so that vaguely works, but i've been unable to find a decent list of all the possible formatting characters that work in whatever frankenstein jinja-django-python monster we've got running on the site. Not all of the django ones work (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/).

• %a -- 3-char week abbr
• %A -- Full day of week
• %b -- 3-char month abbr
• %B -- full month name
• %c -- Thu Feb 18 08:56:31 2010
• %C -- this outputs "20" for every line on the page, no idea
• %d -- day of month

Pattern matching seems to indicate that you can format jinja datetime / timestamps using python date formatting ...

---

Which is why at work I'm taking on the (currently not-unmanageable) job of responding to customer support requests.

However, I'm finding that gmail (we use google apps) is not really a good interface for doing this quickly. I want to be able to do things like bulk respond to a set of emails with the same message... Gmail has the canned responses plugin, but that doesn't cut it -- it's too slow to use.

So I just hooked Thunderbird into our support queue, and now I'm trying to figure out how to configure or optimize it for processing customer support emails. I'd also love it if it automatically kept stats or some how output to a CSV file on the number of emails processed through canned responses.

Or maybe I just need some lightweight CRM software. Hmm... I wonder what the best CRM solutions are for a small business? and how much can I expect to pay? If only there were a website with some reviews and a listing of top providers that would give me a sense of what to expect... (Okay, this is a shameless plug, since that's what ChoiceVendor does.)

• Office Interactive: "All you need to run your business using one system". That scares me; I don't want to run my whole business on this. NEXT.
• BatchBook: "Your Social CRM". I don't really want my CRM to be social. I want it to be efficient. This seems to be about within-company contact management, not CRM (remember, that would be CUSTOMER relationship management).
• Relenta: "Can your email do this?" Again, seems more salesforce / lead tracking-focused.

Let's try investigating "Customer Support Software for small business".

• Business.com -- ooh, that looks promising, they have a result in Google for "Small Business CRM Software: Customer Service Solutions | Business.com" (and I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to make them even more credible for their stupid site). Oh right. Business.com is a crappy AdWords linkfarm.
• WorkEtc: Okay, again they want to manage my entire company. First, dont' want that, second, not authorized to make that decision, third, we're generally pretty happy with Google Apps. (Most of us worked at Google after all, and we're pretty used to their stuff.) However, maybe their Help Desk Software is what I want.

Why are there SO MANY crappy sites for small businesses, by the way?

Okay, now I'm back to Salesforce Service Cloud 2. I can't really see if it does what I need since I have to register to walk through their product demo. Annoying. I'm pretty sure I even have an account with them already, but I'm not going to bother to look it up just to see if they even remotely have what I need.

Open source help ticket system:

Kill me now. I don't want this attached to our bug tracking and I care about the interface and how fast it'll let me get through the emails in our queue. I don't want to have to install anything anywhere, either. Back to paid / hosted services....

Searching through the Thunderbird extensions for business, CRM, helpdesk, and related keywords yielded no results.

Okay, I'm hosed; I've now spent about 2 hours researching this and haven't come up with a satisfactory discussion or solution, so it's time for me to ditch the effort and just process the emails manually.

Le sigh.

Here's the question on Quora, but haven't yet gotten much of a response:
http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_the_best_fresh_up_to_date_academic_type_resources_for_mobile_UI_UX_design

Today we launched our Private Beta release. We've still got a long ways to go -- On to usability testing!

www.choicevendor.com

Anyway, I wanted to leave a review on the product page in the Apple store. I can't figure out how to post my review:

"Some words in your review cannot be published. Please revise your review." Huh?

Their guidelines state "avoid comments about... service and support", but how the hell are you supposed to review a product that doesn't work if you can't describe anything about the customer service response to the issue? I've tried about 8 versions of text for this review, and I have no idea why they won't let me publish this.

So on my own blog I'll say it:

Fuckers.

Love,
Ellen

The Church - A Box of Birds; Snow Patrol - Eyes Open

And now, not only does Digg do it too, but the sites are so dumb that they're double stacking these stupid toolbars.

This is crap primarily because it breaks basic web behavior: the URL on your web browser no longer represents the page you're viewing, or trying to view. Big juju nono. We've known this since 1996, people!

Also, I don't want to send someone to http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=89405539347&h=1e79i&u=2fnBr&ref=nf. I want to send them the link that's www.youtube.com so they know where they're going and what they're going to get.

The one case where Google does something like this -- a frame with another site inside its toolbar -- is when a user clicks on an image search result. That frame bothers a lot of site owners that Google links to, but it was a necessary tradeoff because image search is kind of sketchy and occasionally unreliable. Users click on an image result and get taken to pages that no longer have the image they were looking for, and the toolbar exists to help them identify the image they wanted -- NOT as a marketing-sticky thing for Google. And even though it's often beneficial, it still confuses a lot of users.

Note that mismatched content and URLs is a usability problem for Google Maps. The URL that many users copy from their browser address bar usually doesn't correctly represent the state that the user's in due to the way the site's AJAX works. AJAX or FRAME, it's the same problem.

Over the years, I’ve learned the following heuristics about my typical user base. With 14 dinner guests, only 11 will require chicken-of-doom. In Northern California, one person ends up vegan, and two vegetarian. Two are Jewish (no shellfish or pork), and one, despite mild alcoholism, is nominally Muslim and doesn’t eat pork either, so that rules out the bacon wrapping on the steaks. Once in a while, I have a guest who is severely allergic to eggs, gluten, and/or nuts, just to keep life interesting. Killing your guests is the opposite of entertaining, unless you happen to be Hannibal Lecter, so when in doubt about allergens, stick to tofu. Oh wait! people can be allergic to soy, too...

The Dinner Program: Throwing a dinner party with one knife, 11 militant chickens, and your design degree [PDF]. Ambidextrous, Summer 2007.

I listen to a fair amount of symphonic music.

I think of symphonic music first in terms of the composer (e.g. Bartok, Beethoven), then the work (5th Piano Concerto in E Flat Major), and then, in the cases where I have multiple performances of the same work, the conductor & performing orchestra (Julius Katchen & London Symphony Orchestra; Hélène Grimaud, Staatskapelle Dresden & Wladimir Jurowski).

However, music metadata format lists the conductor and symphony in the "artist" field on CDDB / iTunes. This is moderately annoying to deal with in the iTunes interface (I have to display and then sort by the correct columns of metadata) but absolutely intolerable on my iPod. Trying to listen to Smetana's Ma Vlast means that I have to remember the name of the composer and orchestra? Oh come on.

So I wrote an Applescript to fix the metadata on my symphonic catalog. It searches my library for all tracks whose genre is "symphonic" and swaps around some of the field values. I still retain the performance info, but as "album artist" instead of "artist".

(It similarly annoys me when other albums list both performers of a one-off song (e.g. Madonna and Justin Timberlake), which breaks that one song apart from the rest of the album when I sort by artist. In these cases I manually reset the "artist" field.)

* What people generally call "classical," but I refer to it as "symphonic" because of a snobby old habit of mine: "classical" refers to a specific period / style of symphonic music in the Western canon, e.g. Haydn and Mozart, so I use the more general "symphonic". I guess "orchestral" might be more appropriate... anyway, the organizing genre in my iTunes library is "symphonic".

Yes, I *do* need to create join tables in my database migration definition files.
It wasn't clear to me at first, but now what I'm realizing -- and hopefully this is correct -- is that the rails migration schema file is really just an abstracted way of writing a database setup script. Rails can translate its file into the setup script for whatever database you're using, but you still have to specify all the joins, defaults, etc. just as you would if you were setting up the database in its native language. Check and check.

I do use the scaffolding command to create multiple model-controller relationships. (See O'Reilly OnLamp: Rolling with Ruby on Rails Revisited.)

"test" is a reserved word.
This is apparently a problem. I'm building a DB to track usability tests, and I named one of my tables "test". I'm trying to migrate to "usabilitytests" but i'm running into problems. Solved by deleting the entire app and recreating. Obviously not something that one would always want to do, but I don't know how to un-create models and controllers and whatnot that have already been set.

functions in the controller are lowercase with underscores.
I'm not entirely sure of this, but I downloaded a sample application and checked out that code.

TOTALLY STUMPED: Radio buttons in RoR?
Okay, I found the documentation for how to render a checkbox. Am I smoking crack? Did the entire RoR project forget about the existence of radio buttons? From an interaction perspective, radio buttons are the exact same as SELECT boxes: They afford one-from-many selection. They're just rendered in an easier-to-read and easier-to-operate widget. (Select boxes are hard for people to use, and even if you know what you're doing, they're way more of a pain particularly for administrative-type applications when you interact with the box a billion times a day.) I expect there to be a function like collection_radio that operates almost exactly the same as collection_select -- but as far as I can tell, no such thing exists.

• I am a very good HTML, Javascript, and CSS "coder".


• I am a moderately proficient PHP programmer, which I use to create prototypes for usability tests and whatnot.


• I am nigh-on retarded when it comes to hooking a webapp to a MySQL database. Ergo, I usually don't get beyond the prototype stage for a lot of cool webapp ideas I've had.


• I can muddle along in a handful of other languages and frameworks, like Perl, Java, Clearsilver, Struts, and XSLT.


• I have zero exposure to Ruby, Python, Gems, etc.


• I'm good at programming -- thinking in abstractions, being efficient, breaking down a goal into minute logical steps, etc.

My goal: I'm helping a friend create a usability testing infrastructure for his startup. I want to create a website to recruit participants for various studies, let people sign up to be a participant, and do some lightweight CRM of when they were contacted, outcomes, and whether they have already participated in a test.

Requirements:

Participant:

Firstname Surname Phone Country Timezone Email(unique) DateOfSubmission Age Gender Occupation Industry Education ContactForFutureTests? NativeLanguage Status[ New | AssignedToTest | Archived | CompletedTest ] NOTES

Note: (Each participant can have several notes)
Author Timestamp ParticipantID NoteText

Test: (Each test has several participants)
TestID Status[ Active | Complete | Pending ] Date Description ConsentFormURL Compensation PARTICIPANTS

TestParticipant:
CompensationGiven ConsentFormSigned? ConsentFormID

ConsentForm
UniqueID HTML TestID

Note that this is NOT tied to the actual test data in any way -- that's not the point. This app is just to keep track of who we talked to and when. It's a very lightweight CRM.

A: A howdah duty.

I was impressed -- the interlanguage (and intercultural; "howdy doody" is moderately obscure, no?) pun is pretty sophisticated.

I don't really know Dan, although I hired him via Google to do some fast icons for a small project a couple of years ago. (I happened to be at his website because a friend of mine needs a template for his blog & I was going to recommend Dan.)