AA7BQ
08-31-2007, 09:38 PM
Welcome to Fred's Blog
With this posting I'm introducing a new series of articles which I'm calling
Fred's Blog. For those who've been wondering what a blog is,
the word derives from "web log". Most blogs tend to take the form
of a continuing narrative rather than a back-and-forth discussion,
however, comments are welcome so long as they remain civil.
As for responding to your comments, you should expect that rather than
jumping into the fray of replies at the bottom of this article that I
will instead respond in the next edition of my blog. We'll see
how that goes.
This first article is about QRZ and several new and some up coming
developments regarding what the Internet world calls Web 2.0 and what
I'm calling QRZ 2.0. I'll also comment about some recent site
changes that have affected some off line users poorly.
QRZ 2.0: What is it and why can't we keep things as they are?
QRZ 2.0 is a major redesign of the site that makes liberal use of Web
2.0 technology. Web 2.0 technology includes things that many of
us take for granted on other websites without even realizing it. If
you've been to sites like eBay, PayPal, YouTube, Amazon.com, MySpace,
or Wells Fargo then you've used Web 2.0 already. In fact, you'd
be hard pressed not to experience the 2.0 technologies in most modern
websites.
Technically speaking, Web 2.0 includes things like Javascript, AJAX,
XHTML, DOM, CSS, and Flash. QRZ already uses a few of these
technologies with CSS at the top right now. CSS refers to
Cascading Style Sheets and it's the magic that makes all sorts of page
formatting possible in ways that can't be done with simple HTML alone.
I can already hear "But we don't need no fancy formattin..."
even as I write this. Well, that's true, you don't "need" it, but
then you also don't "need" fancy new microprocessor controlled radios
with multiple DSP units, automated notch filters, and automatic antenna
tuning, and yet they're selling like hotcakes. QRZ has a choice
to make: it can be the online equivalent of a trusty old Kenwood TS-830
or perhaps something closer to a modern Icom IC-7800 or a Yaesu
FT-DX9000.
Actually, when QRZ came into being the TS-940 was the hot rig on the
block and the first web browser was called Mosaic (later Netscape,
later FireFox). Microsoft was perturbed because a) they hadn't
thought of it, and b) where was no way to charge for it. They're
still working on that one. Anyway, I didn't know HTML before I
put QRZ.COM online and I learned it as the site grew. If you look
at some of our old pages you'll see some pretty remarkable differences
between those old days (way back in '93') and today. During those
years everybody was learning and over time everything advanced
to new levels.
Only 5 years ago, for example, you couldn't depend on certain HTML and CSS
constructs to work equally across all browsers. Today,
thankfully, those incompatibilities have been greatly reduced by the
adoption of standards (despite Microsoft's objections), and as a
result, advanced features are now available to just about everybody so
long as they run a reasonably recent version of web browser.
Today, this web site is a mix of Web 1.0 and later technologies and
in some ways it still has somewhat of a primitive look and feel to it.
These old pages are also inefficient and time consuming, both for the
user and the server. Imagine the simple act of inputting a bit of
incorrect data in a form. The user clicks on the Save or Update
button, the server pauses a bit, and then returns with a message saying
that such-and-such is incorrect, prompting the user to correct the
input. In Web 2.0, these types of errors and interactions are
handled directly in the browser without having to involve the time to
send it to the server and the wait for a response. It's called
Javascript and it's the best thing that ever happened to
browsers. QRZ 2.0 is going to be using a lot of javascript and
some of the new features will be remarkable.
New QRZ Features on the Horizon
In the past few months, QRZ has undergone hardware and network upgrades
that have increased our capacity in key areas. Recently, we've
introduced an upgrade to the QRZ Practice Tests that have made them
into a stand alone application using Adobe Flash 8.0. Is your browser
not compatible with Flash? If so then that would be a rarity
since the statistics out now indicate that it's installed on 98% of all
browsers. The new tests offer new kinds of feedback, allow the
users to skip questions and answer them later (like a real test), and
they run completely from the user's browser instead of making repeated
requests on the server for each question. It's a win all the way
around for both the users and the server.
One of our biggest new projects involves a complete redesign of our
callsign database and our callsign display pages. Our server and
network upgrades are enabling us to implement a new system in which
users will be able to upload multiple photos for each callsign, have
full HTML editing and formatting capabilities, and complete control
over page colors, styles, fonts, etc..
We're also removing the restrictions on maximum page and photo size
and we'll probably include the ability to upload audio and video clips.
We're even throwing a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) HTML
editor so that even newbies can have great looking web pages.
We're also introducing a new mapping facility that will provide grid
square and lat/long coordinates for any point on the globe. All
you will have to do is pick a point on the map and your coordinates
will be precisely calculated. Web 2.0 makes this possible too.
We're also planning on replacing our Forum software,
Ikonboard. Ikonboard was abandoned by its developers a few years
ago and there are newer forum packages out there that do a better job.
We plan to preserve the old articles by integrating them into the new
system.
We're working on the new database now and hope to have a beta
preview sometime within the next month. Stay tuned for a front
page announcement. We'll probably be using more Adobe Flash as
well for some of the narrower applications such as our DX Cluster and
QSL Manager Lookup.
Recent Changes that Have Upset Folks
Last week I did the unthinkable. Well, it didn't seem like
much to me but the fallout continues as I open my mailbox this
morning. What happened? Well, for starters, <span style="font-style: italic;">I removed the colons!</span>
That's right, the colons. While in the midst of choosing some new
layouts for the new database, I looked at the existing Callsign Detail
pages and noticed that the formatting we were using there looked old
and boring. Since it was a quick mod, I changed the page by
removing the colons, adding color and emphasis to the field names, and
voila! A nice new look that only took about 10 minutes.
Within hours I began hearing from people who were bewildered and/or
irate. Over the next couple of days I learned that those colons
were the key to free data services that a number of people have been
enjoying for the past couple of years. The technique is known as
Web Scraping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping) and what has basically been going on is
that some logbook programs have been reading the QRZ web pages (sans
advertisements) in the background, filtering them and then presenting
the harvested data harvested to the user. It has become a popular
alternative to subscribing to our XML Portal (http://online.qrz.com)
which is a fee based service.
Currently, we have more than 1000 subscribers whose
support helps keep QRZ running. We don't know how many people are
using the "free" method but as of last week the number dropped
precipitously.
The folks who created the web scraping software are resourceful and
some have already adapted to the new format, but they didn't appreciate
the exercise. One user group of the package known as Swisslog,
are particularly upset because the program's author is unable to step in
due to health reasons. One ham wrote me to argue that QRZ was a
"money grubbing enterprise". Maybe the guy knows how to get free cable
TV, or if not at least he's willing to pay for it because there is no
shareware alternative.
I suppose that now is as good a time as any to speak out on all of
this. First of all, the format of the QRZ pages was never
guaranteed to be a standard. Those who wrote programs expecting
it to be so accepted this risk when they started. They knew of
the XML port and chose to circumvent it by technical means. It's
worth nothing that I never heard from any of
these developers until the format changed. Now they're asking me
to change it back since it effects "a lot of users". The developers are
now finding out what it means to presume that a non-standard is a
standard. I'm sorry guys, but what you're doing is unfair both to those
who pay for such services through subscriptions, but also to QRZ and
its advertisers who are being billed for the pages that they draw upon
to fetch the data.
At the risk of being redundant, let me say that I will not put the
colons back into the listings and that the QRZ pages are absolutely not
guaranteed to remain stable. In fact, the pages are guaranteed to
change, sooner, rather than later. Most, if not all of the
upgrades and enhancements that I mentioned earlier in this article,
depend on new page layouts. Sorry, but if you want a published
standard to rely upon then the XML port is your option.
In Closing
That's it for this week's blog. Thank you all for being a part of QRZ.
(also, please excuse the difficult formatting of this article, yet another reason we need new Forum software)
73,
-fred AA7BQ
With this posting I'm introducing a new series of articles which I'm calling
Fred's Blog. For those who've been wondering what a blog is,
the word derives from "web log". Most blogs tend to take the form
of a continuing narrative rather than a back-and-forth discussion,
however, comments are welcome so long as they remain civil.
As for responding to your comments, you should expect that rather than
jumping into the fray of replies at the bottom of this article that I
will instead respond in the next edition of my blog. We'll see
how that goes.
This first article is about QRZ and several new and some up coming
developments regarding what the Internet world calls Web 2.0 and what
I'm calling QRZ 2.0. I'll also comment about some recent site
changes that have affected some off line users poorly.
QRZ 2.0: What is it and why can't we keep things as they are?
QRZ 2.0 is a major redesign of the site that makes liberal use of Web
2.0 technology. Web 2.0 technology includes things that many of
us take for granted on other websites without even realizing it. If
you've been to sites like eBay, PayPal, YouTube, Amazon.com, MySpace,
or Wells Fargo then you've used Web 2.0 already. In fact, you'd
be hard pressed not to experience the 2.0 technologies in most modern
websites.
Technically speaking, Web 2.0 includes things like Javascript, AJAX,
XHTML, DOM, CSS, and Flash. QRZ already uses a few of these
technologies with CSS at the top right now. CSS refers to
Cascading Style Sheets and it's the magic that makes all sorts of page
formatting possible in ways that can't be done with simple HTML alone.
I can already hear "But we don't need no fancy formattin..."
even as I write this. Well, that's true, you don't "need" it, but
then you also don't "need" fancy new microprocessor controlled radios
with multiple DSP units, automated notch filters, and automatic antenna
tuning, and yet they're selling like hotcakes. QRZ has a choice
to make: it can be the online equivalent of a trusty old Kenwood TS-830
or perhaps something closer to a modern Icom IC-7800 or a Yaesu
FT-DX9000.
Actually, when QRZ came into being the TS-940 was the hot rig on the
block and the first web browser was called Mosaic (later Netscape,
later FireFox). Microsoft was perturbed because a) they hadn't
thought of it, and b) where was no way to charge for it. They're
still working on that one. Anyway, I didn't know HTML before I
put QRZ.COM online and I learned it as the site grew. If you look
at some of our old pages you'll see some pretty remarkable differences
between those old days (way back in '93') and today. During those
years everybody was learning and over time everything advanced
to new levels.
Only 5 years ago, for example, you couldn't depend on certain HTML and CSS
constructs to work equally across all browsers. Today,
thankfully, those incompatibilities have been greatly reduced by the
adoption of standards (despite Microsoft's objections), and as a
result, advanced features are now available to just about everybody so
long as they run a reasonably recent version of web browser.
Today, this web site is a mix of Web 1.0 and later technologies and
in some ways it still has somewhat of a primitive look and feel to it.
These old pages are also inefficient and time consuming, both for the
user and the server. Imagine the simple act of inputting a bit of
incorrect data in a form. The user clicks on the Save or Update
button, the server pauses a bit, and then returns with a message saying
that such-and-such is incorrect, prompting the user to correct the
input. In Web 2.0, these types of errors and interactions are
handled directly in the browser without having to involve the time to
send it to the server and the wait for a response. It's called
Javascript and it's the best thing that ever happened to
browsers. QRZ 2.0 is going to be using a lot of javascript and
some of the new features will be remarkable.
New QRZ Features on the Horizon
In the past few months, QRZ has undergone hardware and network upgrades
that have increased our capacity in key areas. Recently, we've
introduced an upgrade to the QRZ Practice Tests that have made them
into a stand alone application using Adobe Flash 8.0. Is your browser
not compatible with Flash? If so then that would be a rarity
since the statistics out now indicate that it's installed on 98% of all
browsers. The new tests offer new kinds of feedback, allow the
users to skip questions and answer them later (like a real test), and
they run completely from the user's browser instead of making repeated
requests on the server for each question. It's a win all the way
around for both the users and the server.
One of our biggest new projects involves a complete redesign of our
callsign database and our callsign display pages. Our server and
network upgrades are enabling us to implement a new system in which
users will be able to upload multiple photos for each callsign, have
full HTML editing and formatting capabilities, and complete control
over page colors, styles, fonts, etc..
We're also removing the restrictions on maximum page and photo size
and we'll probably include the ability to upload audio and video clips.
We're even throwing a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) HTML
editor so that even newbies can have great looking web pages.
We're also introducing a new mapping facility that will provide grid
square and lat/long coordinates for any point on the globe. All
you will have to do is pick a point on the map and your coordinates
will be precisely calculated. Web 2.0 makes this possible too.
We're also planning on replacing our Forum software,
Ikonboard. Ikonboard was abandoned by its developers a few years
ago and there are newer forum packages out there that do a better job.
We plan to preserve the old articles by integrating them into the new
system.
We're working on the new database now and hope to have a beta
preview sometime within the next month. Stay tuned for a front
page announcement. We'll probably be using more Adobe Flash as
well for some of the narrower applications such as our DX Cluster and
QSL Manager Lookup.
Recent Changes that Have Upset Folks
Last week I did the unthinkable. Well, it didn't seem like
much to me but the fallout continues as I open my mailbox this
morning. What happened? Well, for starters, <span style="font-style: italic;">I removed the colons!</span>
That's right, the colons. While in the midst of choosing some new
layouts for the new database, I looked at the existing Callsign Detail
pages and noticed that the formatting we were using there looked old
and boring. Since it was a quick mod, I changed the page by
removing the colons, adding color and emphasis to the field names, and
voila! A nice new look that only took about 10 minutes.
Within hours I began hearing from people who were bewildered and/or
irate. Over the next couple of days I learned that those colons
were the key to free data services that a number of people have been
enjoying for the past couple of years. The technique is known as
Web Scraping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping) and what has basically been going on is
that some logbook programs have been reading the QRZ web pages (sans
advertisements) in the background, filtering them and then presenting
the harvested data harvested to the user. It has become a popular
alternative to subscribing to our XML Portal (http://online.qrz.com)
which is a fee based service.
Currently, we have more than 1000 subscribers whose
support helps keep QRZ running. We don't know how many people are
using the "free" method but as of last week the number dropped
precipitously.
The folks who created the web scraping software are resourceful and
some have already adapted to the new format, but they didn't appreciate
the exercise. One user group of the package known as Swisslog,
are particularly upset because the program's author is unable to step in
due to health reasons. One ham wrote me to argue that QRZ was a
"money grubbing enterprise". Maybe the guy knows how to get free cable
TV, or if not at least he's willing to pay for it because there is no
shareware alternative.
I suppose that now is as good a time as any to speak out on all of
this. First of all, the format of the QRZ pages was never
guaranteed to be a standard. Those who wrote programs expecting
it to be so accepted this risk when they started. They knew of
the XML port and chose to circumvent it by technical means. It's
worth nothing that I never heard from any of
these developers until the format changed. Now they're asking me
to change it back since it effects "a lot of users". The developers are
now finding out what it means to presume that a non-standard is a
standard. I'm sorry guys, but what you're doing is unfair both to those
who pay for such services through subscriptions, but also to QRZ and
its advertisers who are being billed for the pages that they draw upon
to fetch the data.
At the risk of being redundant, let me say that I will not put the
colons back into the listings and that the QRZ pages are absolutely not
guaranteed to remain stable. In fact, the pages are guaranteed to
change, sooner, rather than later. Most, if not all of the
upgrades and enhancements that I mentioned earlier in this article,
depend on new page layouts. Sorry, but if you want a published
standard to rely upon then the XML port is your option.
In Closing
That's it for this week's blog. Thank you all for being a part of QRZ.
(also, please excuse the difficult formatting of this article, yet another reason we need new Forum software)
73,
-fred AA7BQ