Higher Ed Institutional Blogging Server Usage Guidelines

This was one of those projects that I thought would take half a day and ended up taking a week. If I’m going to sink that much work into it, I might as well share what I’ve learned.

I started out looking for lists of higher ed blogs. I didn’t realize at the time that I’d be documenting the process so I didn’t save the lists I ended up using. Those playing along at home can Google it. Once I found my lists, I looked for blogs that lived on a .edu top level domain. Then I looked for any links that mentioned usage guidelines or policies, went to the home page and performed site searches, played around with the wording, and whatever else I could come up with to locate the sort of info I was hunting for. Sometimes the leads I found would be walled up inside an intranet, which is understandable if not a little disappointing. I ended up with around a dozen promising leads.

• From Zero to Blogging in Five Easy Steps on the Web Musings blog from agency.nd.edu
• Blogs @ Brandeis University
• Create A Blog at Stanford
• Requesting a Blog Account from Vanderbilt Medical Center
• Vanderbilt ITS Blog FAQ
• Blogs on Spark at Tufts (I love the whole idea of Spark by the way)
• General Recommendations for Social Media from Binghamton U
• Policies and Procedures for Smathers Libraries Blog at Uni of Florida
• Wordpress Help Blog at Oregon State U
• Berkely breaks out the P-word for Use of Social Media
• Yale University Web institutional server policies
• Weblogs at Harvard Law School » Terms of Use

From those links, I collected about 60 phrases from 7 different schools (in no particular order).

1. Brandeis
2. Stanford
3. Vanderbilt
4. Tufts
5. University of Florida
6. Yale
7. Harvard

I grouped those phrases under common themes and came up with these 9 common elements.

1. The stuff you publish here is visible to the entire internet and could be cached by search engines or archiving services for a very long time.
2. This server/service exists to support the mission of the institution, if your intended purpose is at odds with this then there are many freely available blogging services available to you elsewhere.
3. Content, including comment moderation, is your responsibility (and liability), not the institution’s.
4. Don’t do anything stupid or illegal.
5. We can re-purpose your content (from RSS feeds to marketing campaigns).
6. We can delete your stuff, up to and including your entire blog/account.
7. We provide a certain level of technical service/support but there are limits. (Varies widely from one institution to the next)
8. We can change our minds about any of this with or without notice.
9. Explanation of process for obtaining an account.

Not every school covered all those points. Not surprisingly, Harvard Law has one of the most thorough documents and they’ve been nice enough to license their terms under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. If you need to put together some guidelines in a hurry I recommend starting there and adjusting the wording to meet the needs of your particular institution.

The Culture of Technological Abundance

In one of my computer science courses the instructor asked if computing resources have reached the point where efficiency can safely be ignored. I responded with a resounding “No!” but some of the younger pups in the class disagreed. I'm begging to think I was showing my age, at least within certain contexts.

Something in my brain makes me love the idea of optimization. I actually police myself away from it, but I still find myself spending hours upon hours thinking about “better ways” to do things. I was recently debating with myself about storing telephone numbers in a database as integers vs. strings. I found the integer approach most appealing. It just felt right. But I quickly figured out that would require formatting the data to be human readable every time I needed to display it as well as a bit of trickery on the front end to get the form input (which would be in a human readable format) into a basic int structure. That consumes a lot of my time, and possibly a lot of time for the users who eventually put the collected data to use. In exchange, I save a little bit of hard drive space.

The new server has 500 gigs of RAIDed space. A formatted telephone number string, such as “(888) 555 - 1234” takes up 16 characters. That's a 17 byte VARCHAR. Even less if we default to something shorter for unrequired fields left blank by the user. But for the sake of argument let’s go with VARCHAR. Storing “8885551234” as a BIGINT requires 8 bytes, saving us 9 bytes. That’s 9 out of over 500 billion available. We’ll end up with a few hundred form fields that will see a few hundred hits per year. For the sake of argument let’s say 400 squared, or 160,000. If my attempts at optimization save an average of 9 bytes per field per record, we'll run out of space after about 350,000 years. I'm not sure what the clock cycles are involved in fetching or even comparing a 16 character string vs a 10 digit number, but probably even more negligible than the storage space. Obviously, server resources are abundant when compared to my time and the time of my users.

I’m about half way done building the forms on my to-do list and I just convinced myself to change the way I handle things. Oy vey.

If data is collected for the purpose of being later presented to humans, I will store it as a string, optimization be damned. I’ll use numeric types for data that is collected to be crunched, which in all honesty if rare right now. In situations where it could conceivably be used for both, such as dates, I’m probably better off storing both versions and fetching (or sorting by) whichever is most appropriate rather than running a timestamp through the date() function as needed or converting user input into the MySQL DATE format (which is both human readable and easily sortable).

2 years into this redesign project and I’m still not done. In hindsight, the biggest setback has been my own perfectionism. I have a hand crafted attitude towards my work. I take great pride in it. But at what cost? It feels great when I see something like Smashing Magazine’s list of current best practices in form validation and I realize I’m already doing the majority of those things simply because they “feel right”. But I spent all day yesterday working on a single form, stayed 45 minutes late, and still didn’t get it done. That felt anything but great. What’s the trade off? Where do I draw the line?

I’m even doing it now. I’m encoding my apostrophes and quote marks. Can anyone out there notice the difference between “this” and "this"? It's 12 extra key strokes for me to use the "proper" encoded characters. For all I know, Blogger auto-converts them for me anyway. (*EDIT* No, it doesn’t.) I've just developed the habit over the years of hand coding HTML. 12 keystrokes per quote pairs times 5 quotes per page times 3,000 pages at 400 characters per minute is 7.5 hours. That's a full workday over the past 2 years. Is that too high a price to pay for typographic correctness?

What's the cost of XHTML validation? Of ADA compliance? That last one could end up saving us a mint if lawsuits start getting tossed around. I know where my personal comfort level lies on most of these issues and I'm willing to re-evaluate in light of new information and fresh perspectives. As the only web guy around here I guess I get to make those judgement calls for the institution. But in a freelance situation my time is the client's money, which is definitely a scarce resource. A 0.2% markup cost for things like typographic correctness may not sit well with some clients, but there's plenty of designers out there who also don't care. Maybe they can service those clients.

The plan

I probably won't have time to put this plan into action until I'm off for the holidays. Or maybe even until I'm back from the holiday break. I'm sure it will undergo some quick evolution once it's made contact with the enemy, so to speak.

Tags

Languages

• php
• css
• html
• xml
• js
• jquery

Technically jQuery is not a language. But I find myself writing more jQuery than straight JavaScript anymore. So in effect the “js” tag will simply mean “JavaScript that isn't jQuery”.

Tools/Software

• dreamweaver
• photoshop
• browsers
• firefox
• safari
• opera
• chrome
• ie
• ie6
• ie7
• ie8

The first two are the biggies. Usually when I see something pertaining to browsers, it's a comparison among several. Sometimes it's more specific, a Firefox plug in for example, or a bug in IE. That's the main reason for breaking IE into different versions. Each version has it's own set of bugs. :(

Content type

• tutorial
• plug in
• code
• framework
• tips
• gallery
• interview
• list

I've put those in order of descending anticipated usefulness. A “tutorial” is an article or blog post that deals with a specific goal in depth. Photoshop tutorials are the most obvious example, but there are tutorials for PHP, jQuery, CSS, DreamWeaver, even specific plug ins like Firebug (which may end up getting its own tag under Tools/Software depending on how much content I find).

Software can have a “plug in” but so can languages and frameworks. “Code” would apply to any specific technique within a language that is meant to be copied and pasted rather than published as a plug in. It's also distinguished from the more general philosophical stuff that would normally be tagged as “tips”.

The “framework” tag is something that will probably fall out of favor as I research more frameworks. If I end up adopting Cake PHP as my PHP framework of choice, then I'll probably start using a “cake” or “cake php” tag the same way I plan to use “jquery”. The framework itself will be promoted to a tag describing the language.

“Tips” aren't plug ins and they aren't code, they are less concrete than either of those. Both the articles I linked to yesterday about writing style guides and creating maintainable CSS are good examples of tips.

A “gallery” is usually but not always visual. There are many galleries of CSS designs out there meant to inspire other designers. But there are also galleries of plug ins and code snippits. The “interview” tag is self explanatory.

Usually, the stuff worth tagging will be a few of the individual resources being linked to on a “list”. I'm thinking of all those “50 CSS Tricks You Can't Live Without!” and “Avogadro's Number Photoshop Tutorials for People Who Spend More Time Reading About Photoshop than Working in Photoshop” that have gotten so popular lately.

Content source

• blog
• article
• video
• screen cast
• pod cast
• wiki

I think most of what I find would technically be classified as “blog” posts. If I notice myself tagging several posts from the same blog, I should probably add it to my RSS reader.

Speaking of RSS feeds, that can cause some problems with the “article” tag. The articles I read online are often from sources that provide RSS feeds (A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, SitePoint, ThinkVitamin, etc.). But I'd also use that tag for anything from a peer reviewed journal, for example, the 80+ articles I've dug up on web usability studies as part of my lit review for my final project. RSS feeds are much less common in that world.

Is the different enough to justify coming up with a new way to categorize content such as Taming Lists vs. Testing web sites: five users is nowhere near enough? My heart tells me no. Jared Spool blogs. As important as peer review is, I think that sort of review process happens more quickly and more transparently online. So blogs, the good blogs at least (those that actually get read, possibly unlike this one), are not free from such a review process. At this stage, I think the academic model servers more as a means of exclusion than as any real control on quality of content. Portals like ACM may be on their way out in favor of Technocrati.

Anyway, I was talking about these tags, but I think the remaining ones are self descriptive enough to not explore in detail. :)

That should provide enough of an organizational skeleton for me to get started. I'm sure it will expand and evolve with use. The most important thing, I think, is to keep it detailed enough to describe resources in a useful way while staying small enough to be maintainable.

And someday, I'll need to work in the need to organize and tag stuff that isn't exactly work related. Luckily, the nature of tags will keep most of that content separate naturally. There may be the occasional overlap with a tag like “funny” and resources like You Suck at Photoshop.

Future KM entries

Lately I've been on an tagging/organizing kick with my knowledge management posts. But there are other areas I need to explore too. As my post from earlier today pointed out, the lack of organizational structure behind the existing site (or at least the lack of documentation of any such structure, the difference between it existing with me failing to understand it vs simply failing to exist is effectively nothing) makes for a lot of unfun time. Once I eventually vacate this seat for whatever reason, I hope to leave my replacement in better shape than I currently find myself.

That means I need to work on documentation ranging from style guides to well documented, maintainable code to official policies and guidelines that better fit into the bureaucratic mindset of the campus than all that geeky stuff. (Both the resources I linked to there are written by women. I wonder if that is at all relevant or just a simple coincidence?)

In a time of economic crunch and budget cuts, many people would probably shy away from purposefully making themselves easier to replace. But if knowledge management is really about boosting the productivity of knowledge workers, isn't it possible that turning our backs on knowledge management now could very well extend the economic troubles? KM is about a lot more than just easing the transition for my eventual replacement. One thing I learned early on in my career about commenting my code, the person I'm communicating with in my comments may very well be my future self. Six months after I've written something, there's a good chance I won't be able to figure out what the hell was going on without at least a little guidance. It may be more important for someone who has never seen the code before, but that doesn't eliminate the very real (and almost immediate) benefits such documentation provides for me.

Bad tagging habits?

In my last KM post, I hinted that SU's swelling user base may be a contributing factor in the rampant miscategorization of content. Of course, I'm really doing a lot of projecting. The tags that work best for me might not work at all for the majority of users. The act of tagging takes its meaning from the idiolect of the person writing the tags. It doesn't get much more personal than that.

But different people have different goals in mind with their tagging. I'm trying to come up with a manageable set of tags that can efficiently describe the majority of the work related online resources I make use of both now and in the future (and hopefully scale well for future growth). Essentially, I'm trying to do more with less when it comes to my tagging structure. Obviously, that's not everyone's goal. Even among my personal heroes, such as Jeffrey Zeldman, the tagging structures used by other people can be called “improper” for my purposes. Zeldman has less than 2000 bookmarks with over 5000 tags in his Ma.gnolia account. In fact, he's currently averaging 2.58 tags per entry. And that assumes that each tag is unique. Obviously that's not the case. He's currently got 62 items tagged with “iphone” and 259 items tagged with “webdesign”. I also see some redundancy at work. He's got items tagged with “palin”, “sarah palin”, and “sarahpalin”. This entry is tagged with “september11th”, “911”, “9-11”, & “9/11”. Since that's all on one entry I assume Zeldman's doing it on purpose and not just forgetting what his primary tag for that concept is from entry to entry. That's precisely the sort of redundancy I hope to avoid. But obviously it's working for him.

So in my previous entries I've said some things that could be taken as insulting my fellow users of social media. I should be more forgiving. If everyone used social media for the same ends, there wouldn't be much of a point, right? I guess just like any other social construct (democracy, economics, etc) simply by participating in it we take on the responsibility to be mindful of our own needs and tolerant of the needs of others.

I'm going to go find a drumming circle to join. More later.

The Social Side of Social Bookmarking

There's a decent amount of discovery power available through Ma.gnolia as well. I still think Stumble Upon does it better. But it would be silly to not explore the 2nd best tool available for the job. Ironically, but doing so, I was quickly reminded of the problems with default tagging in SU. I pulled up a couple of recent bookmarks from Jeffry Zeldman.

The first is a blog post from Simon Clayson on feeding IE6 a basic style sheet using the sort of techniques that were once common for targeting Netscape Navigator 4 with a set of specific, dumbed down styles while simultaneously protecting NN4 users from that browsers botched implementation of the majority of CSS which was safe to show to less craptastic browsers. Now NN4 is little but a ghost to haunt the nightmares of us old school CSS scribes and IE6 is now the crappiest browser still in common usage. I'll probably spend the rest of December debugging the redesign in IE6. Had I found this idea a year ago, I probably would have served IE6 a very simple style sheet and skipped the debugging. In all honesty, even at this stage it may be less work to implement these ideas rather than try to “fix” IE6.

So anyway, I thought this was a potentially useful technique, so I thumbed it up. This didn't pull up the form for submitting new content to SU, so I knew someone else had already submitted this particular link. This gave me a great opportunity to see what the default tag would be. jackosborne says this page is primarily about “graphic-design”. It deals exclusively with serving specific CSS code targeted at a specific web browser. I can think of at least half a dozen tags more useful for this content than “graphic-design”. But the current SU system gives too much power to the person submitting the content. Jack's actually got more stumbles tagged “web-design” (54) than “graphic-design” (45), but apparently that's due to other people's default tags on the pages he is thumbing up. Looking at his discoveries, he's also submitted this article on Five CSS Design Browser Differences I Can Live With by Andy Clarke and Using jQuery for Background Image Animations from Snook.ca as “graphic-design”. Maybe that tagging scheme server Jack well. It makes SU virtually worthless for me when it comes to organizing and retrieving the resources I discover through it.

The other page I discovered via Zeldman is Western Civ's guide to CSS browser support. Again, this page deals exclusively with CSS and web browsers, so for my purposes it would be pretty easy to tag. It was submitted by SU user kancerman uh...wow, 3 years ago. If I'm reading this right, I'm only the 10th person to thumb this up in those 3 years. That could be because it was submitted into the category “internet-tools”. For me, that category is better suited for things like online mortgage calculators or WriteBoard. But due to the way kancerman submitted this page, “internet-tools” is the default tag. Now I can look at his entry for this page and see that his 2nd tag is in fact “CSS”, but since that's the 2nd tag on his entry, it holds no bearing for how it is tagged by default when I thumb up the page.

Maybe this problem in the design of SU is worse than I thought. Not only does the default tagging scheme make it harder for me to go back and look up stuff I have previously thumbed up without bothering to write a review and/or manually tag myself. But it also seems to have a negative impact on the effectiveness of SU to function as a discovery engine. How many times have I found a page via means other than SU, thumbed it up, didn't see the new content submission form pop up, assumed whoever beat me to the punch on submitting the content at least submitted it properly, and went on my way? How often does the average SU user do that? One thing I've noticed since I started paying attention to the default tagging scheme in SU is how often I see content that is submitted into the wrong category. If I have found this content via SU, then I can use the “report last stumble” feature. But that only works if I stumble into something in one of my defined interests that really should be tagged as some other of my defined interest. If someone submits a CSS gallery as “photography” for example. But if I get to that page without being referred there by SU, there's no way for me to bring the miscategorization to the attention of whoever addresses such things. That is most likely to happen if someone submits content that should fall within one of my defined interests as pertaining to a topic of interest that isn't on my list.

Oh look, this jQuery plug-in has been submitted under “alternative-medicine”

There's no way I can do anything about that. All I can do is tag it properly within my own account. But since very few web designers are going to be stumbling through the alternative medicine category (then again, maybe I assume too much), and very few people looking for alternative medicine information will give a rat's ass about a jQuery plug-in, very few people who care about that content will ever stumble into that content. I can't even resubmit it. Once a page is submitted, all I can do is tag and review it myself. In effect, such content is quarantined, cut off from it's true target audience. I've got to think there are ways for SU to address this. If Mac OS X can have a pretty effective summarize tool built in, can't a similar algorithm be run against the content of new submissions to SU in an attempt to verify the categorization of that content? Couldn't meta tags, key words, or the sort of tricks search engines use to categorize content be applied? I know these things aren't cheap, but they are possible, and SU has a larger user base than delicious (which may actually be a big part of the problem).

Getting organized with tags and Ma.gnolia

I've been mulling over how to approach planning out my tags for using Ma.gnolia (M) to store and organize the work related resources I find via Stumble Upon (SU). At first I thought about a matrix of some sort allowing me to drill down within a topic. But how would I share that here? An HTML table won't work without getting really nasty with the colspan attribute. Mind mapping software could work, but the image it would produce would to far too huge to post here. I even tried to think of it in terms of XML and custom Doctypes where I could use “web design” like a root element and have a bunch of descendant tags from there. That lead me to two realizations:

1. Only someone at least as geeky as me would have any chance of understanding such a system
2. I was ultimately still thinking in hierarchies

The philosophy behind tagging is to address areas where hierarchies break down. For example, as I explored such a matrix, I found myself coming up with compound tags like “javascript-framework” and “php-framework”. Part of the reason for this line of thinking is due to the structure of SU, where such compound tags would be useful. But M allows to search and sort based on a combination of tags. Resources on Cake PHP, Zend, Ruby on Rails, and jQuery could all take the tag “framework”. I could also tag such resources with their associated language: “php”, “php”, “ruby”, and “javascript” respectively.

Simply typing this out here has lead to another discovery. Typing out “javascript” sucks. I don't plan on tagging stuff with “cascading style sheets” either, so I'll steal an idea I've been using in my directory structures for years and shorten “javascript” to “js”. That will be clear to me and should be clear to any other web professional who happens to browse through my links in Ma.gnolia. In theory, that should also apply to anyone taking over this position in the future.

I also realized that trying to use a root tag such as “web design” is short sighted. Not everything I do is related to design. Some of the server administration or SEO stuff I do would stretch the common definition of design.

Leaving behind the idea of a hierarchy should also allow me more freedom for future growth. If I'm simply tagging resources with an associated language (“css”, “js”, “php”) it becomes much easier to just add a new tag for any new languages I start to use or learn (“perl”, “ruby”, “lolcode”). This industry evolves so quickly, that sort of scalability will likely pay off in ways I currently can't even predict. Five years from now my job may require as much understanding of psychology as it currently does programming and design. I'm pretty sure we're one high profile lawsuit away from moving a solid understanding of the legal implications of accessibility from the “recommended skills” to the “required skills” section of job descriptions such as mine.

I'm going to give some thought to classification of tags I will need. Languages are an obvious example of what I'm talking about. Maybe I should add a class of tags for software, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc. I try to keep what I do tool-neutral, but I'd be lying if I said I never use Photoshop tutorials from the internet. If the Adobe Creative Suite was not already bought and paid for, I could get buy using free text editors and open source programs like the GIMP. But the reality of my job is that I spend a lot of time working with Adobe software so it's probably a good idea to reflect that in my tag structure. I'll also put some thought towards the need for consistency. Luckily, Ma.gnolia offers an auto-complete function based on previously used tags. SU offers no such feature. I just realized Blogger has the same sort of auto-complete function in the tag field for my blog entries. That should at least keep me from forking my tags due to a common misspelling or something silly like that. I'll continue to think things over and share my thoughts over the weekend.

My personal knowledge management problem

Full Disclosure:

This post and probably a couple of future posts will serve to fulfill a requirement in my graduate course on knowledge management. But I'm trying hard to approach this in such a way that such requirements are totally transparent asside from this note. Maybe I'll pull it off and this will bear some interest for folks other than my proff. Or maybe I'll totally drop the ball and not engage anyone with this content and totally screw up the assignment to boot. If so, maybe I'll at least fail spectacularly enough to get some good schadenfreude going.

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I tried going through the exercises Kirby put together. The basic goal is to figure out which tasks I perform as a knowledge worker bring the most value to my organization, then figure out how much of my time I spend on those tasks vs. less valuable tasks, then try to maximize the time I can devote to the valuable stuff and minimize the time wasted (although that's a slightly harsher term than it needs to be in this context) on less valuable tasks.

I'll be honest, I don't think those exercises work for me right now. There's a couple of reasons for this.

1. I'm 18 months in to this job and the task that has dominated my time thus far, redesigning the website (we launched the beta by the way, I don't think I took the time to announce that officially here, although I did on the Vol State blog), is not typical of the work someone in this position would be doing otherwise. Once the redesign launches, the way I work will shift, rather radically. It's hard if not impossible for me to look at the last 18 months and make conjectures for the next 18 months.
2. The biggest drain on my productivity falls outside of my realm of influence; IE it's a trend I am powerless to address. I won't go into detail here but Kirby if you want specifics just email me and I'll fill you in.

So I've been looking at the way Kirby breaks down his model of personal knowledge management and one area I see a lot of room for improvement in the way I currently handle things is with information organization and retrieval. The sad part is I've been sitting on the tools to address this issue for years. I just need to be mindful of how I use them.

I signed up for a Ma.gnolia account back when they were still in beta. I used it for a while, then I found Stumble Upon (hereafter: SU). My thoughts at the time were that SU did all the social bookmarking stuff I had been using Ma.gnolia for with the added element of discovery of new content at the push of a button. That's true in theory. 2 years later, it's obvious that it falls apart in practice.

SU does the whole discovery thing very well. I don't think I ever would have found jQuery without SU. I had been underwhelmed by the JavaScript libraries I had seen during the first few months of that whole buzz and had pretty much written off the whole idea. I was just gonna stick to writing my own custom unobtrusive JavaScript using the Document Object Model. Now I literally use jQuery every day. My job would not be the same without it.

But I discovered jQuery at a time when I actually had the time to take on the learning curve, as gentle as it may be. The official documentation is complete enough that managing access to the information I needed to direct my own learning wasn't an issue either. The only exception I could find to that would be the plug ins, but truth be told if the plug in doesn't make intuitive sense and isn't well documented, I don't use it.

Compare that to some things I hope to learn more about in the near future, such as Drupal and Cake PHP or Perl. Or even compare it to some of the stuff I'm already using but need to reference source material rather than working from the top of my head, like regular expressions and PEAR or Active Directory. Now we're talking about steeper learning curves just as what little time to learning new skills is shaved away as I try to push the redesign through the beta testing phase and into launch. I keep stumbling onto sources for these topics, but lacking the time to fully digest them, I thumb them up and move on.

Ok, that last statement begs the question, if I don't have time to digest this stuff how do I have time to keep stumbling onto new content? First of all, SU is addictive. On top of that, it's so easy to just click the stumble button (with or without specifying a topic to stumble through, such as web design) that I can click through a fresh page or two while I'm checking in the files I just completed working on in Dreamweaver (hereafter: DW). Or while I wait for DW to generate the broken link reports I've been running lately. Actually, now that I bring that up, I really hope DW performs better on the redesigned site. The current site is such a mess of spaghetti code that DW is prone to take its sweet time or even crash when I ask it to perform a site wide action. The redesign is much leaner. Based on the work done so far, the code we shave off should be equivelant to about 68 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare. No, really. Project Gutenberg has the complete works of Shakespeare as a plain text file. I've done the math. :)

This is where the problem comes in. I find these great resources, or at least potentially great, but going back to find them later gets to be a real pain. Sometimes I don't take the time to write my own tags for a page. I just thumb it up and switch back to DW or click the stumble button again. But SU being socially driven, the tags default to the category chosen by the person submitting the site. I currently have 143 stumbles tagged with “graphic-design”. I'm not a graphic designer. I don't really even consider myself a web designer. If you want to split hairs, I consider myself more of a web developer. When I tag an article relating to design, I use “web-design”. I've got 418 of those. But it's possible I didn't personally tag all of them. If the person submitting them tagged it as “web-design” and I just thumbed it up and moved on without bothering to apply my own tags to it, then that's how it would default. It's obvious that graphic design is a pretty popular tag in the wild and the zeitgeist is polluting my tag cloud.

An Example

Over a year ago (November 1st of 2007 according to my SU history), I stumbled upon Scott Jehl's StyleMap script. At the time I thought, “This is how we need to do the org charts.”. Previously we had done the org charts in Microsoft Viso and then those files were exported to HTML. But that produces a tangled mess of frames and images. It's hard to navigate, hard to maintain, and doesn't even work on my Mac (thanks Microsoft). I thumbed it up and moved on.

In October of this year, I finally turned my attention to the org charts for the redesign. I remembered stumbling upon this script a long time ago that would be perfect. But I couldn't find it in my SU history. I tried Google searching every combination I could think of. I literally wasted an entire day trying to find this script.

The problem was the default tag the page was assigned had nothing to do with how I conceptualized the content of the page. I don't even remember what it was now and I have since gone back and edited the entry with my own tags. Google wasn't working because I had forgotten that it was written as a script to do site maps rather than org charts. To add insult to injury, when I finally dug up the article and tried to put the script into use, our org chart proved to be way too complex. But I could have discovered that in an hour had I not wasted an entire day (and part of the following morning) digging up the script.

The Problem

Partly due to flaws in the way I use it, and partly due to flaws in the way it's designed, SU is failing me as a means of efficient information organization and retrieval. In defense of the development team behind SU, it is designed more as a discovery engine than as an organization tool. And I can't sing enough praises as to how well it performs its core function.

The Solution?

So I turn my attention to my neglected Ma.gnolia account. If I start using both these tools to perform the tasks for wich they were designed, and approach my use of these tools in a mindful way, I think I can milk a lot more productivity out of my days. I'll map out that plan in a future entry. Stay tuned.