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If you’re interested in the kind of work we’re doing here at Guardian Unlimited, then you might be interested in joining us. We’re looking for a Development Manager. As an experiment I put an ad on Google Base (now expired). Here’s the text in full…

Guardian Unlimited is embarking on a concentrated effort to expand its Development Team over the next 6-12 months, and is seeking an experienced Development Manager to drive that process.

The ideal candidate will have excellent knowledge and experience of website operations, of managing a team of developers, and of hiring excellent new developers. Additionally, you will have experience of working in a fast-changing and pressured environment, with demonstrable expertise in managing change in development teams. Excellent planning and organising skills are also essential

Technically, the team practises agile development with Java, so you will need to demonstrate a deep understanding and affinity for both these areas. The underlying operating systems are Linux and Solaris, so expertise there would be an advantage.

The Guardian Unlimited workplace is very diverse with many different stakeholders, so it’s essential to be able to work with many different kinds of people and have excellent interpersonal skills.

This position will remain open until a suitable candidate is found, and ideally the successful candidate will start as soon as possible. This is an excellent opportunity to be part of an award-winning team on a product recognised for its innovation and quality.

To apply for this role you must be available to attend an interview in London, and to work permanently in the UK. If you are, and if you are interested in this role, please e-mail gujobs@guardianunlimited.co.uk and include (a) your current and desired salary, and (b) a copy of your CV.

We welcome applications from any individual regardless of ethnic origin, gender, disability, religious belief, sexual orientation or age. All applications will be considered on merit.

This role has come up because my job has expanded to encompass the whole software side, including project management and QA, so we’ve got a gap to fill.

Here at Guardian Unlimited we’ve just launched our new Travel site. You’ll be able to read a lot about it in the industry press, but I just wanted to write a little what we’ve done from a technical-managerial point of view.

The project motivation is ideal

The main strands of our business are editorial, commercial and technical. But this is not an editorial project, it’s not a commercial project, and it’s not a technical project. This is something that’s been driven by all of us. Editorially we wanted to improve navigation and bring in more user-generated content. Commercially we wanted to offer more flexible advertising opportunities. And technically we wanted to exploit our content much more.

The new Travel site brings all of us together. One technical force was to exploit keywords, or tags, a bit like those on Del.icio.us and Flickr. This is a very flexible way of categorising content and hence allowing better use of it. Tags, in turn, allow us to generate much more relevant navigation and bring in related readers’ tips from our travel tips site, Been There. For example, if you’re reading about Croatia then you can also see a column headed “Readers’ top tips” which shows readers’ tips specifically about Croatia.

This is also the perfect opportunity to redesign, to better present that information. And just as we can present more relevant tips, so we can present more relevant advertising to our readers. And the redesign also allows us to shape the pages to better fit the ads — the page can close up around a small ad, and expand to comfortably fit a larger one.

Of course, there’s a lot of technical stuff involved, but a technical project is no good for the sake of it. Here, the three strands of our business were driving each other. An ideal scenario.

Aside from much better navigation and contextual advertising, and since this is a technical blog, here are four of the other (smaller) things we’ve used tags for…

There’s a page for every tag

Each tag has its own page! Here’s the page for San Francisco. And here’s the page for skiiing. And here’s one for food and drink trips.

In fact, we’ve got hundreds of tags in the system already — you can see our list of places and activities, for example. And now we’ve automatically got a page for each of them.

There’s an RSS feed for every tag

Okay, not a big leap technically, but terrific for our readers. Top right on each subject page is the RSS link for that subject. If you’re interested in an area of Travel then it’s odds on we write about it. And if we write about it then we’ve got an RSS feed for it. You can get your own personal skiiing feed from Guardian Unlimited.

We can combine tags

Tags also allow us to pull together even more really specific and relevant content. If you’re on the San Francisco page you can find out about food and drink in San Francisco. Or you can investigate short breaks in Portugal. Or water sports in the UK. Well, you get the idea.

Friendly URLs

Our URLs are usually of the form

http://travel.guardian.co.uk/budget/story/0,,991699,00.html

which is short but a bit obscure. So we’ve taken the opportunity to improve that for the new Travel site. The same article above now has the URL

http://travel.guardian.co.uk/article/2003/jul/05/watersportsholidays.budgettravel.boatingholidays

It’s longer, but we hope it’s also more intuitive. You can clearly see the what it is (an article), the date (5 July 2003), and what it’s about (water sports, budget travel, and boating holidays).

And it’s not just articles which have friendlier URLs. Here’s the URL for the Hamburg tag page:

http://travel.guardian.co.uk/tag/hamburg

and here’s the RSS feed for our Hamburg content:

http://travel.guardian.co.uk/tag/hamburg/rss

All much easier to deal with.

And one other thing…

Lots of this is automatic. But there’s one important part of tagging that’s not: the actual act of adding the tags. In theory we could use software to look at each of our articles and determine what it’s about, and so apply the tags. But that’s not going to give the best results for our readers. So we’ve made sure that all our articles have had their tags considered and chosen individually by someone who has actually read the article. That means the navigation should be spot on, and the advertising links are ideally targetted. There’s an awful lot that machines can do, but sometimes it needs a human being to add the magic.

Anyway, hope you like the site.

I know this isn’t really the place to post code, and I’m sorry. But this is why I don’t like loosely typed languages. I was caught by a Javascript nasty earlier this week (no I don’t code professionally, this was for fun) which boils down to the code below. What you think could happen here…?

var problem_found = null;
var listener = function(event){ /* Do something with event */ };

try
{
    document.firstChild.addEventListener("click", listener, false);
}
catch (ex)
{
    alert("Problem: "+ex);
    problem_found = ex;
}

if (problem_found)
{
    alert("There was a problem: " + problem_found);
}

You might have thought that either everything passes within the try block smoothly, in which case no alerts appear, or that there’s an exception in the try block and you get two alerts — one from the catch block and one from the if block.

And you’d be wrong.

Javascript actually allows you to throw anything. You should really throw an Error. But you could throw a String, or even a null if you liked. And if your code could throw a null then testing for null does not tell you if you had a problem. In the above example you’d get only one alert, from the catch block. If your problem-resolution code is in the if block then you’ll miss it.

Advocates of loosely typed languages will say that type problems can be avoided if you write good unit tests. But the problem occurred for me because this kind of mistake was in the JsUnit test framework, and it incorrectly showed a test passing. It took me two days to find the source of the problem. It turns out that the addEventListener() method above in Firefox 1.5 does indeed manage to throw a null if the listener parameter is not a function. Try changing it to a string and you’ll see this. My mistake was to pass in a non-function. Firefox’s mistake was to throw a null. JsUnit’s mistake was to assume a null exception means no exception.

Strict typing helps avoid problems that come about because we’re human and make mistakes. A wise man in ancient China once said “the compiler is your friend”. Javascript doesn’t have a compiler, and I can do with all the friends I can get.

By the way, you may be interested to know what the statically-typed Java language does. It doesn’t allow you to throw any object, but it will allow you to throw null. And if you do that it automatically converts it to NullPointerException. An actual, proper, concrete object. I know who my friends are.