FromThePage has been on a production server for about a month now, and the results have been fascinating. The first few days' testing revealed some shocking usability problems. In some places (transcription and login most notoriously) the code was swallowing error messages instead of displaying them to the user. Zoom didn't work in Internet Explorer. And there were no … [Read more...] about Progress Report: One Month of Alpha Testing
Review: IATH Manuscript Transcription Database
This is the second of two reviews of similar transcription projects I wrote in correspondence with Brian Cafferelli, an undergraduate working on the WPI Manuscript Transcription Assistant. In this correspondence, I reviewed systems by their support for collaboration, automation, and analysis. The IATH Manuscript Transcription Database was a system for producing transcriptions … [Read more...] about Review: IATH Manuscript Transcription Database
Rails: Logging User Activity for Usability
At the beginning of the month, I started usability testing for FromThePage. Due to my limited resources, I'm not able to perform usability testing in control rooms, or (better yet) hire a disinterested expert with a background in the natural sciences to conduct usability tests for me. I'm pretty much limited to sending people the URL for the app with a pleading e-mail, then … [Read more...] about Rails: Logging User Activity for Usability
THATCamp 2008
I'm going to THATCamp at the end of May to talk about From The Page and a few dozen other cool projects that are going on in the digital humanities. If anybody can offer advice on what to expect from an "unconference", I'd sure appreciate it. This may be the thing that finally drives me to use Twitter. … [Read more...] about THATCamp 2008
Rails 2.0 Gotchas
The deprecation tools for Rails 2.0 are grand, but they really don't tell you everything you need to know. The things that have bitten me so far are: The built-in pagination has been removed from the core framework. Unlike tools like acts_as_list and acts_as_tree, however, there's no obvious plugin that makes the old code work. This is because the old pagination code was … [Read more...] about Rails 2.0 Gotchas