Category: User Experience

  • IE Tab – Firefox Extension

    This is it. The Firefox Extension I’ve been looking for. As a site developer I spend a great deal of time switching between IE and Firefox to test browser support. This extension completely removes that need and brings it all home. I haven’t tested it extensively however one of my other gripes has been the…

  • Ajax apps that don't break the Back button

    This stuff’s all over my head, but it seems to be talking about tricks to get the performance of Ajax applications in the browser without trading off the standard browser experience your users (and Jakob Nielson) have come to expect (Developing Ajax Applications That Preserve Standard Browser Functionality): To provide the traditional Web usability features,…

  • It's not nice to fool Mobhappy blogger

    The How Not To Deal With Blogs: A Case Study entry by Carlo Longino at MobHappy provides a perfect object lesson in how to get on the bad side of bloggers when dealing with them straight would have been much smarter.

  • Keen CMS Observations

    Anil Varma of Refinery makes some intuitive points regarding success factors for implementation of a Content Management System in this white paper (Four success factors for a Content Management System). As I frequently work with Extractable’s clients during the early stages of Content Management System evaluation, I strongly believe that understanding the business and user…

  • American First Credit Union site launches!

    We’re pleased to announce a successful site launch: American First Credit Union. Congratulations to the team that designed, developed, and deployed the site!

  • Google Code Analyzes the Markup of a Billion Pages

    The folks at Google Code have published some interesting analyses of HTML markup statistics and trends, complete with nice bar charts for us visual learners (Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics): In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and…

  • On the Usefulness of Meta Tags

    One of the oldest rules of Search Engine Optimization is the importance of meta description and keyword tags. They help search engines understand the content and context of each page they query. On my drive in to work today I thought a bit deeper about a strange occurrence I’ve begun to notice. I recently spent…

  • Paul Graham deconstructs Web 2.0

    Graham is right that Web 2.0 started off as a brand invented for an O’Reilly Conference. He says now it means something along the lines of “using the web as an application,” “Ajax,” or “doing things the way they should be done” on the web. Here’s his take on Ajax: One ingredient of its meaning…

  • Firebug (Firefox extension) helps debug Javascript and DHTML and Aj*x

    FireBug aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter. Here are some of the listed features: XMLHttpRequest Spy – Ever wonder what all them newfangled Ajax websites are up to? Watch the requests fly by in the console! One…

  • IE7 will support Ajax's XMLHttpRequest without requiring ActiveX

    Because a day can’t go by without something about Ajax appearing onscreen, I’m stealing a news item that Todd posted to our project portal that IE7 will have a native XMLHttpRequest Object: In IE6, 5.5, and 5 (yes it’s been there for 8 years) you had to use MSXML as an ActiveX control to get…

  • Starting points for typographical inspiration

    I don’t design type, but I wish I did. I’m posting this iStockphoto.com article, Know Your Type, here as a reminder to read it later when I’m not as slammed.

  • Periodic process renewal

    In his Noise Between Stations blog Victor Lombardi compares three models of organizational evolution and change–deteriorating, chaos, and periodic renewal–and finds the last the most healthy, writing: Periodic renewal requires the organizational discipline to stick with what works as well as the resolve to occasionally improve it, a careful balance. Just today Dan and I…

  • Corporate blogging? Not so fast

    David Kine asks What’s Holding Back Corporate Blogging? and finds the usual answers: fear, an unwillingness to relinquish control, and so on. That makes sense to me. Some corporations are clearly not cut out to blog in the usual sense. (It remains to be seen whether they should have internal project logs or knowledge logs,…

  • "Wireframing AJAX is a bitch"

    Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman examines the “Web 2.0” hype that threatens to overwhelm some of the legitimate advances in rich application development for the web in his article Web 3.0 at A List Apart, noting that it’s hard to map out AJAX interactions and putting the bubblicious flavor of the hype in context with this…

  • A few Google map mashups

    Shimone just sent these around via mail: SF Bay Area Tech Companies Companies advertising on their rooftops for the benefit of Satellite Imagery

  • Seminar in rich interactive web applications

    More info at Silicon Valley WebGuild…

  • Upcoming conferences

    The Extractable strategy team has a few conference appearances in the upcoming months. First, Christian and A’lan are both presenting posters at the upcoming IA Summit (March 23 to 27, in Vancouver): Social Software in the Enterprise – Christian Architecting to Users Concerns – A�lan Architecting from Values – A�lan & Christian Also Christian will…

  • How do I blog?

    Frank Paynter at Sandhill Trek has been asking people this month how they blog. Cool people. Not me. Which is just as well, because I’d be tempted to make a joke (“very carefully”), or be all literal about software and processes (boring). I don’t think I have a good answer anyway. It keeps changing. Mostly…

  • Back up your blog!

    I’ve been asleep at the wheel lately, but the recent Typepad outage should remind everyone to keep current backups of your site, both the data and the output if possible, whether you are self-hosting or relying on a service. Related: *michael parekh on IT*: ON TYPEPAD OUTAGES AND WEB 2.0 MORTALITY, More than a common…

  • Generation theft

    J.D. Lasica posts about a conversation with BlogHer co-organizer

  • Geodog notes the inverse relationship between blogging and work

    Quoting from Geodog: Work is the curse of the blogging class: I suspect that historians looking back at the rise of blogging will see the tech depression of 2001-2004 as a critical factor in getting blogging started. The stage was set by the 1996-2001 internet boom where content had been hailed as king, and by…