How to Publish an eBook

David Carnoy has written about "How to Publish an eBook" in CNET Reviews on July 26, 2010. To quote:-

A while back I wrote a column entitled "Self-Publishing: 25 things you need to know," which was mostly about how to create and sell your own paper book. Since then a lot of folks have asked me to do something similar for e-books, so I have.
I begin with one caveat: The whole e-book market is rapidly evolving and a lot of self-publishing companies are offering e-book deals bundled into their print book publishing packages, which makes them harder to break out and evaluate. It's all quite complicated, and in an effort to sort through the confusion, I've decided to offer a few basic tips and present what I think are some of the best options out there for creating an e-book quickly and easily. As things change--and they will--I'll do my best to keep this column up to date.

Tips

• It's gotta be good


• Create an arresting cover


• Price your e-book cheaply


• Avoid any outfits that don't let you set the price


• Marketing is all about creating awareness for your e-book

Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation

Peter MORVILLE and Jeffery CALLENDER have written about Faceted Navigation in "A List Apart magazine" on APRIL 20, 2010. To quote:-

Also called guided navigation and faceted search, the faceted navigation model leverages metadata fields and values to provide users with visible options for clarifying and refining queries. Faceted navigation is arguably the most significant search innovation of the past decade.[2] It features an integrated, incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic keyword search and then scan a list of results. It also serves up a custom map (usually to the left of results) that provides insights into the content and its organization and offers a variety of useful next steps. That’s where faceted navigation proves its power. In keeping with the principles of progressive disclosure and incremental construction, users can formulate the equivalent of a sophisticated Boolean query by taking a series of small, simple steps. Faceted navigation addresses the universal need to narrow. Consequently, this pattern has become nearly ubiquitous in e-commerce, given the availability of structured metadata and the clear business value of improving product findability. Faceted navigation is being deployed rapidly across an impressively wide variety of contexts and platforms. In the world of search, faceted navigation is everywhere.

CSS Techniques I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Websites

Tim Wright and TJ Kelly have written about CSS Techniques in NOUPE on 18-Dec-2009. To quote:-

CSS is the best thing to happen to the web since Tim Berners-Lee. It’s simple, powerful, and easy to use. But even with all its simplicity, it hides some important capabilities. Ask any designer, and they’ll tell you that the majority of their code headaches are caused and ultimately solved by CSS.

All designers at some point in their career go through the process of encountering a weird display issue, searching for a resolution, and discovering a trick, technique, or hack could have saved them hours of frustration—if they had only known when they started.

Tree Testing - A quick way to evaluate your IA

Dave O'Brien has written about evaluating Information Architecture organization with "Tree Testing" in "Boxes and Arrows" on 5-Dec-2009. To quote:-

A big part of information architecture is organisation – creating the structure of a site. For most sites – particularly large ones – this means creating a hierarchical “tree” of topics.

But to date, the IA community hasn’t found an effective, simple technique (or tool) to test site structures. The most common method used—closed card sorting—is neither widespread nor particularly suited to this task.

Some years ago, Donna Spencer pioneered a simple paper-based technique to test trees of topics. Recent refinements to that method, some made possible by online experimentation, have now made “tree testing” more effective and agile.

Future scenario: starting a new job

James Robertson has written about the ideal "assistant" in "Column Two" on 8-Dec-2009. To quote:-

Her email inbox has a message from Morris, the intranet. Hmm, “welcome to the business Sarah!”, it seems even the intranet is friendly. Firing up “Morris”, Sarah spends a little time familiarising herself with the system she’s expecting to spend a fair bit of time in.

Part of Morris displays the standard corporate links and tools, but the right-hand half of the page seems to be just for her. There’s a prominent box linking her to an induction package, including a few get-up-to-speed videos, some recorded by other staff members.

Included in her online to-do list are a number of induction items, and she expects these will keep popping up over the next few months. Clicking on one of the tasks, she goes into her staff profile, and fills in a few easy details. The rest can wait for a quiet time over the coming week.

Noting that she’s involved in sales and customer service activities, Morris has suggested a few office groups she might want to join. Not today — too much too quickly — but Sarah does click the checkboxes so she can keep an eye on what’s being talked about, before she works out which groups to join.

She’s already been signed up to her local project group, and browses through the profiles and activities of the team members. Seems like there’s a fair bit happening, with a big report delivered last week. Better add that to my favourites.

Sarah’s also been recommended a “buddy” in a similar role, and she reads through their profile. Looks good, let’s have lunch. Now to unpack the mobile.

Software engineering is dead, long live engineering of software

David M Williams has written about "Software Engineering" in ITWire on 20-Jul-2009. To quote:-

Tom DeMarco is co-author of one of the most timeless and seminal works on creating software, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Yet, this month DeMarco suggested to the IEEE Computer Society that maybe software engineering has had its day.

This first line of this 1982 title has been quoted extensively in the ensuing 27 years. DeMarco wrote, “You can’t control what you can’t measure.” To solve that problem software engineers have bravely attempted to uncover and analyse as many software metrics as possible.

Yet, DeMarco now reveals with the passage of time he has become uncomfortable with the views he originally espoused.

“Implicit in the quote (and indeed in the book’s title) is that control is an important aspect,” he says, “maybe the most important, of any software project.”

“But it isn’t.” He now says, citing examples of GoogleEarth and Wikipedia as impressive software products that proceeded without much control.

To illustrate his changed reasoning DeMarco refers to two hypothetical projects. Both will eventually cost about a million dollars. Yet, Project A will produce value of around $1.1m and Project B will produce value exceeding $50m.

It’s obvious that Project A absolutely must have tight controls. If the budget is exceeded or the software is delayed or the quality is lacking then the project runs a real risk of running at a loss.

By contrast, Project B has such a vast difference between its cost and its expected return that control can be relaxed. Obviously, matters of costs and deadlines and quality remains but ultimately the project is going to turn a profit. It would take things to really go haywire for it not to.

Thus, DeMarco muses, in reality the more a manager focuses on control the more likely they are to be working on project that is actually striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

The problem of managing software development, then, he continues, ought not to be about such tight control and metrics as software engineering would stipulate. Instead, software teams should work on projects that deliver genuine value and managers need to reduce expectations for how much they will be able to control the project.

....a software team ought to go about incrementally adding pieces to the whole of the project in order of relative value, documenting and testing as they proceed, ready to package and deliver the product at any time the project manager dictates it is finished.

DeMarco says it still makes sense to engineer software, but that’s not actually what the term “software engineering” has come to mean.

Finding a Fair Price for Free Knowledge

Peter Eckersley has written about "Intellectual property in the Digital Age" in New Scientist on 24th June 2009. To quote:-

TEN years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it, but will our legal and economic system ever allow it?

This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term "intellectual property". As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.

So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism?

Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics?

The roots of agile project management

Rick Freedman has written about Agile Project Management in Techrepublic on 24th June 2009. To quote:-

Here’s a brief history of agile project management. By brushing up on these fundamental concepts, you’ll gain insight into the challenges and problems that agile techniques are designed to resolve.

In 1998, Harvard Business School academics Robert D. Austin and Richard L. Nolan studied large software projects. Their study, which questioned many of the fundamental ideas of IT development and project management, produced these key findings:

• The first flawed assumption is that it is possible to plan such a large project.


• The second flawed assumption is that it is possible to protect against late changes.


• The third flawed assumption is that it even makes sense to lock in big projects early.

Watts Humphrey, a respected IBM researcher, followed this study with a paper outlining his Requirements Uncertainty Principle, which asserts that:
"For a new software system, the requirements will not be completely known until after the users have used it."

Hadar Ziv of the University of California followed soon afterwards with his Uncertainty Principle in Software Engineering, which states:

"Uncertainty is inherent and inevitable in software development processes and products."

IBM touts 'stream computing' for real-time data analysis

Jon Brodkin (Network World) has written about "Stream Computing" in Computer World on 14 May, 2009 . To quote:-

IBM is bringing "stream computing" to the IT industry with new software that the company says analyzes thousands of simultaneous data streams to provide insight that helps businesses solve their most challenging problems.

...stream computing takes a fundamentally different approach to business analytics by analyzing data in continuously updated streams of information from multiple sources, rather than static files pre-loaded into a data warehouse.

User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing

Mike Padilla has written about "Faceted Browsing Interfaces" in "Digital Web Magazine" on April 29, 2008. To quote:-

Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.

• You Know What You Want


• Filtering Sequence


• Rich & Complex or Basic & Simple


• No Such Thing as a Free Lunch


• UI Design for Faceted filtering


• What’s Happening on the Web


• Slice-n-Dice or Puree?

(See also Decision Tree Diagram for selecting anappropriate filtering UI)

How to be a Genius

David Dobbs has written about the making of Genius in New Scientist on 15th September 2007. To quote:-

... forget the notion that "genius", "talent" or any other innate qualities create the greats we call geniuses. Instead, as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration - or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration.

Web Application Form Design

Luke Wroblewski has written about Web Application Form Design in User Interface Engineering on 26th June 2006. To quote:-

Quite rare is the Web application that doesn’t make extensive use of forms for data input and configuration. But not all Web applications use forms consistently. Variations in the alignment of input fields, their respective labels, calls to action, and their surrounding visual elements can support or impair different aspects of user behavior.

Web Changes Nature of the Organization

Gerry McGovern has written about "The Web Organizations" on his "New Thinking" web site on 18th June 2007. To quote:-

From a closed, centralized, cohesive unit, the organization is being changed by the Web into an open, dispersed, cohesive network.

In the beginning of the Web was the link, not the word. Linking is an inherently open, collaborative, and sharing activity.

The Web organization is

• measured by how linked it is,
• is nomadic. Its home is wherever its links are, wherever its content is re-published, wherever what it is about is being talked about.
• thinks beyond the website
• strives to be a hub, not an outpost.
• actively seeks out and encourages others to link to it.
• participates. It starts and contributes to conversations, and does not worry about who came up with the idea first.
• spends more time thinking about what it should share than what it shouldn't. Its first position is: Let's share this unless there's a really good reason not to. It assumes that its competitors know it already. It sees its strength in the network it is building, not necessarily what is on the network at any point in time.
• sees openness as a key strength and closedness as a major weakness.

The Anatomy of a Help File: An Iterative Approach

Mike Hughes has written about Help File Development in "UX Maters" on May 21, 2007. To quote:-

This article presents an approach to Help file design that focuses on creating a task-centered user experience and accommodates an iterative development strategy. This methodology allows the introduction of user assistance into early test phases—not only getting earlier validation for its accuracy, but also supporting quality assurance testing by serving as the test scripts for interactions with the user interface. This approach can also be a self-contained strategy—that is, one that allows an iterative approach to user assistance development even if the rest of product development operates on a waterfall model.

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Ralph Lengler and Martin J. Eppler have written about Visualization Methods in www.visual-literacy.org (2007).

This is a highly visual page and difficult to quote from. There are some 100 Visualization Methods identified, classified and illustrated (with pop-ups), all laid out in a classic periodic Table of Elements style.

Methods cover visualization of:-

• Data,
• Information,
• Concepts,
• Strategies,
• Metaphors and
• Compound forms

providing either

• Process views or
• Structure views

Methods are classified as either providing

• Overview,
• Detail, or
  
• Overview AND Detail

illustrating

• Convergent or
• Divergent thinking

Very creative and information rich.

The Seven Deadly Sins of AJAX Application Development

Scott Robinson has written about "The Seven Deadly Sins of AJAX Application Development" in "ZDNET Builder-AU" on 20-Apr-2007. To quote:-

The AJAX bandwagon is a good place to be. It takes you to faster, more efficient, more dynamic apps. But it also has pitfalls all its own.
(Actually 14 'sins' - 7 'lesser' and 7 'deadly')

1. Misuse of the Back Button


2. Not telling the user what's happening


3. Neglecting Links


4. Trading content control for page control


5. Killing spiders


6. Producing unspeakable text


7. Not letting the JavaScript-challenged user know what's going on.

(The 'deadly' sins).

1. Letting memory leak


2. Not knowing what "asynchronous" means


3. Keeping the server in the dark


4. Getting lazy with GET


5. Not accounting for data type


6. Some apps just don't know when to shut up


7. Keep your JavaScript out of your DOM

The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles

Tomski has written about "The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles" in www.tomski.com on 6th Jan.2007. To quote:-

We developed these as part of the BBC2.0 project. I've been meaning to publish them for a while since they were signed off by the BBC board.

1. Build web products that meet audience needs:


2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well:


3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves:


4. Fall forward, fast:


5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas:


6. The web is a conversation. Join in:


7. Any website is only as good as its worst page:


8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.


9. Remember your granny won't ever use “Second Life”:


10. Maximise routes to content:


11. Consistent design and navigation needn't mean one-size-fits-all:


12. Accessibility is not an optional extra:


13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes:


14. Link to discussions on the web, don't host them:


15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent:

Good to great intranet

Toby Ward has written about Intranet Quality in "IntranetBlog.com" on Thu 11 Jan 2007 . To quote:-

What is the difference between a good intranet and a great intranet? What do you do to get to great?

There is no simple answer. In fact, using the Prescient Digital Media intranet methodology of rating and scoring an intranet out of 10, I estimate that to advance a 6 out of 10 intranet to an 8 out of 10 requires twice the effort and much more intelligent thinking.

Build a carousel with JavaScript

Chris Duckett has written about "Build a carousel with JavaScript" in "builder.au" on 19-Oct-2006. To quote:-

Flash can be make Web sites look pretty but for one reason or another not everyone has the player installed on the client browser. If you or your users are one of those poor unfortunates that has a 64-bit linux distro or you just hate having animations on your Web page, then you are forced to go without flash.

In this article we'll show you how to build a more usable carousel in JavaScript instead of Flash.

Associative Collections in XSLT

Edmond Woychowsky has written about "Associative Collections in XSLT" in "Builder.au" on 19-Sep-2006. To quote:-

Recently I created a solution that started with having to parse SQL "INSERT" statements which were stored in a table used for logging inserts. The table consisted of all of the information required to create a log of SQL "INSERT" statements, like user id, date and the actual SQL insert statement itself.

The biggest issue was figuring-out just how to associate a column name with a column value.