JBot Mania

Txt message to Sora
12:06am October 29, 2007:

Fuck yeah!

And now onto cheering for another underdog… the 8-0 New England Patriots.

GO PATS!

…that I am just now discovering.

The plugin is called Stylish. A description from the download site is:

Stylish allows easy management of user styles. User styles empower your browsing experience by letting you fix ugly sites, customize the look of your browser or mail client, or just have fun.

What does this mean? Well, one example where you might want to use this is with FTP sites. Generally speaking, FTP sites are very basic, and to some, intimidating because of that. There isn’t alot of overt direction about what you do when you get to an FTP site through your web browser, even though it’s actually pretty easy.

Using Stylish, however, you can make this interface alot more appealing and clear. Read the rest of this entry »

From this week’s Web Dev Newsletter, we have some videos of users using assistive technology.

I watched three - “Everything I can’t do in the real world I can do with my Mac”, “One thumb to rule them all”, and “Me and my computer”. They all get you a little choked up or make you smile, and the last one made me all drippy from my nose.

The company that made these videos and that makes these fantastic tools is Assistiveware.

Here’s one video for starters.

Everyone in Europe I met is convinced that the only people that support Bush are people who don’t have a passport.

-An old chum of mine

In case you are part of that 0.0000001% of web designers who give a damn about the handicapped, here’s an article about some little known techniques for handling complex image display when your user is blind. That’s right, BLIND.

Alternative Text for Complex Graphics

Who’s starting to care? Probably Target.

I say “lite” here because any serious usability expert (those guys with the eye ball tracking devices and data sheets that involve decimals and not various fractions of a stick figure) would take serious issue with idea that their entire curriculum could be summed up in a list of 30 terms. Why do I care? I care because I used to work with these nerds and there’s something to be said for having good hard science to backup the proliferation of generalizations about “the user” and their fantastic voyage called their “experience”.

I was reading through this week’s Web Dev Newsletter some more and I came upon two interesting articles about usability. The first, much closer to actual science than the second (it involves decimals), is called Landing Page Confusion. It discusses the effect on user performance of having multiple objectives on a page. They provide examples of successful changes they made to some unnamed web sites and the effect this had on conversion rates. It provides some convincing evidence for keeping it simple… because we’re stupid.

The second article is a great synopsis of major usability principles, notable theories, and relevant terminology. If you read this, you will definitely be more comfortable at your next usability meeting. It’s also a great jumping off point to go more in depth into any of the 30 concepts. Brought to you by good old Smashing Magazine (the King or Queen of Lists), this article is entitled 30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of. Heck, print it out even and hide it in the back of your desk drawer. I won’t tell anyone.

So, I’m using the plugin WP-Polls for a very opportune question that you’ll see below. As a side note, I highly recommend this plugin.

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I was reading my weekly Web Dev Newsletter and I came across the following tool - Designer’s Plaything. I tried it out and it’s slightly addictive.

From the site:

A tool for designers and clients to experiment with different typography and colour combinations on a web page as well as check for colour accessibility level.

It’s available online and as a downloadable standalone app—which brings me to an interesting suggestion they have for using it…

As a standalone web application Designer Plaything can be passed to clients or designers alike so that they can easily explore different layout combinations and express them clearly and precisely back to you.

Give it a shot and have your own plaything for a while. Heck, maybe you could even do something useful and work-related, but only if you feel it’s absolutely necessary.

we’re gonna get hammered…

Alright, so I didn’t get hammered but I did go to a chapel. Well, a church, but it was for a glorious reason. Miss Jennifer got married! To whom? Why, Mr. Timothy, of course. Oh, my little Jennifer, all grown up.

What was the best part? Well, a very distant first would be Jen’s very kind words about me. I mean, I know I’m pretty spectacular but when someone else says it, it lends a bit of credence to it. Now, if only we could coordinate speaking more often than once every six months. We’re boys like that—boys with fantastic racks. Read the rest of this entry »

After settling into my unemployment only vaguely, I decided to turn in the ol’ change bucket and see what my years of throwing coinage into it had gotten me. Turns out, it was quite a bit. Read the rest of this entry »