November 2002 Archive

Don’t Forget

November 29 is Buy Nothing Day in the US and Canada. November 30 is Buy Nothing Day in the UK. Also, Buy Nothing Christmas lasts all season long.

If you’re going to buy me something for Christmas, Don’t Buy Me Gap.

December 1 is World AIDS Day. Link and Think.

The Fastap Keypad, first reported here in May, is finally making it to concept. The BCC reports that Fastap technology, invented by former Apple ergonomic designer David Levy, has been put into the Panasonic GD87 camera phone.

This is one of the greatest mobile phone innovations in a long time. I’ll be sure to follow the Fastap Keypad over the next year as it hopefully makes it’s way into more phones.

(via WebWord)

The Learning Web

The BBCi homepage has been redesigned and now learns from your previous link selections. Whenever you click within a section - say, News or Radio - and then return to the homepage in the future, that section will be a shade darker than the others. It’s an excellent form of personalization that doesn’t take anything away and doesn’t get in the way.

Matt Jones discusses the redesign and the team that made it happen. Matt mentions that most of the code was done by Paul Hammond, a client-side coder who has inspiring thoughts about the future possibilities of the W3C DOM.

Atomless

James Tindall shows some of the most beautiful (visually and audibly) Shockwave and Flash to be found on the Web at Atomless. It’s a nice break for the end of a long day.

Live Webcast: Scalable, Beautiful Web Documents

Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software and creater of the CSS specification, will be speaking at MIT today about CSS and its media implications. The lecture will also be webcast live at 4:00 EST. Details are available at the MIT Media Lab.

(via Brainstormes and Raves)

Your Rights Are Disappearing

Your rights are disappearing as fast as the autumn leaves.

Lee Sten, senior staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains the dire situation we’re in:

‘The Total Information Awareness program, with its ability to provide persistent storage of everything from credit card, to employment, to medical, to ISP records, is a recipe for civil liberties disaster unless there are provisions for citizens to find out who is looking at their records and to see and correct those records.’

(via Opensewer)

Great List of Font Sizing Articles

Thanks to my referrer log, I just found this great list of font sizing articles. Enjoy.

Lance Is No Longer Keeping It Real

Lance Arthur of Glassdog recently posted “I am no longer keeping it real.” The godfather of the personal web and one of my inspirations for this website is considering leaving the web scene altogether:

Lately, I can’t be bothered with any of it. Not even this. I’ve contemplated leaving altogether, actually. No more glassdog. It’s not that it’s an encumbrance, necessarily, but it is an expense that I don’t necessarily think I need to hang on to. I’m not part of any neighborhood anymore. Not a weblogger, not a webziner, not a pixelator, not a designer, not a writer, not anything. So, I mean, what?

No more glassdog. My stomach dropped when I read that sentence. It’s hard to believe that someone who was once one of the most prolific writers and designers on the independent web is thinking about calling it quits. It really saddens me. It makes me want to take a step back and think about what I’m doing with this site and elsewhere on the web. What will become of it all?

Bits, Experience, and Jazz

Mark Hurst of Good Experience discusses two online experiences, Googlism.com and Myway.com, that appropriate aspects of other sites and create a whole new user experience:

The beauty of online experiences is that they can be appropriated, modified, perhaps improved, and then re-created in endless ways - somewhat like a jazz riff. Since the experiences are fully based in bits, these changes can be made with relatively little investment in time, money, or effort. Want to change the experience of historic China? You’re talking person-years and millions of dollars (see Offline Experience, below). Want to re-launch a major set of bits with some drastic changes? You might do it in days or weeks.

Good Experience: Bits, Experience, and Jazz

(via WebWord)

Search Enabled

Site search now sits on the right sidebar, just below the navigation. JavaScript is required for the search form, but those who don’t or can’t use JavaScript should see the Non-JavaScript Friendly Search link thanks to the noscript element.

For those who are wondering why I provide a search domain option: I wanted to use the power of Movable Type’s Public Search for my weblogs (Joshua Kaufman’s Weblog, Elsewhere and Web Simple (Update: The Web Simple project is over.)), but that left me with a considerable chunk of non-weblog pages that weren’t searchable. So I decided to also incorporate AtomZ’s free search service to search the non-weblog pages. Did you know that you can exclude directories or pages from AtomZ Search? Neither did I until I looked for it. Kudos to AtomZ for providing such a great service for free.

Now I can do fun things like find out that I’ve typed “usability” 36 times on my weblog, but mentioned Jakob Nielson only 8 times. Tweaks to the search results are forthcoming. As always, feedback is encouraged.

Zeldman on the Independent Web

SXSW recently interviewed Jeffrey Zeldman, who had this quotable bit to say about the independent web:

(Q.) How do you persuade people to fall in love? (A.) You don’t have to. The independent web takes care of itself because it fulfills basic human desires. The desire to connect. The desire to produce. The desire to enjoy content not mediated by corporations that can’t afford to produce anything less than a blockbuster. On the non-commercial web, an audience of 10,000 souls (or even a thousand) is meaningful.

Request for a Weblog Entry Validator

I just put in a request for a weblog entry validator over at webgraphics. There’s also a thread at the Movable Type Support Forum which may turn out some results.

Get Out the Vote

Today is Election Day. Vote for what you believe to be right and what you know to be necessary. Vote for what you believe is in the best interest of your district, county, state and country. Don’t miss your opportunity to change the world. Get out the vote!

Composite: A Visual Textarea Editor

Old news but still worth mentioning : ComposIte, a visual textarea editor. It’s a chrome overlay which uses a streamlined Mozilla Editor for HTML composition in text areas. For those that do a lot of typing in text areas, like most webloggers, this is a very cool thing.

Two Redesigns of Note

Jeffrey Zeldman: The champion of web standards finally goes all CSS. He uses some nice CSS ~~tricks~~ features, including using a:hover to create the illusion of JavaScript image swaps in both the secondary navigation and banners. Check out his CSS to find out how he did it.

v-2 Organisation: Adam Greenfield’s web playground also redesigned with standards at the forefront. With help from Spazowham Design Group, v-2 sports validating XHTML and CSS, Section 508 compliance, and an RSS feed. Now, the best written user experience weblog is also one of the best looking outside and in.

Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture

I just received a note from Jeff Lash about the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, which is publicly launching tomorrow. From the press release:

AIfIA is a non-profit volunteer organization that serves as a resource for organizations and individuals seeking to learn more about information architecture and its benefits, and assists information architects who wish to promote the field. Information architecture, the art and science of structuring and classifying information on web sites and intranets, is a growing field that is becoming increasingly important in the modern information age.

Three great IA books in the past year, a wonderful and growing IA community and now the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. These are exciting times for Information Architecture, and I’m very happy that I can be a part of it.

← October 2002 | Archives | December 2002 →