I must have been kissed by a Muse at @media, because I had another idea, that I’d like to get help with.

The problem

• There are far too many outdated, obtrusive and plainly badly written tutorials and scripts out there
• As they have been around for a long long time, they are ranked very high in search engines, and new, interested developers will find them instead of The Good Stuff™.

The dilemma

As the developer or writer of these scripts and articles, you do have the choice of the rock and the hard place:

• You hardly have the time or the inclination to rewrite the articles, sometimes they have been published by a third party and you cannot do that.
• You don’t want to delete them, as you do get visitors, and they might be persuaded to explore your publications more and find The Good Stuff™.

One solution

What I thought about, and many people at @media agreed is that there should be an option to keep these scripts and tutorials for achived reasons and tell the visitor about The Good Stuff™
The idea is to set up a service, which I intend to call Obsoletely Famous (yes, I miss Futurama), which is basically a RSS feed listing good, modern articles and resources for the topic at hand.

(Basically a pre-filtered del.icio.us, as many people linking to it sadly enough does not necessarily mean it is a good quality resource, it is simply popular, probably by oversimplifying the issue at hand. A good example of that are a lot of ALA articles, where the real good information ended up in the comments, but not many users go there)

As the developer / maintainer of the script you can set up a bridge page (or a custom error page) that tells the visitor that the above was fun while it lasted, but the list here actually shows better ones.

The benefits

• We re-use the high google ranking to promote The Good Stuff™
• We help writers and scripters / developers to back off things they are not proud of any longer without giving the visitors alternatives
• We ensure that newer users find The Good Stuff™
• New writers of The Good Stuff™ can easily reach more people

The plan of action

Give me the bricks, and I’ll build the house

Basically, we need to identify our areas of expertise and define The Good Stuff™ links. Then I can set up the RSS feed and create some example bridge pages. In the long run, I might persuade my evolt colleagues to host it.

Areas covered:

• JavaScript
• DOM JavaScript
• CSS
• HTML
• Visual Design
• Usability
• Accessibility

We can start by listing some here in the comments.

Check your own stuff

• Let’s all go through what we have online and see what is a possible candidate for becoming obsoletely famous (I know for a fact that 75% of my onlinetools.org is). Squint your eyes and look at it in a menacing way – make it aware that its days are numbered^*
• Scan your bookmarks for good, modern tutorials and name them here.

^* optional

The @media conference is over and taught us mainly that there was a misconception of what the audience would be. The first day was a bit of preaching to the converted, whereas the second one seemed to realise that and start an expert discussion instead.

This afternoon, the JavaScript / DOM think tank will meet in the pub to discuss things further, mainly discussing the impact of DOM changes and screen readers.

Derek Featherstone of WATS fame uttered a quite interesting remark during his testing for accessibility presentation:

We advise screen reader users to turn JavaScript off. This is to avoid nasty surprises and because most JavaScript enhancements are visual only.

Excellent point, IMHO. We use object detection to check if the browser supports certain scripts, and punish Opera 6 by cheekily testing for createTextNode and getElementById.

This is a much cleaner way than browser sniffing and easy to check. However, when it comes to screen readers, a lot of our testing really is assuming what they should do or not. Especially new DOM developers assume that a screen reader works like a text browser, which is not true, as modern screen readers do detect and speak out DOM changes.

More over a pint later.

From Thursday on, I will attend the @media conference in London. In case anyone wants to have a chat there, I am rather easy to find:

Just came back home from a Tori Amos gig in Hammersmith. If you don’t know Tori Amos, go to the nearest independent record shop (don’t support the big ones) and buy one of her CDs, read the lyrics while listening to it and be amazed.
It was a very good gig, she is some wonder (playing a piano and an organ at the same time and singing does require some skill). Although, some things I have to remark:

• Ticketmaster are a bunch of c very greedy people indeed and when you buy a ticket that states “standing place only”, bring a spyglass, as you will be at the very end of the room far far away from the stage perched like tube commuters, and that for 28 pound!
• Our society consists to 10% of weak bladdered freaks who cannot stand a 100 minutes performance without two loobreaks. Please stop downing 5 pints before you go to a concert
• George Michael has lyrics! When Tori covered “Father figure” I realised that.
• There are not enough red haired stars on this planet

I bought Chuzzle for a friend last weekend and got totally addicted to it. While other developers go crazy about the latest 3D FPS releases I can spend hours exploding fluffy coloured things in a tetris / blocks clone. Will I ever grow up?