Month: October 2004

“Print your boarding pass here!”

There are plenty of little internet shops that charge $2.50 for 15 minutes of access and 25 cents for a copy, but French Quarter Computer Services had the inspiration to bundle them to create a product. A textbook case of turning a service into a benefit that solves a simple but serious problem… you can now retrieve your boarding pass online in your hotel, but how do you get it onto paper to give to the airline? Their window sign stopped me in my tracks.

If you are ever in New Orleans, give these folks some business. They are at 824 Chartres, 504-525-4660.

Philip Claypool

I drove to the Marina district the other day to check out the rumor and, sad to say, it’s true: Claypool’s B-B-Q is gone. A lady who looked to be closing out the books said he was “out of town… working on a franchise to open in Southern California” but further investigation reveals he’s simply gone… off to the Napa Valley with no immediate plans for a new spot.

Which is a true shame. Because this Arkansaw boy (whose family ran the huge Claypool duck farm, incidentally) who specialized in Tennessee pulled pork established, in the last year, a true talent for Texas brisket to go with his wonderful Jack Daniels beans. And is a good and generous guy as well as (full disclosure) the original owner of my backyard barrel smoker.

Come back soon, Philip. In the meantime, all of us should head off to Amazon.com and buy one of his country albums or, at the very least, listen to a clip or two.

In the middle of things

So, I finally got my website up. It’s no big deal, some HTML with a few images and links, and I will do more later. I’d planned to use GoLive, which I got as part of Adobe CS, but became baffled as soon as I started the tutorial. They wanted me to make a Site Diagram and I tried, but couldn’t make it like the examples onscreen. I then went browsing for simple HTML references and was delighted to find this nice tutorial on the w3.org website.

I then went hunting in “view source” on other pages for examples of how to construct links and open new pages to display my samples… the challenge, in an era where everybody uses javascript or, I guess, tools like GoLive, was to find a site to emulate with an author whose vision was as modest as mine. And then I went back into GoLive to edit the whole thing for publication. But I still don’t know what a Site Diagram is for.

This brings to mind what a student in my class last week said is the characteristic of good documentation: it talks to the user about the process they are in the middle of. Or, in the case of the CSS tutorial mentioned above, it puts the user into the middle of something and gives them logical, easy steps to take that will pay back with satisfying and tangible results. I certainly did learn from the CSS tutorial, as you can see if you go to my site. And if anybody has a good GoLive book to recommend, or simply wants to explain Site Diagrams, please drop me a line.