I borrowed an i-mate to capture some small thoughts of our trip as we traveled. I didn’t write much because even with the K-JAM’s QWERTY keyboard it was pretty painful to type.

First a precious few thoughts from near the end of our flight into Istanbul. 20+ hours of travel, the second part of which, with a higher majority of Turks onboard was much rowdier than I’ve ever been used to on a flight.

We are one hour from Istanbul and the flights children are getting restless. Feels a bit like a family birthday party – a bit much after 20 something hours of travel and a full-on work day before that.

Our first challenge once we are free from the airport will be to tram to Sultanahmet and try locate our hotel. We will likely walk past the blue mosque and other locations of interest along the way but the yearn for a hot shower should stymie the temptation to linger too long.

Tomorrow’s tour should see us back there anyway but with someone who knows what we are looking at.

Later in the trip I revisited the memory of our first day and wrote a second document on the K-JAM – this time evidentially more stalwart, more determined to capture my thoughts…

Arriving in Istanbul airport saw us stumbling around until another traveller, a german I think, confirmed our feeling that a visa was required. No trouble, they are purchased for 20 lira right next to immigration.

A wait in a throng of european tourists and then we were through hurtling into the airport, bags arrived at the conveyor belt just after we did and so after all that flight we had slipped easily into Turkey without a hitch. A friendly Turk at the info desk pointed us to the metro and showed us our line and changeover on the map.

The metro is modern, efficient and runs on time. We experienced a brief amount of confused delay at the changeover as we searched for corresponding names on our map but nothing too stressful though as it was still mid afternoon and the weather was perfect and we were soon on the correct tram to Sultanahmet.

From the Sultanahmet tram stop you could spy the minuets of the Blue Mosque. To welcome us, it almost seemed, the prayer song began to ring out from the speakers placed atop each of the mosques towers and we were drawn towards it like argonauts to the sirens.

The clerics voice was alternating from tower to tower to create an omnipresent effect and did I mention it was maddeningly loud? Deliriously tired by this point and knowing we could only be not more than 100 metres to our hotel it became impossible to think clearly to determine how we could locate the small street our hotel was located on when the map we had did not name small streets.

We decided to sit and wait the cleric out in the beautiful warm environment however when it was obvious the cleric had much puff and as far as we knew might continue throughout the afternoon we started looking for other maps. Found them – covered in calamine lotion of course. Note to self; carrying containers storing liquids in a plastic bag is always a good idea. Try do that next time.

Hotel found, only a step or two off the main street we were quickly checked in and up to our room, remembering too late the guide books advice to tip the bag boy. Exhausted we soon were snoozing. I woke a few times feeling guilty we were sleeping through the end of what appeared to be a stunningly beautiful day in Istanbul but the exhaustion of 40 waking hours won out.

Well that feels good to have got that to print (its been trapped in the phone for weeks waiting for my rescue). I hope to follow up later (probably days, hopefully not weeks) with more fragments of my trip and a few photos at some later point as the trip for me was quite perfect and magical.

A point I covered in earlier posts about Twitter which I would like to revisit is that of Twitter’s usefulness being less about letting people know ‘What I’m doing now’ (which, as readers of this blog may remember, I don’t find that useful) and more about it as the nexus point between various gateways.

Reviewing what I said in one of the earlier posts :

Something I haven’t heard much in the current conversations about Twitter and that I think is important is that one of the key strategic strengths of the service is infrastructural – the link between IM and mobile network messaging and the web is a useful one which many applications will build upon. I think one of the players in the industry, whether Twitter or Jaiku or a new player to come (and regardless, likely to be acquired by one of the big companies) will benefit from owning a reliable set of gateways maintaining these links.

Being a platform is hard work

As anyone using the service would have noticed – its hard work maintaining gateways and services and in general ’being the platform’ or nexus point for a variety of different consumers.

Some proof of this; another company, IMified who are in a very similar business to Twitter, recently plugged Twitter into their own service whilst the Twitter IM bots were out of action to allow users of Twitter to keep on Twittering :

Over the weekend we added Twitter as a new IMified service. We definitely feel their pain trying to keep an IM bot up and running. We’ve had our own issues in case you haven’t noticed ; )

And this cheekiness :

It appears the Twitter IM bots are still down, but have no fear, we just added support for notification updates to go along with the release of status updating last week. What can I say, we’re opportunists!

But being a platform can also pay off…

One of the coolest bits of functionality that’s actually useful that Twitter has afforded another service I use, RememberTheMilk, is the ability to use the SMS and IM gateways to post tasks to my task lists. This saves me money and time when I am out and about and I think of something I need to do/remember.

A ‘QuickAdd via SMS’ option to Google Calendar should be a straight-forward (and bloody useful!) addition  if utilizing the Twitter platform. I am sure a variety of other services leveraging SMS/IM will appear (Google/Yahoo/MSN Search?) benefiting from the effort the Twitter people have undertaken to ensure the infrastructure they provide stays accessible (and I am not saying they are there yet…).

If I make bold (and possibly long) assertion; assuming people continue to find use for these short message/short instruction services and the Twitter team can keep it all hanging together, ironing out the kinks and interruptions, we will see them become the platform of choice for short-message-in/short-message-out type services and in the acquisition path of a multi-national telco!

Anyone who has worked at an organization with more than a few developers for a reasonable period of time would have felt the pain associated with a growing codebase. The word ‘legacy’ creeps into the everyday language and the number of maintenance tasks soon exceeds the amount of time spent writing new code.

The maintenance tasks hopefully make your existing clients happy (‘serve the client in front of you’) but the reduction in new code generally means less new features per developer and therefore is naturally linked to a reduction in your ability to increase the amount of product you can sell to your clients.

There is of course a correlation with the amount of code you write to the amount of maintenance it requires however exactly to what factor this is depends entirely on your processes and how they affect the technical debt you incur.

Relish deleting code

My first piece of advice to any developer (you never know when your own codebase will become a multi-developer maintenance monster) is to relish deleting code. Most code, after-all, is the application of standard algorithms and patterns to specific problems and is therefore not that useful or unique once it is no longer required.

Don’t keep code around just in case. You have it under version control so as soon as it is orphaned then delete that sucker. Have an active deprecation process that is regular and ruthless!

Campaign actively to deprecate unused functionality within your organization as well. The temptation to keep functionality around just in case is not reserved to developers; product development, sales and marketing all fall into this trap.

It is costly to leave unused functionality and code intact because it costs an organization in a number of ways:

• Developers have more complexity to deal with and this will always result in waste.
• Users have more unnecessary complexity which affects the usability of your product which in turn affects how your product is percieved.
• Technical debt is incurred over time - its like continuing to pay rent on an apartment you already moved out of.

The global namespace is not your playground

Making changes becomes the focus well before the codebase even reaches the inflection point of maintenance outstripping new code. This is because many features of any given software product are built on top of existing features.

The enemy of change is the dependency and the easiest way to create unnecessary dependencies is to create globals because if its in the global scope then other coders will use them. Declaration scope and JIT inclusion of necessary dependencies are your friends – use these wisely.

Those entry points into your codebase that are necessary because they are utilitarian or because they kick your application off should at least be namespaced off into a structure by using a pattern such as the Singleton. Don’t be fooled – a Singleton is still a type of global but it is much easier to attach documentation to and control the signature for it.

Divide your code into layers to assist in reducing coupling and avoid having lower layers called directly from layers that are not immediately above them. For instance – if your page or front-controller calls your database directly you will find you reimplement the same query creation code, query execution and object population code over and over. Its much better to abstract this functionality to an object hierarchy which can specialise in these tasks as there is nothing useful in seeing lowlevel logic scattered through-out the logic behind your presentation.

Much of this advice is available from a variety of sources and I do recommend reading up further on the topics I have mentioned if you found that some warning bells with your own organisation’s codebase started to ring. Codebases can become massive – particularly when their are multiple developers involved multiplied by a few years of time. Some continual investment in keeping the house clean will pay off by allowing you to spend more time on new code.

I think my recent reduction in post frequency, whilst mostly due to various events in my personal life, has been somewhat affected by growing frustrations with my authoring tools.

As I’ve previously noted, I was using the performancing.com firefox extension for authoring my blog posts. Its since renamed to Scribefire and had a few improvements however in the end its just not pleasant to write into an area that is a third of your viewing area. You can expand it however this makes the reason you would use a plugin for authoring reasonably redundant.

Browser extensions – particularly firefox ones can seem a touch sluggish and I assume this is because they are mostly interpreted javascript.

I also did a few of my posts in the editor interface provided in the WordPress administration area. Its okay for last minute edits and applying of links but in general its got a few niggling issues with the editor that you constantly come across.

Time to scout for a standalone, hopefully native application for authoring. I thought I had seen one from Microsoft but decided to Google around anyway in case there was something out there that was widely regarded as the preferred post authoring tool.

Windows Live Writer appeared in the results so I figured I may as check it out as it was a free download and of course would be a native windows application.

A painless install later and I was up and writing my post. And now this one. The interface is clean, attractive and simple. The editing area is presented like a blank sheet of paper which seems to beg for words to be entered into it.

If your OS is windows and you run a blog, I recommend checking it out.

There is no denying that feature-wise WordPress offers everything that an amateur or even a professional blogger could need.

Unfortunately, something I always suspected of WP but never wanted to admit was internally there was a level of chaos which might spill out and hurt me.

Well last night, hurt me it did. I am not sure whether an edit to the theme, a new plugin or a recent upgrade was responsible but I noticed the feed was no longer validating and various applications were having trouble with this including Feedburner.

Feedburner’s FeedMedic led me quickly to discover an errant white space at the start of the file.

Familiar with PHP as I am I thought that following the execution logic from the index page (to which passing a parameter would yield the feed to be returned) should eventually locate the mischievous white space.

The first few files seemed straight-forward and single purpose however the more I dug, the more apparent WP’s internal discord became. Globals, functions everywhere (including a whole stack in a file called ‘functions’), procedural code and the occasional class that of course gets instantiated into the global namespace.

After about an hour of checking through the end of php files trimming white space and double-checking every echo I could locate I decided to take another tack. I tried to create a simple file which just recreated the variables I needed for the feed file to work.

This work revealed a very deep hierarchy of requires – as I added in one require it would require further dependencies which as I proceeded seemed less and less relevant to the work required to render the feed.

Finally I realized that WP was not going to let me debug this issue in any sort of reasonable time (without setting up a step debugger or retracing my steps earlier with echoes until I located my space) and I should just accept that a space was being buffered and I should try clear it just before I echoed my feed.

Some quick research on php.net and the only function which looked like it might clear the default output buffering php uses was ob_clean. I’d always thought this would only apply to output buffers I’d explicitly setup but it seemed to do the trick for my feed.

So what to conclude from all this?

I believe blog software will continue to evolve – but I wonder whether WordPress be able to keep pace with all its technical debt?

That a space can break an application is somewhat of a flaw in PHP. (Using a template system with PHP helps avoid that regular case of unwanted output creeping in after a close tag.)

That it took a few hours to get a resolution on this issue is a critical flaw with WordPress. Whilst this doesn’t seem to have hindered what appears to be the healthiest plugin support of any blogging platform I feel it will ultimately limit the competitiveness of WordPress as better architected solutions which can foster a dedicated plugin development community similar to WordPress come to the scene.

After a very satisfying break for a few weeks, holidaying in Turkey I have caught up with work and am now back online, back to virtual reality. I can highly recommend holidaying in the real world – I plan to do more of it.

I will hopefully cover some of my holiday on this blog over the next few weeks – we have many hundreds of photos to review and share – I can’t emphasise enough how great a destination Turkey is for holiday that both satisfies needs for relaxation as well as for new experiences.

I’ve also got a bunch of web development related posts I want to put together now I have completed some projects at work that were monopolising my time. Hopefully some of these experiences will prove valuable for those of you involved in building cutting-edge web applications.

Even better, if I could inspire people to visit a place like Turkey (which disappointingly has seen a downturn in tourism in recent times despite offering such amazing drawcards in its people and its overwhelming number of brilliant attractions) it would reward the effort I will put in to documenting my travels.

Look forward to a return to posting frequency benefitting from the reinvigoration my trip has provided me.

I have long found Outlook a pain-in-the-butt to use and a few years ago switched back to Thunderbird (I had been a user of the Netscape Mail client in a former life…).

I find Thunderbird is much lighter and quicker at filtering mail than Outlook. There are better clients but all seem to have their own quirks which have kept me from adopting them.

The main difficulty with replacing Outlook with Thunderbird is that it lacked a good calendaring option. Incompatibility with the other Outlook stalwarts in my office meant I was forever having to ‘View Source’ on email bodies to see when a meeting was to be held so I could go and manually enter it into Google Calendar (my primary calendar which I share with my team). Fortunately I found the Lightning plugin to add a calendar to Thunderbird but I was still manually updating meetings in Google Calendar.

Now I have just come across this excellent tutorial on setting up what might be the holy-grail of calendar setups and want to share it with all Thunderbird users and frustrated Outlook users. Here is the short version of the tutorial for experienced Thunderbird users :

1. Install Thunderbird 2, RC1
2. Install the Lightning plugin so Thunderbird can read Outlook meeting requests and place a calendar in the Thunderbird interface.
3. Install the Google Calendar provider to allow Lightning to add two-way synching with Google Calendar.
4. Add the XML address for your primary Google Calendar (Found under “Calendar Settings >> Calendar Address”).

And you are done – test it by setting a meeting in the calendar within Thunderbird. You should see the meeting appear in your Google Calendar shortly (I had to manually refresh). More information at each the sites I have linked to.

Catchy title maybe; but hopefully anyone who is or will be experimenting with Twitter might consider this post and draw some value out of it.

The Steve Rubels and Robert Scobles of this blogoworld (notice its hard to refer to virtual domains, I keep choosing different ways to refer to the world of online information, I will continue to until I find one I like) are heralding Twitter’s importance via their virtual pulpits. After about a month of my own experimentation with the service I suggest tread with some caution when signing up for Twitter alerts to your phone or workplace IM.

For a basic description on Twitter see my previous post  ‘Tweets are the Ultimate in Disposable Content’.

Few of us have jobs which benefit from that much interuption and very little of the content available through Twitter currently could concievabley be relevant to our minute-to-minute activities at work. We cannot draw the same value out of the content as those whose jobs it is to evangelize web usage and cannot benefit from the immediacy of republishing new technologies the minute they hit blogland. I am not saying the hype around Twitter is necessarily wrong – there is useful or entertaining information on it but , like blogs it will be more useful to you at a time when you choose, for a task you determine.

As I covered in my earlier post, the value the author places on their own words is linked to the audience’s percieved value of the content. Lets put it this way there will never be twittershelves built for storing your favourite tweets from the Shakespeare’s and Dylan Thomas’s of our times. You will wait for them to publish a book and then you will buy that for your bookshelf because you know that a book will be the fruits of their considered thought and effort.

I think acknowledging that this will be how people value individual content items on Twitter will also will drive how people value Twitter overall. One of the key variables in the Twitter value equation is in the timeliness of the information – only timely information that truly provides value in being timely will serve the audience. This is not to say there wont continue to be a constant streams of banal chatter… it just means that this content will have an erosive impact on the audience – taking more from them than it gives.

To avoid being owned by your inflow of everyone’s presence information I’d suggest for now, switch it off. Then, have a think about what you will get out of it and how you might distill this information source down to an information flow that is there when you need it at a rate that will truly benefit you.

Steve Rubel has good suggestions about how to filter and utilize content (see his Gmail nerve center articles) however remember, he takes this stuff to the extreme. I don’t know enough about the particulars of his job to comment but for own jobs, I suggest thinking about what your job entails and determine how much of a need there really is to be up to the minute with all the comings and going of the internet.

Is this actually something you could catch up on once a week (or even a month!) and instead spend those valuable minutes or hours lost to Twitteruptions and use them to being productive in the actual tasks pertininent to you being a valuable employee (or betting on the dogs, whichever suits you best)?

I am interested in other people’s experiences with Twitter – let me know if you are using it, wont use it or stopped using it.

Following on from my previous post on the fast-food like properties of web-content I thought I would look at the service which embodies the latest acceleration in content consumption, Twitter.

For the uninitiated, a ‘tweet’ (as referred to in this post’s title) is a single message sent via the Twitter service. Twitter is a short-message system which can be accessed by numerous applications and devices; primarily, but not restricted to, web, IM and mobile. Messages are by default public and therefore you could think of it as ‘mini-blogging’ where messages can be posted as easily as sending an SMS or IM.

The rise of Twitter in the early adopting set (lets face it, it hasn’t hit mass market yet) has seen the introduction of a new, even more throw-away type of content. The plethora of states, moods and emotions punctuated by links to sometimes vaguely interesting content really leaves a faint impression. The experience lacks cohesion and any real filter determining significance or relevance of a particular content item. This gives it a sort of fun lightness and I guess the beauty of it is in the aggregate of the impressions you get from someone’s Tweets you follow.

There has been plenty of discussion on blogs about Twitter – all discussing what amounts to the same thing – does this medium have future? Not to be silent on the subject I do think it is a service which will be a place alongside other internet-mediums like blogs and IM. I think it will be in a form evolved from the one we know today – one of the reasons being that many currently heavy users of Twitter in this experimental adoption phase will stop or at least severely par back their usage of the service as they realise its capacity to cause constant distraction, fragmenting their thinking and to generally get in the way of Getting Things Done. I’ll touch more on this in a subsequent post.

Something I haven’t heard much in the current conversations about Twitter and that I think is important is that one of the key strategic strengths of the service is infrastructural – the link between IM and mobile network messaging and the web is a useful one which many applications will build upon. I think one of the players in the industry, whether Twitter or Jaiku or a new player to come (and regardless, likely to be acquired by one of the big companies) will benefit from owning a reliable set of gateways maintaining these links.

The direction the presence products will expand will be in their ability to filter and summarize the content they deliver – experimentation with Twitter and Pipes will be interesting as the service will need to overcome its procrastinatory qualities. With the internet already being the procrastinators achilies heel the last thing we need (and I am assuming I might be representative of at least some of us in this) is a stream of random information flashing on GTalk or our mobile phones constantly to distract us from what we are actually doing.

Where Twitter-like applications could come into their own is if they can combine the users current geo-location, mood or other information to tailor very relevant alerts to them. Currently however its like trying to work with firehose to the side of your face.

In the realm of written content there has always been a relationship between how much work went into the piece and the depth to which consumers engage with it. Now I know this may sound like a gelatinous concept but bear with me as I explain.

Books generally render deeper, more memorable experiences than magazines; magazines more than newspapers; newspapers more than pamphlets etc. But even these pulpier written forms will yield more attention (and retention) from the reader than content on the web.

The rise of the blog has introduced an even faster medium which is more catered to scanning and bulk consumption – sort of like reading’s equivalent of fast food.

The active nature of computer screens mean reading from them is tiring and the sheer amount of content available without the physical restrictions of the real universe mean content can be shifted and consumed much quicker. We write content so it can be easily scanned – we try to remove anything that might cause friction with the user getting our core messages. The messages themselves can be delivered in many ways, in bite-size chunks. You do not interact the same way with this information as you would a book or magazine.

To help picture what I mean – imagine working your way through the same amount of individual texts as you have in your most recent blog reading session and then imagine doing that using a paper-based media. You are in a bookstore, tearing through page after page, jumping from book to book like a maniac, leaving a wake of cast-aside material trailing behind you. You move through content like pacman through pellets.

The atomicised web-based content accelerates our desire to move through content quickly looking for small morsels of cerebral nourishment, each nugget of which can excite a brief sensation of satisfaction. These small rewards encourage a desire for more as well as an impatience with content that doesn’t instantly satisfy.

This is not to say that there is not great content on the web, there is plenty, but the best content knows what it is, it knows how much attention the user has to give – for similar reasons, McDonalds never tried to sell you McCaviar.