The Future of Open Source

What’s happening now—when we started designing websites we always invented the
wheel over and over again. For long time nobody had figured out Information
Architecture so we all just made stuff up. We made up, we said, this one is going to have
seventeen buttons and we’ll name them after the zodiac, I mean, it was wild and Willie
thing and then Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld wrote Information Architect for the
World Wide Web and people started to figuring it out. Jared Spool and Jacob Nielsen
started talking about usability and people start figuring that out and Steve Krug wrote
about it beautifully and people started going, “Oh, its common sense applied to design.
Oh okay. I get it.” What’s—and so that was sort of the first face of the web.

All these phases in a way it’s all kind of artificial but the first phase of the web was going
from pirates doing underground stuff making it up, nobody really having any idea, how
any that work that was so much fun. And then figuring it out how usability information,
architecture, designs on the web, what are standard screen sizes all that stuff. So, we went
through that phase. What we are going through now with open source and with, open
source library especially is that, I’ll talk about my least favorite thing first. So, CSS is the
design language of the web, and it is not as easy to use as it ought to be and it can be
confusing especially if you are new to it.

So, certain people who created CSS libraries which they give away, where they say well,
if you want a three column layout then do this. It’s not a tutorial telling you how a make a
three column layout. That sort of the first phase, I wrote some of those but—and lots of
people wrote those. This is the second phase where instead of writing editorial people are
basically giving you a bunch of code and saying here is how this score works. If you need
to do a four column layout or here’s the grid. Here’s the 10-part grid that’s 960 pixels
wide and it will fit very nicely at 10x24 by 768 and if you want these proportions then
use this little snip with code and if you want these proportions use this little snip. That’s
useful. It’s my least favorite because there is no one size fits all for design and I think
way that I can help you if you don’t know CSS, make a CSS layout. Ultimately it doesn’t
really educate everyone and it doesn’t allow designers to think outside the box. It’s
basically we’re making a box. But mostly these days it’s not.

Mostly you can use expression engine or Drupal. Basically, tools that are kind of like
Wordpress and or unblogger kind of like blogging tools but on steroids. You can use
those things and there’s a whole community of people out there. We have a site right now
that is currently running in a custom or on contents or at magazines. It’s running on a
beautifully created custom content management systems. It was written in Ruby on Rails
by Dan Benjamin, it’s awesome. He is a brilliant developer and he created it very quickly
but he is also very busy. And when we really need to modify something, we can’t always
get his attention. And he is the only person in the world who knows how to come in and
modify. So, we’re transitioning technique to expression engine. And you know that’s not
a no-brainer process that requires real developer power. But once you’ve done that, once
you’ve—it’s sort of like transitioning to web standards.

If you move from old fashion mark up to web standards there is sort of pain. The first
time you do that because you got all this crap, and you don’t know what to do with it and
it is like how I scrape the content out of all this crap that was used to surround it. But
once you’ve done it you never had to do it again. Once you’ve done it your markup can
stay the same forever even though your layout my changes radically. What is the same
with these tools, once you’re moving from static to million dollars CMS, the pain was all
that learning and all that money and the licensing agreements and miserable stuff.

Now, we have really powerful comparatively easy to understand, open source content
management systems sort of proprietary seems like expression proprietary but it has a
very simple licensing agreement. Basically, you pay like hundred dollars a year and that
is it. We’re really in a time now where a lot of stuff has been invented, we know how a
lot of stuff works, we know community means on the web, we know what magazine,
publishing is on the web. We’re still trying to figure out art direction on the web but we
know we figured a lot of stuff out and people who will in the past might have just kept
their expertise to themselves are now sharing it very generously in these little frameworks
and open source applications and other people way adding writings, Mark Hewitt, who
works for Happy Gag, created extensions for expression engine line. All the client wants
to do is expression engine doesn’t do out of the box. Here is the thing I invented; I’ll give
it to the community to use. So, that’s where we are with that.