VoteTheSite.com, a micro-site my good friends at New Media Campaigns have built, is conducting an on-line experiment to explore just that question. VoteTheSite.com pits congressional candidates’ websites against each other race-by-race. Races can be viewed randomly or by state. I was surprised by the range of quality congressional websites have. From top notch sites in Texas’ 5th to the really poor websites in Georgia’s 1st they run the quality gamut.

VoteTheSite.com - Vote on Political Websites

After the elections have taken place the votes on websites will be tallied up and compared to election results. Should be really interesting to see what the outcome is and how strong website quality correlates with campaign success.

Within the first 24 hours over 5,000 votes have been cast. Congrats to the New Media team for getting this out the door so quickly (with a little help from the Mechanical Turk)! Go vote on the websites in your state…

VoteTheSite.com was written (in under 2 days!) on an early version of the PHP Framework, the Recess! Framework, I’ve had my head down plugging away on the past couple of weeks. Expect blog activity to pick up as the Recess! Framework moves closer to a public release. Sign up to be notified of the release at RecessFramework.com.

I’m in the process of replumbing the lightweight PHP application framework I wrote with Joel Sutherland over three years ago. Its original design was inspired by the Java Struts Framework. It enabled us to rapidly develop the first version of New Media Campaigns‘ website management software. Two summers ago we did a major redesign inspired by the DRY nature of Ruby on Rails. Since then Joel and Josh Lockhart have been tweaking the framework by addressing the issues which crop up after their intensive use while rewriting New Media’s system. 

Energized by what I saw at the Web 2.0 Expo in NY I’m back at it again. My three big goals with this take:

1) Get it in the wild: Open source with an MIT license. This is going to happen before the New Year. Hopefully sooner. We intended to do this with V2. It actually was publicly available in 2006 for a brief period of time but without any real plan for evangelism. I’ve been using open source software for a long time and its high time to give back.

2) Play nice in the new RESTful world. If I had to bet on a paradigm for interacting with web APIs I would bet the farm on REST. It is perfectly aligned with the grain of the web. Most existing frameworks written without an emphasis on REST have made awkward face lifts to adapt. When revisiting our own framework and considering how to make it properly RESTful this would have held true if not for…

3) Signficantly Improving the Architecture. Revisiting old code is a joy. It’s easy to forget how clever you were and how much work you did. Yet it’s very disturbing to realize how hacked some of the fundamental design was. As mentioned, the current version was influenced significantly by what Rails plumbing looked like circa-2006. Since then two really important things have changed: 1) the emphasis on tying closer to HTTP protocol, and 2) two additional years of experience with systems design under the belt.

So, here’s to take 3! Bits available for download in upcoming months. E-mail me at krisjordan/gmail if interested in being copied on barely functional, pre-release bits in the mean time. Otherwise, stay tuned.

After getting a comment from Ric Bretschneider of Microsoft’s PowerPoint team I came across the book slide:ology on his site Presentations Roundtable. I picked up slide:ology from a bookstore on my way out to New York and it is a great piece of work (and art!) authored by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design. Duarte Design is the firm behind Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” Keynote slide deck. They are also the designers of John Doerr’s TED talk‘s deck. Duarte Design is truly first class.

Innovating with Sticky Notes (Excerpt)

A technique that caught my eye was “Innovating with Sticky Notes” (p28). The premise is to use a sharpie and generate ideas on sticky notes. One idea per sticky note (the bonus of using a sharpie is that is about all you can fit). Just unleash as many ideas as possible and get them up on the wall. Structure and flow can then be orchestrated by rearranging the notes.

Idea Notes for Chord Talk

I decided to give the sticky note method a shot with a talk I’m giving on the Chord Protocol in a graduate class I’m auditing at UNC. I must admit I really liked the technique after trying it out. It’s quick and dirty and prevented me from getting lost in details and aesthetics. My focus remained on the big ideas and overall message I wanted to ‘teach’. I would even go so far as to say that it’s fun. Once I’m done with the talk I’ll narrate a slideshow and throw it up on here so you can see the end result.

This sharpie + sticky notes method is only a detail in the grand thesis of Nancy Duarte’s slide:ology. Spend some quality time with this book before you prepare your next presentation, you won’t regret it.

Aside: if you’re going to use this technique on a wall at a coffee shop be prepared for inquisitive looks!