Of course, I still love real books. One of the things missing from eBooks is a sense of each book’s physical size. I bet most of us approach a book differently if it’s 600 pages long rather than a skimpy 150. But it’s hard to tell what you’re getting into on the iPhone.

Classics, another iPhone ebook application, tries to make its books more physical by displaying them on a bookshelf:

And reading books involves a simulacrum of a page turning, complete with sound:

Very swish, although fake bookshelves and “real” pages feel like computer interfaces modelled a bit too closely around real world desks — kind of fun but a bit annoying after a while and no practical use. (Although I must admit I haven’t tried Classics.) And even with all the fancy graphics there’s no sense of the heft of the book.

Stanza, which has a larger collection of books, doesn’t attempt much in the way of physicalisation. The closest it comes is the Mac-like Coverflow view of book covers:

Which tells us little and, personally, I find as useless an interface for choosing a book as I do for browsing music in iTunes. Stanza’s text view doesn’t even attempt to mimic paper and allows you to adjust the font, its size, and text and background colours. Here’s how it currently looks for me:

It’s a bit of a wrench to break from the traditional view of a book after so many years but it’s quite pleasantly readable. Although so far I’ve only read science fiction on it and wonder how I’ll feel reading a one hundred year-old book in white on black Verdana.

With so much abstraction away from the physical object in Stanza I feel even more need for further cues as to the book’s nature. Stanza doesn’t even supply a page count, probably as this would be meaningless within the application — if one alters the font size then the number of pages changes because more or less text will fit on one screen (or page).

As someone who habitually looks at the number of pages in a book when I start to read it I want to know what I’m getting into. It takes me a disappointingly long time to finish most books, and I always finish what books I’ve started, so I want to know what kind of commitment I’m making.

The best solution I’ve thought of so far is for Stanza (or Classics or whoever) to create a fake 3D image of a book. Take some careful photographs of books of different thicknesses and then superimpose the existing cover images on top of the appropriate photo for the length of the book. Maybe a bit more cleverness to mock up a spine using the book’s title and author and you’d get something like this:

Which is obviously going to take longer to get through than this:

There will be extra points awarded for showing wear and tear on the virtual book after it’s been read.

I don’t think this falls into the trap of painstakingly recreating reality for no real function, like Classics’ bookshelf and page turning. The 3D image has no function as such — we don’t have some fake 3D hands that pick it up and open it where you left off (please, don’t). Instead it’s providing information rather than functionality, information that we can understand at a glance.

And it would help me work out whether I’ll be spending weeks or months reading the next on my list.

First it was “Thought for the Day”. Let’s leave aside the whole issue of why there’s a slot in a news programme for smug men and women to tell us how to live our lives, and why that slot is reserved solely for smug men and women who believe in the existence of imaginary beings. That annoyance is simply every day’s baseline of Today fury.

This morning it was the Bishop of Liverpool making a case for why the Church of England should remain part of the state. Again, we’ll leave aside whether he’s right or utterly wrong about this and merely ask… why the hell is this on the Today programme? It’s bad enough we’re subjected to a few minutes of sanctimonious religion every morning, never mind donating the slot to someone to air their baseless political views about keeping our supposed democracy nominally beholden to a sodding church. Come on! I don’t want to get all green ink and “what’s my license fee doing paying for this” but I’m getting dangerously close.

And calm… this was just the warm-up after all.

The 8am headlines brought the news that the Pope has said, to quote BBC News, “saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.” Sometimes I think we’re going back in time. The headline news took this at face value and didn’t offer an opposing soundbite but I bade my time and at 8.20 am my patience was rewarded when [a presenter who is nameless on the website] introduced a segment on the topic.

Did I say I was rewarded? I meant poked in the eye. No, both eyes. She introduced two guests, the first was Joanna Bogle from the Catholic Times. Fair enough. Who, I wondered, would be countering the argument… Cristina Odone, ex-editor of the Catholic Herald. Oh, strange. You can listen to it here.

For crying out loud, I’m listening to it again and Bogle’s plain backward righteousness is driving me nuts. I hoped Odone, who was last on Today less than a fortnight ago, would counter this with some, you know, blinding common sense. But no, she goes on about how talking about sex isn’t very “media savvy” for the Pope. Bogle hogs the slot, managing to sound utterly certain about what she’s saying without actually saying explicitly what we all assume she’s saying about homosexuals.

What on Earth is going on at Today? Could they find no one to call this out for the shit it is? Have all the researchers gone on holiday already? It’s a disgrace, a disgrace that someone as influential as the Pope can peddle this crap and have no one oppose him. What are you people doing every morning? Are you scared of offending Catholics who, one hopes, should be as ashamed of their leader as I am? If we have to endure John Humphrys giving every poor interviewee the third degree over far more mundane stuff than this are you not going to expose this claptrap for the hateful, divisive nonsense it is? I know you want to maintain some “balance” but a smidgen of courage and enquiry wouldn’t go amiss. Do your job.

I’ve never complained to the BBC before and I hoped I’d never have to, but today I did. Maybe I’m middle aged or something, but I’m still furious.

Download pelinore.pdf (26.9MB)

Given the size it’s probably best to right-click to download it, rather than trying to view it in your browser. I don’t think it’s complete but it must be very nearly all there.

I’ve since noticed there is a probably more complete version as a torrent on Demonoid.com but hopefully my version will be useful to anyone interested who, like me, doesn’t have an account there.

I haven’t played RPGs for nearly twenty years but I still find attempts like this to describe cities, countries and the way a world works fascinating.

Aesthetics

Few people could find Bloglines Beta (BB) a thing of beauty (even fewer would find the original version beautiful; that blue… ugh). But the first version of Google Reader (GR) didn’t grab me much either. There was something missing for me, as if in trying to simplify things they’d omitted some solidity that left it all a bit loose for my eyes. With the new version of GR it’s been tightened up and the simplicity seems to work better now. BB looks clunky and unfinished in comparison but then it always did, unfortunately.

Solidity

One of the factors that made me try GR again is BB’s flakiness. It’s usually OK but on several occasions over recent months feeds that have been dormant for ages have suddenly suggested they have hundreds of unread articles. Marking these all as read was only a temporary solution. Eventually the problem goes away but it isn’t encouraging. I’ve also had problems when trying to subscribe to feeds with BB not letting me but, when I try again, telling me I’m already subscribed.

I’ve only been using GR for a couple of weeks but it feels more solid so far.

Browsing

The ease of browsing feeds is the critical task and in this the sites work almost identically. For me, BB works slightly better here. I can use the ‘J’ or ‘Space’ keys to move through unread items and, once I reach the end of a feed’s items, the same key will move me on to the first item in the next feed in my list.

GR works in almost exactly the same way — ‘J’ and ‘Space’ moving from one item to the next, or paging down through items, respectively. The crucial difference is that in GR if you’re on the final item of the final feed in a folder then another press of ‘Space’ (but not ‘J’ for some reason) takes you to the entire next folder, rather than the first feed within it.

I don’t like reading aggregated collections of all items within a folder, so this is a loss for GR for me. It’s not hard to move focus from the folder to the first feed inside — Shift-J for the next feed, then Shift-O to ‘open’ it — but it’s a bit of a hiccup in the flow.

Mobile browsers

When I’m out and about with moments to kill and I’ve read all my friends’ twitters and caught up on email, my feeds are the next thing I check on my iPhone. Both sites have mobile versions which work well. BB lets you select subscriptions that you don’t want to appear in the mobile version, which can be handy. But overall the GR mobile version is much slicker. For example, any large image in an item throws BB mobile’s whole layout out while GR re-sizes it to fit (see the image below). GR mobile feels more like a real iPhone app while BB only amplifies the standard site’s slightly clunky feel with more of a “Web 1.0” feeling.

If you click a link in a feed item in either mobile browser, you get sent to a simplified version of the page. BB uses Skweezer for this but it seems extremely flaky with some odd layouts and, recently, a complete inability to view any pages. GR’s by contrast tend to look pretty good on the iPhone and, so far, Just Work.

Currency

I haven’t done an in-depth test of this but on a quick comparison it looks like GR is much speedier at updating feeds. It’s possible that BB is just being flaky as I check now, but several feeds with updates in the last few minutes or hours in GR are lagging way, way behind in BB.

Starring vs pinning

Given the vast similarities between the sites, the slight difference in how items are marked for future reference is one of the biggest differences in basic usage.

In BB you can “pin” an item and it will remain visible in the feed, as if it’s permanently “unread”, until you choose to mark it as no longer pinned. The number of items in a feed that are pinned are listed as a separate number next to the number of unread items.

In GR you can “star” items. All your starred items are then listed in a separate “Starred items” list, rather than staying marked within their original feed.

I prefer BB’s approach as I don’t like mixing items from different feeds in GR’s “Starred items” list but as I don’t use either feature often it’s not a huge deal.

Private feeds

BB will let you subscribe to feeds that require a username and password using the form http://username:password@www.domain.com/etc/etc. GR doesn’t offer this feature which surprises me and it was another reason I never gave GR a proper try when it first launched. But now Daring Fireball includes all items in its free feed I have no private feeds.

Extras

There are other, bigger, differences between GR and BB — such as shared items and notes in GR; weblogs, mailing list to feed conversion in BB — but I don’t use any of these features so they don’t sway me toward either service. I just want to read lots of stuff as easily as possible.

I’m a sucker for statistics though so I do like GR’s Trends screens (below) which give you graphs and stats for your aggregated and individual subscriptions.

And GR’s “Bundles” — collections of thematically similar feeds — is a great idea if you want a quick dip in what’s happening in a particular field.

Summary

Although I still feel slightly lost in GR it’s won me over after years of Bloglines, which is no mean feat. It’s amazing how incredibly similar the two services are but one or two niggles aside, GR has that final 10% of polish and attention to detail that makes all the difference.

(I did consider comparing Newsgator too, as I’d love to use its associated Mac application NetNewsWire, but (a) Newsgator’s not very pretty, (b) it appears to have no keyboard shortcuts, and (c) it refused to import my OPML files from either Bloglines or Google Reader.)

It’s from the Observer magazine on 3rd November 1968 about Boots’ new open plan office building. Aside from a few amusing scenes which date it, the text doesn’t quite live up to the outrage suggested by the harrumphing headline and it focuses more on the architecture.

Skidmore Owings and Merrill from Chicago, with Yorke Rosenberg Mardall from London, designed the building and interiors (“You can’t separate the furniture from the appearance of the building”). It’s hard to get a sense of the place from these photos but I like the look of it. I’d love to know how it all worked out over the past forty years.

Click an image to see a larger, readable version at Flickr. I’ve pulled out a few of the more amusing quotes…

Dolen Davies, a chatty blonde who has been with Boots for 34 years and is now their beauty consultant, says: “I think the girls are so much more conscious of being on show, they take far more trouble with themselves. And you get to know people so quickly here.”

With my 21st century politically correct hat on, I assume Dolen is a blonde woman, rather than a blonde man, and that the “girls” are also adult women.

Ivan Mitchell, Boots’ own chief architect, sits in a private office with smoked glass walls through which he is clearly visible and says that he suffers from visual distraction. He has to turn his desk sideways to avoid seeing the mini-skirts.

Excellent.

[In] the directors’ wing … the rooms … branch off a wide, quiet corridor which houses secretaries. There is a private bar for morning coffees and pre-lunch drinks, the dining-room is wood-panelled and tungsten-lit; the conference room sumptuous with wild silk walls and brown leather chairs.

No open plan for the directors of course. I suspect some things don’t change.

UPDATE: A couple of links with a bit more information about the building:

• Ghostly memories at Boots’ historic HQ
• Architectural Record Building Types Study | Boots the Chemist

MT is much more powerful than it used to be. It’s still clunky and infuriating in several places but it can do so much more than it once could. I think I now only use a single third-party plugin on this site whereas I used to rely on several. This is largely because MT’s template tags are now much more powerful than they once were.

On the downside MT has grown to become more complicated than most simple webloggers would need and the documentation is often infuriatingly vague and empty just when you need help the most.

Here’s a few of the most frustrating or useful things I came across this time around.

No OR

While MT’s newish loops and conditional statements are hugely welcome there seems to be one thing missing. You can do the equivalent of

if ( $category == 'fish' ) {

or even, relying on regular expressions,

if ( $category == 'fish' or $category == 'bird' ) {

but you can’t do something like this:

if ( $category == 'fish' or $entry_id == 632 ) {

There seems to be no way to do an OR statement with different variables. Which results in some annoyingly clunky and laborious nested and repetitive code.

Pages not publishing?

If you start creating some Pages (standalone pages, rather than templates listing Entries and Archives, etc) but they don’t appear on your site when you publish them then you’re lacking a Page archive template. This will almost certainly be the case if you originally had an old (like v3.x) version of MT and haven’t tried to use Pages since you upgraded.

Of course, MT won’t tell you your pages can’t be published. It will say everything’s gone just fine but provide you with a link to the front page of your site rather than the published Page. This time around was the second time I got caught out by this madness and it took me a while to remember the solution. Go to the templates and create a new Page archive template and then create an Archive Mapping for Pages. That should do the trick.

What page are we on?

If you’re customising your templates at all chances are you’ll want to customise things depending on the page being displayed. eg, “If this is the About page, display this thing.” How to do this isn’t immediately obvious because Pages are annoyingly slippery — there seem to be few hooks to customise the display for each one.

I think I picked this up from one of the add-on template sets or somewhere in the documentation I’ve long since lost… You can add tags to Pages (and, presumably, Entries) that begin with ‘@’ and these tags won’t show up anywhere on the site. But they can be used in template code.

For example, say you had one Page that shouldn’t have a sidebar. You could give it a tag called ‘@layout_wide’ and then in a template you’d have:

<mt:If name="page_archive">
    <mt:PageIfTagged tag="@layout_wide">
        <!-- Do something on a wide page here. -->
    <mt:Else>
        <$mt:Include module="Sidebar"$>
    </mt:PageIfTagged>
</mt:If>

Or something like that. You need those If tags around it all or else MT will complain when trying to parse the PageIfTagged tags when not rendering a Page archive. It’s a bit stupid like that.

System Templates

The System Templates have always been an annoyance. They’re the only templates that aren’t published with everything else; they’re displayed dynamically when, for example, someone previews a comment. Because these templates are processed by perl any, say, PHP code in shared Template Modules won’t be parsed and will be output to the browser.

While there’s no way to get your PHP code to function in System Templates you don’t want it displaying either. I got round this quite simply by setting a variable at the start of each System Template:

<$mt:SetVar name="no_php" value="1"$>

And then in my ‘Header’ Template Module hiding the bits of PHP:

<mt:Unless name="no_php"><?php
    // PHP code here...
?></mt:Unless>

Hardly rocket science, but it’s nice to still be able to use the same ‘Header’ template for the System Templates as well as the rest of the site.

Template caching

Finally, a pointer to an article in the documentation that’s very well hidden: Ultimate Guide to Template Module Caching. If you have any Template Modules that use a fair bit of MT code and are repeated a lot, such as lists of recent Entries or Comments in the sidebar of every page, this could save you a lot of rebuilding time. I didn’t have many cachable modules but I still reduced the site’s total rebuild time by 20%.

I had two aims. The first was to scrap the over-complicated home-brewed PHP framework and Smarty templating in favour of a more vanilla Movable Type (MT) site. The second aim was to belatedly get my head round MT v4’s tags and ways of doing things.

One of the dilemmas with making a website around any weblog-oriented CMS is how to incorporate all the bits of the site that aren’t a weblog. These days other standalone pages are no problem because MT, WordPress, etc, let you create hierarchies of pages that have little to do with all the webloggery organisation. But if you have some pages that are more complicated, integration can be tricky. This is probably why most Web 2.0 sites that have associated “site news”-type weblogs keep the weblog entirely separate from the rest of the site — integration is just too difficult to be worth it.

For me, the trickiest bit of integration is my database of what I’ve been reading. It’s dynamically generated from a MySQL database with PHP and none of its data comes from the MT CMS. So last time around I approached the site as being a PHP/MySQL site in which some of the PHP pages (all the webloggy ones) had data that happened to be generated by MT: the MT templates put all of the data about weblog entries and categories and monthly archives into PHP arrays which, when a page was viewed, were sent to the same kind of Smarty templates used by the rest of the site.

This slightly cumbersome arrangement had all the advantages and disadvantages of both static and dynamic sites:

• Much of the site required occasional rebuilds in MT. (Bad)
• Changes to Smarty templates appeared across the site instantly. (Good)
• There was a chance pages might be slow to display because so much was dynamic. (Bad)
• Because so much was prepared while rebuilding by MT there was less realtime database access than a completely dynamic site. (Good)

Which was all very well but for a personal site it seemed a bit over-engineered and so this time round I decided to approach things from a different angle: Instead of trying to fit the MT-generated content into my PHP framework I’d simply add the few necessary PHP-generated bits into a conventional MT site.

This was probably more feasible than when I last worked on the site because MT is so much more powerful. Now most of the site is purely static, generated entirely by MT, with just some of the sidebar widgets (Last.fm, Flickr, Reading, etc) pulling stuff live out of a database with PHP.

The most clunky part is how I’ve integrated all those Reading pages: these PHP-heavy pages are now Pages within Movable Type’s CMS. It feels nasty to have Pages in MT that are nothing but heavy PHP — it’s a bad interface to edit code in for a start — but it does mean that menus and sidebars and other common parts are easily integrated across every part of the site. If I started creating more sections of the site that needed to be dynamic this solution could get tiresome rather quickly.

As I say, hopefully you’ll notice no difference to how the site looks and works although I’d hope pages load slightly speedier.

In the next post I’ll write about a few Movable Type annoyances and tips I came across.