Category: User Experience

  • Seybold SF, Day Two

    First of all, the WOW party at Chevy’s last evening was really fun. I met some cool people from NCI (the National Cancer Institute), part of the US government’s department of Health and Human Services, who have developed a comprehensive set of web development best-practice guidelines that they will be distributing free soon via PDF.…

  • Seybold SF, Day One

    Attendance seems sparse today. I brushed up on browser compatability issues and learned a lot of useful tricks for optimizing graphics. I skipped a content-management session I was thinking of attending at the last minute. Going through the schedule, I see a lot of conflicts, so I’m glad I’ll be able to download the powerpoints…

  • I'll be at Seybold all week

    This is just a reminder that I’ll be attending the Seybold 2003 conference in San Francisco all this week. I’m doing an hour on syndication on Tuesday afternoon, a half-hour intro to blogging on Thursday afternoon, and a 3.5-hour comprehensive weblogs tutorial on Friday afternoon. There’s wi-fi at the conference, so though I might not…

  • jjg on user-centered design

    Good (public) interview getting underway in the Well’s Inkwell conference with Jesse James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience (New Riders, 2003), a book I’ve promised to review in this space and will get around to eventually, I promise! Garrett is a groundbreaker in the less-than-a-decade old discipline of information architecture. Much of…

  • Weee're back

    Well, that took longer than expected. I’m still getting things re-configured and re-set up at ol’ Open Publishing / ezone / x-everything industries, but most of the sites are at least now visible, and I may hope that we’ve cured the hacked-so-easily problem we had going there. In the meantime, off the air, I found…

  • Radio silence

    I’m bringing my server down for maintenance. You can only hack my home page so many times (three, to be exact) before I decide to do something about it. My sysadmin/friend/host Jeff Tiedrich will be updating our Linux install from an old Slackware version to a more recent Red Hat version said to have more…

  • Visio ate my homework

    I’ve been drawing wire frames (also called virtual blueprints) depicting schematically how a number of different page views and portlets and popup windows show look and function for a portal project, and I’ve been drawing these pictures in Visio. It’s an old version of Visio (2000) and I’m running it on a fairly old Dell…

  • I must be losing it

    After a long pleasant period of using my Mac for pretty much all my work and play tasks, I’ve been involved in an IA project recently that required me to work in the Microsphere, in Windows 2000, with Office/Win software, using Visio to make diagrams instead of OmniGraffle or Illustrator. It hasn’t been that bad,…

  • Automatic content inventories

    Right now I’m working on two paying projects (amidst my more speculative and creative and fun stuffs), a book about the upcoming version of FrontPage, which I’m coauthoring, and an information architecture job, part of a requirements-gathering process for a corporate portal for a Fortune 500 client. OK, I’m also supposedly writing a white paper…

  • The RSS evangelist

    Chris Pirillo’s preaching the Word about RSS. Can he get an amen, somebody? [Note: This post is destined for RFB, but I don’t remember how I set up the email-to-blog system and I’m away from the desktop client where I have Radio set up and it’s behind a firewall on a dynamic IP anyway, so…

  • We're addressing the wrong level

    All praises to the LazyWeb, David Galbraith has made a point I’ve been pussyfooting around for ages: on the web, the permalink’s the thing (not the page). Pages are just framing devices for any number of items, each of which must be addressable individually. Not just addressable, but also indexable and hence searchable. That’s why…

  • A simple CMS

    What the world needs now… is a simple, open-source, free content management system: CMSimple is a simple content management system for smart maintainance of small commercial or private sites. It is simple – small – smart! And it’s free! It is not only Open Source – it is Free Software licensed under the GNU General…

  • Posting from OAK

    Well, I found a power outlet so I can work while waiting for my flight (first to Dallas, then to New Orleans), and I noticed a wireless signal. Turns out it’s a fee service called wayport.net, so I paid the $6.95 for access till midnight, though I can only use it for a little over…

  • Google as OS

    Every few years some new technological framework comes along to challenge Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop. Since the advent of the Internet, Microsoft has managed to fight off Netscape (IE), Java (.Net), application service providers (Hotmail), remote process calls (SOAP), and U.S. antitrust law (Bush). OK, I’m waving my hands here. Not all these things…

  • Content architecture for business blogs

    Dave Pollard’s been doing some heavy thinking on how best to use weblogs in the workplace, to enable employees to “publish their filing cabinets.” He’s got some useful diagrams illustrating the content architecture he recommends. Any blogger (or k-loggers) would recognize his scheme as a variation on the familiar weblog format that has emerged in…

  • Server back up

    Well, I don’t know what was wrong with my DNS or Apache configuration, but whatever it was it seems to be working correctly now, thank Murphy. I’ve been getting some poignant messages from a friend in Iraqi Kurdistan. He and his family are headed from Erbil into the countryside to avoid, if possible, the ravages…

  • My server appears to be down

    As of right now none of my web domains appear accessible, although I still seem to have FTP access to my Open Publishing server. I’m x-posting this to RFB’s usernum address on the Salon community server (0001111). I’m depressed about the war. Working hard. Conference coming up. Lots to post about. Server down. Figures. Positive…

  • Mac view of my Linux server

    Silly me, I just realized I could connect to my remote web host directly as a server and then thumb through the site in the OS X interface. This should be obvious but I just put two and two together.

  • Safari debug menu

    Steve Champeon took a moment out of his busy life to post this to webdesign-l today. Kinda cool: Here’s a neat trick, for those of you using Safari. If you want to see the debug menu (which includes goodies like a DOM tree viewer and a “snippet viewer”, which lets you take a snippet of…

  • JemBlog to offer "semantic blogging" using RDF

    Danny Ayers posted to the cmsblogapidev mailing list today in response to a question posted to the list: “Does anyone have strong opinions about databases here? if so, do they extend beyond uses for mysql?” His reply: I don’t know about it being a strong opinion, but I believe in the context of cms and…

  • Testing

    Test post to new “knowhow” location (http://opublish.com/knowhow/).