With the last redesign I placed google adsense ads on the site. Making money from this site is not a concern, nor a motivation to post - I just figured that the occasional check would be nice. Well, since I haven't received one check, and never even look at my stats, I've decided to take the ads off. I might still keep the site5 links up, simply because I really think their service (for the cost) an excellent value.
No promises as to when I plan to redesign the site, but I think it will be more than just a blog -- who knows.
Stay tuned.
I think things are finally settling down. I'm just 4 days shy of 3 months at the new job, and I think I've got my feet planted firmly.
I want to post more. Not that all that much is really going on, I just have this desire to post more.
I want to redesign this ugly cookie-cutter template as well. I'm not too fond of the new template conventions of MT. I could possibly move to another engine, write my own, or even go to a hosted solution.
At any rate. I promise ( to all 3 of you reading this ) to post more frequently.
I'm listening to more music these days too... here's my current fav.
Lots of the SNL skits I've seen over the years aren't that memorable... but this one, "Change Bank" has long been a favorite of mine.
I left the amazing group at the Chron on Friday and today I started my new gig with JP Morgan Chase, in the N.A. Investment Bank Technology Center.
Changing jobs is tough. The most difficult part, for me, is dealing with the emotional ties I made at the previous job. It's heart-wrenching leaving people you spent 8 hours a day with for the last n years. Second to the emotional change is the anxiety you have before you start the new job, not fully knowing how things will play out.
My experience has been that things will be great at the new place... just as the were at the last. The key for me is making the transition a quickly as possible.
I'm a big fan of the book, Don't Make Me Think, which illustrates design conventions for making things easier on the user.
iTunes does a great job at this, but has gone from Don't Make Me Think, to Think for Me, regarding whether or not I really want to download podcasts that I'm subscribed to because it's been a while since I've listened to them.
That's a feature I could live without. If you're going to offer something to the user, like the option to subscribe to a feed, which to me means, "all newly found episodes will be downloaded", don't change the definition of the term "Subscribe" behind the scenes because you think you know me better than I know myself. Remember, I'm the one with the brain.
It was only this morning, after using iTunes for years, that I mistakenly clicked on the little gray circle next to the feed with an exclamation mark (I wish I had taken a screen shot)... that action is what brought up the above dialog box. I had always assumed that that was an indication that the feed URL was unavailable -- If too much time went by and the resource never became "available" again, I'd eventually unsubscribe. All this time I've been misguided.
Here's a tip software developers: If a dialog box's purpose is to ask a question (even if it's confirming what you told it months ago) do everyone a favor and put a flippn' question mark in the icon -- indicating that you have a question for me! Reserve that cute little exclamation mark for when either myself, or some external factor has caused the application to behave unexpectedly. When I've not changed anything related to a feed, and see an exclamation mark next to it, I think there's an error, but surely, it's the cause of something other than me -- Simply because I haven't done anything! Those are the sorts of errors that eventually fix themselves, or will never be fixed.
So Apple, don't think for me, and next time, give me a little more insight into what that mysterious circle means. If you have a question for me, show me a question mark, show me some indication that my action is requested, have it glow or do something. Bouncing icons in the doc is a wonderful example of where you've done it right!
I wanted to change my twitter background image yesterday and recalled how much I love the background images over at squidfingers.
As can be expected, the site was redesigned at some point in the past 3'ish years. The redesign broke my script as the image names/locations changed.
The newly modified perl script can be found here.
I'm convinced that search is the future... just google it if you don't believe me.
Red circles surround Brands.
Green circles surround Search Form Fields.
Clay Shirky, while being interviewed for this new book, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, explains what I feel, is the key ingredient to achieving success in anything.
I gave a talk at Supernova, a brief talk on the Perl programming language. I was pointing out that the Perl programming language, which has been an absolute mainstay of the web from the earliest days, is held together by love. It's not held together either by government intervention or by corporate investment. It's held together because a bunch of people love Perl, and more importantly, they love one another in the context of Perl. They like being part of a community that makes this language work, and work better.
Love is the key because this outward expression waters and nourishes the seeds of enthusiasm, discipline, and determination. Without it, progress is damned, or hampered at best. Only when these seeds are constantly nurtured will a cause flourish and grow to it's fullest potential.
source: The Worldchanging Interview: Clay Shirky
I paid for Adobe (Student) CS2 Premium.
That's more than alot of people can say.
Before I replaced the HD in my MacBook, I uninstalled (or somehow removed) Adobe Illustrator.
Now, months later, I want to fiddle around with it.
I pop in the install DVD... get the license screen, with all fields blank... ~sigh~ My thought process followed, "I don't see the serial in the box, it's probably in my gmail somewhere, shouldn't be too hard to search for... forget it, I'll just use photoshop, it's got the vector tool thingie.... I'll put Illustrator back on here when I've got the time to do a complete fresh OS install."
Or so I thought...
I fire up Photoshop and was greeted with this:
Space Monkeys with laser guns will normally tickle my funny bone. That was not the case tonight.
The next thing I see is this:
"That st00pid installer!", I thought to myself, "st00pid! st00pid! st00pid!"
A quick search on google revealed a blog entry that helped me solve my problem:
http://sambot.com/2005/07/adobe-space-monkey.html
I followed the steps, and all is fine and dandy.
The moral of the story, don't put in any Adobe install DVD/CD unless you 1) have the time to wait for a behemoth 1GB app to install, or 2) you have the serial handy.
props to these guys that did it without Adobe.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_carl/sets/72157604144345854/
Many ad-driven sites have photo galleries. They're great because they garner easy impressions because the uses must advance (click) through to each next photo, turning one visit into 10 (or more) impressions.
I was logged into my "my.yahoo.com" home-page-portal-thing (in which I encountered another misfortune/bug I can blog about later) where I followed a link to a "Bit Kit" photo gallery showing off various cases for carrying and storing drill bits.
The slide show navigation did a wonderful job of setting the expectation that there would be 10 related photos in this gallery. I clicked and clicked my way through the gallery, each click confirmed the expectation... "Slide 1 of 10", -CLICK- , "Slide 2 of 10", ect...
For me, the final photo in a photo gallery is particularly fun to anticipate as sometimes It's the climax of the gallery and I'm often disappointed when it isn't. The concluding photo in this photo gallery was an anti-climax if anything. It was a freaking Advertisement.
IMHO, a site's objective from a usability perspective is to give the user a predictable experience. You build up expectations through consistent design and functionality and then with every new page and every user interaction the site confirms the expectation, the product being a predictable site.
It is dishonest to build that expectation that with each next click a new photo in the gallery will appear and then, on the final photo, rub the user's nose in the fact that they (the user) just put a few advertiser dollars in the site owner's pockets.
I've made my share of design blunders and other mistakes on the web, but those are for you to blog about.
As a result of my graduating from UHD with a Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) in CIS I benefited from a few graduation presents. One in particular was a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble. Spending it at their online store was a 2 hour ordeal. Partly due to the fact that I didn't know what I wanted and partly due to the fact that their site is a navigation nightmare. B&N's design blunders inspired this post, below are a few User Interface and/or design blunders found recently on the web.
Be Consistent
Be consistent. Either hyperlinks are underlined or they aren't. I didn't realize that there were any pages after "10". First because the "Next" button is so far away from the last page, "10", and secondly, because "Next" didn't appear to be. hyperlinked. Also, give your users a preview, show them that pages 11, 12, and 13 exist if they do, lead them on a little.
Make Sense
There aren't 10 items on *this* page.
Protection by Limitation
This is one way to thwart would-be crackers... don't allow *anyone* to use *special* characters. That's taking the easy way out and potentially restricting some to not use one of the dozen passwords they already know.
More password weirdness
Did a DBA make the decision to only allow 12 characters in my password? Again, now I've got to remember one more password to comply with another site's bizarre password criteria.
White Space
I never knew the dentist office could be so fun!!!! White space is key here. The text describes a different picture, but isn't a little too close to this picture?
link: www.whitersmiles.com/our_office.htm
The same image "zoomed out" a bit.
Bugs & More Bugs
I had to unsubscribe from Dave's feed due to this issue. The only way to mark all of Dave's feeds as read is to first read ALL my other unread feeds, click on "All Feeds", then mark my complete repository of links read. Clicking on Dave's folder, or subscription alone wouldn't do it.
"5" gets singled out.
Is that debugging code? What's up with the curlies around the pages? I hope this is a bug and not a cryptic feature.
All images used in this post can be found in my "UI Blunders" flickr set.
Here's a screenshot from my work pc from back in the day
Those were the good 'ol days. This desktop represents nothing to you, but to me it encapsulates so much of what I loved about the web. There was something so intriguing to the web back then, it was a bit of a mystery, almost magical. Every day held something new, I went to work with anticipation.
Today the web is work, it's life.
The web is too predictable these days. I miss the days when Josh Davis, Gmunk, Mike Cina, and the other usual suspects of the era were churning out jaw-dropping designs or new flash techniques every other day, things that I couldn't have dreamed of.
I'm ready for something new, something fun. Or has our web grown up? Are those innocent, fearless years packed with excitement and ground-breaking firsts behind us? Maybe it's just my perspective, and the ear I speak of was my personal technological awakening.
I desperately want to believe that the web can return to what I once perceived it to be. I want the innovation to continue, I want to feel like I'm on the frontier again, looking at uncharted territory. Perhaps the key is in the belief; believing that the frontier is still there, and enjoying the journey of searching for it.
