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International Herald Tribune: Quirky serifs aside, Georgia fonts win on Web. The thesis of the article is that, because of its use in some fairly high profile redesigns (the New York Times website among others), the font Georgia is undergoing a comeback. A slim thread on which to hang an article, particularly when you consider that Georgia has been the font of this blog since at least its redesign in January 2004 (the original custom CSS design used Verdana or Helvetica, depending on availability, as my old stylesheet reveals).

It is sad, as Dave Shea at Mezzoblue notes, that there is practically speaking only a pool of eight or nine fonts through which we can rotate for web typography. In this vein, I have to go back and give Hakon Lie partial credit for at least trying to move the ball forward on web typography, as wrongheaded as he was about the business model implications of what he proposed.

Recently AH Digital FX Studios was featured in River City Weekly's article about businesses in Idaho that have succeeded on the web. (Full Article (535 K pdf) )

Kevin Keefe remembers answering the phone in Idaho Falls late one night, and on the other end was a voice with a unique accent. “Hi, I’m calling from Liverpool, and I want to buy a ski hat.” That’s just one of the stories he has to tell after retailing his custommade ski hats since 2001 on the Internet from his Web site www.getaKLU.com.

Keefe’s business, KLU Mountain Outerwear, is just one of many locally owned businesses that have taken advantage of the Internet. Some are custom-designed, some are variations of a ready-made site, but all bring customers easy access to their information and products.

Keefe and his wife sew the hats after customers place their orders online with their own head measurements and choices of colors and patterns. It only takes about a day to sew it up before they ship them out to all parts of the world.

“We don’t do any advertising,” said Keefe. “It’s all about search engines. The person who figures out how to get number one in search engines makes a million bucks.” Keefe for several years had a Web site that simply told about their products but didn’t have a way to order. He did a redesign of his site in 2001, then started taking credit cards as a form of payment and put in metatags so that his site was the first one found if someone searched for the key words “ski hats.”

“Our business went up five-fold,” he said. Last year was their best year ever, grossing about $12,000 in sales. In December he took two weeks off of his day job at the site; KLU mountain outerwear took 176 orders that month and each Monday shipped out about 32 orders.

“That’s our busy season. We don’t take vacations or visit family in the winter. By about March it slows down, and we have summers off, which is what we want,” Keefe said. “I thought about adding a summer line, but I’d rather go rock climbing and kayaking.”

Kent Frecker never really advertised his custom saddle-making business in its 18-year span. But when Frecker Saddlery went online (www.freckersaddlery. com), he doubled his business and hired two more employees.

“We did it for convenience,” Frecker said. “Our goal wasn’t to expand any; it’s easier to refer people to that Web site than keep making copies of pictures or try to make a catalog. Then we got bombarded with phone calls and more people wanting saddles. Now and then we’d put extra saddles on the Web site, and they would sell. Then those customers would come back and have orders lined up. It kind of surprised us. Now we get phone calls from all across the country.”

The Web site is essentially Frecker’s store, which allows added flexibility. “We don’t have a storefront per se. The shop is here at my house and we don’t keep business hours. If I want to go for a horse ride today I can close the shop, let the answering machine answer the phone or let the emails come in. It gives us a lot of freedom,” he said.

Convenience was the main reason for Melissa and Jim Barnard of Rigby to put Landmark Development and Silver Creek Construction online (www. landmarkdevelopment.org and www.silvercreekconstruction. com). It’s easy to list lots for sale and house plan descriptions online.

“It’s convenient for customers. They go to the site at their leisure and don’t feel sales pressure. It’s technology that everybody uses. It’s a way to find us and for the Web site the more information the better,” Melissa said. “We have protective covenants listed and any plots or house amenities. If I had to send out a mass mailing it would be very expensive, and I’d probably miss my market. Online it’s specific. They’re the customer you want because they’re looking.”

Adam Hayes started his Web design business in 2002. He does everything from the initial concept, design and branding to the coding, back-end administration and search engine optimization.

With several local and national clients, including Keefe, Frecker and Barnard, he has a few tips for those thinking of starting out on the Web.

He has helped individuals develop a small side business and helped large companies get noticed online.

“The most important thing that anyone can do when starting a Web-based business is understand their customer. You’ve got seven seconds when they find your site for them to decide this is where they want to be. Otherwise they’ll click ‘back’ and never come back to your site. You have to know what they want so they can say ‘yes, I finally found where I want to be,’” Hayes said. Hayes’ clients come mostly from referrals. He was recommended to Keefe by his father-in-law and was recommended to Barnard by a satisfied client. You can find his site at www.ahfx.net.

There are currently 736,425 benchmarks in the database at geocaching.com. Overall, 82,517 benchmarks have been found and recorded in 114,528 logs. In the last 7 days, 1,007 benchmarks have been logged by 407 users. Four of them were found by me in Greentown, Pennsylvania near Exit 20 of Interstate 84.

I had tried to find a 1959 benchmark named "Burke" a couple of months ago. The eXplorist 600 indicated that I was within a half-mile of and then I realized I would have to trespass on private property to get to the mark -- something I do not do, at least on purpose. I saw a sign nearby labeled Robert Burke Consulting. Upon visiting his web site and seeing that he works with Linux, I concluded he must be a nice person and likely would not mind me giving him a call. Not only did he not mind, he offered to escort me to the benchmark -- he had noticed it in the past and knew right where it was. I met Bob and his four-year old son at his driveway and off we went in his four-wheel drive truck down a dirt road and off into a field. Turns out that Bob's father owns hundreds of acres of land where the benchmark is located. Five generations of his family have lived in Pennsylvania.

Turns out that there are actually four benchmarks (Burke, Burke 2, Burke Reference Mark 1, and Burke Reference Mark 2) all within a couple of hundred feet of each other. Three were placed in 1959 and one in 1967. The descriptions given are accurate for finding them -- but don't rely on lat/lon because those are not accurate. One of them was off by nearly 200 feet. Ater many a wild goose chase, I have learned that the best way to find benchmarks is to carefully read the datasheet. Here is a typical description for finding a reference mark...

REFERENCE MARK 1, A STANDARD DISK STAMPED BURKE NO 1 1959, IS CEMENTED IN A DRILL HOLE IN TOP OF A 2 X 3 FOOT BOULDER IRREGULAR IN SHAPE AND PROJECTING ABOUT 2 INCHES ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE GROUND. IT IS 85.9 FEET SOUTHEAST OF AN 8-INCH TRIANGULAR BLAZED MAPLE TREE, 72.8 FEET SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF A STANDARD METAL WITNESS POST AND MARKER, 37 FEET SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF THE CENTER OF A TRACK ROAD AND THE MARK IS ABOUT THE SAME ELEVATION AS THE STATION

The disks were all readable, although there is some corrosion. All are in plain view and the main mark (Burke) has a witness post. If you ever noticed a 3-4 foot long orange stick in the ground with some wording on it, that would be a witness post. It says basically, there is a benchmark nearby and don't mess with it! The marks would have been useful to surveyors and civil engineers decades ago, but with the advent of inexpensive and accurate GPS devices, they have become unnecessary. In spite of this, they are fun to find -- 72 for me so far and only three-quarters of a million or so to go! Lastly, remember the Honda ads from years ago -- "You meet the nicest people on a Honda"? Well, this past weekend I discovered the same thing about looking for benchmarks. If you need any systems or Linux consulting in the northeast Pennsylvania area, pay a visit to Robert Burke Consulting.

Other patrickWeb stories about benchmarking

Interoperability and DRM Are Mutually Exclusive: The music industry’s insistence upon DRM iswhat put the ITMS in the position that Apple now enjoys; the recordindustry is decrying a lock-in advantage that they themselves handedto Apple. (Via Daring Fireball.)

This article is a good start, but it gives too much credit to the music industry. They are not just misguided about the impossibility of interoperable DRM. Anyone with a clue has understood this since the original interoperable DRM efforts collapsed circa 2000. Some music industry executives may still lack a clue, but they do not have much incentive to learn because the central issue for them is not interoperability, but control. Attacking Apple here (like the publishers attacking Google, or the telecoms attacking net neutrality) is misdirection covering up that issue. The major labels don't really care that one DRM system dominates the market, they only care that the system is not theirs to do as they please, for example in introducing variable per-track pricing (shades of the telecoms and net neutrality).

I rarely buy from iTMS because I dislike its tying down to particular machines and lower quality than what I get by buying CDs and ripping them at a custom AAC rate. Not to mention the pleasure of walking down to my locally-owned record store and browsing their well-chosen new arrivals (last month's purchases):

• Trio Beyond (Jack de Johnette, Larry Goldings, John Scofield): Saudades
• John Coltrane: Soultrane
• Marc Johnson: Shades of Jade
• Louis Mhlanga: World Traveler
• Boards of Canada: Trans Canada Highway
• Thelonious Monk: The Classic Quartet
• Vijay Iyer and Rudesh Mahanthappa: Raw Materials
• Andrey Dergatchev: The Return (soundtrack of the intense, beautiful movie by Andrey Zvyagintsev)
• Christian McBride: Live at Tonic

So many great books, so little time! This posting is to recommend two books that were extremely interesting and enjoyable. First is Genome by Matt Ridley. After the Computational Biology panel at Demo in February, I asked the panelists what book I could read to learn more about the mapping of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome. All three experts recommended Matt Ridley's book. Genome is organized into twenty-two chapters as a convenient way to tell the incredible unfolding story of what we are all about. Each chapter is like a story unto itself describing the characteristics of some of the more important genes that are part of that chromosome. The twenty-third chromosome pair is what we learned in high school -- two large X chromosomes in women and , one X and one small Y in men.

Ridley explains in almost excruciating detail how some of the genes work and the implications of having a particular gene that doesn't work. For example, there is a family of genes called the apolipoprotein genes, or APO genes, that comes in four basic varieties -- A, B, C, and E. If you happen to carry of the E variety genes, your probability of getting Alzheimer's disease is dramatically higher than the population at large. Whether you would actually want to know that you have propensity to get a disease that for which there is no cure or prevention steps is another question. One thing for sure is that by reading Genome you get an appreciation for how much is actually known about genes and how incredibly fast the knowledge base is growing. There is no doubt in my mind that the improvements in medicine over the next ten years will surpass what we have seen in the past 100 years.

Equally intriguing but much more entertaining is Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. To call it a techno-thriller is an understatement. It is riveting and chilling from the first page to the last. I could not put it down. Like The Da Vince Code, you will question how plausible some of the happenings are and you may question the validity of the details of the inner workings of the NSA. The core theme of the book has to do with one of my favorite topics, cryptography. After designing a computer that could break any encryption, the NSA found itself hostage to the technology. Highly recommended read.

Stories from the "favorites" category of patrickWeb

Roughly eight years ago I bought myself a welder.  I was restoring the 1950 Bantam Jeep Trailer I had purchased and it needed a new floor and some other things welded up.  The costs for hiring it out were roughly half of the cost of a small 110V MIG welder so I figured it was time to make the investment in a new tool and new skillset.

Since then the welder has proven quite handy - I was able install the new floor in the trailer, and have also been able to create a tandem bike for my kids:

And a piece of artwork for our mantle:

Over the years I’ve also used the welder to make repairs and add-ons on the 1964 CJ6 Jeep that I’m working on, as well as small repairs for friends, relatives and neighbors.

So - what I’m thinking now is that if this web development gig doesn’t work out for whatever reason, I’ll be able to go apply for any welding job because I have eight years of experience welding.

Wait - why are you rolling your eyes like that?  And what was that small huffing sound you just made?

Well, OK.  You’re right.  Picking up a small welder and dabbling in it periodically doesn’t really add up to 8 years of experience that an employer would be interested in, does it?  I have a friend who is a certified welding inspector - he owns a business that does metal fabrication so he employs professional welders and has to inspect their work.  He likes to wander around my projects and point out which welds would and wouldn’t be acceptable to him - and I usually feel good if I shoot 20%.

Yet - I see this pitching of hobby work and playing around as “experience” in the web design and development world and it seems like people fall for it in a way they wouldn’t with my welding experience.  A few weeks back I was contacted by a person who just took on a internship with a client that I had done a site for.  The project included a new custom design and deployment on a content management system so all content on the site could be updated or changed without them needing to know HTML.  It was the perfect fit for them as a business because they are small and not in a field of business where they’d naturally have people on staff with web skills. The site was immediately beneficial to them - with their previous site you couldn’t Google their name directly and get their site in the results, and the new site got them in #1 spot for their own name in short order.

However it was the classic case of having all the available tools at hand and never taking the time.  The site has sat, relatively unchanged, since we launched it roughly 4 years ago.  Then here comes the new college intern who assures me that he has been “designing websites for about 8 years now” so I wouldn’t “need to be concerned that he would end up damaging the site.”

Right.

I went to look at it yesterday and sure enough - the main navigation has been moved, the nice little main nav icons that tied into the company’s business area (and they paid for) are gone, and in the place of the main nav is now a “doesn’t quite fit in that space” blurb for “latest news”.  Latest news - for a company that had nothing new to say over 4 years time.  All the new content could have been integrated without requiring the design changes.

Specifics aside - what bothers me is my former client probably heard the same “8 years experience” line and, even though it’s coming from a college senior and therefore means that this persons “experience” started in roughly the 8th grade, gladly handed over their most prominent piece of business marketing to this person.

So business people - listen up:  Periodically noodling around with web technologies as a hobby doesn’t equal “experience”.  Sites built out of that context are rarely based on any real-world constraints of time, budget, or business requirements.  When someone uses the word “experience”, what they should be implying is “I spent a considerable portion of my day for that period of time working with this stuff” and (ideally) “people paid me for it”.

You wouldn’t look at my welding projects and hire me on to do structural, mission critical welding.  Don’t do the same with your website.

Over two years ago now I wrote a post entitled Potential Client Red Flags, wherein I listed 6 situations that, if they come up while talking with a potential new client, might possibly lead to me passing on the work.

I re-read that post this morning and have a few red flags to add.

7. Previous Web Developer Baggage
Once in a while I’ll be approached by someone with a project that has already been taken on by another developer and the project has failed.  In these situations the potential client always blames the previous developer for the failure, saying they had misrepresented themselves, or were over committed, or were just flat-out not able to do the work.  The potential client will then appeal to my ego with statements like “After reviewing your portfolio it’s obvious you would be a much better fit than the previous developer was.”

But - like stories of dating relationships and marriages gone awry -I’m only hearing one side of the story.  Might the issue really have been a client with unrealistic expectations, or who were unable to pay their bills on time?

I always feel like the only real way to seriously think about taking on a project with baggage would be to interview both sides of the failed project and see if I could determine what really happened.  But the time investment for doing that is such that it never makes sense because neither side is going to want to reimburse me for that time.

Additionally, if the site is sitting there half-baked and “just needs to be finished” then I’m faced with the prospect of it being started poorly and either having to rebuild it from the ground up or being responsible for issues with the site due to poor decisions being made at the foundational level by someone with less experience than I have.

8. Emergency 911
It’s amazing the number of contacts I get for projects where the timeline is “ASAP”.  Here’s an actual request: “We need a complete EE build with content and user migration from a Drupal install, the design is in Photoshop and needs to be converted to HTML, and looks like we either need some custom EE code or use of a 3rd party module.  Oh and the deadline is in 11 days”. 

Not 11 business days, just 11 days.

So after I’m done with the gut-reaction snide response that I won’t post here, the first question I have to ask is “How did the project get to be in this state?” And if the answer is “poor project management” then the follow-up question is “What other aspects of the project are suffering due to being managed poorly?” Is the design going to be right?  Has the proper functionality been identified?

I’m reluctant to take on projects that come with a red flashing light to wear on my head - I didn’t create the crisis situation so feel no urge to shoulder the responsibility of resolving it.  Although - I have toyed with the idea of proposing to take it on, but at 2 or 2.5 times my normal rate.  So far the stress potential hasn’t been worth the possible financial gain.

9. The Client Who Knew Too Much
Maybe the better title is “The Wanna-be Developer as Client”.  When I get communications from clients that include nonsensical statements like “we like the idea of separating content from presentation for SEO reasons”, or they want to talk about URL structure before the site design or IA is done the hair on the back of my neck goes up just a bit.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate technically-savvy clients, but when they have things just a bit “off” it makes me wonder how they got there, will they be open to and capable of being re-educated, or will it be a constant struggle to get them to understand how things actually work?

10. Hi, My Name Is Tom Sawyer
Once in a while I will be contacted to put a proposal together for an ExpressionEngine site, but the real reason for the proposal request is to determine if EE is actually well-suited for the project.  The challenge with these types of requests is that in order to do a quality needs assessment and (if EE is the right fit) a proposal it requires a lot of time - which is likely why the client hasn’t done it.

ExpressionEngine provides a pre-sales forum for answering questions like this - and I’ll often even pitch in on those threads.  But if the project needs an in-depth requirements analysis then that’s really outside of what I should have to provide at no charge in the form of a quote - that’s work that should be defined as it’s own project and I should get paid for as an internet consultant with specialized CMS knowledge and experience.

11. You Don’t Know Me
Boyink Interactive was a charter member of the ExpressionEngine Professional Network, and it’s been a valuable source of leads on new projects.

The downside is I’ll often be BCC’d in on emails along with multiple other members of the Pro Network.  I’ll have to be honest—if I’m elbows-deep in projects when these emails come in they do have less weight than email addressed to me specifically, or email that has come through Boyink.com instead.  I wonder if they’ve even reviewed my work at all, or are just blasting everyone on the Pro Network to see who responds.  I don’t immediately discount these emails, but if they have any other red flags (and they often do) then it’s not likely I’ll respond to them.

12. Can You Hear Me Now?
I’ve had a few interchanges with potential clients where they just couldn’t answer simple direct questions put to them via email.  And asked two or three times in different ways.  In one case after email exchanges hadn’t worked well I scheduled a phone call with the potential client instead.  When I called at the appointed time they answered with “Uh, hello?”.  This didn’t exactly instill confidence that they could communicate well enough to work with and that they were a marketing & communication firm was the deciding factor in passing on the work.

So there you have it - now the “dirty dozen” of client red flags. Will there be more?  Only time will tell…

Technology writer, Peter Svensson, wrote an interesting story called "Will video break the Internet?". From a technical point of view there are many factors to consider. If a large number of web "surfers" were using the Internet as their primary way to watch TV, there would be a problem. More capacity is clearly needed, especially as HD-TV becomes more prevalent. The pessimists -- and some telecommunications operators -- see rising fees to pay for the bandwidth expansion. Optimists know that various technologies such as multicasting, caching, digital video recorders, etc. are dramatically improving the Net's ability to deliver video content and in parallel the cost per unit of technology continues to decline. History would suggest the optimistic view is the right one.

During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta there was a bomb blast. Native Atlanta ex-patriots living in Japan and Germany and other parts of the world wanted to get as much news coverage as possible about the status but had few choices (there were no blogs then). The Internet Technology team at IBM in Southbury, Connecticut was running a large web infrastructure for the Games at the time and one of the engineers, Andy Stanford-Clark, got the idea to "stream" a local Atlanta radio station over the Internet using an IBM technology called Bamba. It was a very successful project but only a handful of people could listen simultaneously due to the limitations of the technology and the Internet. Some people thought that if there were large numbers of listeners "audio would break the Internet". Today millions of people consider audio over the Net as commonplace. (Listening to crystal clear classical music from KUSC-FM in Los Angeles through my Sqeezebox as I write this). Based on the tens of millions of daily visitors to YouTube, it is clear that video has also become commonplace. Another leading indicator is what is happening on campus. A number of universities have decided to use the Internet to deliver cable TV to their dormitories.

One of the issues Mr. Svensson raised in his story is "net neutrality", a term that means different things to different people. The fear is that the really large telecommunications companies that provide parts of the "backbone" of the Internet may decide to not only raise fees but also to be discriminatory. In the extreme it would mean that Verizon would block access to Google because they made a deal with Yahoo! or visa versa. The telcos have never been successful in getting into the content business so a new angle for them might be to make deals with content providers that would make their video move through the Internet backbone at a higher priority in return for fees. These fears have gotten the attention of lawmakers who are now talking about legislation to insure net neutrality. Legislation is the worst possible way to address the issue.

What is really needed is more competition. In Japan, the Internet service available to consumers is significantly faster than in the U.S. and significantly less expensive. For example, Yahoo! Broadband offers 8 million bits per second for about $20 per month. Up to 100 million bits per second is available. What technical breakthrough have they had? None. The breakthrough was to separate the various infrastructure elements of Internet service and allow "Adam Smith's invisible hand" to go to work. More competition means higher speeds and lower prices. In the U.S. we have legions of lawyers and lobbyists at work doing their best to gain protections for themselves and to slow the spread of innovation such as municipal wireless and voice over IP. Will video break the Internet? No. The biggest threat to freedom of choice for content at competitive prices is a lack of competition.

Misguided or overly-prescriptive legislation can have unintended consequences. It can often fix one problem and create two new ones or add yet another layer of protectionism. Mike Nelson, former Director for Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission (and former colleague at IBM), says "a lack of competition which lets companies exert monopoly or duopoly power is probably the biggest damper on innovation". Not all legislation is bad. It is possible to use it to increase competition and decrease regulation, to fund e-government pilot projects, ''connect the unconnected,'' or fund university education and research.


Other patrickWeb stories about Internet Technology
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On Monday and Tuesday of this week a number of analysts and consultants gathered with IBM at an intellectual property briefing in Greenwich, Connecticut. Not as glamorous as the meeting in Rome but exceptionally interesting. The term intellectual property reflects the idea that the subject matter is a product of the mind and that legal rights to the "IP" are protected in the same way as any other form of property. IP is a vital issue for many companies but probably no company has as much influence in this area as IBM. IP is a broad and deep subject but one of the key elements is patents.

The United States granted the first patent to Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont in 1790. Mr. Hopkin's idea had to do with making potash which in turn was used in making glass and in various industrial processes.Two other major patents granted the same year were related to making candles and milling flour. Earlier this year the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that for the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM received more patents than any other private sector organization in America. No company, other than IBM, has yet been granted 2,000 patents in any year while IBM exceeded 3,000 four years in a row and last year had 1,100 more than anybody else. IBM has a portfolio of more than 40,000 patents globally and has another 21,000 U.S. patent applications pending. Potentially more significant than IBM's leadership in creating inventions is the fact that it is giving away thousands of patents. See Patent Commons (January 2005).

The industrial age focused on proprietary innovation and patents became the key differentiator for technology companies such as IBM. In the 1970's and 1980's there was a lot of cross-licensing to provide freedom of action; e.g. IBM cross-licensed with many other technology companies so that it could be able to ship it's products without any concerns about patent infringement. Since IBM's inventiveness created a lot more patent licensing income than licensing expense, the IP business became a major source of income -- to the tune of a $1 billion per year and mostly profit. Now that the industrial age has given over to a knowledge economy based on collaborative innovation, IBM has begun to re-evaluate it's IP strategy and begin to leverage IP as a new source of business growth.

Since IBM has a very large group of engineers and scientists who are prolific inventors, the patent portfolio is sure to grow and the income from it will be significant for quite some time. The company has more than 1,000 active licenses whereby companies pay IBM to use it's patents -- that represents about a third of IBM's IP income. Another third comes from joint development; e.g. with Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung where the companies work together on a project and then share the results. A prominent example was the development of the Cell processor which is used in the new Sony PS3 game console. A final third of IBM's IP income is from the assignment of patents for things that IBM invented but does not want to pursue on it's own -- digital cameras, liquid crystal displays, the laser used in eye surgery, setup boxes, and many other things.

Technologists working in healthcare and education cheered the move by IBM to allow them royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats. If new application software is developed in these key industries, society is better off and IBM will get it's fair share of the hardware, software and services opportunity. Very smart. To leverage internal ideas, IBM has created ThinkPlace -- a next generation suggestion program where employees don't just submit an idea and hope to get an award but where they tee up an idea and enable others to build upon the idea and collaborate to take it to the next level. IBM is also leveraging it's IP by using it to solve problems for it's clients through services engagements. For example, a group of PhD's from IBM Research helped a limousine company optimize the routes of it's cars to minimize wait time and fuel costs

The world of patents has become ever more complex across the spectrum of collaboration and competition as the world has moved from proprietary to open -- as the world has gotten flat. Patents issued have skyrocketed in the past dozen years -- more than 150,000 patents issued in 2000, and so have patent suits. The thousands of suits are taking a huge economic toll and in many cases are stifling innovation. Patent reform has become urgent. IBM is not waiting on the sidelines. It is taking a leadership role and encouraging progressive changes. For example, it has launched initiatives to improve the quality of patents by developing and proposing an index to evaluate if a patent meets the standards of patentability -- in other words, to test if the patent is really legitimate. These efforts are not just for IBM but for the entire economy. Hopefully the politicians, many of whom have links to trial lawyer associations, won't kill the pending patent reform legislation.  

Other patrickWeb patent related stories
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The challenge: Build on Approach D of building navigation for static content in ExpressionEngine, but only show 3rd level links when any page on a specific branch is active. 

In Approach D I introduced the idea of using ExpressionEngine’s Relationships to drive navigation for 3 level content. This installment builds on that approach by creating a menu that only shows the 3rd level pages when you click into that branch of the navigation.

To follow this tutorial you’ll need:

• The EE components covered in Approach A.
• The additions mentioned in Approach D - so essentially a weblog with content and relationship fields and an index template.
• Several entries posted with some of them being assigned to a parent page.
• The entries need to be ordered by date in an order that matches their position in the menu.  Put another way - the date ordering should be such that if you showed them all at the same time they would be in the right order - Parent A with it’s children before Parent B with it’s children.  Getting the children to show up correctly in all cases depends on this sort being correct.
• A template group and template structure such that url_titles will display in the segment_3 position.  If your structure is different you’ll need to adjust the code.

Note: this approach does require the query module, which isn’t included in the Core version of ExpressionEngine.

The Results
Let’s first look at the results - so you can determine whether the outcome is something you’re interested in building.  Here’s the working example.  The index loads initially only parent pages showing in the left nav - so these are pages with nothing assigned in the relationship field.

Clicking a parent page link will load that entry, and also refresh the left-nav with child pages for that section.  Clicking a child page loads that entry and keeps the navigation the same. Choose a different parent and the 3rd level options change to only show the children for that parent.  Behind the scenes - no javascript trickery, no CSS showing and hiding, no dynamic HTML - it all runs on straight EE conditionals with one query thrown in.

OK - so that’s the finished product.  Let’s take a look at what it takes to get there.  In this example I broke out the menu-building code into an e Embedded Template so that it could be easily reused from different areas of a site that needed the same type of navigation.

Index Template
Let’s start in the parent template - it features this code which calls the embedded template while passing in all the things the code in the embedded template needs to generate the navigation:

my_weblog_name: Used to set the weblog to create the navigation from.

my_index_entry: There will be one post in the weblog that holds the index content for this section - and we don’t want to display that post in the subnav.  Passing in the url_title of that entry will allow the embedded template to exclude it.

my_detail_path: We’ll need to build links in the embedded template so will need to know the path.  Note that you can use this in two ways - either have one template for everything or use an index/detail template arrangement.  In this example I’m using a single template.

my_relationship_field: The embedded template will need to know what field holds the relationships. Different weblogs will have different names for this field so its passed in as a variable.

Embedded Template
Now for the meat of the code - the embedded template.

There are essentially three parts to this code:

• Showing the parents only
• Showing children when a parent is selected
• Showing siblings when a 3rd level page is selected

First let’s look at the weblog:entries tag:

You can see we are using two of the passed in values to choose the right weblog, and exclude the post that represents the index entry.  We set the sort and turn dynamic=off so EE doesn’t look at the URL to choose its results.

Showing Parents Only
The first conditional finds entries that have no relationships assigned:

Showing Children When a Parent is Selected
Within this conditional is another:

The code assumes that when the index for this section is loaded there will be nothing in the segment_3 position.  So - remembering that we are still on an entry with no relationship specified - if there is something in segment three that means the user must have clicked a 2nd level—or parent - entry.  Now we need to show the children for this entry so the code uses the reverse_related_entries tag to do so:

Those two situations are the easy part.  The harder part is determining when a child entry has been selected and then displaying the siblings for that entry.

Showing Siblings When a 3rd Level Page is Selected
The first part - detecting when a 3rd level page has been selected - is handled by this if:elseif in the main conditional:

This finds the case when the currently-displayed entry has been assigned to a parent (so is a child page) and whose url_title is displaying (so has been selected).

Now for the trickiest part - finding other pages with the same parent - or siblings - to this page.  There is currently no built in tag to do this in ExpressionEngine, so we have to use a custom query (I won’t go into the specifics of the query here - I was only able to figure this out by bringing EE data into MSAccess where I could use the visual query builder to figure it out):

Note that the query uses the global homepage variable, the passed-in my_detail_path variable, and a query-specific variable of my_url_title to assemble the proper link.

So there you have it - a one weblog, one field group, one template way of building static navigation that requires no client-side trickery to only display children for one branch of the navigation tree at at time.

I do need to thank Rob Dircks of Dircks Associates for permission to share this code.  I developed some of the trickier parts as part of a project for Rob.