last updated:16 Aug 2002 13: 49 Webword time, or 16 Aug 2002 18:49 UK time
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(Comments added for week ending Sun 14 Jul 2002) | View Other Weeks
BlogAmp | Sun 14 Jul
BlogAmp is a free Winamp plugin that allows the user to keep in his personal web page a list with the last songs played in his Winamp. This list is update by FTP in real time.
Sun 14 Jul 17:20 | Jack Schonchin | WipeLog is a free Restroom plugin that allows the user to keep a running tally of the remaining squares on his household toilet tissue rolls. WipeLog can track tissue usage over time, generating statistical reports that show trends in tissue usage by day-of-the-week or month, estimating when rolls will run empty, and even provide comparison analysis to reveal how many squares individual Restroom visitors use on a per-visit basis. I am no longer amazed at what a programmer will waste hours of his life to develop. At least my WipeLog can be used by frugal apartment roommates who want to accurately divide the financial burden of purchasing toilet tissue.
Sun 14 Jul 19:53 | John S. Rhodes | Jack, WipeLog...cute. Made me chuckle. But don't worry about BlogAmp. The market will decide if it is good and useful.
Sun 14 Jul 20:29 | Jack Schonchin | Ahh, but BlogAmp is free software spread via pseudo-free web publishing. Its existence is not subject to natural selection. Any yahoo programmer can publish anything he wants and not face extinction. At best, people don't use the software. That doesn't mean software of its ilk will die off. The idea persists.
Sun 14 Jul 23:51 | Eric Scheid | The idea may persist, but does it sire offspring?
WebWord Comment | Thu 11 Jul
I dont have anything to hide regarding the traffic to WebWord. Take a look at my usage statistics (scroll to the bottom for links). For July 2002, it looks like Im running at over 4,000 page views per day and over 1,700 visitors. Not too shabby. Share your web traffic statistics here so we can compare.
Thu 11 Jul 12:31 | John S. Rhodes | Previous WebWord Traffic Data: May 2000 Average number of page views per day -- 1,027 Average number of user sessions per day -- 594 May 2001 Average number of page views per day -- 1,608 Average number of user sessions per day -- 973 June 2002 Average number of page views per day -- 4,920 Average number of user sessions per day -- 2,193
Fri 12 Jul 00:56 | James Robertson | We use Webalizer as well, and its great. One thing we did do, was strip some of the useless info out of the report. This is very easy to do via the config file, even in a hosted environment. FYI, here's the changes we made: * Removed 'Total URLs by Kilobytes' * Removed 'Total entry pages' * Removed 'Total exit pages' * Turned on the reverse DNS lookup, so the 'Total Sites' table shows domain names, not IP addresses. This will also give useful information in the 'Total Countries' table, which is always very interesting. * Removed 'Total sites by kilobytes' * Removed our own site from 'Total referrers', so only external sites are shown. These are changes we do for our clients as well. (Less is more, etc)
Sun 14 Jul 10:16 | Stephen Downes | Hiya John, For June, my last full month: total pages = 51766, total visits = 24614. That's 1905 pages per day, 820 visits per day. Worth nothing is that I have many more hits - 120364 - per month because many of my readers (650 daily, 250 weekly) read me by email only, receiving only graphics from the web server. These aren't Yahoo! numbers or even close but I'm pleased considering they were generated by pure word of mouth only - no advertising, no promotions (no budget).
WebWord Comment | Fri 12 Jul
I have decided to create a book club for WebWord. The idea is quite simple. I will pick a book to read and we will all discusss it together on WebWord. I set up a notification list for the Book Club on the WebWord Subsciptions page. To get the ball rolling I have decided that our first book will be Constructing Accessible Web Sites published by glasshaus (ISBN: 1904151000). We will begin our discussion of the book on, or about, July 1st. That gives you a little over two weeks to read the book. (Erratum: Well start the discussion on August 1st.)
Fri 12 Jul 13:51 | Anonymous | Don't you mean August 1? dave
Fri 12 Jul 14:24 | Jack Schonchin | That leaves $15.01 worth of merchandise left for me to purchase so that I get Amazon's free shipping. Tell me the next book that will be read so I can buy it. Second, that free shipping is slow. By the time the book arrives I'll be lucky if I have one week to read the book. My humble suggestion: have all members suggest books, then have everyone vote to select the books to be read for the year (or whatever time period).
Fri 12 Jul 14:42 | John S. Rhodes | 1. Dave, I do mean 1-August-2002. Thanks for catching that typo! 2. Jack, thanks for the comments, as always. The community voting idea to pick the book is good, but not totally easy to set up. I'll think about as a future enhancement. If I forget, please bring it up again. 3. The book for September will be Son of Web Pages That Suck by Vincent Flanders and published by Sybex (ISBN: 0782140203). 4. I know that the schedule is tight for Accessible Web Sites but I really want to get things going. If you can't participate for the 1-Aug-2002 review, don't worry! You will have plenty of time for Son of Web Pages That Suck in September.
Fri 12 Jul 20:20 | Alastair Campbell | Weird, I just bought that book to read over the next two weekends, how did you know?
Sat 13 Jul 02:57 | Jack Schonchin | John, does this book talk specifics about accessible design? I mean teaching code. I have one accessibility book already and it's only a primer on the concepts. The actual design advice is vague. For example, 'don't use tables for layout.' Uh, ok. Now give me the specifics on how to code without tables. I'd really like to see a good HTML/CSS book that incorporates accessibility awareness throughout - instead of handling accessibility as a separate issue requiring a separate book.
Sat 13 Jul 09:51 | John S. Rhodes | Jack, The book covers the basics of CSS. There is a 30 page chapter on the topic. Check out the Table of Contents. Regarding CSS references, I'm going to be reading Eric Meyer on CSS. I have on my desk right now. It is a beautiful book; just full of excellent examples and code. By the way, if you want to code without tables using CSS, check out Glish's CSS Layout Techniques.
Sat 13 Jul 12:15 | MadMan | You can be sure i won't be taking part in this. Are you trying to do an Andrew Sullivan on us, John? ;)
Sat 13 Jul 12:25 | John S. Rhodes | MadMan, you know I like to experiment. I throw things against the wall to see if they stick. If people like the idea, I'll keep doing it. If they don't, I won't. Just curious, why are you against the idea? If you could elaborate...?
Sat 13 Jul 20:37 | Alastair Campbell | Hi Jack, As John said, Eric Meyer is pretty much the godfather of CSS, and the accessibility book in question does give some code examples. However, what really makes it worthwhile is the higher level guidance it (seems to) give on how to use the WAI guidelines. The WAI guidelines and associated techniques are very in depth, but this book will help to give you priorities. Otherwise all the WAI stuff can be a little overwhelming. hth, -Alastair (Just getting through the TOC at the moment!) WAI Guidelines: http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/ WAI Techniques: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/
WebWord Comment | Fri 12 Jul
Jack Schonchin thinks that the navigation on the Round Table Pizza web site is annoying and looks like the bumper stickers from the Unamerican Activities web site. What do you think?
Sat 13 Jul 01:20 | Jack Schonchin | Round Table did an auto-detection that forced me into using this Flash version. That nifty detection process created a form of 'mousetrapping' by putting me into an auto-forward situation where my BACK button got neutered. Way to go! Anyhow, back to my point... I object to a web page that loads completely, then makes me wait for the navigation menu to appear. I object to my navigation menu being pulled out of a pizza oven, slathered with what looks like vinyl bumper stickers. During this wait I must disregard what Brunelleschi taught us about perspective and Newton taught us about gravity, as my almost two-dimensional pizza is extracted horizontally from the oven and then vertically turned on its side. I object to waiting in painful anticipation for the pizza slices to fall from a pan that just hangs there suspended in mid-air. I object to any web site that feels like a bad drug trip. Tonight I ordered Papa Murphy's. At least Papa only subjects me to a tacky Flash splash page.
Sat 13 Jul 01:38 | Jack Schonchin | Oh! Oh! I must keep talking. My initial disgust was so great that I never actually used the Round Table site. I just noticed how the pizza slices fall onto the plate when you click them. Notice how small the plate is and how big the Round Table pizza slices are. Marketing psychology at work. Bravo! not. Anyone want to hire me to ridicule their work?
Sat 13 Jul 12:11 | MadMan | It could be worse. A 'net marketing' company like www.brandquiver.com has no f***ing clue. Did I mention it was started by the CEO of an ad company? What do you expect?
Sat 13 Jul 12:47 | MikeC | I expect the casual user not to care about waiting 7 seconds for the navigation to load. It takes a few seconds for one's brain to parse a new site anyway, so by the time the navigation has come to a stop the user has just become ready to use it. Or, the user could use the many links offered in the main window before the navigation is even done loading! Personally, I really like the metaphoric navigation. I clicked around simply because it was fun and engaging. I never even bothered to think how fake the physics were - it was just cool. Yet, if I were a returning customer I could see how the navigation might become slow and inefficient. It bothers me that there isn't a copy of that global navigation in plain text at the bottom of each page. Lastly, while that initial detection page does screw with the back process, after the initial bounce I automatically right clicked the back button and manually skipped over that page without thought. It could be more safely implemented, however.
Sat 13 Jul 18:06 | Chad Lundgren | There's absolutely no excuse for a zero second forward. If you're using Javascript, you can use the location.replace() command so the the forwarding page is deleted from their history.* If you think you need to forward because index.jsp or whatnot is not a default type, you need to get a real web server that allows adding of default document types besides index.html. ( Apache and even IIS do) If you've moved the home page from index.html to index.jsp, and you're afraid people have bookmarked the actual page name, then you set up a server side forward that looks like one page to the user. Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine. Only an annoyance to me, but I have many friends who say, I hate when I get stuck on a web site. I try to explain the right click thing, but I'm not sure any of them will use it. My all-time favorite was a zero-second forward page that forwarded to itself. You should have a page with an old-fashioned forward (with a PAUSE) and a link to the actual home page for weird browsers/PDA/Googlebot type visitors anyway. *If you're paranoid, you will browser detect for Netscape 3 and NOT use the location.replace for it, because it will forward them to an essentially random location consisting of 'www' followed by their default domain.
Information architecture concepts | Fri 12 Jul
(IBM) An information architect is a vital member of a Web development team, playing a critical role in how content is organized on a Web site. This article seeks to clear up some of the misconceptions about information architecture and help define the role an information architect plays in Web site development.
Fri 12 Jul 12:28 | John S. Rhodes | If you look in the Resources section near the bottom of the article you will see this quote: 'The Nielsen-Norman Group runs a very good Web site called Usable Web. It is chock full of all kinds of usability and information architecture topics, plus links to resources on the Web.' That is WRONG. Nielsen-Norman do not own or operate this Usable Web. It is operated by Keith Instone.
Sat 13 Jul 12:13 | MadMan | But Keith hasn't updated it in a long time. Not sure he intends to either. Try submitting a site and see his message. M (whose computer's motherboard is fried but still posts comments on this site from a cybercafe)
Quickhead 3.0 | Fri 12 Jul
Quickhead-E is a timesaving program that monitors your e-mail accounts and downloads the header portion of new mail in the background of your PC. When new message headers are delivered, you are notified of their arrival. Then, using the main program window, you have the options to mark unwanted messages for deletion and to preview important messages ahead of other mail.
Sat 13 Jul 00:34 | Jack Schonchin | In other words, it's a mail checker.
Sat 13 Jul 01:27 | Jack Schonchin | OK, enough with my smarmy comments. I use NewMail by Ketil Hunn. It's simple Windows freeware. It checks multiple accounts and notifies you with a pop-up window, sound and/or flashing icon in the system tray. The pop-up window shows you the FROM and SUBJECT field, but you cannot preview or delete mail. I've used it for years. I'll check out Quickhead 3.0, despite the sexual overtones in the name. And I'll spare telling you what I think. ;-)
Sat 13 Jul 10:33 | Morris Cox | Actually, it's shareware.
Sat 13 Jul 10:41 | Jack Schonchin | D'oh! I've been living in sin! Forgive me Oh Lord, for I grew lazy with the expectation of pop-up registration reminders to alert me to my transgressions.
Sat 13 Jul 12:08 | MadMan | Looks like your spambusting friend gave you an interesting link. ;)
Quality From Design | Fri 12 Jul
(New Architect) Simply put, there is no downside to designing before coding.
Sat 13 Jul 07:31 | (the other) JS | Can there be both? ...Are there situations where one or the other might be better suited, especially during a transition between 'extreme' and old school (stage-gate?) processes. I'm assuming a situation which is not self contained, where you would be working with different clients.
Sat 13 Jul 09:35 | Ron Zeno | Summary: Alan needs clients. Did I miss something, like actual information, rather than Alan just promoting his consulting company? Why is this newsworthy?
Emotion & Design: Attractive Things Work Better | Fri 12 Jul
Therefore, it is essential that products designed for use under stress follow good human-centered design, for stress makes people less able to cope with difficulties and less flexible in their approach to problem solving. Positive affect makes people more tolerant of minor difficulties and more flexible and creative in finding solutions. Products designed for more relaxed, pleasant occasions can enhance their usability through pleasant, aesthetic design.
Fri 12 Jul 13:58 | Tre | I've been saying this for years but the battle lies in trying to find 'evidence' to help management believe the enhancement to the bottom line. Since I believe it, shouldn't everyone? ;^)
Fri 12 Jul 21:01 | Morris Cox | Let them try something that's a pain to use and then have them use something that's a pleasure to use. Managers need direct experience before they'll believe you. Otherwise, they'll stick to what they 'know' and will generally ignore anything difficult/new in order to minimize risk. An example of inertia in business. What I tell people is that: 'If it's not usable, it's worthless.'. You'll think it would be obvious.
Rocker Room | Fri 12 Jul
A Japanese business man walks by a misspelt English advertisement for a fitness centre in Tokyo July 9, 2002. Mistakes in written English are common in Japan, where national performance in the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) examination is nearly the worst in Asia, well behind China and South Korea.
Fri 12 Jul 17:15 | Anonymous | http://www.engrish.com
Sharpening the Focus of Focus Groups | Thu 11 Jul
(HBS Working Knowledge) The focus group is a favorite option. Its cheap, quick, and easy—all you need is a moderator, eight bodies, a topic, and a two-way mirror. Not surprisingly, managers tend to use the focus group indiscriminately—and ineffectively—for almost every company problem. The bottom line? Focus groups have potentially enormous value, but not the way most companies use them. The following is a guide to avoiding that trap.
Thu 11 Jul 09:14 | Jack Schonchin | 'Free Registration' does not exist. Handing over personal information always costs you dearly. But in this particular case, the article is not 'Privacy Invasion Required.'
Fri 12 Jul 15:32 | Ron Zeno | Good article, except for this very sad statement, 'Jenny Craig used a certified hypnotist as a moderator to age-regress focus group members back to their earliest childhood memories of being overweight.' So, people at Jenny Craig were duped, along with an author and multiple editors at HBS. I can understand the mistake at Jenny Craig, but HBS?! Market researchers and HBS should be ashamed!
You may not have received this email | Thu 11 Jul
(Strom) This isnt just a few individuals tuning up their filters to reject messages: the problem is on a wholesale level. Theres often no way for individual users to determine whether or how their email is being filtered. That is very troubling, because obviously these filters are catching a lot of ordinary messages.
Fri 12 Jul 09:43 | Jack Schonchin | In the past six months I've discovered about 10 pieces of legit mail in my filter 1-2 weeks after arrival. A couple times it was business mail with important attachments, which was embarassing. I've changed my business address to one that doesn't need filtering (for the moment).
Fri 12 Jul 10:00 | jonathan | I've been using Cloudmark's product since they launched a couple weeks back and it has successfully routed about 95% of SPAM for me. If you're not aware of it, it's a COM ADD-IN for Outlook (only supports Outlook now, not Express). It is an excellent peer-to-peer based SPAM utility. Truly excellent.
Fri 12 Jul 10:04 | jonathan | Sorry... www.cloudmark.com
Fri 12 Jul 10:57 | Chris | I've got at least a 95% accuracy ratio on my Spam filters. Maybe one or two 'good' emails end up in the spam folder a week, but since I skim the folder daily its not a big deal. A quick right click on the improperly routed email ensures that sender goes to the inbox the next time. I use Pocomail as my mail client, which has a very nice spam filter built in.
Fri 12 Jul 14:47 | Lydia | I've had a few pieces of good mail in the filtered spam, too. I guess the trick is to check often. At first, it was so accurate at filtering garbage that I didn't check for a long time, and then realized a friend had sent an e-card that got filtered. Boy was I embarrassed. Now I check about once a week.
Nondirected Interviews: How to Get More Out of Your Research Questions | Thu 11 Jul
(Adaptive Path) As user experience designers, a key component to nearly all the techniques we use in our practice is the one-on-one interview. Its the basis of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, I practice a kind of questioning technique called the nondirected interview.
Fri 12 Jul 12:21 | Ron Zeno | Another consulting company trying to get credit for reinventing the wheel. Yawn. They don't appear to be synthesizing in anything new, nor crediting their sources...
Website Guidelines | Thu 11 Jul
(Syracuse University) These guidelines, which are recommended but not mandatory, are intended to provide website developers with current information on website organization, navigation, layout, graphics, technology, and content. Websites that adhere to these guidelines should be easier to maintain and redesign, and will have a more uniform look across platforms and browsers.
Thu 11 Jul 16:46 | Jack Schonchin | which are recommended but not mandatory In academia that essentially means, 'Ignore these guidelines.' Universities are horrible when it comes to a consistent experience for the user. Each department wants to do their own thing. Exploring a university can be like visiting 100+ different web sites, each with their own look, navigation, etc.
Thu 11 Jul 22:58 | Joshua Kaufman | I work at a large Community College and Jack is exactly right. Communicating consistency to individual departments is not so bad, but coordinating the look of 100+ websites across an entire college or university is near impossible without centralized quality assurance that requires elements, not just recommends them.
Fri 12 Jul 12:02 | Greg Benoit | Based on what I've seen, and what I've heard from some university administrators I know, trying to induce tenured academicians to adhere consistently to just about any institution-wide guidelines can be like herding cats. Given the deliberate immunity to most traditional forms of accountability inherent in the tenure system, and the deeply-ingrained spirit of academic freedom and individuality among the academic community, you really can't 'require' these folks to do anything. Not that I'm necessarily opposed to these things...
Fri 12 Jul 12:18 | John S. Rhodes | If academicians aren't willing to follow guidelines, and if we can't force them into it, what can be done? Suggestions?
Requirements are Corporate Assets | Thu 11 Jul
Requirements are a valuable corporate intellectual asset. They require a considerable investment of time and resources, and represent the collective memory of the organization.
Fri 12 Jul 11:55 | (the other) JS | If what the requirements yield isn't an asset, there's already a knowledge management problem.
Half the World | Thu 11 Jul
(Clay Shirky) The phrase Half the world has never made a phone call or some variation thereof has become an urban legend, a widely believed but unsubstantiated story about the nature of the world. It has appeared countless times over the last decade, in essentially the same form and always without attribution. Where did that phrase come from? How did it take on such a life of its own? And, most importantly, why has it gotten so much airtime in the debate over the digital divide when it is so obviously wrong?
Thu 11 Jul 13:36 | Tom | A very good article. Thanks for posting it. Too often we here some stupid phrase and don't question it. This is a good example of why we shouldn't.
Fri 12 Jul 11:53 | (the other) JS | By the year 2000, one billion people will be on the net.
Bringing KDE Closer to Joe User's Desktop | Thu 11 Jul
I served as a User Interface designer while I was working in a knowledge system project in UK and I worked as a web developer and web designer for the last 5-6 years. This article is merely a suggestion to the TrollTech and KDE developers on how to polish the current UI a bit.
Fri 12 Jul 11:48 | (the other) JS | The only way I can classify this as the slow follower strategy. It's target is to at least drag itself into a competitive position, were that competitive position circa 1995. Should it succeed, it will still fail. It isn't where it needs to be now. Forget dragging this mess, kicking and screaming, to embrace average users. It will always be targeting where users were, instead of where competitors should be in order to compete -- leading. This requires a rather radical rethinking -- and even more radical, creatively interpreting user feedback -- in interaction design. ...it ain't happening.
User Empowerment and the Fun Factor | Thu 11 Jul
(useit.com) We need much better methods for testing enjoyable aspects of user interfaces. Such methods should be both robust and easy to apply, since people with relatively little expertise do the vast majority of user testing in the world. That said, ease of use must remain our first priority. Technology is just too difficult for us to abandon this goal. But hopefully it will soon be time to emphasize joy of use as well.
Thu 11 Jul 12:30 | Rikard Linde | I was really happy to read Jakob Nielsen writing about 'joy of use' as an important element in web design. Don Norman has probably had good influence on his colleague. What bothers me is that Nielsen tries to find ways to measure 'joy of use'. He really, really, really doesn't appreciate things that haven't been proven with statistical evidence and it feels obvious that there are lots of joyful designs that can't (shan't?) be measured.
Fri 12 Jul 04:48 | Mac | It's already happened: Alertbox scores 1.7 on the Joy Index
Fri 12 Jul 10:49 | Ryan | That is hilarious!
UI Designer Position | Thu 11 Jul
Google is looking for a candidate with a strong background in interface design. As UI Designer, you will work with engineers and product managers to design highly usable interfaces that adhere to Googles commitment to the best possible user experience.
Thu 11 Jul 11:33 | Jack Schonchin | Sounds great and all, but who wants to live in Mountain View, California? Don't settle. Find an employer situated in a nice, liveable community, or insist on telecommuting, or, hey, work for yourself. I'm one of those silly people who believes that where you live is more important than where you work... but in today's world, with our tech skills, we can have both! I live in a beautiful, rural community. My 10 minute commute subjects me to barn studded pastures, ocean views and forested hillsides. I work for one of the few major employers in the area. The local government economic development folk would love to lure a tech company, but they can't comprehend the concept of corporate handouts. The rest of my compadres do contract work across the country, or telecommute to the silicon valley. The latter group only has to travel a few times a year to that place 'where the air stinks and the people are mean.' (That's a quote from a friend's son who prefers to stay home when daddy travels.)
Thu 11 Jul 14:40 | Tre | I agree. Unfortunately there aren't as many 'understanding' employers as there could be. I don't understand why more employers aren't taking advantage of telecommuting? Sounds like an opportunity for some entrepreneur to start a web board of telecommuting-friendly companies?
Thu 11 Jul 16:17 | Jack Schonchin | To be fair, most of my telecommuting compadres first worked at the companies for 6 months to 2 years before requesting a telecommuting arrangement. I just couldn't stomach putting up with a big city that long. Two years of my life just isn't worth it.
Fri 12 Jul 02:05 | Oliver | I thought you were in print media, Jack? What DO you do anyway? And where do you work?
Fri 12 Jul 02:15 | pb | As post-dot-com transplant to bay area, I feel an urge to defend it. I do enjoy living here. I did live in the mid-west for 2 years and the people were extrememly friendly, but I was really bored there as a young person. There are always a trade offs.
Fri 12 Jul 09:39 | Jack Schonchin | Oliver, I actively work in both media. I am classically trained for print media. I am worldly trained for web.
Fri 12 Jul 10:34 | Jack Schonchin | PB, it's a matter of personal taste. I enjoy being surrounded by natural beauty - from my house window, my car window, my work window. I enjoy a cool coastal climate. I enjoy owning a home that my compadres tell me would cost me upwards of $500K to $900K in the Bay Area. I enjoy living 10 minutes from my workplace. I enjoy working in a town with no traffic and no stop lights. I enjoy my wife asking me before we leave the house, 'Want to walk or drive?' (and not being concerned for our safety when walking anywhere). I cannot stand life in a Big City. I see an artificial environment made of cement. That's me. Sure, I am giving up: #1 the sun, on most days. #2 diverse entertainment venues (music, plays, etc.) and #3 diverse brick 'n' mortar shopping options. These are my neighbors' top three complaints. Oh, and a lack of good coffee shops, although I disagree on that point. And, it's darn tough finding a good paying job here, unless you telecommute. Some transplants grow tired after a couple years and return to the city. For a lot of people, maybe you too, the conveniences of metropolitan life take precedence. That's OK.
Searching for solutions to an on-site problem | Thu 11 Jul
A recent CSIRO survey showed that about 84 per cent of university sites, 61 per cent of Federal Government agency sites, 36 per cent of IT company sites and only 20 per cent of sites for public companies provided a direct search engine link or form on their homepage.
Thu 11 Jul 16:43 | Jack Schonchin | Umm, ok, I'll be the first to ask. So what? On-site search engines often perform poorly. Users frequently are more successful at locating their target information if forced to browse their way to it. Too many users run straight to a search box without trying other means, then complain when they can't find their target page. Some designers who have no control over the quality of their company's search engine will intentionally bury access to it.
Book Review: Constructing Usable Web Menus | Thu 11 Jul
(WebWord) If you are a web developer and you care about building usable web menus, this book is definitely worth buying. It is a short, powerful, easy-to-read book at a fair cost. Some of the more advanced programming techniques are worth the price alone. Want my advice? Add this book to your library.
Thu 11 Jul 14:08 | Karl | For another review of this book, see: http://www.evolt.org/article/Book_Review_Usable_Web_Menus/12/30618/index.html
A Linux user goes back | Thu 11 Jul
After three and a half years of trying to make GNU/Linux work on the desktop, Ive decided that its simply too hard for the average home user.
Thu 11 Jul 10:08 | mcw | The author worked at Linux longer than I did. I gave up after about 3 months. Linux did not support the applications that I liked to use, and it was painful to get it working initially. Upgrades and new s/w apps - more pain. I thnk for lots of Linux advocates, my pain is their recreation. People like different things. I like to use computers, and I'm less enthused by building/configuring/compiling type activities.
Thu 11 Jul 12:11 | Jack Schonchin | Like Bill Maher says, 'people can't hold two different thoughts in their head at the same time,' whether they be evangelizing their OS, their political party or their brand of automobile. In this case, 'Linux good for servers. Windows/MacOS good for desktop users.' I tried Redhat (back in version 6.1?) and couldn't get it to work. Had to enlist an über-geek buddy to get it up and running. Then my problem became that GIMP ain't no Photoshop. That's mostly what killed it for me.
RNIB debate sees web usability experts divide over 'one size fits all' | Thu 11 Jul
It is becoming clear that adopting the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is not enough to ensure that visually impaired people will be able to make full use of a web site.
Thu 11 Jul 10:43 | Mac | I attended this meeting and was struck by the big companies attitide towards providing accessible sites. They seemed to think that we should be very grateful if they deign to provide different interfaces for different audiences, as many other companies just 'dont care' about accessibility and you can just 'take it or leave it'. What about an 'open content' policy? Companies would allow non-commercial 3rd parties to mine their sites to present their information in formats different to their own offering. People could write and distribute apps that sat on your own PC and re-purposed the content on demand. This means that there could be potentially 1000's of different interfaces onto existing sites that would meet the needs of all the diiferent user groups. If the companies wanted to make it even easier, they could provide access to XML feeds of their products and services data. But of course, they want to control the 'user experience' and wouldn't dare let amateurs meddle with their advertising policy or branding. So maybe we should just be grateful if they actually provide more than one view of their site, and maybe if we write enough letters more companies might provide accessible versions of their sites. Or perhaps we should join the 'consumer-disobedience' movement and start to take some control over what we see through our peepholes.
Thu 11 Jul 11:10 | Joe Clark | See also NUblog.
Control Your Identity or Microsoft and Intel Will | Thu 11 Jul
(John Udell) A culture of identity would be at odds with the culture of anonymity that is, for many people, a core value of the Internet. It comes down to this. We can choose to control our own identities, by embracing and refining some existing technologies that are widely available. Or we can cede that control to a cartel that wants to reinvent the PC and the Internet in ways antithetical to freedom and innovation.
Thu 11 Jul 08:55 | John S. Rhodes | Don't miss the TCPA / Palladium FAQ by Ross Anderson.
Writing “Basic” with a Global Reach | Thu 27 Jun
About those flags, animated and otherwise … ditch ‘em. If you offer your site in multiple translations, use the correct name of the language instead of the country’s flag for identification. Which flag would you use for English (you can choose from USA, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Singapore)? And which of four languages would you be indicating by using the Swiss flag?
Wed 10 Jul 03:44 | Mac | Views and Feelings: Flags are not Languages A SIGCHI Bulletin discussing this.
Functional Specification Tutorial | Sun 30 Jun
(mojofat) Functional specifications (functional specs), in the end, are the blueprint for how you want a particular web project or application to look and work. It details what the finished product will do, how a user will interact with it, and what it will look like. By creating a blueprint of the product first, time and productivity are saved during the development stage because the programmers can program instead of also working out the logic of the user-experience.
Tue 09 Jul 17:12 | Bryan Timmins | Yes, Mac does indeed seem to have an absence of existence short of pining over the dreaded MANAGER! Da-da-daaaa! Look out man! Better put away your spec! Really...how could anyone argue with the master of the spec, the amazing, the fantastic, the maturing (I might add), the one, the only... MOJOFAT!
Tue 09 Jul 17:12 | Bryan Timmins | Yes, Mac does indeed seem to have an absence of existence short of pining over the dreaded MANAGER! Da-da-daaaa! Look out man! Better put away your spec! Really...how could anyone argue with the master of the spec, the amazing, the fantastic, the maturing (I might add), the one, the only... MOJOFAT?!
WebWord Comment | Wed 03 Jul
Ill be on a (much needed) vacation from 4-July-2002 through 11-July-2002. I will have very limited access to email and the web. You might want to visit some of the Hot Sites. Thats all for now. Please take care of yourself while I am gone!
Mon 08 Jul 14:50 | MadMan | Jack, it probably would be cheaper that way. You say that the shipping costs cancel out the discounts. Amazon, on the other hand, claim the opposite. See what they wrote to me when I complained about their high international shipping costs. (Scroll down to the last bit.)
Tue 09 Jul 04:07 | Alan Fisher | Amazon shipping costs aren't exactly trivial in the UK either. The general discount offered on books is 20%, which means that you have to order 3 or more books to actually save any money, and even then you're not talking significant savings.
Tue 09 Jul 13:01 | Jack Schonchin | MM, they can claim anything they want. When I looked at what I was paying, I found that physical bookstores sometimes were 50 cents or a dollar more per book, but not always. With all the other benefits of a physical bookstore, it was a no brainer. IMHO, the charm of online buying is wearing off. The dot-coms that thrive will fall into these categories: 1) Selling a unique product. 2) Selling a hard-to-find product. 3) Selling at a significant discount that outweighs the perks of brick 'n' mortar stores.
Não seja masoquista tecnológico. Reaja. | Wed 03 Jul
A vida como ela é - cheia de software que não funciona, sites enrolados, dificuldades de interação. Reclame, ache ruim, ligue para o SAC, mande um e-mail, fale com o ombudsman!
Mon 08 Jul 04:04 | Mac | Consumer Disobedience Rules It can be very difficult to influence the behaviour of large companies when they do things we disagree with. However it is much easier to do something about it using the ease of access and community building that the net offers us. But I would like to go further than simply demanding changes from companies and organisations that are not meeting my needs. I would like to get together with a group of like-minded people and start taking over their web-enabled services with a view to providing access to their services that suits me and my friends, why should they control the 'user experience'? Rather than waiting for these companies to provide access to their data and services via web services and XML, we should start taking our data and information from them by deconstructing their web sites and allowing the ordinary consumers to decide how they want to access those services, by accessing the underlying content (via XML) with our own interfactes rather than relying on the commercial companies implementing changes that they may view as 'not in their commercial interest'. I want to be able to 'steal' my data from all of my online financial products and do my own aggregation, without having to use a 3rd party company. The only way we can give 'Power to the People', if is we get together and take control ourselves.
Tue 09 Jul 07:37 | Dinesh | learn online earn online business.
Tue 09 Jul 07:38 | Dinesh | learn online earn online business.
Technology Is Movies' Angel, but Record Industry's Devil | Wed 03 Jul
We tend to ask how can we make more money and sell more product, not deal with consumer gripes.
Mon 08 Jul 16:03 | mcw | Contrast DVD's and CD's: DVD's - - on sale at Walmart! Buy your favorite movie! See the neat out-takes, interviews, and such! Prices have actually dropped over the years, supply & demand works, people buy more. CD's - - prices stay high and go higher. No new features or content. 'Cram down' of 80% mediocre songs to the 20% I want. Sales stagnate, prices stay high, discounting by retailers is forbiedden. Record companies complain that the consumers are thieves, and try to introduce new copy protection schemes. If only the consumers would just pay us more money and buy more product, all would be well, say the record companies. Can a company prosper and grow if its suppliers ( the musicians) and customers lack respect for it? I think the music business is in deep trouble.
Tue 09 Jul 04:10 | Alan Fisher | I'd also like to hear a representative from the music industry explain how Wilco managed to make their entire new album available for download from their website several months before it was available in the shops, and it still sold as well as any of their previous albums. Is downloading an alternative to buying? Obviously not, in this case.