Jennlog

As an architect, I get to design some pretty nifty functionality into a product. I can determine what I need to see in an interface and how that interface interacts with the back-end components. I can specify the minimum operating environment for the delivery of the product and then design based on the conditions of that environment.

For Yallery Alpha, the minimum operating environment is constrained by four things:

1) Yallery would be delivered in a dashboard interface with no browser-level scrolling

2) The resolution of a member’s monitor would be 1024×768px so that they would be able to size their browser large enough to accomodate our design (based on compatibility with ~95% of screen sizes observed “in the wild” — after subtracting mobile platforms)

3) The CSS, HTML and Javascript would be compatible with at least one Browser on Windows and Mac platforms

4) My ability to produce code that would display my vision (and I am not a professional UI designer or programmer)

So in Alpha, we have the “minimum” Yallery environment as Firefox or Safari operating on Mac or Windows at a screen resolution of 1024px by 768px or higher.

Yallery.com Visitor Browser Resolutions (from Google Analytics)

In 611 visits, only 1 visitor arrived with an incompatible resolution… or so I thought.

Below you will see a screen capture of Firefox operating at 1024px by 768px viewing Yallery’s Home Page after I had installed Me.dium:

This is Yallery with Me.dium (or any other Firefox “sidebar” window open)

Ooops! If my screen resolution was capped at 1024×768, I would be unable to log-in to Yallery with Me.dium active in my browser.

This is Yallery’s “Public Dashboard” with Me.dium reduced to it’s smallest size.

Above, I’ve marked the problem areas of the Yallery “Public Dashboard” if someone managed to get into Yallery while using a Firefox “sidebar”. The actual site is crunched and pushed out of the bounds of its design.

I don’t feel it is realistic to expect our members remove their sidebars while they use Yallery.

Lots of people have loaded up their browsers with plugins and helper bars, search bars, tracking bars, recommendation bars, ad bars — toolbars, to the point where a significant portion of their browsers aren’t even displaying “browsing space”, they’re displaying “bars”. This is the likely cause of certain issues we’ve had reported with people unable to use links or information that we place at the bottom of our display dashboard.

I don’t expect our members to remove their plugins or top bars while they use Yallery either.

This means that we need to re-evaluate the UI design and functionality that is placed in our “Dashboard”.

Rather than working to solve this issue now with our limited resources, I think a resolution is something left to discussion with the team (when we have a team including a UI design/programmer and programmers) prior to opening our figurative doors to the public.

Who knows? Maybe the answer could be as simple as popping up a new 1024×768px sized window. That would work, but I personally hate hate hate sites that popup new FULL SCREEN sized windows for no reason. Hard-sizing a new window to 1024×768 would be fairer than grabbing someone’s full screen at (what was the screen resolution I just saw reported on another site I own…) 6400px. by 5120px. (!).

Several years ago, after a rather annoying week of having one of my email addresses used to send many americangreetings.com “greetings” to unknown masses, having my email address added to americangreetings’ spam list and then wasting a bunch of time complaining bitterly to americangreetings.com with no results, I added americangreetings’ IP blocks to my anti-spam appliance’s blacklist.

I guess they’ve changed IP address blocks since, because I received an email last week saying that I’d sent some person a “greeting” from americangreetings.com. Of course I complained bitterly, noting that in all this time, I was disappointed to experience that they hadn’t implemented any sort of email address validation that would authenticate their user’s ownership over an email address used to generate “greetings”.

A few moments ago, I received a response from americangreetings.com proposing a solution (an evolution from 1999). Their method to prevent email address forgery is to ban everyone, including me the owner, from using their product with my email address. Elegant.*

I suspect that americangreetings.com neglects to authenticate their users because they realize that if they did implement a real email validation step before allowing anyone to send a “greeting”, they’d lose 50% of their traffic because the barrier to use vs. usefulness would be too high for most of their users.

When I wrote the mailing list sign-up routine for Yallery’s Alpha home page, I made sure that all the email addresses submitted to us are validated. About 70% of the email addresses in the list have been validated and will receive email from us as soon as we have something to say. The remaining unverified email addresses will be culled after 30 days.

I wish more Web businesses would value real members vs. eyeballs. Eyeballs forge my email address, members do not.

* This is the same solution used by AOL after I learned that the maximum number of AIM accounts allowable had been created by my email address (and none of them were owned/created by me).

Update:

The original message was received at Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:23:31 -0400 (EDT)
from exprod8mx36.postini.com [64.18.3.136]

—– Transcript of session follows —–
451 4.4.1 reply: read error from ag28.americangreetings.com.
<blocksend@americangreetings.com>… Deferred: Connection reset by
ag28.americangreetings.com.
Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours
Will keep trying until message is 5 days old

heh.
sigh.

I don’t know whether I should count Yallery’s birthdate from the day I registered the domain name or when I started working on the specifications? Oh well, the anniversary of that date has already passed this year.

Yallery is about 90% to the feature set that we’ve planned to implement before we exit our public Beta later this year. It’s been a long road, from last March when I decided it was time to find and register a domain name after months of idea marination. In April 2006 I began the functional specification and in June 2006, Michael came on to lead the development.

Our initial plan was to use and customize Drupal to our needs and wants. Our secondary plan was to find two or three additional people to help on the coding side while I worked on hashing out the business model and market strategy. Neither plan really worked out.

In November of 2006, after a majority of the model and strategy had been scoped, Michael and I revisited our development progress and decided to dump Drupal and embrace a pure LAMP approach with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Our progress in the first 24 hrs on LAMP surpassed the complete effort from five months on Drupal. Drupal is a great CMS solution for traditionally designed blogs or communities, but we just couldn’t mesh the Yallery vision upon it.

I refocused my attention to development, learning PHP and MySQL and have spent many allnighters since then and now working with Michael to make Yallery real and I have loved every second of it. I had forgotten all about the rush of coding an idea into reality.

We have members! In March of this year, we opened up the site to a an extremely limited membership. Out of 25 initial invitees for the Alpha, a handful joined up and have been contributing amazing feedback and shaping the service for members to come.

We’re still looking for two PHP ninjas, a MySQL wizard and an HTML UI god/goddess (with deep knowledge and experience with javascript and css… ajaxy goodness). If you fit one of these qualifications, please email me at jenn@jenn.com.

Also, If you are an artist or art collector and wish to participate in our Beta, please respond to this message or email me at jenn@jenn.com.

It’s another beautiful day in Colorado today. So, I’ve been adding to the Yallery feature set from the comfort of the hammock in my backyard — complete with the Sony Locationfree receiver. If you work on your hammock and prefer a little background “distraction”, I highly recommend the 7″ locationfree tv.

I have a couple of slingboxes, but the client + remote takes up too much screen realestate on even the 17″ powerbook. And, I find it difficult to push the video into the background like a tv or audio from a stereo (or sonos or soundbridge or squeezebox or ipod).

Jenn’s Hammock^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HOffice-mounted Sony Locationfree TV.

I suppose the same coat hanger+elastic rope rigging could also support my 100GB Archos AV700 to play divx video, if it weren’t a useless non-working brick sitting in the closet.

I’ve been adding some new features to Yallery.com in preparation for our first “independent” (non-artist operated) gallery, joining the Alpha today. They’re mostly on the back-end for identifying and displaying gallery inventory works. I’ve also been focusing on the member invitation feature a little sooner than I’d planned so that they may invite some of their represented artists onto the Alpha.

I’m excited. My main focus until recently had been on the Artist-Collector relationship features. These new features will close the “wankel engine” relationship triangle. (I credit Alan Huang with the analogy there. I’ll post about three-participant relationships in the future)

- Jenn