I’m unclear why this has happened. The URLs for the feeds should still be in the same place. All of the articles that were in the old feed are still in the new feed. I did mess around in the database and fix a number of GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers, for those non-geeks in the audience) that were pointing to a temporary address. But that should only have affected your feed reader’s ability to mark the entry as read or not read.

At least you can delete and re-add the RSS feed to your feed reader. The syndication for my Amazon blog broke altogether several months ago, and my message to the Amazon technical support staff seems to have fallen into a crack in the Earth somewhere. Now I’m stuck adding new entries to my Amazon blog by hand.

Why is so much technology so goddamn fragile?

I joke about this all the time with my web programming customers. Chances are that if you see something drastically wrong with the website I’m managing — layout all fucked up, images floating all over the place, everything completely unreadable — it’s the fault of a single misplaced comma somewhere. Other industries don’t have this problem. I mean, if you’ve got a single board nailed crooked in your house, the whole thing doesn’t fall to pieces.

This fragility is one of the whole reasons why it makes sense to move websites to CMS’s like WordPress or Drupal, or application frameworks like Ruby on Rails. Setting up a framework takes the gruntwork and repetition out of web programming, and it insulates you from fucking up the whole website by sticking a comma in the wrong place. Mostly.

The reality of the matter is that web technology is still on a very low rung of the evolutionary ladder. We’ve got application skeletons and frameworks galore, but you don’t see a lot of application musculatures or nervous systems. Most software can’t repair itself — and even when it can do rudimentary repair work, like replacing accidentally deleted files or Windows Registry entries, it’s not smart enough to know when it needs repairing. My Firefox browser is now smart enough to automatically restore all of my tabs when it crashes, most of the time — but about 20% of the time, the browser still isn’t even smart enough to know that it’s crashed, and I have to open the Windows Task Manager and manually kill the process that’s not responding.

And so I find working on web technology really fucking frustrating because it’s fucking broken so much of the fucking time. The web is full of dead links because the mechanisms for propagating electronic changes of address are sucky. Pages break on different browsers and operating systems because nobody — not even Mozilla — implements all the W3C standards correctly, and it’s quite difficult to make a website degrade gracefully.

I get a little melancholy when I start to think about these things, because I realize that I’m not going to live long enough to see the really cool stuff. None of us are. Technology can be maddening and frustrating today, and it’s going to remain maddening and frustrating for a long time to come.

Yes, it’s that new website that I’ve been mentioning for months and months now. I actually started soliciting feedback on the DeepGenre blog way back in December (see my piece “What Works on an Author Website?”). And now you can see the results here. You might also want to take the opportunity to poke around the redesigned Infoquake and MultiReal websites.

It’s likely that I’ll be doing some continuous tweaking to the site over the next few weeks, both to improve functionality and to fix problems. I haven’t looked at the sites on IE6 in over a month, and I’m sure they look absolutely horrendous. I’ve never tried to view them on a Mac. Plus I keep stumbling across broken images all over the place, which is entirely WordPress’s fault, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my shoddy organizational skills and inability to follow directions or standard programming practices.

In the meantime, here are some of the highlights of the new website:

• New home page (here) with consolidated information about me and links to the important parts of the site. It also features the John Steinbeck quote from East of Eden that I’m strongly favoring as the epigraph for the beginning of Geosynchron.
• Frequently asked questions page (here) with what I hope are frequently asked questions, along with the frequently given answers.
• Easy-to-find social networking icons at the bottom of every blog post that are, frankly, a crass attempt to garner more attention and traffic from social networking websites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and the like. (Thanks to the fabulous Sociable plugin which makes managing these icons easy as pie.)
• Subscribe by email functionality on the blog, courtesy of the Subscribe2 plugin. Look in the left sidebar and sign up if you’d like to receive emails whenever I post a new article on the blog. Does it actually work? Well, er, I don’t know. I haven’t thoroughly tested it yet, so let me know if you have trouble.
• Notify me of follow-up comments functionality on every entry of the blog, to try to encourage continuing discussion. Does this feature actually work? Not sure about that either, but let’s hope so. Courtesy of the Subscribe to Comments plugin.
• Random entries in the left sidebar, in an attempt to get people to sample the bountiful harvest of archived blog posts. Courtesy of my own damn PHP programming skills (which is probably why it occasionally breaks and shows nothing).
• List of top 15 tags in the left sidebar. Just move your mouse over the “Tags” headline to see it. Yeah, okay, so it’s not a particularly intuitive navigation scheme, but I’m working on it.
• Revised “Best of the Blog” page (here) updated to include some of the stuff I’ve written here in the past year.

New things to note on the Infoquake and MultiReal websites:

• Complete excerpt of MultiReal is online. The Pyr PDF sampler contains chapters 1-5; the excerpt on the MultiReal website also contains chapters 6, 7, and 8. And considering chapter 6 is set on the virtual sex network known as the Sigh, you know you want to read that chapter. (But don’t get too excited, it’s not particularly explicit.) No word from Josef K. Foley about artwork yet, but word is his wife is expecting twins, so he’s got his hands full.
• Buy Now pages give the discriminating SF consumer a bevvy of choices of where to purchase their copies of Infoquake and MultiReal.
• Consolidated RSS feed for Book News pulls all of the Infoquake and MultiReal-related entries from my blog into one place. (You’ll notice that my home page now automatically displays the latest book news as well.)
• New podcasts will be coming shortly. I’ve already recorded chapter 1 of MultiReal (though Audacity is giving me fits so I haven’t posted it yet). Plus I intend to go back and finish recording chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Infoquake as well. So keep an eye on the audio pages for Infoquake and MultiReal.
• Web exclusives pages that currently house the first drafts of Infoquake‘s chapter 1, the essay “Why I Wrote Infoquake,” and links to blog posts about Infoquake and MultiReal. I’ll be posting first drafts of MultiReal‘s chapter 1 at some point — and that’s going to be interesting, considering I have about a dozen entirely different openings for the book that are currently just gathering digital dust on my hard drive.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout-out to the Inline Posts plugin for WordPress as well. This miraculous plugin is what allows me to mirror the contents of several pages throughout the site without actually having to maintain duplicates of them. It’s worth checking out.

And now, I crave feedback. What do you think? Positive and negative comments welcome.

Update 4/17/08 at 8:58 PM: Okay, so I’ve now heard from a few people that the comments form doesn’t work, which is why none of you are giving feedback. I just assumed you all hated me. Now I know that you don’t — unless the comments form doesn’t work and you hate me. Off to fix it now…

In my first ramble about user interface, I used the toaster as an example of something that is erroneously thought to have a perfect user interface. Perhaps a more apropos example for most techies is the Internet search engine.

Think of any piece of information you’d like to know. Who was the king of France in 1425? What’s the address and occupation of your best friend from junior high school? How many barrels of oil does Venezuela produce every day? Chances are, that piece of information is sitting on one of the trillions of web pages cached in Google’s databases, and it’s accessible from your web browser right this instant.

You just have to figure out how to get to it — and Google’s job is to bring it to you in as few steps as possible. It’s all a question of interface, and that’s why user interface has been Google’s main preoccupation since day one.

It might seem the model of simplicity to click in a box, type for a search term, and click a button to get your results. But the Google model of searching is still an imperfect process at best. You may not realize it, but there are still a number of Rubegoldbergian obstacles between you and the information you’re trying to get to. For instance:

1. You need to have an actual machine that can access the Internet, whether it’s a computer or a cell phone or a DVR.
2. That machine has to be powered and correctly configured, and it relies on hundreds of other machines — routers, satellites, firewalls, network hubs — to be powered and correctly configured too.
3. You need to know how to log in to one of these machines, fire up a piece of software like a web browser, and find the Google website.
4. The object of your search has to be easily expressed in words. You can’t put an image or a color or a bar of music into the search box.
5. Those words have to be in a language that Google currently recognizes and catalogs (and your machine has to be capable of rendering words in that language).
6. You have to know how to spell those words with some degree of accuracy — which isn’t a problem when searching for “the king of France in 1425,” but can be a real problem if you’re looking for “Kweisi Mfume’s curriculum vitae.”
7. You need to be able to type at a reasonable speed, which puts you at a disadvantage if you’re one-handed or using imperfect dictation software.
8. Google has to be able to interpret what category of subject you’re looking for, in order to discern whether you’re trying to find apples, Apple computers, Apple Records, or Fiona Apple.

Some of these barriers between you and your information might seem laughable. But it all seems so easy for you because you’re probably reading this from the ideal environment for Google, i.e. sitting indoors at a desk staring at a computer that you’ve already spent hours and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to set up. If you’re running down the street trying to figure out which bus route to take, the barriers to using Google become much steeper. Or if you’re driving in your car, or if you’re a Chinese peasant without access to 3G wireless, or if you’re lounging in the pool, and so on.

Even in the best-case scenario, after you jump through all those hoops, you usually have to scan through at least a page of results from the Google search engine to find the one that contains the information you’re looking for. Google does no interpretation, summarization, or analysis on the data it throws back to you. Some search engines do some preliminary classification of results, or they try to anyway, but it’s generally quite rudimentary. Chances are you’ll need to spend at least a few seconds to a few minutes combing through pages to find one that’s suitable, and then you’ll need to search through that suitable page to find the information you want.

I don’t mean to minimize the achievement of the Google search engine. The fact that I can determine within minutes that a) the king of France in 1425 was Charles VII, b) my best friend from junior high school is currently heading the division of a high-definition audio company in Latin America, and c) in 2004, Venezuela produced 2.4 million barrels of oil a day — this is all pretty frickin’ amazing. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t note the search engine’s shortcomings. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that there are still a zillion ways to improve it. There’s still a huge mountain to climb before we can call Google an example of perfect user interface.

But don’t worry, because Google’s on the case.

Google has been making a mighty effort to break out of the web browser for quite some time. Not only have they been pushing their browserless Google Desktop app for some time, but they’re also quite open in publishing their APIs and trying to get you to hook into Google from other places. Cell phones, iPhones, car dashboards, public kiosks, refrigerators, digital chopsticks, Bluetooth-enabled dog collars, etc.

Why? A few years ago, we might have said that they were trying to escape the monopolistic grip of Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. But now that Firefox has made serious inroads on IE’s dominance — they’ve got around 16% global market share, 20% North American market share, and 30% European market share, if you believe the latest statistics — it’s not such a big concern.

No, the main reason Google’s looking for new avenues for search is that the standard WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing Device) user interface is a dinosaur, and right now it’s late the Cretaceous Period and there’s a big fucking meteor zipping across the sky.

Forget about the distinctions between Mac, Windows, and Linux — they’re all inefficient. While some computer operating systems may work more smoothly than others, they’re all based on the principles developed by Stanford researchers and Xerox PARC engineers in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

What’s wrong with the WIMP interface? It’s a nice all-purpose interface for general tasks, but it falls down on the job on just about any specific task you give it. As software has grown more complicated, the WIMP interface has failed to keep up. Programs like Microsoft Word have become mazes of hierarchical menus and drill-down dialog boxes, and operating such programs efficiently has become an exercise in rote memorization. Shoehorning the computing power of a 2.4 GHz dual-core processor into seven or eight subcategories and a row of increasingly tiny icons is kind of like running an M1 Abrams tank off an Atari 2600 joystick. You’re wasting potential.

Software manufacturers are now toying with a host of WIMP extensions and alternatives like the Office Ribbon, which try to unearth options that had been buried four menus deep for years. And while the Office Ribbon is pretty nice, it’s ultimately limited. You’re still dividing up a list of possible tasks into seven or eight subcategories, and expecting users to drill down to find the item they’re looking for. The Ribbon works fine for Office 2007, but it’s certainly not going to cut the mustard in Office 2020 (if such a thing even exists then).

But let’s take things one step further. Forget the WIMP interface — the computer itself is just an intermediate step, headed soon for the great Recycle Bin in the Sky.

As the MacBook Air has demonstrated, the physical machine itself is disappearing. People have been talking about the concept of “wearable computing,” and experimenting with gadgets like the Senseboard, which allows you to project a virtual keyboard and type on any surface you like. Computer manufacturers are looking at the mouse and realizing, heck, you don’t need an intermediate plastic device that represents where you want to point on a computer screen. You can just touch the damn thing yourself and make it do what you want. Thus the creation of Microsoft Surface and devices like the iPod Touch.

The point I’m trying to make with all this is that we’re still in the Dark Ages in terms of user interface. You may feel pretty content with your little plastic box showing little two-dimensional pictures on a little 17-inch screen. But it’s just an interface, and a ridiculously inefficient one at that, and it’s going away. Soon.

So if computers are going away, where do we go from here? Do we still need user interface? Coming in the next article…

***

(Of course, let’s not forget that all this time I’ve just been talking about one very narrow application of user interface, and that’s interface as a gateway to information technology. But what about user interface in the real world? After all, your car’s got a user interface, your hedge clippers have a user interface, your TV has a user interface, and so does every elevator you’ve ever ridden.

(Take the standard elevator. Elevators are extremely dumb machines. They spend large amounts of time sitting on the wrong floor. When you walk up to the elevator, the only interface you’ve got is a simple two-button panel that asks whether you’re going up or down. People often end up piling into multiple elevators that are going to the same destinations, requiring all of the elevators to stop at multiple floors. The buttons for opening and closing the doors once you’re in there are a bad joke — by the time you find them, it’s either too late to stop the doors or just an unnecessary extra redundancy.

(How come the elevators don’t know where you’re going already? If you’re in a strange building, that’s understandable — but why should you have to push the same button for your apartment or office every day? Couldn’t the building automatically sense that someone’s waiting for the elevator via motion detectors? And couldn’t it automatically sense which floor you’re heading to by reading an RFID chip in your key? Hell, the elevator should start making decisions about which elevator to send and when as soon as I enter the parking garage.

(So just like computers, these real-world interfaces are rife with inadequacies too. They’re just waiting for a revolution in user interface.)

***

(Sources for the images in this article: “Google Is a Giant Robot” by Stuart Brown; screen cap of Google Desktop from the unofficial Google Operating System blog; and the original WIMP interface for the Xerox Alto, circa 1973, from the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

But even more important, the Internet has allowed me to keep in touch with readers during the (too long) break between novels. Before the prevalence of websites and blogs, the only way for newer SF authors to keep their name in the public eye was to write gobs of short stories and spend a lot of time on the con circuit. Now I can have an ongoing one-on-one dialog with readers through the blogosphere and social networking sites, and keep them posted on news of my next book.

In addition to my response, you can also read responses to the same question from fellow authors Matthew Jarpe and Tobias Buckell, my editor Lou Anders, and book marketing expert Andrew Wheeler.

I had an ulterior motive for attending. I’m in the process of evaluating promotional ideas for my upcoming novel MultiReal, and the idea of doing a book launch on Second Life has cropped up in my discussions more than once. I created a Second Life profile many moons ago, just to poke around and see what the fuss was about. After a few days, I quickly grew bored with the whole thing and uninstalled the software from my PC. But yesterday, in the service of book promotion, I resurrected it and went exploring once again.

And after attending Paul’s Second Life event, I can now officially say I don’t get it.

This was no fault of Paul Levinson’s. I’ve shared a couple of panels at cons with him, and he seems like a friendly, intelligent, and interesting fellow. The reading itself was quite lively, and the book The Plot to Save Socrates sounds like that perfect combination of thought-provoking and nerdy cool. The plot in a nutshell: a grad student in the future decides to travel back in time to save the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates from drinking the hemlock. (Go read more about it on Paul’s website.) The interviewer herself asked pertinent, thoughtful questions.

But the Second Life aspect of the event basically went like this: I logged in and teleported to a virtual auditorium. I sat down in a virtual chair along with about 25-30 other spectators. The virtual Paul Levinson and the virtual moderator sat in virtual chairs on the stage, next to a virtual spinning copy of The Plot to Save Socrates. And then we all just sat there for an hour doing nothing while the two of them had a very interesting chat on audio.

So besides the novelty factor, what does Second Life offer to book promotion that you couldn’t get by holding your reading on, say, FreeConferenceCall.com or WebEx?

I’m not saying that Second Life is a bad place to hold a book event. If you’re the author, you get to see who’s attending the reading. You get a direct conduit to your own personal bookstore, along with all the tracking that entails. You get the potential of interacting with people who live in remote places you’re not likely to ever hit on the real-world book tour. Oh, and it’s free.

But as I sat in front of my computer and watched my avatar watch Paul Levinson’s avatar watching the moderator’s avatar, I tried and failed to figure out what potential Second Life has for literature over the next ten years. It’s kinda neat. It’s kinda fun. Is that it?

I tried to extrapolate, to think big. What if my name was Stephen King or Dan Brown, and someone gave me $500,000 and six months to put on a fabulous Second Life book event? What could I possibly do? Hire Second Life actors to put on a clunky little pantomime while I read? Create big virtual sculptures of the creatures in my book to hang over the stage? I have a difficult time imagining what I could do that wouldn’t just look silly. I suppose in 15 or 20 years when you can see 3D Hollywood-quality monsters zooming around while you read, that will be pretty cool. But Second Life is still a long way off. Right now they’re closer to King’s Quest IV circa 1988 than they are to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

The problem is that literature is a very one-directional art form that doesn’t translate well into an immersive environment like Second Life. People are always talking about “updating” the reading experience, and so far it’s pretty much all been marketing hokum. Even if we all ditched paper and ink tomorrow and shifted over to Amazon Kindles or some other gee-whiz e-book reader, the basic reading experience wouldn’t change, only the distribution method. You’re still staring at a narrative of sequential words that you read from start to finish. What’s really changed about the narrative experience since the ancient Sumerians sat around the fire to hear The Epic of Gilgamesh? Only three things that I can think of: (1) writing, (2) paper, and (3) hypertext.

You often find people drastically overhyping the potential of new technologies to revolutionize aspects of life that haven’t changed for thousands of years. That’s no surprise; it’s human nature. But it’s surprising to me how much people still fall for this, even after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001.

In addition to checking out an online book event, the other thing I made sure to investigate on Second Life was online sex. I mean, hey, I’m hip! I’m wit’ it! I can get freaky in the Multiverse, yo! So I made sure to check out one of Second Life’s red light districts to catch a glimpse of the future of sex. I saw a group of blocky, King’s Quest IV avatars standing around naked with their blocky, King’s Quest IV naughty bits on display. There were a number of virtual men thrusting blocky, King’s Quest IV penises into blocky, King’s Quest IV vaginas. The result was about as sexy as the X-rated mannequin sex scene in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police.

I tried to figure out how you might do that with the confusing hodgepodge of controls that Second Life gives you, but it seemed like it would take two, or possibly even three or four, hands to do it right. And what’s the point of that? To paraphrase Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski: there may be exciting new developments in online pornography right around the corner, but we still jerk off manually.

***

(A quick aside: Okay, I can think of one book that would lend itself well to Second Life promotion: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Which, in case you were wondering, is the greatest children’s novel ever written. Somebody needs to build a Second Life realm of The Phantom Tollbooth that allows you to travel to Dictionopolis and Digitopolis in your own little wind-up car. I’m willing to be convinced. Norton Juster, if you’re reading this, I’m waiting for your email.)

I’ve taken the opportunity of moving the blog to make a number of changes, which I list below:

• Infoquake site is now on WordPress. The Infoquake website is now running on good ol’ WordPress (as opposed to ColdFusion, which is what I originally created the site in). This means it will be a heck of a lot easier for me to maintain, and will allow me to install nifty plug-ins and the like. Plus once I do the redesign in 2008, all I’ll need to do is modify the skin and I’m good to go — no need to reprogram the whole thing. But the coolest thing about moving to WordPress? I can use the IMM-Glossary plugin to give me automatic popup definitions for the terms in the book. Go look at the excerpt page and run your mouse over one of the words with the dotted underlines to see it in action. (Or just look at the screen cap to the right.)
• The John Barth Information Center is also now on WordPress. Some of you may or may not realize that I’ve maintained a fan website devoted to the Postmodernist author John Barth for the past, oh, 12 or 13 years. (Go ahead, search Google for “John Barth” and see what comes up just below the Wikipedia article. I’ll wait.) This site is now running WordPress too, and seeing as I’ve been such a horrible steward of the site, I’m hoping to open it up to other John Barth fans to write, administer, comment, and manage.
• All my personal websites are now running on LAMP. Yes, I do frequently defend Microsoft and have not always been keen on open source software. But I’ve decided to move to an all-open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) environment, because a) it’s cheaper, and b) WordPress runs better that way.
• Cleaner permalinks. If you look at your browser address bar, you’ll notice that the “/blog” is gone. As is the “index.php” and the date-based URL. Why? Well, it’s cleaner, that’s why. Whereas the old WordPress installation had permalinks in the form www.davidlouisedelman.com/blog/index.php/year/month/day/title/, the new installation shows permalinks in the form www.davidlouisedelman.com/category/title/. Much easier to read, and much more search engine-friendly. (Yet thanks to the magic of John Godley’s Redirection plug-in, you can still follow old links to the new pages. Really, this thing is a miracle — regular expression-based redirection, just like in Apache, but you don’t have to leave WordPress or mess with .htaccess files. Plus 404 logging, and more.)
• My old book reviews and interviews are now part of the blog. If you take a look at the full archives page, you’ll notice that I now have blog entries dating back to 1994. No, I wasn’t the most prescient individual in the world, I’ve simply moved all of my old book reviews and author interviews from the mid-90s into WordPress. This means they’re accessible through the search and the archives and get the benefits of tagging and all that WordPress-y goodness. You can read my Baltimore City Paper interviews with Tim O’Brien, Nicholson Baker, and Stephen Hunter here — still three of the most popular pages on the website — and more.
• I’ve licensed the pieces on this blog with Creative Commons. The pieces on this blog now come with an Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons license. Which means you’re free to copy them and remix them in any fashion you’d like, as long as you attribute the original to me and share your copies and remixes yourself. I really have no idea what this is going to do for me; I figure that it will either a) help, or at least b) not cost me anything.

So far the transition to Bluehost has been pretty smooth… with one very important, and very souring, exception. Go to the Bluehost home page and try to log in to the Control Panel in the top right. It doesn’t matter if you have an account, type in a bogus domain and a bogus password like 1234. What do you see? If you’re at all savvy about website security, you’ll see the problem right away. The password you typed is sitting right in the query string of the URL. (See below.)

Why is this a big deal? Well, your ultra-secret password to all your web files, the one you typed behind asterisks, is now sitting right there for anyone to see. It’s also sitting in plain text in your browser history. It’s also been passed through dozens of routers on the Internet in plain text where any doofus can copy it down. It’s also sitting in plain text in Bluehost’s log files.

This is the kind of bonehead security mistake that they teach you in Webmastering 101, not long after they disabuse you of the notion that your computer comes with a built-in cup holder. Bluehost’s response when I opened a customer service ticket about this? Hey, there’s a secure login — just type the Bluehost URL with a leading “https://” instead of an “http://”. Shit, my ESP must be on the fritz, because your mental telepathy telegram warning me that your standard account login is insecure failed to come through.

This kind of carelessness doesn’t exactly make me feel secure about my choice of ISP. But I’ve learned the hard way that all web hosting companies suck.

Oh, and the last irritating factor? WordPress doesn’t let you migrate post excerpts. I’ve been very careful to create bite-sized summaries for every post I’ve written, so you can browse through the article list in the categories and have some idea what you’re about to read. No more. The excerpts are all gone, seemingly for good. (Sniff.)

So you suit up and get on the field, but you still don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on. Sometimes people are running with the ball, sometimes they’re throwing the ball, sometimes they’re kicking it or just pushing other players around and jumping on them for seemingly no reason. You try to ask the other players what’s going on, and they’re perfectly willing to help you — but all you can catch is a few seconds of their time between plays when they’re out of breath.

That’s kind of how I feel trying to learn Ruby on Rails.

What the hell is Ruby on Rails? For all you non-technical people out there, it’s a programming environment that’s supposed to make development super, mega easy.

Those with a more technical bent have probably already heard about Ruby on Rails. But for those who haven’t, it’s an open-source web framework where you can use the popular Ruby language to build robust applications using the Model-View-Control pattern in an astonishingly few lines of code.

How easy is it? Well, once you’ve got it installed properly, you literally type “rails book” and then “ruby script/generate scaffold chapter.” In the space of seconds, RoR generates all of the files you need for a project called “book” composed of multiple “chapters.”

From there on out, it’s amazingly simple too. You can describe the data model with two basic statements:

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :chapters
end

class Chapter < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :book
end

RoR takes care of generating all of the HTML files needed to make it work on the fly. Within five minutes, you can have an application that will let you seamlessly add, edit, and delete chapters to a book. No more mucking around with granular SQL statements and spending hours debugging.

The problem is, you’ve got to get it installed properly.

And getting Ruby on Rails installed properly is a bitch. It’s taken me days, and I’m still not sure I’ve got it done right. Luckily, you don’t need a web server to serve up the application because RoR comes with a built-in lightweight web server called Webrick. Oh, but wait, Webrick isn’t powerful enough for a production server, so we need Apache. With the FastCGI module installed and configured for Ruby files. Oh, but wait, nobody uses FastCGI to do this anymore, everyone’s using something called Mongrel these days…

Compound this with the fact that every flavor of *nix has its own special tweaks and mods that you need to do to the config files to get things working. I’ve seen a million pages now with some variation of the following: “Never mind why for the moment, if you’re using CentOS with MySQL and Apache, you need to CHMOD 755 on this particular folder and add this line to the httpd.conf file…”

Think you can escape these problems on Windows? Good ol’ clunky, kludgy Windows that makes everything simple? Wrong. There’s a package out there called InstantRails that you can supposedly just unzip on your computer and have the whole thing running in minutes. Except my spankin’ new Windows Vista machine at the office won’t unzip it, because Vista currently has a problem unzipping zip archives with tens of thousands of files in them. (Update 3/14/07: Problem solved. Downloaded and installed free, open-source 7-Zip instead, which took care of the upzipping in 2 minutes 30 seconds.)

Yes, Ruby on Rails is cutting-edge web development, and I’m not used to sitting out on the cutting edge. RoR has literally only been out for 2 1/2 years. And that means that it’s poorly documented, with most of the available information coming from uber-geeks who’ve figured something out after much trial-and-error and written a hasty post about it on a blog or forum.

Remember what the World Wide Web was like in, say, 1994? Everyone was fantastically excited about it, but nobody was quite sure what it could do. You would see pages that were nothing but prettified bulleted lists alongside pages of enormous graphics taken straight out of a glossy four-color catalog.

There’s a reason why they call it the cutting edge or the bleeding edge. It’s because you feel like you’ve been cut and you’re bleeding. Kind of like you feel after playing football.

The common assumption among programming types about MySpace is that the system started off as somebody’s pet project and quickly mushroomed beyond the programmers’ control. Rather than cooling off growth to create a better infrastructure, the MySpace folks opted for growth at any costs. As a result, we end up with the buggy, unreliable usability nightmare that is MySpace today. Now, it’s assumed, the programmers and sysadmins are scrambling to play catchup.

This article pretty much confirms these assumptions. According to the article, MySpace started out as a ColdFusion-based project — and while ColdFusion is ridiculously easy to program, any developer can tell you it’s got a reputation (deserved or not) for being a little slow and resource-heavy on the performance scale. So as they’ve grown, MySpace has been moving to Microsoft’s ASP.Net and relying on emulators to port some of the older code over.

One can’t really blame MySpace for such logic. It’s the kind of hot-air logic that propelled companies like Pets.com to the stratosphere back in the ’90s and made a ton of people oodles and oodles of cash. It’s Web 1.0 thinking. Using such Web 1.0 thinking, MySpace has quickly vaulted to become the most visited site on the Internet and gotten snatched up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in the process.

But as a result, they’ve built on an unsustainable foundation. They’ve made the classic gamble that short-term gain will trump long-term stability. And like so many Web 1.0 companies that came before them, MySpace is headed for a big, clumsy fall. Here’s why.

• Easy come, easy go. The base audience for MySpace consists of teenagers and folks in their twenties. That’s not to say this is the only demographic using MySpace, but that’s the core audience. These people flocked to the service for the same reasons young people flock to anything: it was new, it was cool, it was free, and everyone they knew was doing it. Give them an alternative that’s newer, cooler, better functioning, and more reliable — not to mention backed by big corporate dollars — and they’ll flock there just as quickly.
• Insecurity. Recently someone came up with the grand idea of distributing malicious code through a security vulnerability in embedded QuickTime videos. Folks have been taking advantage of CSS and HTML quirks to hack MySpace almost since the place began. More and more people are complaining about hacked profiles and hijacked identities. MySpace has demonstrated time and again that they’re behind the curve when it comes to security. So I think it’s highly likely that at some point in the near future, we’ll see a series of successful crippling attacks on MySpace that will send people running in a panicky exodus.
• Slowing pace of innovation. Adapt or die, that’s the unofficial motto of the Internet. And unlike, say, Google, which continues to pump out features and applications by the gallon, MySpace has remained largely sedentary for the past year. They released a lamentable, old-school IM client and better video integration, but otherwise the system is pretty much the same as it was 18 months ago. As MySpace’s technical problems grow and their folks spend more and more time just keeping up with demand, they’re going to fall even further behind.
• Facebook. If you want to see an example of a MySpace-like program that actually works, look no further than Facebook. It’s user-friendly, it’s popular, and best of all, it’s reliable. The service’s big handicap at this point is that it doesn’t allow nearly the level of customization that MySpace does. But that’s only one major partnership with Yahoo! away (assuming Yahoo! finally bites the bullet and makes a deal with them already).
• Where are the premium services? I’m not entirely familiar with the intricacies of MySpace’s business model, but from the looks of things, they’re entirely dependent on advertising. And as Yahoo! has discovered, that’s not a stable strategy for the long term. Why hasn’t MySpace tapped into the burgeoning third-party market of MySpace website pimpers and added services like that of their own? Where are the premium clubs and the premium band promotion services?
• “Why change?” attitude. A former MySpace VP of operations is quoted in the article as saying: “when you look at the result, it’s hard to argue that what we did with the interface and navigation was bad. And why change it, when you have success?” Few technology companies have succeeded in the long run with the mantra “why change?” It won’t fly on the Internet, where the barriers to migrating to another free service are absolutely nil.

So there you have a few reasons off the top of my head why I think MySpace is headed for a fall. This doesn’t mean that they’ll disappear entirely. After all, Compuserve is still around, and America Online will probably hang on for awhile too even after they’ve recklessly thrown away their customers. But neither are any more than a shell of their former selves, and I suspect that MySpace will eventually meet that fate too.

Is it inevitable? Well, every Goliath falls eventually. That’s just the nature of the universe. But it’s up to MySpace just how far away and how graceful that fall is.

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(Related reading: see my previous rants on Why Does MySpace Suck So Badly? and MySpace Spam or Clever Marketing?)

I’ve nearly completed all the modifications I wanted to make on this blog for 2007. Finally this weekend I cleared one of the last remaining hurdles: a good hook to social bookmarking and Web 2.0 sites.

I found that hook with Alex King’s Share This plug-in for WordPress.

Look at the gray bar underneath the headline of any article on this site. Along with “permanent link,” “comments,” and “trackback,” there’s now a “share this” link. Click it and give it a whirl. (If you’re viewing this article on LiveJournal, MySpace, or SFNovelists, you can look at the screen shot to the right instead. Or view this article on my WordPress blog.)

The Share This plug-in is a godsend, because it eliminates the bane of so many blogs and websites these days: the growing clutter of Web 2.0 link buttons. We’ve all seen them. They’ve spread throughout the footers and sidebars of the World Wide Web like kudzu. Alex’s plug-in takes the whole kit-n-caboodle and tucks it nicely in a dynamic pop-up. Look, ma, no mess!

The list is fairly easy to configure if you’re comfortable editing a well-commented PHP document. You can use the list of other social web-type services found on 3spots’ list of blog footer buttons. Obviously I don’t have accounts with all these services, so all y’all blog readers will have to let me know if there’s a button that’s misbehaving. And let me know if there are any services I’m missing.

So far, the plug-in seems to be working extraordinarily well, and I can only hope it will allow my blog to continue to grow and dominate the blogosphere. Perhaps next year, I’ll look back at all the rival bloggers I’ve mercilessly slain on the field of Technorati and have Alex King to thank for it. (Hopefully Mr. King will even forgive me for grayscaling his nice standardized share icon.)

Of course, there’s always room for improvement, so I’m going to throw in my two cents about things I’d add or change in the plug-in.

1. A user-configurable e-mail comment. If you’re sending the article to someone via e-mail, you don’t have the opportunity to type in a quick comment to the recipient. They’ll receive the same canned message as everyone else. I tried to add the title or an excerpt of the story you’re e-mailing, but since the plug-in doesn’t fall within the WordPress “loop,” the standard tags didn’t work here either.
2. E-mail confirmation message. Once you’ve sent the article off, you get dumped right back to the article with no indication that your message has been sent successfully.
3. A configuration page in WordPress Admin. You need to dig through the PHP code of the plug-in file in order to configure those bookmark links, which is a little inelegant. I even had to venture below the “do not edit below this line” comment to get the e-mail message to say what I wanted.
4. Auto-sorting of links. I had to manually alphabetize the links, which seemed to be in some haphazard order by default. And what’s with the side-to-side alphabetization? I think top-down newspaper column-style sorting is more intuitive.
5. A drop shadow. A little visual cue to differentiate the pop-up window from the rest of the screen would be helpful.
6. A standard ‘Help’ or ‘?’ link. It doesn’t have to say much — maybe just a two-line description of what this “Share This” thing is all about. And hey, it would be a great way to spread the word about the plug-in too.
7. The pop-up should close if the user clicks outside the box. Right now you need to either click the “Close” link or toggle the “Share This” link in order to close the box. Standard behavior for pop-up windows like this is to also close when the user clicks elsewhere on the page.

Eventually, what we need is a way for the user to configure the Web 2.0 services he/she wants to see here. But in order to do that, we’d need to have a Web 2.0 service that keeps track of all your Web 2.0 services — a meta-Web 2.0, if you will. Which is a much larger issue than just this one plug-in.

I like Google. I have great faith in their ability to bring new technology to the masses in an intuitive, highly functional package. Google Maps quickly supplanted MapQuest as my street directory of choice when it came out. And I’ve got high hopes for Writely, an online word processing application that Google bought earlier this year and promptly rechristened Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

So why is Gmail so irritating?

Gmail should be a slam-dunk for Google. After all, I can build a simple POP3 application on a ColdFusion web server in a couple of hours, and that includes time for me to consult the Macromedia documentation to fix my mangled CFML syntax. I’m not saying that that’s all there is to it, of course. (If you want to see a ColdFusion-based application gone horribly awry, look at all the flaws in MySpace.) But I don’t have some of the world’s best developers and billions of dollars in cash lying around either.

Here are my major problems with Gmail:

• Gmail breaks the browser Back button. To me, this is an absolute cardinal sin. Yes, I understand how difficult it is to make a functioning web application that obeys the Back button in a stateless environment like the web. But certainly Google can do better. I back up into blank, non-functioning pages at least two or three times a day, usually when following links from the Gmail module on my Google home page. And when Google isn’t breaking the Back button, they’re opening up new and unwanted tabs in my browser.
• Gmail breaks the Reload/Refresh button. Try opening an e-mail message, and then hitting your browser’s reload/refresh button. You get taken back to the list of e-mails. I get hung up on this several times a day too.
• The interface is very, very slow. I lose patience very easily with the “Loading” messages that pop up at the top of the screen — there are actually two different messages, one that appears in the top right and one that appears in the top left — and they’re up there a lot.
• No folders. Google assumes that we don’t care for the convention of filing our e-mail into different folders. Therefore Gmail does away with this metaphor altogether in favor of its own Label system, which I can’t seem to get used to. Couldn’t they at least give you the option of using folders, even if it’s not set by default?

• What’s with the Reply textbox? There’s a textbox at the bottom of every message that suddenly expands into a full-fledged e-mail reply once you click on it. It’s very bizarre and counterintuitive, considering the fact that the e-mail reply looks nothing like the textbox.
• Threaded conversations are just confusing. Message replies and forwards are all tacked on to the original e-mail to form one long chain of messages. It sounds like a good idea to have a record of the entire conversation in one place, but in practice things get very cluttered very quickly. When conversations start to branch off into multiple threads, it’s almost impossible to keep track. Furthermore, threaded e-mail conversations cause messages to jump around in chronology. That message that used to be halfway down the page suddenly jumps to the top of the page, rendering any attempts to order your messages useless.
• Why can’t I easily sort? Every other e-mail program in the world — hell, just about every other program period — lets you sort objects. Usually by clicking the header at the top of the column. Gmail doesn’t let you sort messages at all. What if I want to view all messages to or from a specific person? You need to type that person’s name into the Search box. What if you want to view e-mail in reverse chronology? Sorry, can’t.
• Gmail doesn’t play well with POP3 clients like Outlook. Sure, you can easily download messages to Outlook — which is more than you can say for some webmail clients like Microsoft’s own Hotmail — but Google renders some of most effective POP3 management tools null and void. Messages you’ve downloaded into Outlook don’t automatically get marked as read in Gmail. And Gmail doesn’t obey the standard POP3 setting allowing your client to automatically delete webmail messages after x days on the server.
• The “Compose Mail” link is hard to find. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it difficult to remember where the “Compose Mail” link is. Yes, it’s right there in the top left under the Gmail logo, but after using the program for a year, I still hesitate a second or two every time I need to use it. That’s generally a sign that there’s a serious design flaw at work.

There are all kinds of smaller problems too. Why, when you click on the “New window” link, is the new window too narrow to see your entire e-mail message? Why are message threads sometimes collapsed and sometimes not? How come clicking on the paper clip icon doesn’t take you to the message attachment like it does in every other application? In fact, why do you need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the message to download attachments?

The main problem with Gmail is one that I’ve started to see too much at Google: product arrogance. It’s the attitude that Google knows what’s good for you, and they’re going to proceed with their internal logic despite what the usability standards say and what the customers think. It’s the same Achilles’ heel that Apple has suffered from for years. (Why did Steve Jobs wait until 2005 to finally ship a mouse with a right-click button and a scroll wheel?)

There are some things I like about Gmail’s interface — the autosave, the fact that sent mail downloads to your POP3 client, the e-mail RSS feeds — but generally they’re outweighed by the annoyances. Enough that I’m seriously considering switching back to Yahoo! for my webmail. Their new interface is supposed to be very nice.