Who owns a Sea Kayak News poll?

When working up the new facility on the Sea Kayak News page that allows members to present a poll of options to the community for their votes we had to make some decisions about ownership. The problem arose while we were working on the facility to edit a news post. Normally the edit function would be used to correct typos in the title or web site URL. In parallel with the ability to edit a comment (available for all comments created by any user) the new ability to edit a poll potentially made it possible for the person that posed the poll to change the results after other members had voted.

We decided that the originator owned the poll overall and had the right to edit the title and to delete the poll if they felt they wanted to. However we also decided to restrict the poll’s originator from deleting or changing the text of an option that had attracted one or more votes. The idea being that votes belong to the voters and not the pollster. Clearly, there will be occasions where a poll originator will want to clarify a poll option even after it has attracted some votes – we feel that this can be handled by adding text to the available section above the poll options that allows for additional details.

A feature of the page that allows Sea Kayak Wales members to post a poll is a checkbox that (when checked) will automatically add an option to the poll with the text “Other (please leave a comment)”. This is a deliberate ploy to encourage pollsters to keep their poll open. I, for one,  am often frustrated by polls that do not allow for my opinion or circumstance in the options available. Now, should that checkbox default to be checked or unchecked?

So – now you can poll our sea kayaking members on just about any relevant topic which is a nice extension to the option to ask questions that had already been added to this dedicated social bookmarking facility.

Markdown

Strangely, Markdown is a markup “language” and was created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. The idea is to allow anyone to generate plain text and have that text re-formatted into valid HTML giving it some structure. The basics are very simple to learn and allow anyone applying this technique to add emphasis and style to their words in a very simple manner.

We thought it would be a great idea to allow members of the Sea Kayak Wales web site to post comments using markdown. We encourage our users to comment and discuss items posted to the news page (a social bookmarking facility for sea kayakers). Anyone can just enter their comments as plain text and that is (more or less) how they will be displayed.

Keen observers might note that when a web URL is entered then it is automatically converted into a link to that URL. They might also notice that some attempt is made to organise what is entered into paragraphs and that whitespace is often trimmed. This is all done by the Markdown processing supporting the discussion pages.

Markdown can be used to emphasise text. Putting an asterisk before and after a piece of text will have it rendered in italics [ *display in italics* ].
Put two asterisks before and after a section of text and it will appear bold [ **this will be bold** ].

Lists can be displayed in a “bulleted” format using this markdown:
* List Item 1
*List Item 2
* List Item 3 etc

Headings can be denoted with hashes or in a more literal manner:
### A Level 3 Heading
or
A level two Heading
--------------------------

Full details of Markdown can be found in the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown) or on the Daring Fireball web site (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics)

Have fun but please don’t overdo it.

Bookmarklet

The word Bookmarkelet, correctly,  has all of the hallmarks of being made up. “Book mark” – fine I use those when reading – sometimes the ones bought for me by family and friends but more often just corners of envelopes or till receipts found quickly when needed.  We are also familiar with “bookmarking” web site pages with the co-operation of our browsers so we can find a web resource again without another major search and filter operation. I suppose we have also seen the use of the term “social bookmarking” where we share gems from the web with others. Which certainly brings me along nicely to the Sea Kayak Wales News Page which is just such an Internet resource.


Where though does the “let” bit come from? We at the Sea Kayak Wales project came across the term when we were looking for ways to make it easy for others to post those very web gems (of particular interest to sea kayakers). Turns out that wrapping a line of JavaScript into a smidgeon of HTML creates an object (called a bookmarklet) that can be dragged onto the bookmark bar of a modern web browser. Once there, it can be left in place until the user of this natty little tool comes across a web page or blog post that they would like to add to the Sea Kayak Wales news page. When that happens then all they have to do is click the SKW News bookmarlet  and that line of JavaScript will leap into action and take the user to the Sea Kayak Wales news insertion page and pre-load the web page address (URL) and title into the form there ready for submission. An amazing time saving utility. The “let” presumably indicates that this is not yet a complete bookmark but that it will become one as soon as you let it.

Anyone interested, can find the SKW News bookmarklet  on the SKW News submissions guide page ( www.seakayakwales.com/WhatToPost.aspx ). If you are using a first class browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) then you can make use of this simple but effective widget. You might need to make the bookmark bar visible on your browser, if it has not been previously used, before dragging the SKW News bookmarklet into position.

The bookmark bar can be activated in Firefox from the View/Toolbars menu option list. In Chrome, click the spanner to get the tools menu, click bookmarks and then select the first option “show bookmarks bar”.  In IE9, (simple but harder to find) just right click on a space in the browser top area to the right of an opened tab and select the “Favourites bar” option from the pop-up menu.

Happy bookmarking

I Don’t know

I read a Freeakonomics blog entry on “Why is ‘I don’t know’ so hard to say?”   the other day – you can catch it as a podcast as well.

It was pertinent because we were just launching a new facility on the Sea Kayak Wales news page to allow our members to ask questions of the sea kayaking community.  We were aware that for some people asking a question is hard – in some fields and circumstances it is hard to let others know that you don’t know something.

We know from having run a support forum for a product dedicated to a specific field of knowledge that many professional practitioners (in that meadow at least) are reluctant to reveal any chinks in their armour. They would avoid asking questions in a public arena and always try and elicit a private response. 

These experts were very reluctant to ask their peers for help – although (we divined) they were collectively grateful when we published an anonymised answer for all. This always felt strange – we thought not knowing everything was the normal.

I have an almost endless list of things I don’t know. I enjoy finding out though – and then in many instances promptly forgetting the answers again.  Modern technology allows the comfort of just having to remember where you can find a given answer - not the detail of the answers themselves. You might be amazed at the trivial data I just can’t be bothered to commit to memory.

More importantly though – any software developer is very aware that it is impossible to accumulate expertise on everything – in any case “everything” grows at what feels like an exponential rate. People who work with technology (and software in particular) get used to not knowing the answers.

Some Internet Question and Answer sites are of a questionable value – indeed many are simply designed to flood the search engines and to catch up the unwary into a flood of advertising (and worse) – they truly “don’t know”.  Others are supported by a community of users who are happy to share their ideas in the knowledge that others will help them in turn.

We aim to make the Sea Kayak Wales site  just such a resource – not just for Welsh coastal trips but for every aspect of sea kayaking anywhere.  We hope that Sea Kayak Wales (well the site users) will know and will be happy to answer your questions – beginner or expert without prejudice.

We also hope that questions that have no answer are identified by the community as such – we can debate them, perhaps decide on some effective strategy – but if we don’t know, we resolve not to pretend to know.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

This handy expression can be used by anyone shamelessly incorporating the work and experience of others into their latest project – it even sounds a bit humble.

In fact anyone building a modern interactive web site like us at SeaKayakWales is going to be humbled by both the quality of what is already out there and the generosity with which so much skill and experience is shared with those that follow.

We know that we have some unique problems to solve in devising, presenting and then evaluating the sea kayak trips we will be presenting to users during 2012 and beyond. However, many of these problems can be broken down into sub-problems that have been successfully solved elsewhere. While we have to ensure that our style and processes meet the needs of our intended audience we will always be happy to learn from best practice elsewhere. We don’t want to be “the same” but we do aspire to be “as good” as the best.

There is a potential conflict between the aspiration to be as good as we can get and the desire to ship. “Ship early and ship often” is a great mantra for getting things done but it does mean that the polish might get left behind.  We have come up with a new phrase that might cover it – “pragmatic perfectionism”. 

We will keep trying to improve the way everything works but not at the expense of shipping new stuff – we will have to see how we get on.
We will be acknowledging the primary influences on our user interfaces and technology stack decisions in due course – once the bugs and worst errors have been removed from our efforts.

It would not be a great compliment to others to say we built upon some of their ideas if all we had to expose was our incompetence.

In the mean time, if you have some web sites, blog posts, photographs or what have you likely to be of interest to sea kayakers then please pop over to www.seakayakwales.com sign in and add a link to our news page. While you are there, take a look at the other items being posted – they might well entertain you.

Don't just sit there, start doing something useful

Start being useful?

We were keen for the Sea Kayak Wales web site to move on from just being a placeholder on the Internet and to start being useful. We have quite a bit of work planned to bring the prototype into the hands of the sea kayaking community but we wanted to get something out there to mark the start of our launch year 2012.

Every web service needs some infrastructure and it made sense to build our initial offering in a way that also allowed us to explore some of the techniques and facilities that will be needed in the long term We will need facilities for people to “log in” to the site and we will need mechanisms for sea kayakers to provide feedback on the detail of our service. Thus, the idea of a news service was born.

We sort of recognise that the interval between Christmas and New Year (with near continuous gales around the UK coasts) is probably not the best time to launch a news page but then again a slow start will help ensure that everything is working in the way we expected – and gives an opportunity to collect ideas on how the facility might progress.
So do feel free to pop over to the news pages for a taste of what we can do.

Whats there?

The first challenge was the dreaded web site “log-in”. We wanted to make this as painless as possible while making some efforts to exclude the automated spam “bots” trolling the web.  OpenID was the obvious foundation for this. OpenID allows our potential community members to access the Sea Kayak Wales site using credentials from another web service they might already be using. Anyone with a gMail or Facebook account  (to pick just two) can log into our site without having to create yet another username and password combination. Sea Kayak Wales never gets to see the user’s account details – we just take advantage of the OpenID facilities offered by these service providers – all we get is a unique “token” to identify each user plus (we humbly request) an email address.

For anyone who wants to use our web site but who does not have an account with an existing OpenID provider (or perhaps folks that are not comfortable with the OpenID concept) we also offer the more traditional facility to create a Sea Kayak Wales account to use to log-in. We take a lot of care to protect SKW passwords and will be offering a fully encrypted sign up link (like the UK banks do) in 2012 so this is not a second class option should anyone need it.

Once Logged In

Now, once users are logged in, they can post Internet links (web sites, blog posts etc. ) as news items. They can also vote for news posts that strike them as particularly interesting. They can’t vote for their own posts and can only vote once for any given item but it is a way of showing interest in a given item.

Site members can also comment on news posts to share their thoughts on a given item or to provide additional information or feedback. Users who are logged in, can also reply to individual comments and vote for comments they feel make a contribution.

All of these new facilities have direct relevance to our future services and also provide (we trust) some great functionality in the mean time.

Up and Running

The SeaKayakWales website has gone live, with more detail to follow