My blogging hiatus should come to an end now that I’ve wrapped up and launched a “community project” that I’m proud to announce: PositiveLookahead.com. I’ve
summarized what I’m trying to achieve here. Over the past
several months, I’ve gone through a large number of book reviews at Amazon, ASP.NET Forums, etc, and carefully analyzed why some reviews worked (and were in minority) while most didn’t. I then tried to distill comments into a series of criteria I believed would help a person buy the absolutely best book for his or her money.
I also noticed that other sites were too secretive about the personalities of reviewers. They would not let them link to their blogs, show public profiles, etc, thus making the whole experience very impersonal and detached. This isn’t how you create an “architecture of participation.” You need to give people due credit for their time and effort to contribute.
Reid Hoffman of the LinkedIn fame said an interesting thing during the Startup Success 2006 panel: If you ship your product and you’re not a little ashamed of it, you shipped too late. I consider Positive Lookahead to be in ver. 1.0 (I don’t believe in betas) and am a little ashamed of rough edges, but I take it as a good sign. :)
No tricks
Even though all book listing come from Amazon, I do not use my Associate ID. On at least two occasions I was asked why not. I want Positive Lookeahead to involve as many people as possible because this is the only way for “community efforts” to be useful. I didn’t want anyone to feel they were getting tricked.
Either Don or Scott suggested that I allow reviewers to include their Amazon Associate ID as a little thank-you for their efforts. I think that’s a great idea! As soon as I get back from the MVP Summit, I’ll put this in place.
Colophon
Since I worked on Positive Lookahead in my off time, I had a chance to play with Microsoft AJAX and the AJAX Toolkit without the everyday pressures of work and deadlines. The most important takeaway for me is that you rarely need AJAX capabilities at all. AJAX comes in handy when you have complex pages (perhaps with tabs or grids) and you can’t afford to flush the entire page. Other than that—from the usability standpoint—I’m hard pressed to
see dire need for AJAX bells and whistles.
On the other hand, the AJAX Toolkit is a great Swiss army knife. At first, I made heavy use of the Animation control, but due to its slow performance had to pull it out almost everywhere. Your mileage may vary, though, depending on the task at hand. I’ll talk about this and other lessons I learned in upcoming posts.
In terms of view state, I agree with Scott that it’s
overrated, which is why Positive Lookahead runs without view state or session!
Acknowledgements
I’d like express my thanks to ORCS Web for hosting the site; Telerik for letting me use their outstanding control suite; Alessandro Fulciniti for Nifty Corners; and contributors to the Microsoft AJAX Toolkit for their great work.
Dig in!
Please write reviews, rate books and help spread the word!
