Mike's Blog of Some Things IS Integration

Site Reviewed

The AJACS team has a pretty good site for getting non-Indian users acquainted with an extremely diverse country and for keeping Indian users connected to the area where they from.

There are still bugs, or "features," that I remember seeing in the second iteration. After clicking a link to read an article and then hitting the back button you are brought back a blank map and headline bar. I might suggesting putting an on.click button associated to city selection list so that users can reselect the same city over again instead of clicking a different city, then reselecting the original one. This is just a band aid fix.

Good job overall,
Mike

Site Reviewed

Another strong showing by Team Extreme. I liked how you guys changed the format for the discussion group from the overly complicated blog. I would think having to sign up for a third party service would be a deterent to using your site. The only thing I would consider changing would be the second search bar. There are a few options in there, like related links and search area that could be placed out on the homepage. Good job.

-Mike

Site reviewed

I really like the simplicity and ease of use that accompany this site. Since it would be used by those who are currently members of the PWP program, there is no question that it would be useful to them. The only thing that I would suggest adding to the calender page are links to the PWP home page and other useful links.

Good luck,
Mike

Thanks for your response to my question.

After I left Bud's office I went down to the lab and found Jeff who pretty much told me the same thing that you did. I had just forgotten to put the childnode stuff in element retrieval section of code. To make a long story short, I just wanted to openly say thanks for busting out that response so quickly. Had I not been able to figure it out, I know your advice would have saved my butt.

Thanks again,
Mike

Site reviewed

Big changes from the last iteration. It was awesome to see you guys come up with ways to solve some of the questions that Mr. Gobel posed to you during his visit. You guys came up with the blog idea for the reviews and got that working. By tallying how many people mark places as a favorite, you are gathering the kind of data that he talked about as being valuable to marketers, so you could have a potential to make some money there.

The only downside I could see to this is that users might get turned off by having to sign up for another website.

Good luck,
Mike

Site reviewed

Since this mashup looked so complete for iteration 2 I'm not suprised to find that not much has changed. At first glance I thought I was looking at the old version. I had to go back to the blogs to see what had been changed and upgraded. I thought it was a good scalability idea to put one marker per city and then put the list of names associated with that city in the bubble, since most users would probably have most of their friends in one or two cities. The only thing I would change with that would be to leave that bubble of names up after you click on it so in case you click the wrong name you don't have to close the wrong persons info bubble and reopen the city bubble. Other than that, you guys should start making some money of that site.

Good luck,
Mike

Site reviewed

Since this mashup looked so complete for iteration 2 I'm not suprised to find that not much has changed. At first glance I thought I was looking at the old version. I had to go back to the blogs to see what had been changed and upgraded. I thought it was a good scalability idea to put one marker per city and then put the list of names associated with that city in the bubble, since most users would probably have most of their friends in one or two cities. The only thing I would change with that would be to leave that bubble of names up after you click on it so in case you click the wrong name you don't have to close the wrong persons info bubble and reopen the city bubble. Other than that, you guys should start making some money of that site.

Good luck,
Mike

Jeff's Post

I feel totally the same about Agile as Jeff does in his post. I think it's great for a small group of skilled programmers who are consistently working on familiar project material. In my experience in IS449 not all of these conditions were met. For projects like our mash-ups where some people are strong programmers and some...well, not so much, could be a hinderance due to lack of experience. Also, by having different schedules and not being able to work on the project together, you could possibly have communication lapses and end up with redundant steps performed. However, since this project wasn't too terribly complicated, I would consider using agile methods again if I had to do it over.

-Mike

Here's the link to my 3rd installment of the source citing mashup. Fortunately Bud and Jeff were available to help me through some of the bugs at the end and I got it to work, for the most part. In order to convert the nodes into the proper format, it would take extensive programming. So instead I just have the Author, Title, and Publisher Info spit out seperately.

Good post on a good article. I agree with what the author said about Microsoft and their silly backwards compatibility. It seems like the more they try to retain it, the more they open themselves to security holes. What I liked even more was the "battle of wits" between the Mac nerds and Windows geeks that followed the article. I recommend it if you are feeling the slightest bit inadequate; just read a few of the comments and your perspective will suddenly change.