Because I was traveling to London for a conference last week, this So Last Week is covering the two last weeks.
Cookies in webkit
For RDS, we had an issue with cookies on webkit. I went on a quest to understand why. Webkit has an issue with “,” character in cookies. It strips everything after the comma in the value. There is a new specification in the process of redifining cookies. You can expect that some implementations to be fixed, and then creating interoperability issues.
Mailing-list
We are using mailing-list for projects archived on the Web. An interesting question has been raised on when creating a new list. So far, we tried to limit the creation of new list when we were getting new clients and not for each project. People participating can decided to subscribe or unsubscribe from each list. The person asking the question was afraid I guess of too many people involved around the project and having useless forks in the dicussions. This is indeed a possibility, but it is a reasonable risk to accept for the huge benefits:
- free archiving of the project
- people who are not directly involved in the current project can act as expert or raise a flag on something they have experimented in the past
- Searchability on one client. Some projects might have influence on other projects for the same client.
People working in Web agencies are not permanent. They just pass, but the client has a longer duration and then focusing the archiving around the client is usually better than creating tens of small mailing-lists for short period of time.
Discussions and scope
Some discussions, if not well managed by the person who initiated it, can wildly drift from their initial goal. We had an example this week on a simple idea which was posted and the threads had a few forks raising issues. The mail is a good place for discussing but not for building up the knowledge of this discussion. In this case a wiki is a lot more effective.
- Send a message on the list with your scope and expectations
- Discuss it on the list (asynchronous wins here)
- Compile step by step the results of the discussions on a wiki
Careful: The people on the list have to be aware of this practice. If not, you create a misunderstanding on how to handle it. This starts with the fact you should make it clear that people except if they are in the To: or Cc: have the freedom to not read the messages.
Wiki refactoring and Techno Manifesto
One of our working tool inside Pheromone is a wiki. It helps us document certain things such as technologies, minutes of meetings, definition of employee roles, and sometimes draft client proposals. This week, I was writing the Technology Manifesto to give a reference for developers and the rest of the Team what are the main orientations of Pheromone.
En coordination avec la mission de Pheromone, le manifeste technologique définit les grandes orientations de l’agence. Le porteur du Manifesto est le CTO de l’agence. Le directeur du développement
- Technologies OpenSource
- Respect des normes Web et ouvertes
- Promouvoir les données ouvertes tout en considérant les règles de vie privée des utilisateurs de nos services.
- Respect de l’accès pour tous
- Services et APIs respectant HTTP REST
- Services multiplateformes (mobile, desktop, etc.)
Directeur/Directrice du développement
We have a job proposal for a development director at Pheromone. I encourage specifically women to apply. Note that the preference will be given to the best candidate, man or woman. But I found it quite hard to recruit women in the technological area. I would love for example to recruit a very good Web API (REST) woman developper.
W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs
Last week I was participating to the W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs. You can read the rough minutes of the Workshop for Monday 12 July and Tuesday 13 July. A report will be published in the future. I will probably write an article later on about some findings of the workshop.
Research on Portals
In the last two weeks, we surveyed Web portals through the world across languages and cultures. It helped us to figure out very interesting findings and some very specific elements depending on culture, techniques, etc. Basically, they all look the same and give a strong feeling of “Déjà Vu”, but there exists a few of them with very interesting features.
Tags: conference, cookies, mailing-list, privacy, workshop