ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Pretty and Pathetic —

A few thoughts on interfaces and completeness.

My archives are by no means growing smaller – thanks to the efforts of people and my own collecting tendencies, tons of stuff ends up joining the textfiles.com site every month, mostly in the CD Shareware, Artscene and Audio collections. I am still sent BBS Lists going back 20 years and those end up where they should, but that’s a small amount of the pure mass of stuff that’s being added, and the stuff that’s yet to be added.

As this happens, I’m faced with the problem of getting the stuff up there or working to “integrate” it into the site. So let’s bring up my little priority set in order:

  • Make it available.
  • Make it comprehensive within its context.
  • Make it easy to browse.
  • Make it function like some amazing transparent interface bringing you the best in web 2.0 javascript technology wired into a massive database and providing APIs to the general populace to facilitate a wide enough customer base to monetize the assets.

Somehow I never get to the last one.

Experimentation is always underway. For example, the BBS Software Directory has gone through a bunch of revisions, and most recently I tried an experiment with adding shareware under a specific BBS Software directory. The thinking is that if you want to look at, say, Waffle BBS Software, you might also have an urge to check out the myriad shareware programs that were released over the years. Maybe. I guess.

To me, however, it’s more important just to get this rapidly fading software up for browsing. Experiments are fun, but it’s a much more pressing issue to get this data off these disks before it’s gone, and maybe then I can consider how to make it easier to deal with.

Most of the stuff I put up ends up in massive file directories. I have experimented with improving the interface to these directories, but to tell the truth it’s not a huge priority. There are extensions and add-ons for various browsers that do this work for most people, if they need it all laid out and nice. What’s important, to me, is that it’s up.

What’s missing from my efforts is a monetary gain aspect. While I like improving the interface, I do not have any goals to make things “sticky” or to force ads down people’s throats. Because of that, I try to make it get to you as quickly as possible so you can get out of there. It doesn’t matter why you’re here, or that you stick around.

The only price I’ve paid for this is that textfiles.com has none of what people might call a “community”. Attempts to bring “the gang” together have failed miserably and I don’t do it anymore. But I do function as a reference point for other groups of people, or to settle arguments, or maybe just comedic relief.

I feel like a skipping CD on this but I can’t stress it enough how important it is to me to save stuff and make it accessible without immediately yanking it back into another new proprietary stale-in-six-months interface. The interface thing is all sorts of fun, I guess, but that’s not where my heart is. 10 more CD-ROMs are about to go up and a bunch of scans are on the horizon. I think people would rather I get those into the system more than how easily I can javascript my heart out.

Speaking of which, this is fucking evil. Cry into your tea-cosy all you want, Mister Chester, but you’re making things worse in a misguided attempt to make things pretty. If you continue with that project, people will curse your name five years from now. Go work on something more honorable with your talents.

Hey, just because I’m a generous person doesn’t mean I’m not a jerk.


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7 Comments

  1. Steve S. says:

    I don’t see a huge issue with typeface.js. It degrades gracefully where JS is supported. Sure, there are accessibility concerns if you don’t turn off JS, but if accessibility is a major concern for you, you aren’t using JS anyways.

  2. Steve S. says:

    I don’t see a huge issue with typeface.js. It degrades gracefully where JS is supported. Sure, there are accessibility concerns if you don’t turn off JS, but if accessibility is a major concern for you, you aren’t using JS anyways.

  3. Steve S. says:

    “is supported” should read “is not supported”

  4. Peter says:

    Jason, I just wanted to thank you for the tremendous effort this must be. It is truly appreciated by this bbs-user and point-and-click-adventurer.

    Keep up the good work, and if you ever need some technical help with the Web2.0 thing, let me know (but you probably heard that one a few times before)

  5. l.m.orchard says:

    Of course, where typeface.js *doesn’t* degrade gracefully – copy & paste stops working. At least, that’s my experience in Firefox on Mac. I’d hate to try to excerpt from a blog post using this thing for full paragraphs.

  6. Steve S. says:

    @l.m.orchard Copy & paste works just fine, even with JS turned on, on Firefox on Windows. It initially doesn’t appear to work though because the characters you are selecting don’t actually highlight.
    But the point stands… everything is still there in plain text, whether you have JS on or not. “Progressive enhancement” isn’t an enemy to web accessibility.

  7. Flack says:

    The only price I’ve paid for this is that textfiles.com has none of what people might call a “community”. Attempts to bring “the gang” together have failed miserably and I don’t do it anymore. But I do function as a reference point for other groups of people, or to settle arguments, or maybe just comedic relief.

    I’d hang out at forum.textfiles.com and I suspect a lot of other regulars would, too. Might be kind of neat to have an area for people to share ideas, comment on your posts, and talk about BBSes, textfiles, your movies, and whatever other topics happen to pop up.

    I know I’ve mentioned this before, but sending you BBS lists and other things is always a mix of emotions for me. I have a need for those things to be preserved and I’m eternally glad you’re doing it, but there’s always a bit of guilt about sending someone else a digital mess so-to-speak and knowing that you are causing them work.