/devel

As I am leaving on a short vacation that will probably take me off grid for few days, there is still a time for a hopefully short, but definitely last post of this year. I don’t like how registration forms ask me twice for password and I think I can offer a better way.

Most registration forms these days still want you to type password of your choice twice. They probably do it to reduce risk of mistyping it. I deeply dislike Facebook, but I think this is one thing it got right. You only have to do it once. Those with FB accounts can see this in action if they log out for a moment and visit front page.

There are several reasons why once is enough. First one is that every decent page provides a way to reset password in case you have forgotten it. So even if password was mistyped, it’s easy to reset it again to a different value. Second reason is that by now it’s quite well known that most people use a low single-digit number of passwords and don’t come up with a new one each time they are asked to do so. Hence it’s quite unlikely they’ll make an error now after so much practice.

Third reason is that in most cases you can help them.

When registration forms first appeared internet access was rare and expensive enough that most common environment in which it was used was work or school. It was therefore likely that when you were registering for a service, you weren’t alone and entered password had to be hidden from people around you. Today it’s probably opposite. Most of the time I am quite private and could see what I type with no additional security risk.

So as in demo we could offer a switch that let visitors see what they are typing if they choose to do so. It should still be hidden by default, since we can’t really tell the environment visitor is in or if Javascript is available. It is always better to err on side of safety.

As a side note for those who might have peaked at implementation. I’m replacing password input field because of Internet Explorer, which doesn’t tolerate type attribute change on input fields. Every other browser tested (FF, Opera, Safari and Chrome) would work perfectly fine by just switching field type from password to text.

Anyhow, that’s it for this year. If you leave a comment, which I hope you will, and I don’t answer, it’s because I lack Internet access.

There’s an HTML pattern that has been bugging me for a while even though I’m guilty of using it too. It’s even present on page you are reading right now.

Almost every page has a navigation bar and chances are that strip is presented as some kind of a list of links. Just as it should be. What bothers me is that when you actually are on page listed in navigation, its navigation item will still contain a link to it.

This reference to itself is like having a door in a room which leads you back in. Not very useful and certainly misleading.

Better approach is to simply not have a link when that link would point to page itself. Such HTML is also more semantic, since it’s clear which item was selected and where we are even without a style sheet.

When discussing this observation it was pointed out to me that with proliferation of Javascript and AJAX you might want to give your visitors a way to bring a page to a known state by reloading it. I think this is more than adequately solved by reload button that every browser has and most users know, but if you find having a link a better solution, why not try a compromise. Just add the missing link with Javascript in spirit of this demo.

This way you won’t polute content markup with behavior that should sit on top of it.

December is running out of days fast and I still haven’t written my annual review of things I planned or did, intentionally or otherwise. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but couldn’t find words to express myself. Finally I gave up. I don’t think I’ll succeed now, but I doubt more time would help.

For me this year has been absolutely wonderful. Coming to Zemanta meant I could work on interesting problems to improve a tool I use myself while collaborating with people I like and respect. I traveled to more conferences than ever before and generally learned a lot. I’m proud of my team’s achievements and of what we did as a company. It is indeed a privilege to have a gig like this.

I’ve also started a private project with a friend, which is coming along nicely. It shouldn’t be too long before we can show it to, well, everyone interested. Hopefully that means to many.

In all, 2008 was great for me and I don’t think 2009 will be worse.

Yet of late I’ve been feeling increasingly gloomy. This has remarkably little to do with economic crisis, influence of which we can already feel even if it’s yet to hit with full force. I won’t be traveling as much next year, but I planned to do less of it even before I knew there might be economic reasons to do so.

I’ve been worrying about the state of our planet for years. Things weren’t getting better as quickly as I thought they should. In fact, they aren’t getting better at all, but I hoped we would turn and do what needs to be done when given last chance.

There are many things that are deeply wrong in this world. Slavery is more widespread than probably ever. We know we should reduce the amount of CO₂ in atmosphere, yet we do opposite. Fisheries around world are rapidly collapsing taking whole ecosystems with them. Glaciers are receding with probably disastrous effect on water supplies for millions of people. Rising world population will continue to negate any progress we may have. I could go on, but this list is depressing enough.

After all it’s not the scale or number of challenges that is dispiriting. It’s our inability to act decisively. We prefer compromises that set targets too low and then fail to meet them. There are 6.5 billion of us, but we are still unable to face real probability that this may be too many. I sometimes wonder how lives looked like in last days of civilizations long gone, most of them disappearing precisely because they taxed their environment too much. I hope I’m wrong and never find out.

I wished to end this post on a positive note, but I’m clearly failing. I do sincerely wish everyone happy holidays and the best of luck in next year. I’m afraid we’ll need it.

I use Gmail mainly for reading mailing lists. I’m old-fashioned and prefer to have my email where I can control it, but otherwise I can’t fault Gmail much. I wish search worked better and until today I wished to have a folder with unread messages.

Well, there is a way around second problem for those, who can turn on Gmail lab features (which hosted domains can’t). Go to the Lab tab in settings and turn on Quicklinks. After that return to Inbox, type is:unread in search box and confirm.

When you get results view, just press Add Quick Link in Quick Links widget, pick a name you like and voila, you have a view which lists unread messages. It’s not perfect though. It won’t show you how many messages are unread and you can’t subscribe to it through IMAP.

The other thing that is not perfect is Google Docs, which I quite like. I did encounter a problem with it that is not important right now, but I imagine it might be in not too distant future.

How do you move documents between accounts?

What you can do is share the document with account you want it moved to and then delete it. If you are owner of this document, you will get a pop-up with a choice to transfer ownership before deletion. Again, it seems I can’t transfer it to a hosted domain account, so this trick is not only not obvious, but also doesn’t work all the time.

If there are better ways to accomplish above two things, then I would love to hear them.

Update: It seems part of my post became untrue even faster than usual.