i wonder if it's bad business practice to do free sites on a regular basis because they'd be much more fun and creative than doing corporate sites. 02:15 pm

The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook. the true power of user-customizable style sheets. 12:52 pm

not content with owning the jakob nielsen mousepad? now, you too can be a guru. via dack. 12:38 pm

aetna makes an interesting use of a javascript alert box. since it only loads on the first access of the page, i can't quote directly, but it's something along the lines of "by clicking ok you acknowldege the following...". now, since it's an alert box, there is only the ok button, so they're probably figuring that everyone has to agree to this before they enter the site. i wonder if they realize that [esc] clears the alert box which means i didn't click ok. 02:30 pm

so, i'm skimming through Forbes Best of the Web and i see that the sharper image received the award in the shopping/perfect gifts category. having just been there yesterday, i had to wonder at why they thought it the best.

forbes claims they're judging on "content, design, navigation, speed, and customization". yet, they admit that the design is horrible. the front page looks like it was designed 4 years ago. the content is identical to their catalog so there's no reason to go when you can flip through the catalog in the comfort of your home. the navigation consists of drop downs and navbars that resemble tabs but aren't actually tabs. it takes about 15 sec to download on my 384k dsl line, which works out to be about a 1.5 minutes at 56k (i think), so the speed isn't that great. and as far as i can tell, there is no customization. so is it just the "many oddball gadge[t]s" that make this site "best"? via dack. 01:25 pm

lou rosenfeld analyzes brint.com, explaining why more is not better. via tomalak. 12:59 pm

a timely article on personalization. it also discusses the difference between personalization and customization. via tomalak. 12:57 pm

i'm on over 20 mailing lists that use egroups. this week egroups moved their ads from the bottom of the email to the top. instead of your eye scanning from subject to message, your eye goes from subject to mess of ad text that you don't want to read but have to concentrate on to find the message that follows it. the moderator can get rid of the ads. if they pay $60/yr. i'm quite disgusted that egroups would resort to torturing their users just to make more money. i'm not sure how many groups they have but if it's 2 million, they're looking at max $120 million/yr. that's assuming no one shifts to topica or refuses to pay. i find it hard to believe a company would say "hey, that's a good idea, let's make it so that no one ever recommends us again, everyone can't stand to use us, and everyone's pissed off that we're making them pay to remove a painful usability problem". i guess money's money and customer service is meaningless. 11:52 am

kenneth cole now has womens' clothes. unfortunately, they're too damn expensive to buy. 04:32 pm

sunday, 11:30pm: bring home sister's couch which she doesn't want to cart across country.
monday, 10am: realize that it needs to be brought inside, but since we're just showered and ready for work, don't bother. it's not like it'll rain or anything. this is california and it's august.
tuesday, 1pm: sit at keyboard listening to the tap tap of the keys and the pitter patter of rain on the roof. 01:45 pm

having never watched survivor or been particularly interested in it, i find the SURVIVORblog more scary than anything else. 01:38 pm

not only does microbians have a cool popup window, check out the neuralgic and spore links. 05:58 pm

microbians.com has a chromeless popup window (using win/ie5). i've never seen that before. it's kinda cool. via building the web mailing list. 05:43 pm

in an effort to prove that i'm not a complete failure, i redesigned brig.nu. god i'm depressing today. 05:24 pm

i'm not one for flash, especially on design firms' sites, but i really like what deepend has done. 02:36 pm

Computer Arts is a creative resource i haven't seen before. they have a profile on fontmonster a site of freeware fonts. 02:23 pm

i'm extremely irritated with adobe. 2 months ago, i got around to ordering an upgrade to 5.5 from 4.0. when i tried to order it from adobe, they requested the serial number. fine, no problem, except they kept rejecting it saying it wasn't valid. so i bought it from somewhere else, installed it, it was perfectly happy with the serial number i gave it, no problems. so, i go to order the upgrade to 6.0, reach the nice little page that requests a serial number and again get told it's not valid. now, if i can go to buy.com and order an upgrade without entering a serial number, why does adobe require it? and if they require it, why don't they have an accurate database that doesn't reject my serial number? there's nothing worse than a company that doesn't want to take your money. 02:18 pm

Photoshop 6 Review. 02:02 pm

sort of long, depressing entry moved somewhere more appropriate. 01:59 pm

my name is brigitte and i'm a junkie. i've come to the conclusion that being a junkie has interfered with all creative thought processes, especially writing. logically, in order to rectify that, i should give it up, go on the wagon. unfortunately, diabloii is more addictive than heroin. 01:29 pm

one link two link, red link blue link. via webword. 01:11 pm

someone got so sick of jakob nielsen, they gave him an award. 07:46 pm

ClickZ : Selecting a Web Development Firm: Part 1 12:45 pm

note to self: analyze the cause of artist block before calling oneself a complete failure. eliminating said cause eliminates blockage. 12:29 pm

note to self: letting freshly opened bottle slide through fingers results in volcanic eruption of cold water which is not good for objects occupying desk. 03:25 pm

the fact that this Think Outside keyboard folds up to the size of your palmpilot, may make the palm a much more useful tool. dan gillmor has a column on gadgets that he uses. 02:45 pm

i think my creative block on those templates is because they need to be so generic. i can't seem to design something that has no branding, no logo, nada. that may be another good reason to abandon the cookie cutter idea, along with the stigma of having work that is cookie-cutter. 02:31 pm

while i think that cafepress is cool, i truly can't imagine anyone wanting to buy eatonweb t-shirts, mugs, or mousepads. is my ego just not big enough? that's hard to believe. it must be that i'm not feeling creative enough to make anything worth buying. 02:27 pm

maybe we're not that far off from the jetson's world, at least when it comes to personal flying vehicles. this strap on helicopter may become a poplular means of transportation. 02:10 pm

i told the last 2 companies that i was at that truste was a meaningless seal since they didn't truly watch the clients they gave seals to. apparently, not only can't you trust their clients, you also can't Trust them. 02:03 pm

i need to come up with three cookie-cutter designs for my real estate app, but i've got artist block. it's really frustrating. i can't seem to break it. 12:30 pm

someone asked the chi-web list about favorite chi and web design resources. here's the responses. one day, i'll get around to going through the one's i haven't heard of. just because they're listed here does not mean they're necessarily useful, just that someone else thought so.

acia
flazoom
yale style manual
hci index
id sig
usableweb
web pages that suck
web sites that work
surl
acm
a list apart
asis
ask tog
baychi
infodesign
hci links
nublog
joe clark's usability articles
foruse
good experience
hci bibliography
hci resource network
hci resources
info-architects
don norman
lynda weinman
itg
systemconcepts
uidesign.net
uie
useit
webmonkey
webreview 12:20 pm

ouch. get better soon fred. 11:33 am

in case you haven't already been convinced that pixels is the way to go, zeldman rips apart every other method of sizing fonts in this week's a list apart. 11:05 pm

we went to my sister's going away party on saturday. she's moving to new york mid-september. it's hard being both horribly sad and ecstatically happy. sad because my best friend, not to mention my best and only hair stylist is moving across country. happy because it's something she really wants to do and i think it'll be really good for her. both for her career and her own personal growth. one good thing is we've decided to go visit her for christmas. i've been sick of the "which family do we go to this year" shuffle for several years now, but had no really good excuse to get out of it. now i do. kirsty will just have to suffer us for 2-3 weeks. 05:02 pm

another conference that i probably can't afford to go to: ecustomerexperience. i'll just put it on my list along with web2000, asis and others that i can't even remember right now. 04:54 pm

this lego desk is just amazing. incomprehensible, insane, yet pure genius. via derek. 04:50 pm

listening to another annoying synapta radio commercial this morning, i heard the line "we build dot coms in six to eight weeks" or something like that. it seemed like such an odd statement. does that mean that if the dot-com fails synapta sites are "built to fail in six to eight weeks"? 01:48 pm

amazon has put up their new navigation. i had hoped, and suggested to them, that they put a customer's most frequently used tabs first in their "today's.." section. i guess that was too difficult for the king of personalization. 01:42 pm

life simulator. via mersault*thinking. 01:37 pm

even more dot coms (other than just beyond) are getting booted off nasdaq. 01:09 pm

K-Meleon. a standards-compliant browser based on Gecko. very light. zeldman. 01:07 pm

AOL for linux?

"If you are intelligent enough to get Linux running on your computer, why in the name of all that's holy would you want to use AOL?"

i just went back to finish reading all the xpert advice interviews at surfstation and noted something unusual. the only woman interviewed was kristina kremer (and she was interviewed with paul kremer). out of 28 designers only 1 woman (unless i'm guessing wrong on the one's with no pictures). so, the question becomes, are there no really good inspirational women designers? is it just that the designers that inspired the interviewer happened to be all male? is it just that male designers are more self-promoting than female designers? and, no this isn't me going off on a feminist kick, i'm truly curious if there are women designers that people find inspirational and at the top of the field. 12:01 pm

a nice quick ssi reference. 11:27 am

i need to do some design work. unfortunately, i can't break out of programming mode. for instance, i was just lamenting about what i would do with my bookmarks now that deepleap is no more. my thought process went something like: "i wish i could get their code. of course there's no way that would work. oh wait, i've got a db, i could code my own....". i will design, i will design, i will. 02:11 pm

i *think*, and this is a knock on wood keep your fingers crossed kind of think, that my computer woes are over. i finally got my docking station and mouse button fixed on my laptop. i've got win00 on my desktop, and everything seems to be running ok.

so i finally got around to downloading xemacs for win. of course my last copy used a customization file that someone else had built, so if anyone has a nice html syntax highlighting thingy that they want to give me, i'd really appreciate it. of course i don't need one so bad that i'd go through the effort of figuring out how to do it myself, but, you know, it would be nice. 02:08 pm

deepleap. c'est morte. i'm sad. and sorry. 01:55 pm

style vs. design. zeldman's latest htmhell column points out the difference between the coolness factor of style and the communication of design. having never produced something cool and stylish, i'm glad to see someone point out that good design isn't necessarily cool or stylish. 06:18 pm

ok. so i underestimated on that 7 hour thing. 3 hours later i'm preparing to upgrade to windows2000. since everything except the power supply has been replaced, the os is the next target. although tomorrow we'll probably pick up a new power supply, just in case. happily, my ibook is running quite well thank you. 09:09 pm

why is it that swapping out one piece of hardware in a pc - something that should take under 10 minutes - always turns into a day long ordeal? let's see, we finally ordered a new video card for my machine and decided to get some extra memory at the same time. should be simple right? 7 hours later, i've gone through upgrade torture. first the video card didn't work, upgrade the motherboard bios, video card still doesn't work, different video card doesn't work either, maybe the motherboard is bad, buy new motherboard, video now works, cd-rom isn't found, upgrade new motherboard bios, cd-rom found, spend 2 hours watching windows find new hardware. now if only my docking station were fixed. 06:18 pm

clothes equipped with fully integrate networks are ready to hit the street. "geek chic" is here.l 10:07 am

there's something uniquely pleasurable about convincing someone to create a useful site. i mean, i can do brochureware sites in my sleep and while they have their, albeit minor, uses, they're never very interesting. but, a content site, a content site that will actually be useful to people and possibly develop community. now that i can get excited over. even if it is just for my dad. 02:29 pm

another nail in the coffin for beyond. i'm just sorry for friends who still work there and own stock. 02:27 pm

i was flipping through cam's slides from his web dc talk. and came across this one and this one. the first describes the web server as the back-end of a web-app, but to me, the web server is just the gateway or the delivery system for the back-end, not the back-end itself. i define the back-end as c++/java code/database. the second slide shows jsp, php etc. as middleware with web servers as the back-end. but again i say the web server is the gateway. in any jsp environment, apache is the gateway to the jsp server (like jserv). jserv compiles the jsp servlets and accesses the db and any java or c++ code on the back-end. i would still call jsp middleware, but i think apache is the layer between the front-end (client-side browser) and the middleware, not even close to the back-end. 02:06 pm

sometimes, when you start to think the world is normal, you hear something like the crazy drunk guy. thanks liz & thoma. 01:03 pm

there's finally a hinged transparent pc case. the nikao submarine. here's a brief review. when i first saw the g3 case i was drooling over the hinged side that provided access to the motherboard. now if i could just find somewhere to buy one. via lilly. 12:19 pm

Couple names baby after Web site for $5,000. "the kid will have a cool story when he grows up". i think it's more likely that the kid will be completely embarassed and hate his parents for giving him such a stupid name: "iuma". why are parents so cruel? 12:08 pm

i'm just at the tail end of finishing that app for my dad. which means i'm still in programming mode. which is why i'm feeling completely useless from a design pov. time to swap. 08:35 pm

webtype.org has a contest. i would like to enter it. the trouble is, i'm looking at how bad my web typography is right now and wondering how i could possibly produce a decent submission. 08:33 pm

so you wanna be an information architect? you can get educated at universities now. 02:53 pm

i've been informed by several people that the nigerian con job is quite a classic both by phone (many people in a hong kong hotel room cold calling businesses) and mail. Nigerian Mail Scam, Nigerian Letter Scams, usps. anita sent the links and chris for the phone story. 02:46 pm

this review of the social life of information may convince you to read it much more than my occasional mentions every time i get around to reading a chapter. i will finish it. really. 02:39 pm

life is good. dsl is up. i have connectivity again. i'm so excited, i just don't know what to do first. 02:31 pm

we have a dsl person scheduled to come out tomorrow morning to install our dsl. i'm trying not to get too excited that way i can limit the disappointment. but, it's been 3 months of no connectivity except dial-up! i feel like i'm taking a vacation from my life. if i really wanted to analyze that, i'd probably find it quite disturbing. 11:22 am

one of the most creative spams i've seen. a nigerian family in the middle of a political struggle, trusting no one but wanting to invest $35,000,000 in my company. i appreciate a good story. 11:17 am

lance is blue-skying again. it's thought provoking. but, who knows what the world will be like in 10 years. 01:09 pm

since i was in programming mode and i realized how lax i've been with the site, i made some modifications. i finally got around to adding a newly added section to the portal, and added this really nifty randomizer that displays a random blog on the page. actually, it's not really nifty, i only did it because i wanted to see if you could include a php file in an html page using ssi. it just sounds so much more worthwhile if i say it's nifty. 08:58 pm

today i spent many hours building a time tracking program. the mindless kind where you click "punch in" and the clock starts and then you click "punch out" and the clock stops. jason was whining about how hard it was to keep track of hours by writing them down. he was just guessing and rounding numbers which makes me believe he's under-charging his hours. even if it's worthless, it was fun to build. 06:25 pm

sometimes, i wish that oh so many years ago when i started doing design work i'd worked on a mac. 8 years later, i'm thoroughly entrenched in the windows world and am much too lazy to learn the ins and outs of another os. just now when i booted up the ibook to check on a site bug someone sent to me i realized how much of a pleasure it was to look at. sitting side by side with my gray toshiba laptop, the orange ibook is just refreshing. the thought of all the effort that swapping would entail makes me cringe tho. 07:28 pm

Showcasing Client Work on the Web. a useful article. i didn't realize how challenging it was until i needed to do it myself. via tremendo. 06:42 pm

someone posted this The Evolution of Brand Strategy article on the wd mailing list yesterday. my biggest compaint is that it assumes that no web designer ever learned branding. any good designer (who came from a print background) already knows all these things and applies them to the web. i don't suddenly feel that "it's an exciting time to be involved in the design business." 06:41 pm

a wap on the knuckles. a very interesting analysis of why wap technology is not delivering. it all comes down to general-purpose vs. specialized. specialized is useful, general-purpose is unwieldy. via mersault*thinking. 06:28 pm

i've not been blogging much because i'm deeply entrenched in my latest project. building a real estate web application which will allow the agent to update their site themselves. i'm mostly doing it so i don't have to maintain my dad's site for him. but i figure i'll be able to sell it to others. well, i was deeply entrenched yesterday, today i was reorganizing our filing system. yuck. 05:52 pm

Webtype.org ( principles ) is a discussion and resource site for web typography. via zeldman. 05:41 pm

i also wish companies wouldn't build sites entirely in flash so that every time you click a link they can play a new flash clip. i'm reconsidering the convenience. 08:19 pm

MAC has finally put up their online store. i wish companies that let you sign up for email notification would actually follow through. that way, i would have gotten an email saying the store was up instead of having to read about it from lilly. 08:14 pm

the latest in my series of body breakdowns: ingrown toenail. 07:48 pm

alertbox. much less controversial this week. i definitely think he's accurate when he says that users will be more inclined to use amazon. pure laziness wins out. who wants to register with a new bookstore? but i'm not optimistic about web wallets and reputation managers. web wallets have been talked about for years. no one has come up with one that has been widely adopted. even aol. reputation managers don't seem to be doing much better. we'll see. 05:28 pm

while waiting an excessive amount of time to be tortured wednesday (my dentist always runs late), i picked up some auto magazine (the magazine selection is pretty bad: parenting, horses, cars) with a weird looking electric car on the cover. the sparrow is built by corbin motors in hollister. it's cute. it' cheap. it's classified as a motorcycle. it's small. 12:38 pm

another, i don't care about this now but i may in the future link. eric describes using relative positioning for the page while using absolute positioning for nifty dhtml stuff. more importantly, he links to some code and articles. i may get around to using this someday. or not. 12:33 pm

today i started developing a site for my dad. i figured it was time to remove the stigma of my dad owning the worst cookie-cutter site in the world. anyway, since i'm a good little sheep, i decided to try and start coding to xhtml standards for all my new stuff. it's disgustingly easy. which means i have no excuse for not doing it before now. i'm still too lazy to go through my old stuff tho. 12:27 pm

phpShop.Org. not that i'm interested right now, but next month i'm going to say "wasn't there a php based e-commerce system?". or not. you never know. via stuffed dog. 12:19 pm

this seems to be an evening for disagreeing with "hot new things". Maybe TVs should just stay dumb gives both the hype and the reality of interactive tv. there's this thing called "know your audience" which applies to every product. people sit in front of the tv to be mindlessly entertained. no effort. sit. watch. relax. sure it'd be cool to decide to watch that show you missed last night tonight. but, that's no more difficult than picking up the tv guide. you just have more options. all the other features they're talking about adding require effort. if you want to truly interact, you'll walk over to your computer because at least the effort is much less. unless of course, you don't have a computer. 12:00 pm

supposedly, we're going to get a call next week. a call in which they'll schedule a time for dsl hookup. supposedly that time will be next week. i'm so confident. 01:02 am

another thought on the personalization thing. one of people's biggest concerns lately is privacy. especially in the e-commerce space, personalization is based on personal data gathered by that company. how that data is used is very much a concern. take a look at amazon, when they released their "circles" data, where you could look at what employees of certain companies were buying, every body starting screaming about privacy issues. so now we've got: takes effort, takes time, too little reward, and too many privacy issues. personalization the new push. 11:44 pm

A Message to Web Designers: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It. this article isn't particularly interesting except for the line

"Designers say that customization and anonymity are the two things users want most right now. For example, consumers favor features like My Yahoo and Amazon.com's Recommended lists."

The Web's Still-Unfulfilled Personalization Promise. i have to truly wonder if personalization is as important and wonderful as it's touted. the number of people who actually use personalization features is really low. 10% of yahoo visitors are going to my.yahoo pages. if personalization was so exceptionally useful, why aren't more people signing up? personalization takes effort. whether you're rating your amazon recommendation list or customizing your my.yahoo page or choosing a color scheme on camworld. it all takes effort. and time. is the reward really worth it? apparently not. 11:09 pm

jason pointed out today that my first designs always suck. those designs which i plan out in my head for hours before i sit down with photoshop are always terrible. i'll then spend 5 hours trying to make it right and having jason tell me it sucks, but in a nicer way. until finally, i give up, wipe the slate screen, look through a design book and come up with something good. in fact, after that initial bad design, i can churn out 3 good one's in the same time frame. maybe i should just skip the pre-design/sucky initial design phase. i wonder if that's possible or if they're an essential part of the process. 10:58 pm

i've decided that i'm cursed. in addition to the multiple computer break downs that have happened recently (my video card died yesterday, docking station, keyboard, mouse switch, monitor...), my body is breaking down rapidly. a rash caused by a virus, a migraine, a potential root canal, a bladder infection... i think there should be a warranty service for bodies. "hi, my body seems to breaking down, since it's still under warranty, could you replace all the broken parts? oh, and while you're at it, why don't you do a few improvements... those 34d's might be nice." 10:50 pm

it's always nice to get feedback when you lose a contract. it's even nicer when you can be amused by it. today we were told that we lost a contract. a tiny little real estate site the hardest part of which would be creating a database and the forms to edit it. simple, easy, quick. we were turned down because it didn't seem like we'd had much experience creating this type of site and it was suggested that we take a look at local prices because we were twice as expensive as the competition. *snort* that's right, we've never done a real estate site. we've just created complex web applications, huge e-commerce sites and multiple brochureware sites. that experience couldn't possibly be applied to the complex needs of this real estate site. hee. 10:45 pm

surfstation: xpert advice. a wonderfully set of short questions to lots of top designers. the beautiful thing being that they're all different. different inspirations, different do's, different don'ts. but, at the same time, they're all right. via zeldman. 09:17 am

in Casual Versus Core ernest adams discusses designing games for the casual gamer vs. the hard-core gamer. the point being that segmenting users into hard types and designing for the easiest type can severely limit the reach of your product. that and the fact that people don't always fit into the little boxes you've assigned them to. reinforcing the concept of "who's your audience and how are they going to use it?". via nadav. 08:52 pm

going to glish and seeing that he'd linked to other relevant napster opinions made me realize that—after just complaining about something being boring—i've fomented the tedium. sorry. 08:22 pm

Text as Design, another typography article. this time for design text. 08:08 pm

typography on the web. if you have no typography experience you *must* read this. it's also a good refresher for those of us who have let slip all their copious type knowledge. via xblog. 08:03 pm

if architects had to work like web programmers. scary. via xblog. 07:41 pm

copywrong. lance's scathing criticism of napster users - "thieves and rapscallions" makes me glad i've never used it. he does have a point tho. how many people are there that jump all over web design theft but use napster for music theft? 07:12 pm