Transcript of the Future Tense episode ‘Rescuing GeoCities’.

Participants

• Jon Gordon
• Jason Scott

Transcript

Jon Gordon: Rescuing GeoCities. This is Future Tense from American Public Media; I’m Jon Gordon. Yahoo! said last week that it would shut down its GeoCities personal website service later this year. Hard to believe now, but Yahoo! paid about three billion dollars for the company back in 01999. You may recall that GeoCities allowed users to design personal websites, but the pioneering service has long since been eclipsed by blogs and social networks.

So what’s going to become of the million-plus GeoCities homepages out there? Yahoo! is saying only that it will provide details later this summer on how customers can save their own data. Jason Scott believes GeoCities deserves saving. Scott runs TEXTFILES.COM, a site that’s devoted to computer history. He’s lead organizer for a new group called the Archive Team, which is working to save a growing body of endangered Internet content, including GeoCities.

Jason Scott: A lot of sites that attracted attention over the past fifteen to twenty years of the web have been shut down — sometimes abruptly. And we’re at a point right now where so many people are willingly putting data that they create and they own online in other locations, and then these companies, right now, feel no mandate to hold this for very long, once they decide for whatever reason to take it down. These data locations have no sense of responsibility — it’s not shameful for a company to just turn off fifteen years of community memory.

JG: What is it about GeoCities that makes you want to do this? What is the potential value in saving GeoCities?

JS: GeoCities had a reputation — though the late ’90s and certainly the early twenty-first century — of being kind of the dumping ground for people who didn’t know what they were doing: a lot of websites that were ugly, that weren’t well-written, that were boring and so on. But in point of fact, it’s a beautiful snapshot of an entire population coming online for the first time. And now that online life has becoming the norm, certainly in developed countries, it represents this turning point.

JG: So how are you actually saving all these GeoCities sites?

JS: So, we’re doing things like checking websites to see if people link to GeoCities, we’re doing Google searches to find the names of different GeoCities sites, and we’re just trying to capture as much as can. We know there’s a lot, but we’re just kinda stepping through. And my attitude is similar to if you’re trying to rescue things from a burning house, which is: you run around and grab the five or ten things or more that you can carry, and run out. And that’s not everything you own, but at least you got something.

JG: So what do you intend to do with all this material?

JS: It’s not entirely clear to me what to do with the material after rescuing it. I don’t really think of it that way. I like to be the guy who, at that historical point, at the historical point we’re in, I said ‘Let’s grab a copy’. And in maybe a year or ten years, someone will say ‘Man, I’m really glad somebody was there to do that, because it turns out this was an important piece of information — we could not have known it back then, in 02009, but here in 02019, it’s so vital that we have it.’

JG: Jason Scott with the Archive Team; more information at archiveteam.org. This is Future Tense; I’m Jon Gordon.

Ronald Jenkees:

See, it doesn’t have to be perfect, folks, for you to play music. Sometimes it’s good; sometimes it’s so-so; and sometimes you just have fun with it. And, y’know, not everybody turns on a camera and puts it on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play and enjoy it.

Start simple. Make up a couple of melodies — get good at those. Start some more — build on those. Home in on the little bitty parts of the song, and try to work those out, for making a beat. And don’t try to do it big real quick; try to work small, and small ideas, and then it just starts developing into something else. And then hey, before you know it, if you’re honest with yourself, like ‘Would I really like this if I heard it out in the car?’, then you’ll have some stuff that you’re proud of. Otherwise, you’ll have stuff that you might, have a lot of… y’know, ya gotta explain the song, like, ‘Hey, yeah, well, I mean to do this, but I couldn’t, and this and that’… just work on it. Do a good job.

(wireframe, screencast; PSD by request)

Feelin’ the 50s today.

Patrick Hanlon’s response to my entry on tumblelogs. I agree with everything he says.

When I wrote the piece, I only briefly mentioned specific services, because I was more interested in the mindset than the actual implementation — I’m currently running this site on Tumblr, which is definitely a great service.

Yesterday I wrote about my difficulty in getting certain CSS properties that I needed for my code. Today I discovered the solution.

After unsuccessfully poking around at a simplified version of my code, I decided to try looking at the complete list of the relevant element’s DOM properties, to see if I was simply asking for the wrong thing. I quickly discovered that element.style doesn’t give back an array; instead, it gives a CSSStyleDeclaration.

This wasn’t much use, so instead I went to the ever-helpful DOM reference provided by Mozilla. I hopped to the reference for element.style, and from there to window.getComputedStyle. Here I found what I wanted:

var element = document.getElementById("elemId");
var style = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(element, pseudoElt).getPropertyValue(property);

This was too unwieldy to be used three different times (column-gap and variants), so I made slight rewrite and put it in my dom namespace:

var dom = {
  …

  getCSSValue: function(element, property) {
    var cs = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(element, null);
    return cs.getPropertyValue(property);
  }
}

Now I can simply call dom.getCSSValue(paged, '-webkit-column-gap'); and move on.

When I first released pagering, I wrote:

It’s not bug free — the ‘pages’ don’t all appear at the same spot, and so on — but it’s written, and it works. Now I can move on to making it better.

Today I decided to work on making it better, and quickly figured out why the ‘pages’ render inconsistently. It turns out there are three variables involved:

1. the width of the ‘paged’ element in the CSS box model;
2. the padding of the element that holds the paged element; and
3. the CSS3 column-gap of the paged element.

I was only accounting for the first one. The second was easy to add, but the third is proving quite difficult. Currently, column-gap has only experimental implementations (in the WebKit and Gecko engines), so I can’t simply test against column-gap; I also have to check -webkit-column-gap and -moz-column-gap.

Fortunately, this much works — I can test against undefined and get a result from the different browsers. Unfortunately, that result is always a null string. This means that it doesn’t matter whether I’ve specified something like -webkit-column-gap: 2em; I’ll always get the same unhelpful answer. Here’s the code I’m using:

if (text.style.columnGap !== undefined) {
  columnGap = text.style.columnGap;
} else if (text.style.webkitColumnGap !== undefined) {
  columnGap = text.style.webkitColumnGap;
} else if (text.style.MozColumnGap !== undefined) {
  columnGap = text.style.MozColumnGap;
}

alert(columnGap.length); // always 0

Without knowing the column gap, I can’t entirely fix the rendering problem.

This brings us back to the entry’s title: how can I get vendor-specific CSS properties from the DOM? Have I overlooked something simple?

Update: I found a solution! Read about it here.

(wireframe, screencast; PSD by request)

It’s been a little while since I last did one of these. I was preoccupied with other things (e.g. rewriting Turpentine).

The idea for this one came from browsing through my ‘inspiration folder’ and noticing all the screen grabs of online galleries. I wasn’t able to think of a good way to set up arrow navigation, so that useful interface element is missing.

Samuel Fine:

The tumblelogging phenomenon is an interesting solution to the major problem with capital-b Blogging: that humans are intensely diverse and complicated beings, and consistent long-form articles are both impractical and inadequate for the type of creative expression toward which most people strive. In short, I don’t want to write 3 paragraphs about every day of my life, and you probably don’t want to read it. There are better ways to get the job done, and tumblelogging is one of them.

Tumblelogs are an attempt to capture the diverse forms of expression that the web affords; a way to present a reconstructed portrait of our fractured online personalities. This is definitely a problem that needs to be solved, and the problem continues to worsen as we are presented with a rapidly-climing number of ways to put ourselves online. Now that tumblelogging has had an official name for just under four years, I think it’s been long enough that we can make some judgements regarding the format’s success.

Tumblelogging’s most obvious win is that it provides a simple way to share whatever happens to be on your mind at a given moment, with no concern for editing or choosing the appropriate service or anything like that — as Jason Kottke said, A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. For services like Tumblr and Soup, the user need only choose the type of entry (image, quote, link…) and drop in one or two pieces of information.

But there’s always a downside. I’m not the sort that cries about the loss of some likely-imagined higher level of Quality that was part of restricting self-expression to those with more money and technical knowledge; instead, I’m primarily concerned with the increased volume of output that tumblelogs encourage. I don’t necessarily see this as a fault, but I do feel that it means current tumblelog implementations have served to worsen the problem of the reconstructed portrait I mentioned above.

I’ll grant that this may not be a fatal flaw — at least for the moment — but I see potential for the idea to be more than the current ‘post it all here!’ approach. I see tumblelogs being something more like Phil Gyford’s technique of publishing content on a variety of dedicated services, then pulling it all back together to show what was done on a certain day.

But more importantly, I prefer the curated approach. While this reduces the immediacy and freedom, it’s also a mindset that encourages the user to spread meaning. Casual sharing is better done with bookmarks and favorites, where the effort needed is equal to one’s interest.

There’s value in being able to click a few times and share anything at all; there’s more value in sharing stuff that matters.

I’ve loved chiptunes and tracker tunes since I stumbled across scene.org in 02003 and went on a download spree. This paper summarizes the culture’s history.

This graphic is taken from Wired’s article The Settlers of Catan. Kind of a trivial complaint, but: I think it’s a bad chart.

It’s so obvious that it shows massive sales growth, with over 600,000 units in 02008… except that’s not what it’s showing at all. The label for the Y axis reads ‘Cumulative Unit Sales’, which means the data is actually a lot less dramatic than it seems. It’s solid growth year-over-year, but 150,000 units is rather less than 600,000. And the caption does nothing to clarify: ‘Released in 1995, The Settlers of Catan only recently caught fire in the U.S’.

So while the chart isn’t an outright lie — it wasn’t created by a marketing department, I’m assuming — the data could definitely have been presented in a more honest manner.