If you go to a post on streetsblog.org, type in a beautifully written comment, fill in the rest of the fields including 5+7 is, um, 13 and hit “Post”, you get “Error: You have entered the wrong sum in the spam protection field…”  Damn!  So you hit Back and go to correct your error only to find that your comment is gone and you’ll have to type it all over again.  Sucks!

Tests

I have been told that this problem didn’t used to exist on streetsblog.org.  You would hit Back after such an error and still find your comment populating the Comment field.  So I repeated this simple test on different sites and browsers.  Here are the results:

Does the browser cache the comment text after an error?

So it seems each browser has some kind of intelligence that tells it when to cache form content.  The top two sites are getting cached by fewer browsers than the bottom two.  One possible cause for this is the Wordpress MobilePress plugin that only the top two run.  I set up a test instance of streetsblog.org at design.streetsblog.org and deactivated the MobilePress plugin and got these results:

design.streetsblog.org w/o mobilepress
n ie6
y ie7
y ie8
y chrome
y ff 2.0.0.7 - xp
y ff - mac
y safari

So it looks like that plugin is causing some browsers to stop cacheing a perfectly cacheable form entry.  Why is this?

I looked at the MobilePress code somewhat and suspected it might be the session_start(); line of the code and then spoke with Matt, one of the MobilePress developers, about this.  He suggested a few things which I tried but had no effect.  I even tried deleting this line completely but, still, the browsers would not cache the page.  So the problem must be somewhere deeper in the plugin.

Questions and Next Steps

This is where things stand for now.  I’m going to bounce this back to Matt and see if he has any other ideas.  Myself, I’m going to start stripping down the mobilepress plugin until I can find the line that might be causing this problem.

An alternative solution would be to get Wordpress to provide error messages dynamically on the same page as the form.  This would be a good solution since cacheing form content in the browser is ultimately up to the browser so if we get things working in one version of Firefox, there’s no guarantee that they’ll work in the next.  The Wordpress Cforms plugin can easily replace your comment form with an ajaxified form of its own that provides the errors inline.

And another solution would be to get rid of the math spam protection on streetsblog.org, which is the main cause for comment form errors there.  GothamSchools.org has been running without such a spam protection and has been having no problems with comment spam, due to akismet.

Afternoon Update

I performed two more tests on design.streetsblog.org by modifying the session_start(); line of code in MobilePress to two different options:

So both are an improvement but the left one is the best.  I ended up combining both edits because the second edit is going to be deployed in the new version of MobilePress.  Here is my final revision.

After I deployed this on all streetsblogs and gothamschools, I did another round of testing to find that, for some reason, things still aren’t being cached on the streetsblogs in ie8 and ie6.  The only reason I can think of for this is that the production server is configured differently than our test server.  Well, it’s running lighttpd instead of apache for one thing.  I think we can live with this for now.  All other tests pass.

The tricky part now is to draw enough interest to get the bulk of the 3000 block parties registered on the site without which our weekly notifications would be less useful.  Transportation Alternatives is in contact with the Upper West Side Community Board to encourage them to register each block party they approve.  We hope to also work out similar partnerships with other Community Boards.  As a return service, we have developed a widget for inclusion on Community Board sites that lists their upcoming parties.

Behind the scenes is a PostGIS database we use for its spatial queries.  The site is built in pylons and Wordpress, and the mapping is done using OpenLayers.  The site was built to facilitate re-skinning for other purposes.  If you are interested in using or developing with the open source software we wrote, the Block Party project page has the details.

So check it out!  Find out when parties are coming up in your neighborhood.  If you know anyone throwing a party, get them to register it on the site, and, don’t be shy, go and throw a party yourself!

In “Change Your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen,” Kathy Sierra talked about how she had famously avoided using twitter for years.  People would insist, however, that, “You just don’t get twitter!”  and in this talk she finally conceded to the mysterious genius of twitter—something no one seems to be able to really explain except by presenting a series of anecdotes about how twitter has changed their life.

Right after her talk Bruce Sterling took the stage for his meandering poetic monologue on the state of cyberspace.  About half-way through the talk he got to the topic of twitter and looked out upon a sea of twittering audience members, paused a moment to listen to the tap-tap-tap of keyboards, before saying something like, “you listen to what’s being said for 2 minutes and then have to let everyone know what you heard so you twitter about it and then miss the part where I talk about dogs fucking horses… Don’t fool yourself–you are losing out here!”

The topic of using twitter during presentations was directly addressed in “Presenting Straight to the Brain.”  One panelist stated, “in board meetings, when I see people put their hands into a prayer position and look down at the blackberries, I know that I’ve failed them as a presenter.”   Another panelist countered, “I think having a background twitter conversation in parallel to the presentation can be useful.”

Personally, I didn’t use twitter during talks.  You’ll see on my feed that the last of my 6 updates was a message to Sonali asking which conference room she was in.  Wow that’s lame!  That probably should have been a direct message.  But I did witness people summarizing a presentation in a blog post while tweeting highlights, reading a steady flow of incoming tweets, and still paying enough attention to ask questions.  It was pretty impressive!

But is that it?  Were they losing out on anything?  In “Brave New Dating” on the first night of the conference someone said that, “in a conversation between two people, 80% of what is communicated is not in the words.”  Rather it is in the tone of voice, the body language, and perhaps, the silent pauses.  Is this true too for technical talks?  In “Can Social Media End Racism?” how important is it to see the glimmer of emotion in the eye of a presenter, to see the way a particular person stands as they ask a question.  Are these subtle signals important to us?

On the last day of the conference I attended “Therapy 2.0: Mental Health for Geeks.”  This was hosted by a Stanford psychotherapist and played out as a support group to air out grievances with the new technology.  One woman summed it up nicely as she talked about her numerous streams of information and communication from facebook, twitter, text messages, voicemail, personal email, company email, personal blog comments, RSS, etc. being constantly delivered to her computers and iPhone and her addiction and anxiety related to them.  She spoke about her loss of solitude, overall dis-enpowerment, and the loss of a feeling of wholeness in her life.

Another person described the mixed feelings on seeing 10 new message in his inbox as both a relief at being validated as a person and also irritation at the obligation to read and respond to the emails.  And there were the coping mechanisms: One woman admitted that she had about 500 messages in her facebook inbox which she would probably never read.  Another person said that they don’t check their voicemail anymore and say so in their voicemail message.

I posed the question, “are these neurosis really new forms of suffering or are they just new ways of manifesting the age-old dis-ease with our lives?”  Perhaps thirty years ago we suffered just as much but it was based around different things, like television or UFO attacks.  What I was trying to get at is whether the problem was in the technology or in the person using the technology (or both).  There were no easy answers here.

Of course, throughout this conversation, someone’s phone buzzed loudly at least once a minute, perhaps as they received new tweets from their friends.  At one point a woman held her head wincing and with all seriousness said, “Whoever’s phone keeps buzzing throughout this last hour, it is really affecting my peace of mind.”  There were a few muffled laughs, an awkward silence, and then an other buzz.

Towards the end of the session, the facilitator directed the conversation to the ways that our Web 2.0 tools were helping us.  People spoke about things like online support groups, meetup.com, accessible medical information, and airline status updates.  It was a relief to direct our attention to the positive side of things.

So I left South by Southwest with more questions than answers and an increased awareness of the issues with designing technology to really help us live our lives.

The other thing I added is a drop-down listing of categories for the admin ui.  This saves people having to lookup their category id themselves.

Please go here for more information, to ask questions and to comment on this plugin.

• I changed the wording on the About page to use “NYC schools” instead of “the nation’s largest school district”
• I similarly changed the wording of the welcome message on the home page
• I added Description and Keywords meta tags to the home page and am generating them on all single-post pages with the help of the All in One SEO Pack plugin

Today, this is how GothamSchools is ranking on Google:

• nyc schools (26th, up from 37th)
• schools in nyc (18th, up from 32nd)
• nyc public schools (17th, up from 33rd)
• new york schools (> 50)
• school nyc (> 50)
• nyc education (> 50)
• new york city schools (> 50)

So we’ve risen up for some of our chosen keyword picks.  I took a look at some other keyword combination and see that we’re ranked in the top 50 for the following:

• doe nyc schools (25th)
• nyc charter schools (44th)
• nyc public school (24th)
• private school in nyc (40th)

We’re definitely moving in the right direction.  Of course, it’s hard to draw a direct causal relationship between changes I made and our rise in rankings.  It is also affected by posts our bloggers have been writing and who is linking to them.  It is affected by our competitors and what they are doing with their sites.

I don’t have any immediate plans for further SEO tweaks but will keep an eye on our rankings as we grow our readership and influence in the coming year.

For this year of block parties in NYC, we have plans to make BlockPartyNYC the main hub for all 3000 NYC parties.  We plan on receiving data feeds from Community Boards as they approve block parties and, in turn, hosting relevant parties on Community Board sites.  We plan on having more advanced mapping, facebook integration, and other features.

See the full specification.  If anyone has comments on the proposed ways of tackling the new site, please get in touch.

• I changed the <title> tag on the home page of the site to read “GothamSchools - Breaking News and Analysis of the NYC Public Schools”

• I changed the text inside the <h1> to read “GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools”.  I’m not sure if this text will have any effect on the rankings since the CSS makes it invisible.

These changes were made on December, 19, 2008.  Within a day or so I noticed a change in our ranking for some of our keyword phrases.  The new rankings fluctuated a bit over the last few weeks.  Today, this is how GothamSchools is ranking:

• nyc schools (37)
• schools in nyc (32)
• nyc public schools (33)
• new york schools (> 50)
• school nyc (> 50)
• nyc education (> 50)
• new york city schools (> 50)

We have plans to introduce a tagline into our site design.  We can make sure to choose a tagline that contains some of our keywords.  Apart from that, though, I’m not sure what other things can be done to increase our search engine rankings by manipulating the content of our site. Does anyone have any other ideas?