Posted by Randy on 3rd March 2010
I wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in. Overall the plugin worked well. Here is a screen shot of one of our forms:
The main issue was a problem in the table that holds the responses. The field that stores the user answer is limited to 255 characters, but no limit is enforced on the form. And when users are invited to submit free form comments they quickly exceed the 255 limit. The result is that a number of the responses were cut off in the database, and some of the user response was lost. Not the nicest thing to realize after the fact, but luckily the fix is easy.
To make the alteration change open the plugin’s surveys.php file and find the create table section. Right around line 101 you’ll see the code that creates the surveys_result_answer table. Alter the ‘user_answer’ column to use the blob data type — you’ll see it is set to a text(255) type, which is too short for many users.
CREATE TABLE {$wpdb->prefix}surveys_result_answer ((
`ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`result_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`answer_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`question_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`user_answer` blob NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`ID`),
KEY `question_ID` (`question_ID`),
KEY `answer_ID` (`answer_ID`),
KEY `result_ID` (`result_ID`)
) ;
This small change fixes that problem. The only other note is we used this tool on a members-only site. I’d want to give it a thorough security check before using this on a public site. I did note the user-text was escaped, so it looks like some protections are in place. But these days you can never be too security conscious.
Surveys < Plugins < WordPress < Tools < Bin-Co
Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to your blog. You can let the visitors take surveys and see the result from the admin side. The user who take the survey can enter their details at the end of the survey – or leave it as an anonymous result.
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Posted by Randy on 10th February 2010
I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow. But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem. If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck. The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live. I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by. But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms. Anyone got an answer? Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?
Quality, a User Problem | Arc90 Blog
Facebook understands the noise problem, and that it has only been exacerbated with the prevalence of third-party application notifications. They’ve tried to solve it, but haven’t really nailed a way to determine the quality of a post.
10 Reasons Why Twitter Sucks | The Virtual Circle
After about 20 days Twitter deletes every tweet you’ve made unless you marked it as memorable. This is so sad. There are many interesting people on twitter saying, on occasion, quite memorable things. It is all being gradually lost unless there’s someone deliberately collecting it.
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Posted by Randy on 10th February 2010
How is the information technology department viewed in your organization? Too expensive, too slow, always say no, better to outsource? If any of these sound familiar then it might be time to take some lessons from The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value. Overall the book is excellent — clearly presented with plenty of real examples to illustrate the various points. I found it tough to keep my attention focused on the book, not because is was boring, but because the ideas rang so true I found myself thinking through how I might employ them in my own workplace.
I’ll only touch on a couple of ideas from the book. The first section touches on value traps — commonly held ideas that are not only wrong, but hold the It organization back from real effectiveness. For instance the notion that IT’s purpose is to deliver quality technology. Technology is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a more effective organization. IT needs to deliver solutions, not just a service. Another value trap goes along the lines of “follow our rules or we can’t guarantee it will work.” Engineers like certainty, but business leaders are often happy to settle for close enough if it gets the job done. And they will find ways to end-run IT regulations that are seen as obstructing progress and see IT as a barrier rather than enabler of progress. What IT does need to do is measure and benchmark its projects in terms of business effectiveness, and communicate that information throughout the business. The big trick is to stop thinking like a service unit and become integral the process of creating new value for the organization. Improving IT is not so much about making the IT department better, but utilizing IT to make the entire organization better. As the authors conclude:
” A small but growing group of CIOs has figured out how to show value and deliver increasing value in terms that are utterly convincing to their enterprises.”
And the lessons described in the book look to be a pretty effective place to start.
The Real Business of IT: a real value to IT executives book review
The Real Business of IT is a clear and focused look at the issue of IT value and the approaches to capture, communicate and increase that value. This book is unique in several respects. It is a book written for CIOs largely based on the experience of CIOs.
The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value – Harvard Business Review
In The Real Business of IT, Richard Hunter and George Westerman reveal that the cost mind-set stems from IT leaders’ inability to communicate about the business value they create-so CIOs get stuck discussing budgets rather than their contributions to the organization.
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Posted by Randy on 8th February 2010
Confused by what Google Wave might be useful for? Here is a nicely demonstrated scenario going through a business process modeling project. I like the example of new members re-playing the Wave to catch up on the team’s progress — very efficient. It seems to me that a workplace effort to encourage this type of Google Wave use would need some type of kick-off/introduction workshop. Get a big group together, have some scripted collaborative tasks, and have them use wave to accomplish those tasks. You’d teach the tool and also work on the general topic of effective collaboration/team work.
Using Gravity to collaborate on processes
Google Wave has been around for a few months now and though the hype is fading away we are seeing more and more practical use-cases in the enterprise. One excellent example is SAP’s Business Process Modelling tool gone collaborative; Gravity. We have been fortunate to work with a prototype version of Gravity with access to the minds behind the concept. Gravity is a Business Process Modeling tool which can be accessed as a gadget in the Google Wave client. This integration in Google Wave allows for collaboration over time and / or near real time, on business processes. This model is exportable to Netweaver BPM via BPMN 2.0 XML, thus making it a fully integrable modelling tool for use in an SAP landscape. Still puzzled? check this video with an explanatory example:
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Posted by Randy on 8th February 2010
Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey. So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting. As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system. So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there. And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.
The plugin is pretty simple and written clearly enough to make adjustments easy. And most importantly it utilizes a table structure that is normalized, and well structured, which will work well for the eventual reporting needs. I did do some hacking around in the code to change some of the default behavior — mostly just commenting out features we didn’t want. These would lend themselves well to some additional options in the plug-in settings — maybe I’ll get around to adding those in at some point. When it comes to the reports I’ll also go into the background, using PHPMyAdmin to grab the tables directly — again it wouldn’t take much to add more flexibility into the WordPress admin panel options for the plug-in, but I’m still running in the quick/simple mode here. And with the help of the Plaintxt theme it is up and running.
The plugin could be quite useful for all sorts of user feedback on a site, not just surveys. The nicely structured data collected in plugin-specific tables would make reporting really flexible.
WordPress › Surveys « WordPress Plugins
The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to you blog. You can let the vistors take surveys and see the result from the admin side.
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Posted by Randy on 3rd February 2010
A new open source project from FaceBook, HipHop for PHP, could bring big improvements for PHP developers. From the description on Facebook’s Developers site HipHop for PHP will translate PHP code into C++, reducing cpu usage by as much at 50%. And for a big site like FaceBook, written in PHP, this is a pretty significant improvement. The ease of writing in PHP, with the performance benefits of C++ — sounds like a great combination. There is nothing except an announcement so far, but expect more very soon.
PHP Magazine, PHP Training, PHP Conferences, PHP Books, PHP Apparel — php|architect
“We think that HipHop has the potential to bring significant changes to the way we use and interact with PHP; … said Marco Tabini, CEO of Blue Parabola.
Facebook Developers | HipHop for PHP: Move Fast
One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.
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Posted by Randy on 1st February 2010
A request came up to put one of the departmental student handbooks on-line. Requirements include ease of editing/updating, access control (only our students) and search. A wiki would be one way to go. But our WordPress MU installation makes deploying new sites a cinch, including the access control, making this my preferred place for this new application. And when I think of WordPress and book-type content, I think of CommentPress . CommentPress works with WPs page hierarcy, which I find users find more familiar than the more open wiki style of organization. And it uses WPs comment structure to allow readers to add their own notes to a page. Still allowing some interactivity, but also lets the author control the official language of the document.
One minor problem is we’d like to ditch the word ‘comment’ and replace it with ‘notes’. I find users/clients often pale at the thought of people commenting on something — the word implies criticism. This is sort of like not referring to WordPress as a blog program — it really is a web publishing platform. Same idea, but words can carry a lot of meanings, not all of them good. So I’ll be working to banish the word ‘comment’ from our application replacing it with ‘notes’, which implies something useful to the reader.
Commentpress » About Commentpress
In the course of our tinkering, we achieved one small but important innovation. Placing the comments next to rather than below the text turned out to be a powerful subversion of the discussion hierarchy of blogs, transforming the page into a visual representation of dialog, and re-imagining the book itself as a conversation.
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Posted by Randy on 27th January 2010
Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash in this month’s Website Magazine suggests that elements such as wild background colors, garish text, visual embellishments (eye candy) and animation/video distract website visitors from important content. In a case study of a redesign of the CREDO website they found an 84% improvement with a simplified design. The case study used a new service called AttentionWizard.com which uses computer algorithms to approximate eye tracking studies of a web site. The idea is these will reveal what point on the page the visitor’s eye should land on. If it is what you want them to see — like a buy now button — bingo, you are doing well. If their eyes don’t land anywhere, or on the wrong things it is time to make some adjustments. I thought it would be fun to compare the Yale and Harvard main websites using the service.
First up Yale. According to the article Yale’s website does earn extra points for its simple, white background, plain text and simple graphics. But don’t start celebrating so fast. The eye tracking study also doesn’t find anything that does grab attention. There is some focus on the graphic, but the links on the left side don’t register too high, except for the about Yale:
Yale's landing page
Yale Attention Heat Map
Now for Harvard – strong black background, white text — low marks. On the attention scale they do a little worse — again the image gets the most attention, but otherwise the eye wanders around the screen not really landing on any other focal point.
Harvard landing page
Harvard Attention HeatMap
It is not clear to me on either site what the key objective is. And in fairness these sites have multiple objectives, mostly trying to give people a lot of options. It might have been fairer to compare sites with clearer objectives, like a sales-orientated site. But then I wouldn’t have been able to tweak the classic Yale/Harvard rivalry. And I may be biased, but while neither site did great, I do think Yale finished with a slight lead. Go Bulldogs!
Two notes on the article: 1) it is written by the CEO of SiteTuners.com, creators of AttentionWizard. 2) in my experience it is the client who wants the flashy, distracting eye candy. Most graphic designers I’ve worked with have better taste than that (good article, bad title). You can use AttentionWizard in a trial version — 1 upload/analysis per day. Give it a spin on your favorite site!
AttentionWizard FAQ’s
The eye gazing path is represented by the numbered path shown on the AttentionWizard heatmap. The eye gazing path starts with the number 1 and follows in chronological order. The eye gazing path depicts the path that your users eyes will take when they first get to your page. Depending on the image submitted (full page or above-the-fold) the eye gazing path can differ significantly.
Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash – Website Magazine – Website Magazine
You were led down this path by your internal creative team or outside interactive agency. Because of the limitations of their unique perspective you have been forced to sacrifice conversions in the name of “coolness.” So, you have actually come to think that your baby is quite beautiful and have, in fact, grown very fond of it.
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Posted by Randy on 21st January 2010
Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat. Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive. Teambox organizes communication around projects. Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files. The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar. And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data. And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails). Now I just need a project to test it with…
Community: Teambox is a public open-source project.
Installing:If you want to run your own server with Teambox, some knowledge of Ruby on Rails and UNIX is very recommended.
Blog Archive » The quiet majority in collaborative communities
Message traffic on our company Yammer network is following the classic 80-20 principle, although in our case it is closer to 85-15.
Twitter for Teams: Teambox Launches Web-Based Collaboration Tool
The Twitter-like UX is familiar and fast, and the interface seems simultaneously lightweight and robust. For project management and team collaboration – including distributed teams – we can see this application going over very well.
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Posted by Randy on 16th December 2009
So I’ve got a test BuddyPress site up and running — for testing/learning purposes only. And I like what I see. I’ll probably blow the site up and rebuild it a few times just to try out different configurations. The activity stream is a key feature, allowing people to follow actions (posting, commenting, etc) across the site and content types.
A growing issue I have with sites like Twitter and Yammer is there is one content type — regardless of your purpose. And while this keeps things simple, it also get limiting pretty fast. Every try to have a real conversation or discussion on Twitter? Or better yet ever try to reference a discussion that occurred some time (can’t quite remember when) a couple of months back? Or want to break the 140 character limit? So BuddyPress gives the live stream, providing one place to track activity, but the content can be in a format better matched to the purpose.
Still a lot of experimenting to do — more thoughts to come…
BuddyPress and WordPress MU Hosting | TMDHosting Blog
By releasing the BuddyPress pack, WordPress stepped into the social network field with almost unmet functionality and features. BuddyPress is a set of WordPress plugins and themes which extend the multi user version of WordPress with many social network features such as extended user profiles, private messaging, friends lists and groups as well as user wall (wire).
BuddyPress 1.1 released | Ramoonus.nl
# Activity streams everywhere. Activity streams can be filtered allowing for feature specific activity streams or adding an activity stream to your custom plugin.
# A new status updates feature is included in BuddyPress 1.1. Actions and filters are included to allow plugin developers to hook into any external service.
# An awesome group extension API allowing developers to easily extend groups and add completely new features.
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