Hunger in the Philippines

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More depressing commentary on the state of the Philippines from Superblessed, with a link to commentary from Raul Pangalanan on Filipinos and government. Also see Conrado de Quiros today on hunger, and Sassy Lawyer on free lugaw, the poor, population, and the Church and NGOs.

Teddy Benigno, back from a writing break, never changes, and zealously pronounces his standard forecast of revolution, violence, and death from the bubbling “social volcano.” (From experience, however, if the Philippines is like a volcano, it’s more like Mount Saint Helens in recent weeks, making lots of occasional smoke and noise, always bubbling and seething with underground [MSH: liquid hot magma / Philippines: civil unrest] but never really erupting into a full-scale explosion like it did in [MSH: 1980 / Philippines: 1986].)

Post-VP-Debate

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The veep debates were kind of boring, so I watched Simpsons reruns, and read the full transcript later on. You know, hate Cheney for Halliburton or not, his reticent, “evil overlord” reputation belies the eloquence of a forceful and articulate speaker, especially on issues of defense, intelligence, and military technology. War is Cheney’s home turf, which should come as no surprise given his background as Secretary of Defense. That’s why he’s President.

Nonetheless, John Edwards did an excellent job of answering the most baldfaced inaccuracies on Iraq and the war, and the attacks on his and Kerry’s Senate records. As expected, he showed levity, charm, and grace, in contrast to the VP’s standard “Vader” disposition. The idea that Edwards’ happy-cutesy demeanor is a liability to his credibility is plain vilification; you don’t even need last night’s debate to know that Edwards is serious and set on business. Smiles and charisma don’t detract from that.

(Oh, and Mr. Vice President, it’s Factcheck dot org — which just drives home how important it is to get a unique .com domain these days if you want good name recognition.)

More input from Instant Replay, Staunch Moderate, Josh Marshall, Jonah Goldberg, Time, and Achewood.

Pickles the Parakeet

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I’ve been pet-sitting a neighbor’s parakeet for the past few days. His name is Pickles. He’s smart and friendly and green, eats apples and cheese, lives in an open cage, and would love to sit on your shoulder. I feel like a pirate. AAARRR.

Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.

(!$ev)

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Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, is leaving it. It just won’t be the same. End of an era, folks. Evlovers, take note.

On Dropdowns

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Zeldman on Dropdown Menus. He’s of the mind that dropdowns are the product of corporate groupthink trying to make every page at every single level in a site hierarchy accessible from every other page at every other level.

In my experience, however, especially with Mambo, it seems that developers are using dropdowns to make their web apps seem more like PC desktop GUIs and less like web pages. That’s not a good thing — at least, not all the time. We’re already familiar with how web pages look; we usually know to check for a sidebar or navigation strip, so if you have an easily navigable hierarchy with clearly defined sections, why burden your audience’s web browsers and your own bandwidth with the bloat of an all-containing dropdown sidebar?

Update: Do dropdowns suck like a remora? “Mousing furiously in a vain attempt to navigate the timing of sublinks” just about describes my experience with a lot of dropdowns out there; only with positioning as well as timing thrown into the mix.

One more update: A Flying Menu Attack Can Wound Your Navigation. David Walker pins the exact piece of jargon I was looking for: “cascading menus,” with lots more insight as to why they don’t work from a usability standpoint.

Horrific CMS Interfaces, Part 3

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Now that I’ve gotten over the initial trauma of recounting the horrors of dealing with open source content management, I propose a solution: it’s time for us standards-aware, usability-obsessed developers to turn the tide on the glut of bloated, unusable CMS’s. Contact the developers, submit bug reports, or better yet, if you’re up to it, write your own systems. (Do something more than just pontificate from a weblog like I’m doing!)

Two Daniels (1,2) have suggested that I initiate a project, but I have no idea where to start. I do know that WordPress and Textpattern are already out there, filling the gap for usable open source weblog CMS; so now I want to put out a user-centered “portal” CMS which can do things as simple as a flat section-article structure, but also take community-oriented extensions like a user directory and an events calendar; something you could use for a church or an alumni association. (You can see where my project experience is coming from.) That’s a lot to handle for someone still struggling with basic MySQL syntax and user sessions. Baby steps, baby steps.

(While I have many complaints about Mambo and other open source systems, I must cite Mambo for this glimmer of promise: xMambo. News is that they’re integrating xMambo’s standards-based code into the Mambo core. Hopefully this involves fixing some of the screwy interface logic along the way.)

Horrific CMS Interfaces, Part 2

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What happens when bloated, corporate-minded CMS themability meets user-unfriendly customization? The “Teamwork” Template: Your Slogan Here! How do you change the slogan? “It’s hard-coded into the template.”

And when the phpWebSite CMS finally does develop a “W3C” theme, its main advantage isn’t validation or standards: it’s the CSS Skin Switcher. Example here. Classic open source priorities at work: cool geeky stuff before basic usability.