Why popurls is the perfect aggregator
Online feed aggregators such as Google Reader and Bloglines are great for collecting timely articles from your favorite blogs and news sources. Every news site has an RSS feed attached to it, but that doesn’t always mean it’s a good idea to stick the feed directly into your reader.
The problem is volume. Blogs often update only a handful of times per day. The most active blog I subscribe to, the mental_floss blog, updates just nine times per day, on average. What happens when you have a feed from a site like Digg or reddit, which might cycle through dozens of front-page stories throughout the course of a day?
This is where popurls shines.
Instead of chronologically reading through these stories—which you’re not likely to do, anyway—you get an instant snapshot of many sources from across the Web. popurls is the brainchild of self-proclaimed “web maverick” Thomas Marban.
In comparison
Note that I’m not attempting to compare popurls to the aforementioned feed readers; they have their place for reading leisurely-updated blogs. Instead, popurls is more comparable to Web “portals” such as Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes.
It’s pretty
Because there are a limited number of feeds and categories available, Thomas was able to create images for the titles of feeds—typeset in Arial Rounded MT Bold. This is a nice touch in era of the Web where the universal adaptation of embedded fonts is still a far-off dream.
popurls also uses white space very effectively. There’s a lot of information here, but it never appears crowded or overflowing.
Most importantly, there is only one advertisement on the whole page. One! If you’re using a device with a smaller screen, such as a MacBook, this ad is actually “below the fold” and you might never even see it.
It has just the right amount of customization
I’m a hacker by nature, but there are some things I would rather not waste my time tweaking.
popurls lets me do what I want, and keeps out the stuff about which I could care less. I can reorder content blocks, and turn off media feeds (Flickr et al.). I can toggle the visibility of “popular today” or “recommended” feeds. I can set the color scheme to light-on-dark to give my weary eyes a rest.
I don’t want fancy widgets. I don’t need another place to access my e-mail inbox, my calendar, my weather report, and my sports scores. I don’t need themes when the user interface already approaches perfection. popurls doesn’t give me any of these features, and for that I am grateful.
You see, the thing I dislike about portal sites is that everything is user-generated. Not only is the content aggregated from user-submitted and user-created news stories, but in order to get the site in working order, the user himself must go about organizing feeds, finding relevant topics, picking color schemes, etc.
I don’t want full control over every nook and cranny at the sacrifice of speed and clean design. Instead, I want a talented Web developer to make the right decisions for me. In this case, I’m relying on Thomas to pick the most popular content feeds and deliver them in a nice layout.
I still need a little control, but these settings are called preferences for a reason. popurls seems to have struck the proper balance.
The customization controls are kept separate
You’ll also notice that popurls lacks many cumbersome user interface elements that plague the layouts of other portals. Instead of mixing content with user preferences, popurls places all the customization options in four clearly-labeled menus at the top-right.
Want white-on-black, or a larger font? Design is the place. Want to reorder your feeds? Hit up the View menu.
Design like this keeps the layout neat, and it prevents you from hunting all over the site to change an infrequently-used setting.
Miscellany
popurls gets brownie points on a few other fronts.
It has a suite of other useful sites
Check out the complete list of sites on the popurls network.
There’s popshuffle, the Web equivalent of channel surfing on your television. popurls.tv satisfies your content visualization needs. Also, the iPhone edition is just fantastic. There are even sites optimized for your Blackberry, PS2, PSP, and Wii.
No account required
popurls doesn’t have a proprietary account management system. You have to be authenticated through one of several other logins, one of which you’re bound to have already. At the current time, the supported login credentials are: OpenID, Google Accounts, Windows Live ID, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL AIM, Technorati, Flickr, and Blogger.
Conclusion
Work popurls into your daily Web reading habits. You won’t be disappointed. It frees you to spend more time reading articles and spotting trends percolating through the Web.
I leave you with an inspirational quote hidden in the source code of the popurls main page:
__ __ ( \,/ ) \_ | _/ IN THE FUTURE EVERY URL WILL BE POPULAR FOR 1.5 SECONDS (_/ \_) - thomas and the wise butterfly
Relevant links
Acknowledgments
A special thank-you to Thomas Marban, creator of popurls, for giving me a shout-out on the popurls blog.
~ February 17, 2009
Revised February 19, 2009
The qualities of good design
The discipline of design is one that transcends individual fields. In the context of this blog, you might be thinking of design in terms of software engineering, or in Web site design and layout, but take a step back for a minute and think about the overarching features that always manifest themselves in good design.
I blame the typeface
My interest in design was sparked from the documentary Helvetica, directed by Gary Hustwit 1. This film taught me that design knows no bounds. A good designer should be able to design anything: a typeface, a sports car, a building, or an album cover. No matter the creative challenge, the same basic design principles hold true.
In Helvetica, renowned designer Massimo Vignelli expresses this idea well.
“The life of a designer is a life of fighting—fight against the ugliness, just like a doctor fights against disease. For us visual disease is what we have around and what we try to do is try to cure it somehow, you know, with design.”
You’ve got to love this guy.
Anyway, I have compiled a list of properties that I believe must be present in every well-designed thing. Whether in Web and graphic design, industrial design, architecture, or even engineering and software development—all these traits apply.
These qualities are as follows, in no particular order:
- Good design is timeless
- Good design is unmistakable
- Good design represents the culmination of one line of reasoning
- Good design gratifies the senses and the mind
- Good design is often imitated, yet never supplanted
Let’s examine them one at a time. You know, so your head doesn’t explode.
Good design is timeless
The best designs have lasting appeal, because the notion of a good design does not change with time. That is not to say that such a design cannot be a product of its own time. While a given design might be born out of some wacky, fleeting art or social trend, a truly strong design never goes out of style.
The Parthenon suddenly comes to mind, in a way that makes me think I have been planning this essay for far too long. The Parthenon was constructed around the proportions of the golden ratio under the premise that it was the most visually-pleasing aspect ratio. How can you go wrong with a design guideline like that? Timelessness is the reason its style has been mimicked in the façades of countless buildings over the centuries.
It has been 2,500 years since The Parthenon was built, and it still stands as an icon of the Golden Age of architecture and philosophy. It has withstood the test of time, both physically and ideologically.
Every designer should be so lucky to work on a such a project.
Good design is unmistakable
Good design will never, ever be confused with a lesser design.
After wallowing in the mires of poorly-planned objects and user interfaces, people develop a sixth sense that alerts them when they are introduced to a better user experience. This has happened to you before; you know how this feels. You can feel things click into place, so to speak. Everything about an object’s design suddenly makes a little more sense. If you don’t have keen senses, you might not be able to pinpoint why, exactly, you feel this way. No matter; the good designer has already left his mark.
To clarify, just because a design is unique does not mean it must be memorable. In fact, some designs are best left to blend into the background. Helvetica is arguably the world’s most ubiquitous typeface, yet most people go about their lives without ever realizing it. Helvetica is simply an irreplaceable specimen whose grace and utility is surpassed by none. This is due to its ability to permeate many facets of culture yet remain emotionally neutral.
Good design represents the culmination of one line of reasoning
I have to admit that this idea came almost verbatim from Helvetica. I thought it was so eloquently phrased that it had to be included. Type designer Jonathan Hoefler explains the appeal of Helvetica:
There’s something about it that does have the feeling of finality to it. This was the conclusion of one line of reasoning […] and perhaps everything after it is secondary in some way.
Arial, I’m looking at you.
Alternatively, this rule might read “Good design does not happen by accident”.
Good design gratifies the senses and the mind
So far, nothing has been said about the beauty of a well-designed object. Every design has an interface to the outside world, and if that interface is not pleasurable to the user, then the design has failed to fulfill its responsibilities.
Notice that I am dancing around the concept of beauty, because it has implications involving just one sense: sight. A good design satisfies the user on every level of interaction.
Imagine you’re using ideal laptop2 computer. It looks cool; really cool. It’s so shiny and attractive that everyone else in the coffee shop envies it. But the ideal laptop does not stop there. It is unbelievably light, yet sturdy enough that it can be tossed into a backpack with some books. It has a bright screen and a tactile keyboard. It runs quickly and responds instantly to every command.
I think you get the idea by now. Good design is never sloppy in its aesthetics. It also stimulates the senses and keeps the mind alert.
That is, until you spill your latte all over the keyboard.
Good design is often imitated, yet never supplanted
It’s okay—I had to look up the meaning of supplant, too. I will reproduce it here, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary.
verb [ trans. ]
supersede and replace : the socialist society that Marx believed would eventually supplant capitalism.
In the same way that a musical artist measures their success by the number of songs turned into Weird Al parodies, a great design also has many imitators. A design might be copied by a third party to achieve the feeling of the original design, or it might be adapted to solve a problem in an entirely new field. A design might even be literally parodied to highlight the stereotypical traits of the design and the people who associate with it.
Observe the search engine Cuil (pronounced “cool”). At its launch, Cuil heralded itself as the “Google killer”. While it appears to have the same simple search interface, Cuil lacks some important features of Google. It does not utilize Google’s beautifully-simple PageRank algorithm that is based upon the structure of the Web itself, nor are its search results listed in a single column of text that scales well to smaller displays and mobile devices. Cuil merely made itself look uncool in the face of the an Internet megastar who seems to have gotten search “right”.
Conclusion
It all sounds like a lot of high-level, ambiguous gibberish—and that’s because it is. I’m hoping you can walk away from this essay with an appreciation for the thought and work that goes into making any design successful.
More importantly, I hope that you refer to these rules the next time you embark on a creative endeavor. We can all make the world a little more beautiful with some good design of our own.
It’s just what the doctor ordered.
Relevant links
Footnotes
1 I am eagerly awaiting Gary’s newest film, Objectified, which delves into industrial design and the manufacture of everyday objects. Expect some more Hustwit-inspired material following its release.
2 Notebook, shmotebook. Am I the only one who still calls them laptops?
Jekyll makes blogging fun again
Jekyll describes itself as a “blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby”. It is written by Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of GitHub. You may have already seen that this very weblog is powered by Jekyll. An article discussing the pros and cons of this emerging technology seemed like a suitable first post.
You may wish to begin by reading his account of the creation and rationalization of Jekyll. Tom’s article also goes into details about how to actually create a Jekyll site. The GitHub repository is also well-documented, and he provides a useful example site repository, so I will not go into implementation details here.
As of this writing, Jekyll is in version 0.4.0.
All about Jekyll
Instead of blogging on a remote Web application, Jekyll enables you to personally store your blog’s template and all its content. Blog posts are Textile files. The site itself is just is a series of HTML templates that are transformed by the Liquid templating engine.
Why this is important
Once you apply Jekyll, your site becomes a directory of plain-text files that now may be trivially placed into your favorite version control system (VCS), such as Subversion or Git. This enables you to track changes to your posts, store an offsite backup, and access it from any remote computer with a VCS client.
In addition, your blog becomes immune to high traffic to which regular blogging sites fall victim. Database-powered blogs that lack caching are traditionally slow and susceptible to grinding to a traffic halt when the Digg hordes come running. If you’re a popular/controversial blogger (I am neither), or you’re hosting a site on your own small server, then static pages are definitely the way to go.
When it all comes down to it, having complete control over your blog and having its contents in a non-proprietary format gives you piece of mind that you just can’t get from a blog Web application.
Other cool features
You can run Jekyll with the --auto option to automatically rebuild the output files whenever a source file changes. Combine this with the --server option and you have a dynamically-updating Web server on which to preview your award-winning blog.
Also note that Jekyll will transform any file that has a special YAML header at the top, and this includes XML files. This very site has an Atom feed which I pulled directly from Tom’s site.
I was dreading learning the syntax and idiosyncrasies of the new technologies upon which Jekyll is based. My fears were confirmed in Liquid (more on this later), but Textile has been a joy to use. It’s no LaTeX, but notation is compact and it feels easy to write. However, it will be a while before I stop typing “textile reference” into Google.
You might miss some things
Jekyll has lots of other features I’m not using here: each post can have categories and tags. These are derived from the directory structure in which the post file is stored. This metadata can be accessed and filtered using Liquid. You can even provide links to related posts.
What you don’t get is all the dynamic goodness of a bigger blogging app. Most notably, you lose the ability for visitors to leave comments. This works well for a personal, broadcast-style blog, but if interactivity is a must, then you should seek a more dynamic blogging solution.
Commenting can be achieved through third-party comment solutions, but it’s not as well-integrated, and you lose almost all customization. This blog uses Disqus.
Quirks and downsides
You’ll have to learn Liquid and Textile. Knowledge of Ruby helps, too. Hackers such as myself thrive on this sort of thing, but not everyone does.
Liquid
The biggest downfall with Jekyll is its use of the Liquid templating system. Liquid has a very special and limited syntax that doesn’t look or behave anything like Ruby. It’s very protected, making it difficult for users to run compromising code.
Now, Jekyll’s original task was to power GitHub Pages, and Liquid fits this environment well, preventing users of GitHub from running potentially malicious server-side code. However, when you’re running code on your own computer and generating static pages, this just becomes limiting and unnecessary. Jekyll needs to lose Liquid and give us full ERB evaluation, à la Ruby on Rails
Relative paths
Tom was smart to include a --server option that runs a WEBrick server to preview your blog. This is great, but it assumes that your blog or site is going to reside in the root directory of a Web address. The URL generation methods within Jekyll also assume this.
It would be great if URLs were all relative, or Jekyll provided a method to reach the root directory of your blog, e.g. creating the string “../../../” to hop up three directories from a post in “/2009/02/10/” to reach a stylesheet at the site root.
Summary
Jekyll is fun to use. It’s a solid, simple, and useful project that brings blogging full-circle and molds modern Web writing styles with the static HTML coding days of yore. It gives you full control and access to your site, at a minimal cost of time, money (static HTML hosting is free or cheap), and server resources.
If you’re an enterprising hacker, or just someone who wants to keep a simple, no-frills, leisurely-updated personal blog, Jekyll is the ticket.
In the future, I intend to try to address some of my concerns with Jekyll by contributing to the project with my fledgling knowledge of Ruby. There’s a still a lot to be done and I’m looking forward to updates from Tom and the team.