, even though I have never ever clicked a single one of them - so much for the vaunted narrow segmentation!)

An Open Letter to Idiot Web Developers

Dear Web Developers,

I understand your motivation in slicing up articles into a zillion pages so you earn ad revenue from all the page views. I also understand why you don't offer a "single page view" option, which would defeat that purpose. I tend not to patronize such sites, but I understand your motivation, which is logical, albeit predatory.

But if most of your articles are one or two pages and you don't offer a "single page view" option - when hitting that "single page" button would constitute a second click serving me more ads while letting me view the whole article (in case, for example, I want to search the text) - then you're being illogical and predatory, which is a really stupid strategy.

Finally, there is a special place in Hell for web developers who provide a "print" button which simply brings up your computer's print dialog without reformatting the page's text. I keep expecting such sites to offer an "Exit The Site" button which shuts down my computer.

Two Cool Web Pages

Thanks to the commenter on my previous article who recommended the thoroughly swell xkcd comics (particularly this one, which pertained to that article).

xkcd, in turn, recommends Wikipedia's superlatively awesome List of common misconceptions, which I didn't previously know about.

CNET Just Scared the Crap Out of Me

CNET has just killed one of my favorite web sites, Versiontracker.com (a repository of links to and reviews of Mac software). They acquired the site a couple years ago, and gave it a half-assed refresh, introducing lots of new problems (sound familiar?), and today they folded it completely into CNET Downloads. The jillions of reviews are wiped (as is my alert list, which was painstakingly built up over many many years). All that goodness, summarily flushed.

Holy crap.

Well, I'd been increasingly using competing site Macupdate.com, which works a lot better (read: at all) on my iPhone, anyway. But still.

"Escape From New York!" at Scouting NY

I'm a sucker for road trip blogs, and the "Escaping New York!" series, currently in progress on Scouting NY, is a particularly interesting one. The blog's proprietor is a film location scout, which means he has a keen nose for interesting, offbeat locales which photograph well, plus a smartly hip perspective. Best of all, he's traveling through the Midwest, which is full of all sorts of treasure which smug urbanites, who spurn the region, miss out on. I love the Midwest.

The site's archives are well worth a look. But this road trip began earlier this month, and you shouldn't miss it. Start here.

10 Things You Need To Know This Morning

There are so many sites aggregating news one really can't live without that there are also countless meta sites summarizing them, and presenting news you really really can't live without. And there a few that summarize the summarizers to offer news you really really really can't live without (the ultimate summary of even those meta meta summaries would be, simply, "Om"*).

So we're all a bit burnt out on grabby summaries. And none of us needs to spend more time web surfing than we already do. But I've added one stop to my daily rounds: a tech rundown on Silicon Alley Insider (via Business Insider) called "10 Things You Need To Know This Morning", which has consistently been interesting and useful for me.


* - An esoteric yoga joke. The Hindu scriptures (Vedas) are nearly endless. Their wisdom is said to be encapsulated by the Upanishads, which are merely sprawling. They, in turn, are encapsulated by the surprisingly terse Mahavakyas. And the final encapsulation of the Mahavakyas - in other words, the complete distillation of all the spiritual knowledge of the ancient rishis, or wise men - is, simply, "Om".

Mark Bittman Slogs....With John Thorne

Apparently, Mark Bittman is about to launch a "Slog" of his own. It's hard to imagine how a mega-successful author/columnist could ever be perceived to have "slogged" (my use of the term is explained here), but, hey, anything that gets John Thorne more widely read is great by me.

Thorne will be contributing, so this would be a good time to reprint my tribute to him which once was a part of Chowhound. He's published some books since, all of which should be bought immediately:

---

John Thorne thinks deeply about food. In his personal, utterly unaffected voice (which is actually a hybrid of himself and wife Matt), he ponders the minutia of meatballs, the inner meaning of rice and beaning. Aptly illuminating quotations are cited, seemingly unrelated concepts elegantly connected; Thorne's rhythms are so honest, his erudition so copious and his iconoclastic conclusions so clever that the reader never suspects the daunting legwork that goes into it all. Thorne, the hardest working man in the food writing biz, erases all traces of these labors, so his prose goes down as easily--and as deliciously--as the most soulful polenta.

When the ruminations conclude--and you've discovered historical, cultural, scientific, and spiritual depths to, say, pancakes that you'd never suspected existed--Thorne presents recipes. Not dozens of variations on a cooking theme, but a few concentrated treasures, the distillation of the preceding essay's meditations. The recipes may or may not be to your taste, but such care went into their developement that they're manifestly more than tested, more than polished...they're downright perfected.

Each of the following three books is composed of articles from Thorne's Simple Cooking newsletter, cleverly selected and arranged to (loosely) fit various themes.

Simple Cooking
This first volume contains two of Thorne's best essays: one contrasting fat and thin cooks, the other about the "outright disgust and hypnotic fascination" inspired by truly awful recipes (those which promise to "conjur instant elegance from dross" like, say, Velveeta or Lipton instant onion soup mix). Other articles (arranged under headings Personal Passions, Perfect Pleasures, Table Talk, and a seasonal Kitchen Diary) include: Ultimate Cheesecake, Pasta in a Paper Bag, A Bowl of Porridge, Aged Sardines, and Carpaccio. Plus, a chapter of insightful reviews of Cook's Books.

Outlaw Cook
Outlaw Cook is arranged into sections on Learning to Cook, Made to Taste, The Baker's Apprentice, and The Culinary Scene. These headings serve as catch-alls for reprints of articles such as: Forty Cloves of Garlic, Russians and Mushrooms, My Paula Wolfert Problem, Soup Without Stock (With A Note on Pea Soup), Natural Leavens: Sorting Out Sourdough, Breakfast Clafoutis, Mangiamaccheroni (a person who eats pasta with his fingers), Some Thoughts on Omelets, and The Discovery of Slowness.

Serious Pig: An American Cook in Search of His Roots
Serious Pig covers Thorne's native New England (Knowing Beans, Building a Chowder, Clamdiggers and Downeast Country Stores, etc), Louisiana (Gombo Zhébes, A Note on Oysters Rockefeller, Rice& Beans: The Itinerary of a Dish, etc), and Texas (Benchmark Chili, The Seared& the Stewed, and Cooking With Wood: An Update, etc).

This Is Why You're Fat (dotcom)

Hysterical.

Protecting Your Email Address from Spambots

It hasn't worked since about 1994 or so, but people still think they're being extra prudent by cloaking their email addresses like this to try to foil the spambots:

Contact me at: jim leff ny ...AT!....gmail (dotcom)

There are geekier methods that can be employed, but most yield similarly weak and annoying results.

Here's the best solution I've seen lately: hide it in a PDF file.

Google's Stock Quotes Go Real Time (Plus: More on SIGA)

I see no discussion of this anywhere, but Google seems to have implemented real time stock quotes. All the better for watching the price of SIGA Technologies move ever upward!

I first tipped you to SIGA on 6/9/08 when the stock price was $2.92, gloated about it on 1/28/09 at $4.29, and it is at this moment (real time!) $6.28. And will be up to $15 by year's end. I'm not usually one for touting sure things, but read on.

The government will buy a huge quantity of smallpox meds in September, and is currently gathering proposals from drug companies. Aside from SIGA, only one other company has a drug that could conceivably fit the bill, and their monkeys died during testing. SIGA's smallpox drug, ST-246, was safe enough to heal a child with a smallpox-like illness a couple years ago. It was nearly instantly effective and had no side effects.

So the contract will go to SIGA, whose 35 million outstanding shares will surely shoot skyward when the check comes in for between 1.7 million and 12 million courses of a fairly expensive drug (and one with a finite shelf life, so stockpiles will need periodic replacement). And that's just the beginning. Other government agencies (defense, homeland security) will want to buy, and Europe, Israel, and India should also be interested. Plus, SIGA has, in its pipeline, drugs for dengue fever (feared a possible future pandemic), drug-resistent staph and strep and a broad spectrum anti-viral (ST-669) that just might crack the virus puzzle once and for all. None of that stuff factors into its stock price at this point, which has yet to catch up even with the in-the-bag smallpox contract...though in the past week or two, volume and price are both starting to pick up.

SIGA keeps a low-profile, burying all this goodness amid dry scientific writing for reasons I explained in that first posting. So very few people have caught on.

Mint: Serious Security Flaw?

I was thinking of joining the hordes using Mint, a web-based application ("we download, categorize and graph all of your finances automatically every day, so you know where you’re spending, without spending any effort") to handle their personal finance. But I found this interesting bit of criticism in the comments for Mint's iPhone app (referring not specifically to the iPhone app, but to Mint as a whole):

"Mint states that they don't store your bank password. That is right. They instead give your password to yodley. And what yodley does is encrypt your password with an encryption key and store the encrypted password as well as the key in their database. It is important to note that the key has to be stored somewhere on the system since it will be needed to periodically decrypt your bank password in order to pull fresh data from your bank. Unfortunately, What this means is that a database administrator or anyone with suitable access can first read the key and then use that to decrypt your bank password. You know the rest of the story... Thank you mint... I initially thought that you were using federated identity management to avoid storing my bank passwords in any system. But I was wrong. I am closing my mint account."

I have no idea if it's true, but after spending a decade vetting Internet postings to pick out disgruntled parties, kooks, vandals, and smearers, I'm pretty good at it, and this guy rings true. But while Mint is insanely popular, web searching has turned up no other parties making this claim. And that's really curious.

midimanche

I'm one of eighteen contributors, from around the world, to midimanche, a blog consisting of photos snapped at noon on Sundays (local time).