onfocus

sk and I went to a reading tonight at Grassroots Bookstore by David Cruise & Alison Griffiths. They're husband and wife, Canadian, non-fiction authors, and they've just finished their first joint work of historic fiction called Vancouver. (It's so new it's not even available in Canada yet.) Of course the reading piqued our interest since we were just there. The turnout for the reading was small, and ended up being more of a conversation than a presentation. They talked about some of their methods for writing, and their painstaking research. The novel is made up of 12 different characters, spanning from pre-history to current day, that all encounter the area that is now Vancouver. We ended up talking about present-day Vancouver—comparing and contrasting with other cities in the US and Canada. They're going to be at Annie Blooms in Portland tomorrow. And here's a review of the book in the Seattle Times.

Here's a blog covering flash mob activity. [via Erik Benson]

Just what you've been waiting for...more vacation photos! We had a great time in British Columbia. We brushed up on metric, learned how to drop a toonie at the car park, and walked along several harbours near town centres. We visited Seattle, Victoria, the Cowichan Valley, Salt Spring Island, and Vancouver—which took quite a bit of driving and four ferry rides. There are 35 snapshots from the trip here...


more »

And here are two more stitched panoramics.

• Vancouver's Stanley Park Harbor (108 kb)
• A valley near Sidney, BC (106 kb)

If you stand back a few feet from the monitor and squint, you can almost pretend the seams aren't there.

I stitched together some panoramic photos from the trip so far:

• Seattle from waterfront park (184 kb)
• The ferry terminal at Anacortes (86 kb)
• Victoria's Harbor (126 kb)

Headed to bc. I'll be back in a week or so. Watch for mophos.

Now this is some sort of situationist street theater happening in Portland today. I guess it's a version of a flashmob where people not only gather spontaneously, but they perform choreographed actions. [via strangechord] If you had a flashmob at your disposal, what sort of situations would you invent?

After my post about OregonLive.com last week, I had to laugh when I saw this headline in OJR: Newspaper Web Sites Struggle to Attract Younger Readers. Maybe they're just getting skewed demographic data. ;)

In all fairness though, they even give OregonLive.com as a good example of attracting younger readers. Online Editor Cosgrove said part of their secret is that they've recruited community members to cover high school sports events: "'These volunteer reporters are students, parents, the lady who sells hot dogs, and even one guy who's a local councilman,' Cosgrove said. 'It's a real cross section of the community.'"

Now if they would just give all of these people their own customizable weblogs, they could cover even more aspects of their communities year round. Then the paper could highlight the best reporting.

Some great Amazon features aren't available through their Web Services interface (AWS) yet. Because the Amazon RSS feeds rely on AWS data, you can only create feeds of available info. Granted, the data includes all of their millions of products across thousands of categories, but there's still some great info waiting to be exposed. Anil mentioned that he wanted his gold box as RSS. And here's my Wish List for additions to AWS that would make good feeds:

• Movie showtimes (especially for my Zip Code)
• Purchase Circle product lists (especially for my city)
• The latest music downloads available
• Early Adopters (Amazon's Gizmodo)
• Movers & Shakers (Amazon's Zeitgeist)
• The latest Listmania! lists and How-Tos (with filters)

In Amazon Hacks, I show how you can access some of this data programmatically with screen scraping. It would be much more stable through AWS, though.

When you think about AWS data as RSS, it puts a new spin on how the info can be used, and what features should be available as XML. What RSS feeds would you like to see?

I'm currently reading an excellent book called How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. In it he considers the ways buildings evolve over time, changing in ways architects don't anticipate, and draws conclusions about how architecture must change to address this evolution. Brand argues for a more user-centered architecture that cares how a building's occupants will use the space for years to come. It sounds obvious, but studies about how people actually use a building are rarely done—and architecture awards are given based on photographs, not interviews with a building's inhabitants. It's timely reading for me because we've been looking at houses to buy in Corvallis, and this book is changing the way I think about buildings. It's also changing the way I think about Web development.

I'd like to see someone put together a similar study called How Applications Learn. Using Brand's book as a template, I bet you could take many of his theories and see if they apply to application development. Showing screenshots of the first version of Word—and each version leading up to the latest Word—would be like showing a house with floors, rooms, and inexplicable hallways added over the years. If cathedrals are "High Road" development and warehouses "Low Road" (as Brand labels them), there must be application equivalents. What are the 70's domes of coding? Are some applications considered an "investment" while not actually solving a real-world problem? How does the structure of MMORPGs limit or embrace the ways their players can add to the environment? Which programs are truly complex and which are "decorated sheds"? User-research is often done early in the design process, but what are some methods for ensuring user-centered design well into the life of the application after features are added where needed?

There wouldn't be as much history and tradition to draw on for How Applications Learn, but it's never too early to think about how time affects our virtual structures.

A conversation from around the house earlier this week...

pb: (excited!) did you see the latest post on my site?
shawnde: Does it have anything to do with Amazon?
pb: yeah!
shawnde: (rolls eyes.)

Daschle will post diary on his Senate Web site: "'My staff told me a while back about a blog,' Daschle said. 'I learned a new word. ... This new blog concept appealed to me.'" [via mkelley + blogpopuli]

Several people have mentioned that it would be nice to show the newest products in the Amazon RSS feeds rather than the top-selling products. There's a quick hack to make this happen. Build a feed with the Amazon RSS Feed Builder like normal, click "get feed", and note the local onfocus.com URL for the resulting page in your browser's address bar. The last bit of the URL should be %2Bsalesrank. Highlight this text, change it to +daterank, and hit enter. When the page reloads, you'll have your RSS feed URL sorted by product release date.

Note that the RSS feed description will still say "Up-to-date listings of Amazon.com's top items (by Sales Rank)", even though it's sorted by date. This is a function of Amazon's stylesheet that's transforming the AWS response—this phrase is hard-coded.

Kinda kludgy, but it works! I set up some feeds to watch for new books by publishers I like. I'll see if I can work sorting choices into the interface when I get some time.