There is no doubt there are many more reasons then just three to love Flickr, but these are my top three. My first exposure to Flickr was in late 2004, prior to them being bought by Yahoo. Its early use of Ajax, in place of editing and other user interface enhancements, made Flickr stand out and unique. Below are some of the features and qualities that make Flickr my favorite site and one that I visit and use everyday. …
On the heels of my posts about email client standards in early October, Email Standards Project has launched with a website that features a list of email clients and the support for the Email Standards Project Acid Test. This project is being led by Freshview, makers of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. It’s great to see this getting off the ground and I hope it gains some traction. …
I’m a huge proponent of open platforms and open API’s, so when Google announced Open Social I was excited. After thinking about it for a bit, I’m not so sure about it now. It’s great for developers to have exposure to these host services’ large user-bases, but at what cost to the hosts brand? The thought of a Facebook style Vampire application on Linkedin just doesn’t sit right. …
There have been a lot of XHTML/CSS services that have popped up recently. Seems like anyone with a text editor and a copy of Web Standards Solutions
I haven’t seen much written on the subject of metadata, especially as it relates to information architecture and designing interactions with users. This post describes metadata and shows real world examples of advanced uses of metadata. Metadata is at the core of what makes mashups, a Web 2.0 staple, so popular.
Wikipedia describes metadata as data about data. So, for example, you might have this post’s content as the main data but the date published, date edited, author, category, tags, etc. would all be its metadata. …
When designing a user interface, be it for the web or an application, my core goals are always to eliminate redundancy and make the UI as intuitive as possible. Sounds fairly simple, but like with all subjective processes, keeping those core goals on track can be tough. By no means are the suggestions below written in stone; these are just things that I keep in mind when designing a user interface. I also use simplicity or the KISS principle as a guiding tenet when developing my user interfaces. …
A couple of weeks ago, someone posed the question “Does IMing make you more or less productive?” on Linkedin’s Answers forum. I thought it was a really good question and I can see how IMing can make you less productive, but I also know the value of using it in a team environment.
I find IMing to be an invaluable tool for working in a team. Email is a passive medium where response times are not immediate and can get lost in a rapidly filling inbox. …
Currently, there are no standards for HTML e-mail and coding HTML e-mail involves reverting to the coding practices from 1999. Tables are a must for structure and this is limited CSS support for most email clients. There are so many different e-mail clients and testing for all of them is a nightmare.
Recently, there was a post on the Campaign Monitor blog about the need for standards in HTML e-mail. Having toiled with HTML e-mail for years, it would be a huge step forward if e-mail clients would render HTML to some standard. Even if it isn’t the exact standard that is used for web browsers, anything would be better than the current state of HTML e-mail. …
Wow, I just read this article called “The Nature of Talent” over at Freelance Switch and I couldn’t agree more with its author. I’ve been feeling and saying this for years about how people perceive talent. It’s a great article on the subject and I’ve added my two cents below.
Talent and creativity is not some magic fairy dust, it’s hard work. I’ve had many people over the years say “you’re talented” and I’m always gracious and accept their compliment, …
Recently I worked on a project in WordPress that was going to have a lot of categories and I wanted to display the categories comma delimited. After fooling with WordPress’s wp_list_categories function to list categories, I realized that it only allowed you to display categories as a list or delimited by a <br>. So after looking around on Google to no avail, I decided to whip up a function that allows for different delimiters. The function is fairly simple with one argument for the string of the delimiter. …