CSS and Django

Any way of combining the fact that MVC paradigm is used in web apps to minimise CSS file names? I liked the idea of RESTful CSS. http://www.digital-web.com/articles/RESTful_CSS/.

In Django how about a .css for app settings, .css for site level settings and action level CSS for the action on the model being viewed.

This is necessitate 3 CSS HTTP requests. In my opinion in a large scale project, 3 calls to small CSS files will lesser intensive that one call for a large CSS file

Abstraction as an Innovation tool

Few days ago, I and Abhijit had a nice discussion on Abstraction. I realised that Abstraction is essentially a tool in an innovator’s toolset. Let me elaborate.

Innovation is the identifying of something new, something that has not been thought of in that manner before.
How does one resolve a problem in an innovative manner. One tool is abstraction.

Every problem has multiple facets. There are many complications in a situation. There are dependencies, there are constraints.
Because of the constraints, the solution set for the problem is limited. We keep on looking for solutions within the constrained set and we keep on getting the same ideas.

What we can do with abstraction is – Imagine that one particular constraint does not exist. Then the solution set will expand. We can look at more solutions. Have arrived at a solution of the problem without the constraint, we then check if the solution can be applied even with the constraint. Does re-applying the constraint make the solution infeasible? or are there ways in which the solution can be used?

The reason I have said that Abstraction is just one tool is because it has only expanded the solution set. It has not allowed us as yet to explore the solution set, to enumerate different solutions now that abstraction has expanded the realm.
We would also need to choose to decide which constraint to drop. That decision would dictate the amount of time we would spend when we reapply the constraint.

My thoughts on that would be the next post.

WordPress.com is hosted on LiteSpeed

I had somehow always assumed that that wordpress would be hosted on a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) platform.

However www.wordpress.com is hosted on a web server called litespeed

LiteSpeed web server is an Apache interchangeable, full-featured high performance, secure HTTP server specifically engineered from the ground up with security and scalability in mind.

Interesting!

Wonder what factors contributed to that decision?

Information Architecture: Users Content and Context

I was reading Louis Rosenfelds book on Information Architecture. I loved Venn Diagram about Content-Context-Users. What I wished to highlight was the importance of the ternary relationship between the three and also the importance of each in the whole process.

A website is among things a means of communication of information. I wished to highlight how each of these factors affect the communication.

Content

Among the various activities involved when focussing on Content is Content Structuring.
Lets look at the sentence: A woman without her man is nothing

If structured as

A woman without her man, is nothing

communicates one idea

If structured as

A woman: without her, man is nothing

communicates exactly the opposite idea.

Hence it becomes critical that we understand the content structure and realise its importance

Context

Similarly about Context, Here we again we will take same content and apply different contexts to it and see how it affects the communication

I say :” The World is Flat”

The most probable reaction is : This guy must be nuts.

However if Thomas Friedman says that, it becomes a bestseller . What has changed is only the context but the it has a radical effect on the communication

Users

Again the same content being shown to different users affects the communication greatly.

There is ad about a soft drink from a Multi national company. They launch a “energy” drink in the Middle East. The creative was simple : A man is tired, he drinks the cold-drink, and he up and energetic again. However the campaign bombed. Because as is common all around the world, we read stuff from left-to-right. However in the Middle east, there content is read right-to-left. Hence the ad effectively communicated that an energetic man on drinking the stuff started feeling tired.

All these examples are probably extremes. But they help in highlighting the basics of three elements of the IA venn diagram

Move to being an Information Architect

I have been a web architect for over 6 years now. I always love looking at innovations and working on new paradigms that are emerging.

One of the biggest paradigm shifts that I have seen in the web app industry is the move from a data-driven paradigm (data entry screens) to content-driven paradigm (contextual information, data with metadata). Recognising the DIKW(Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom) heirarchy, we are moving from Data Management Systems to Information Management Systems to Knowledge Management Systems. I wonder if we will have Wisdom Management Systems ever?!

I am looking to move from being a Data/Technology Architect to an Information Architect. This in the context of the DIKW heirarchy is a move to adding more value to the end-user of the application; by adding as much as context to the data as possible.

“Good context” and “Bad context” are relative to the user. Hence the understanding of the user is critical in providing context to data. Thus information architecture involves understanding the user’s profile, his needs for consuming the information besides designing the information itself.

I am keen to adopting and utilising all the skills involved in becoming a Information Architect.

Who knows?! Next would be becoming a Knowledge Architect