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...glittering idly in the moon...
Taken by lauren {elycerose}
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A Signature Cadence
Love this post from Rands In Repose and it couldn’t come at a better time. I’m working on finishing up a lot of little details on a web application and it’s great to remember how important these little things are.
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Does the broken windows theory hold online?
In my opinion it does, and I think Kottke’s points about the care and use of the visual design at the end of his post are spot on. He seems to sit on the fence with how much the visual design impacts the broken windows theory. I agree somewhat, a well moderated and active site owner probably does play a greater roll than the visual design in how much trolling and spam comments you get, but the visual design is still a vital component.
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2002 story resurfaces on Web, decimates United stock in minutes
“the light-speed wipeout is a powerful reminder of how quickly bad information can spread via the Internet to a trigger-happy Wall Street that is willing to dump millions in stock before checking the facts.” Whoops.
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Seth's Blog: Is architect a verb?
“More interesting, you can architect a business model or a pricing structure to make it far more effective at generating the behavior you’re looking for. Most broken websites aren’t broken because they violate common laws of good design. They’re broken because their architecture is all wrong. There’s no strategy in place.” The semantics of Information Architect, Designer, Visual Designer, Interaction Designer, etc. don’t really interest me anymore, but I do agree with Jeff’s commentary about educating the public more about what’s happening behind the scenes “design” and in particular web design. It’d be fantastic if clients knew even just a little more about what goes into creating a great website. It would sure make my job a lot easier.
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Aurora (Part 1)
Interesting new browser concept Adaptive Path did for Mozilla Labs. Lots of good, well thought out concepts but like a concept car this isn’t something we’ll be seeing anytime soon.
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Welcome to the All New Webmonkey
Glad to see it’s back, complete with a nice redesign and some “new” features like tagging and comments. It seems quaint that it didn’t have them before. A cold-water-to-the-face reminder of simpler era of the web.
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Boagworld web design podcast
Nice new site from Paul Boag for his podcast. I finally met him briefly at SXSW this year and he was great to talk to. The inaugural interview for the new site is friend and fellow Blue Flavorite, Jeff Croft.
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OS Form Elements
Photoshop form elements for various browsers and operating systems.
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CharacterPal
A great little widget for those hard to remember special characters.
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Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
“Occasionally someone would notice his value to a project, but instead of giving him the care he deserved, they’d just fork over copious amounts of cash to ship him off to his sketchy uncle SEO, who tied him up and fed him keywords all day long.”
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Ties that bind
Antitrust laws exist mainly to “prohibit agreements or practices that restrict free trade and competition between business entities.”
So, among other things, they protect you from Company X trying to force you to buy a second product after you’ve already bought a first one. This is the main crux of what got Microsoft in trouble with Internet Explorer.
These laws, specifically the Sherman Act, are likely what’s keeping you and me from having to buy our milk from Standard Oil, which is great, but with software it can be tricky. Microsoft stepped over the line a bit for sure, but it’s not always so blatant. What constitutes a “product”? Where does one piece of software end and the other begin? What should be part of the operating system and what shouldn’t? For the most part I think software companies are doing it right. Applications are focused around particular tasks: listening to music, getting your email, browsing the web, editing photos, etc., and the operating system or “the web” is there to facilitate that. It’s the links that make these individual applications really shine and that’s where this gets sticky.
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Webbing
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Barbed web
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Special Characters
Great reference site for testing special characters and quickly grabbing their HTML codes.
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Writers: The Most Undervalued People Online
It’s a good article and I was surprised to see my coworker Keith’s slide is used halfway down the article to make a point about the importance of writing online.
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Enough With The Lists
“Everything is freely available on the Internet, and is accordingly made inestimably valuable and utterly value-less.”
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Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards
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Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site
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11 Clients You Need to Fire Right Now
A funny list of clients that you should be leary of.