In the last few months I struggled a little bit with designing a few websites. Yes, I am a web developer. And yes, I create good designed web pages. But usually I get a Photoshop File and build the site from that. That needed to change.

My weapon of choice was Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy. And it is really great. From layout over fonts to color you will find everything covered in this book you need to design a webpage. After this you have all the basic knowledge about design. The next step is experimentation and learning from good looking sites.

Sadly the next book is only available in German, but “Kunst. Die ganze Geschichte” is a good companion for the design book. It covers the complete history of art and explains the different styles and why the artist has painted the image how he has painted it. You can get a great deal of inspiration from this. And to every cologne citizen: you can get into the museums for free on every 1st thursday. Use that!

At first I was a little bit afraid of doing this. Will I still be able to read my news, blogs and other content on the net? Will I see tons of click-overlays, blinking flash adverts and other annoying stuff that made me install an adblocker in the first place?

The first hour of surfing without an adblocker was eye opening. Advertisement has learnt a lot in the last 10 years. And the site owners too. Most of the sites changed from “ads right were the user is most annoyed to see one” into “ads were they don’t piss off the user”. And most of the ads have learned that lesson, too.

In the second hour of surfing I did something I would not expect to do ever. I actually clicked on an advert that interested me. It was the ad for a computer game I wanted to buy. And after seeing the trailer on the ad-site I bought it. To be fair I would have bought that game anyway and clicking on ads was very rare in that week. There were only a handfull of ads I clicked on. And most of them didn’t interest me after I saw their site.

In the next few days I got the feeling that I was wrong in activating the adblocker on all sites. Most sites do respect you and try to make money with ads and think hard on where to place them. Sadly there were exceptions. Some sites love to put a video ad in full browser window size that you have to click away. With activated sound. But those were rare.

After the week was over I thought about activating the adblocker again, but I felt I did not need it for most sites. I only want to punish sites that didn’t respect me and tried to do evil stuff with ads. Stuff that I think was not okay. Like those full screen ads.

Sadly Adblock Plus, the adblocker of my choice, did not have a nice gui interface for that “blacklist mode”. If you know how to write the filter rules, you could have the plugin only filter ads on certain sites. But I didn’t want to do that manually. So I forked the plugin and added that feature. The fork can be found here:

https://github.com/bitboxer/charma_adblockplus_chrome

If you clone that repo and load the plugin into your chrome, you can activate the blacklist mode in the last tab of the settings panel. After that the adblocker is deactivated on all sites and you can enable it for specific sites with a click on the icon in the url bar.

And I really encourage you to at least try this for a few hours. The internet can only be free if we allow ads. Only those few sites who do annoy you with bad designed ads need to be punished. Not all sites.

TL;DR: Ads are not that bad like they used to be. Try to switch to an adblocker that only enables adblocking on bad sites, not on all sites. I have created a fork of adblock plus for chrome that does this.

Do you want to participate? Register for the event today! Details can be found on hcking.de.

For example, look at the Cologne Zoo in OpenStreetMap:

And this is how it looks like in Google Maps:

A lot of information. Even the locations of the different animals are marked on the map. I love it. I love the fact that you have tons of bike paths that are unavailable in Google Maps. But please don’t show all of this information at once.

If you zoom out of Cologne, you will see what I mean:

Compare that overcrowded mess to the clean Google counterpart:

The Google Map Renderer highlights the important roads and fades out the unimportant onces. Sadly the OpenStreetMap-Renderer doesn’t. A few fixes in the color schemes in the smaller zoom views and a improved rendering of street names should fix this, shouldn’t it? You have tons of data, please make it look good.

At the moment it’s only a small app with the railscast default layout, but this will change soon.

And this is how it looks like:

Pretty, pretty, pretty …. pretty good!

If you want to participate somehow, feel free to contact me!

If you have missed my talk, you can find the slides here:

If you haven’t done yet, please rate my talk here and leave a few hints on how to improve it.

See you in Amsterdam!

Actually the first lines of basic I entered into the c64 were from “Fix and Foxy”, a German magazine for kids. But after entering the few examples from that little magazine, I started reading the handbook. And I started to understand what I just wrote.

Nowadays “handbook” means a PDF on a disc that only shows how to do very basic things. In the 80s, it was more than that. Way more. It covered everything from first steps in basic to a few examples on how to access the graphic memory to create images and move them around on the screen. And it was well written. Well enough for a child to understand it. Well enough for me to start writing my first few little games.

It ignited a fire that is still burning inside me and hopefully will burn a few more decades.

What was your book that changed everything?

I will present a talk about arduino and ruby at the euruko this year. Hope to see you there!

Endless fun with Arduino and Eventmachine

After seven years of working as a java developer, Bodo fall in love with ruby and moved to cologne to work as a full time ruby developer. He started tinkering with hardware as a teenager with his C-64, his dad created the robots and he wrote the software that made them move. Besides coding Bodo loves diving, traveling and biking.

In his talk he will show how to connect an arduino with ruby using eventmachine. He will also show potential use cases and projects that can be created using this technique. Most of the projects can be finished on one weekend.

If you didn’t manage to get a ticket, but you would love to talk with ruby developers in Berlin, maybee the eurucamp is a good alternative for you.

It’s a sleeping pill in book form. Unbelievable. The author really thinks that by showing railroad diagrams he can explain the language. But we don’t want to write a lexer for a compiler. We want to learn good Javascript. And tons of diagrams won’t help here. He even tries to explain RegExp-parsing with those Diagrams.

And the pages where he shows how to write a JSON-Parser?! Why?! Oh my god.

In short: stay away from this book. Really far away.