Sometimes conventions adopted by many unrelated sites across the web help make sites more friendly and familiar for visitors. That is certainly the case with adoption of the orange feed icon across the web.
It is such a good idea to develop ‘standard’ icons that there are now multiple ‘standard’ share icons and behaviors.
- Share Icon Project
- Open Share Icon Project
The later project started in part due to licensing and ownership issues with ShareThis’s graphics, which is something I’m sympathetic to, however at what point do we have too many conventions that the behavior of these conventions remains a mystery to visitors?
Molly recently lamented that twitter has sucked the blogging out of her. I’ve been feeling the same way for some time, though I was never as prolific a writer has she is. Though for me I think it was Web 2.0 that has sucked the blogging out of me, and unfortunately the slow down isn’t all that recent.
Bookmarks hidden in one service, interesting news stories in another, photos and other content in yet another. I tried to remedy that with the creation of a tumblelog-like Place Name Where but I never did get it integrated into this site beyond tag searches and so it never felt like part of any discussion that might take place here.
So where to next? The basic tumblelog format doesn’t appeal to me, nor does simply putting a bunch of widgets on page or daily “this is what I bookmarked today” posts along side of any blog content. That kind of leaves most existing solutions behind. I’m not quite sure what form this site will end up in when I’m done or what purpose it will serve. But I do want to start playing again and posting more doodles or pieces of what I’m playing with for others to see.
In the mean time I also have a backlog of posts I’ve been meaning to write or finish writing, some even describing subtle features of the current design [open the site in a browser, not a feed reader and resize the width!]. I may revisit those ideas as a way to get some activity here again and get myself back into the habit of posting on web dev stuff.
Things are getting a little old and dusty around here as a result of me being quite busy with work as well as contributing more elsewhere on sites like flickr, ma.gnolia and newsvine.
To honor its crusty-ness I’ve aged the site’s color palette some, like a fine, aged, um, newspaper? Enjoy.
The above screenshot of a page from The Jersey Journal shows one of the most annoying web advertising I’ve come across in some time. Whether on purpose, or due to some insane twist of [random] fate the page in question displayed the same auto-playing video ad with audio in two ad spots on the page. Due to page load being what it is the audio was staggered by half a second or so making the unexpected audio even more obnoxious. Particularly as it was loaded in a background tab so I didn’t know where the sound was coming from at first.
The page also gets bonus points for displaying ads for police recruitment on a story about a highly decorated cop getting arrested.
Andy Clarke has posted a quick write up of his approach to browser testing new site designs. Though a bit of a simplification, he follows a line that looks similar to:
- Gecko
- Safari
- IE 7
- Opera
- IE 6
And then trails in with testing the stragglers at various degrees based on spec, but always for at least access to content. I don’t have too much to add to that other then I agree. When I’m coding I will typically be working on my mac with Camino open (it always is), Firefox (for the DOM Inspector + JS console) and Safari. When the page is stable in those I will turn to IE/Win (flipping between 6 or 7, depending on which box I’ve got easiest access to) and then work out from that base. The only real difference in our approach is that more often then not I still give IE5/Mac style information.
