Yet Another IT-related Blog

Hi there, this is another post motivated by my newest personal project, substitutefor.com. By definition pet projects are the ones you cannot afford giving much time to, essentially because you already have a life and a job with their respective schedules. So when it comes to taking design decisions, it’s very likely that you end up using your guts instead of the analytical process you’d use in your daily work.

It’s also very likely that at least you try to gather some information, which is usually the easy part, and then blog about it: Let’s see what other people thinks about the matter.

And the matter here is OpenID, would you use it as default registration/login schema for your website? I will even go further, would you remove any other login mechanism in favor of it?

There are three issues that make me worry about the adoption of OpenID:

1. Usability problems
2. Only known by tech savvy users
3. Convenience of having a user’s database

The first document I’ve found about the matter comes from the yahoo developer network [1]. And from a quick overview my worries about usability got confirmed. Ey, a good suggestion from these guys:

Promote the utility, not the technology

The fact that’s only known by tech savvy user’s is something that from now I can only suppose, but assuming it’s true, the main advantage of avoiding the user the need to register losses it’s value. Even more, if your website is the responsible of making a user create a new openID account, the process will be longer and more confusing for him than simply creating a local account in your site. You’re not only asking to register, but to learn something else first. And also diverging the attention of the client to a third party provider in the process.

The third issue, on the other hand, is probably less problematic, since there is still the possibility of storing local user’s data or preferences in your site and link them to its openID. There are also some interesting developer’s opinions here [2].

[1] Yahoo! OpenID Usability Research

[2] Stackoverflow: What reasons are there NOT to use OpenID?

So, this is it, third post about substitutefor and no official presentation yet, :-). Ah by the way, my guts taken decision was to discretely allow openID, but use native registration/login as default option.

Substitutefor.com was presented the other day as a side-effect of the shocking news that the Ra-Ajax people was being sued, precautionary removing all of its files from download sections.

But that wasn’t an appropriate presentation and neither is going to be this one :-). I’ll leave that for the pt. III, you know what they say: third time lucky.

So what’s this post about? Let’s present the not-really-five-but-four objectives of this pet project.

1. Make money: Err… not really. Would have gone this way in that case.
2. Have something to blog about: Yeah, that’s important. Synergistic approach, discretia.org and substitutefor.com will benefit from each other.
3. Give a try to some web technologies I haven’t played with as a developer: I’m not a web developer, designer or whatever position related to the web but in *every* project or job that I’ve been involved I’ve had to deal with web technologies. So I guess it’s a good point.
4. Have a place to try new things, where things are either ideas, or bad ideas, or even good ideas!
5. Measure the time to market of this kind of ideas.

Some months ago I had an idea –ey that’s a great start for a post! Let’s better say that I thought one of my ideas was worth trying to make it real.

I thought about a community –what else, these days– of questions and answers around the best substitute for something. The idea was to organize them into categories and let people vote for the answers and popularity of the questions.

The idea isn’t extremely innovative, in fact it gets things from forums, ask.com, digg, stackoverflow and many more. But I started to see a lot of funny categories and uses.

In my case, it all started from the need of a substitute for a cooking util in a recipe I was trying to prepare :-). But it would be also very interesting to know who people thing would be the best substitute for Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones, or confirming the most popular substitute for sex is chocolate!

It wasn’t until February that I started working on it, since it’s only a project I can devote my spare time at home. But it’s ok, the main idea was not to have a great success but to demonstrate that it was possible to create something from an idea in the shortest period of time. I gave it my free time for three weeks and then let it apart until now, 3 months later. But this is another post, what I wanted to comment now is something that really shocked me today.

The people from Ra-Ajax, which obviously is the framework I intend to use in this project, have been sued. Apparently Thomas Hansen, one of the authors, worked beforehand for Gaiaware and they are suing him. I won’t go deeper there since I don’t have the details, but their framework has been removed from its website as precautionary measure.

Good news is, apparently I can use its Stacked platform as the base for my project with the LGPLv3 license, since I downloaded it before the measure. Phew!

By the way, this is my new project, substitutefor.com. A lot of changes are expected, but I decided to go public early as a motivational measure, after months of doing nothing related to it. Now I have an excuse also to publish a lot of interesting things here.

… as viagra-like pills. Hi there, it’s a long time since my last post and this one is not going to be related to IT. As I say in the title, discretia was mentioned in yesterday’s episode of the famous TV series Prison Break. They made it up as some kind of pills, you can see it in the next screenshot.

As you know, I own the discretia.org domain name and I like it. I remember how I got to it, and it sure doesn’t sound like a pill’s name to me. I was looking for a name for a supposed computer security company and I even used it in an exercise at the university :-).

By the way, the discretia.com domain was already bought in 2004 by one of those companies who try to resell it afterwards, so that’s with whom I’d have to fight if I want it in the future. And now it comes the IT-part of the post (I was lying about this post not being IT-related… sorry).

If you want to know who owns a domain name, there is a whois service and some other useful links for that matter at internic.net. And as a matter of fact I can check that my domain is not owned by me, but my hosting company. And it is also marked as Client Transfer Prohibited, which means that they locked it so I cannot transfer it to another register. Nice uh?

I’m still doing some setup work on my new blog and also some design work. This time I’m not really interested in designing a new template or something, like I did with my friend’s blog. Web design is somehow entertaining but time-consuming and also there are these great people who really know how to make things look good and contribute to the community by freely (as in free beer, though) publishing their work.

So I’m only making little modifications based on the iTheme template by N. Design Studio.

And why was I telling you all that? Ahm, yes, because I found a really interesting Firefox extension: Firebug, which in fact is not a new one, that let’s you examine and modify the CSS content of the webpage you are visiting. Of course modifications are only local, but it’s really easy to change some CSS properties with it and see them rendered in firefox instantaneously. That way you can test and debug your design really fast. I’d only add an option to export local changes in the form of a patch file.

Other not less useful features are Javascript debugging and network monitoring (load times). Well, I’m not paid to advertise them so I’ll let it stop here, xD. Did I mention also that it’s an Open Source project?