Fresh data

So what runs better – OpenOffice or KOffice? Anecdotal evidence says KOffice is slimmer but OpenOffice works better, but it’s very hard to find actual hard numbers on memory and resource usage. And when you do find somebody who’s done a comparison, it invariably dates back to 1995 and it’s totally obsolete.

How about Evolution vs. KMail? Evolution’s much more popular, but there are a few blog posts that offhandedly mention it’s a huge hog compared to Kontact. Which is odd, because there are actual filed bug reports that claim Kontact leaks memory like a sieve. How can I find the truth without installing both and painstakingly testing them in a wide variety of common use cases?

Well, we know that Evolution’s more popular because of the Debian Popularity Contest, where Evolution has a commanding lead. (The “Vote” column is the useful one.) popularity-contest is a Debian (and Ubuntu) package which automatically collects stats on what software is installed and how often it’s used, and I urge everyone to install and enable it now so that it can give a more accurate picture of what’s popular and where developer resources are best spent.

It would be great to have a similar program that automatically collects resource usage statistics for all running programs. Suddenly we’ll have actual hard, fresh data to settle arguments about whether your favourite app is a bloated hog or no worse than everything else! This info would be invaluable for both developers and packagers.

Joel gives bad advice: details at 11:00

Am I blind, or does Joel on Software not allow comments any more? (Or did it ever?) Well, I guess I’ll respond to his latest article on disabling unusable menu items right here, even though that means he’ll never see it.

Don’t do this… Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there’s some reason you can’t complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

That would be incredibly annoying – I’d be constantly clicking on items I expect to work and getting a popup saying, “Sorry.” In an app I use often, I use the menus mostly by feel, so I’m not going to notice that now there’s a message saying, “Disabled because the moon is in th’e fourth quarter and you haven’t paid your phone bill.” Or if I do it’ll be in the instant before my finger clicks the button, so now I’ll just have time to realize I screwed up before it pops up the Box of Aggravation.

A better thing to do would be to disable the option, so if I click on it nothing will happen instead of the app yelling at me, and have feedback on why it’s disabled.

Wild Zebras

Christian at Design Desires posted some simple Javascript to make dynamic zebra-striped tables. He asked for comments to be mailed to him – in keeping with last month’s rant about open discussion, I’m posting my response here instead:

No sir, I don’t like it.

I don’t find it adds anything. I’m perfectly able to read across the lines of a plain old static table, so highlight one line doesn’t make it any faster to read that line. It also doesn’t help me pick out a line when scanning with the mouse, because I’m already looking at the line that gets highlighted – I put the mouse there myself!

I don’t know if it’s just my browser, but highlighting the line causes a lot of flicker. (The “more extreme” example from Neil Roberts is even worse – it actually resizes things while I’m mousing over them, jerkily. That’s terrible!) So I’d really hesitate to use this until it’s been tested on a lot of browsers and setups to make sure it’s smooth everywhere.

The only advantage I could see is if I look away and come back later. There might be some value in highlighting the line after the mouse has stopped there for a few seconds, which wouldn’t cause flicker when scanning quickly. It still might be more annoying than useful, though.

Advogato vs. the world

Now that I’m not using Advogato any more, I’ve taken a little time to think about what made me dislike it. Mostly it’s that the user interface is bland, but there’s also a bit of clunkiness that really annoyed me:

90% of the world’s blogs are laid out in the same way: if you have something to say about a post, you make a comment on it. If you have something to say that you think deserves a post of its own, you post in your own blog and make a trackback to the post you’re referencing.

Advogato works a bit differently: you can post, and that’s it. There are no comments and no trackbacks. On the surface, that’s because it’s more primitive, but the community’s had plenty of time to add these features. Either they just don’t care or they think their system’s actually better.

(Wait, that’s a misuse of worse-is-better – I should have linked to less is more.)

The advantage of the Advogato system is that people do comment on each others’ posts, but they do it in their own journals. You just start out with a link to the post you’re commenting on, in this format:

shlomif: did you actually read the Nichomachean Ethics? The thing is repulsive…

On most blogs, when referencing a post somewhere else the standard is to quote copiously – quote the parts you are replying to directly, quote the parts you find especially interesting, quote the parts that give the argument’s main points. Since you found the subject interesting enough to go to all this effort, you want to give your readers a good overview. But this gives the reader very little incentive to actually go back and read the original post you’re quoting, since they already have the hilights. The Advogato style gives no context, but readers can always click the link to find it. That means that, on Advogato, people who are hooked in by a post are actually more likely to go back and read the entire context, because there’s no other way to get it.

The other advantage of Advogato’s style is that I can find interesting discussions no matter who starts them as long as someone I know takes part. When a discussion starts on one blog and unfolds entirely in the comments there, it can’t draw in anyone who isn’t already a reader. I only find new blogs when they’re widely linked to, which only happens when lots of different people have a lot to say on a subject, or when they feel that a post is so insightful that it needs to be shared. I miss out on the smaller, more specialized posts which may attract comments and observations by not wide dissemination.

On the other hand, the Advogato style discourages casual commenting, since it’s so much work to make a link – nobody comments unless they have something substantial enough to make a full post. Discussions tend to peter out after a few exchanges. And unless you already have a strong relationship with the person you’re replying to, how do you know they’ll even read your reply? There’s a list of recent posts throughout the entire site on the front page, but this doesn’t scale well at all.

So, no, the Advogato system doesn’t really work as-is. It’s pretty good for building a sense of community, but the poor scalability and lack of features in the interface it makes it unattractive for serious blogging, so many writers migrate elsewhere. (Take a look at the Advogato recent blog entries list and see how many are syndicated from other sites.) In fact, the community feeling is exactly the reason I switched to WordPress – I wanted more control over the layout, the name, and the style. I wanted a blog that I felt like I owned. But here I am complaining about how blogs are fragmented when everybody owns their own instead of participating in a communal site.

So what’s the solution? Act like a writer, not a reader. Unless what you want to say is really inconsequential, do it Advogato-style, in your own blog, with a simple link back to the post you’re referring to. That way more people will see what’s going on, and the whole community will grow. Just commenting on other people’s blogs is easier and faster, but it’s also less effective. Unfortunately, it’s what’s most encouraged by most interfaces.

(Now – should I disable comments, just for irony?)

Advogato again (7 replies)

I was just about done typing up a post about Advogato and how its community differed from most blogs, and then I went over there to check on something and realized my entire thesis was wrong. So let me ask a question to see if I can salvage it, or if I’m just a blind idiot:

I last used Advogato 4 years ago. I could have sworn at the time, there was no way to leave a comment on a post, leading to lots of people making posts in their own journals just to reply to a post in another journal. But the top post on avogato.org right now has 7 replies, so apparently it’s possible.

Has it always done that, or was it added recently? (That is, some time since 2004?)