jtnt://life/unedited

And I quote - "downloading will not work with Internet Explorer"

Went to download the latest update to Roxio's Toast CD burning application, and was surpisingly greeted by this message:

In order to download the update you will need Safari, Camino or Netscape browser – downloading will not work with Internet Explorer.

This is really no better than the silly coders who disallow any other browser, it's just that you don't often see the apple fall on IE's side of the tree.

9/11 Commission Report Free on iTunes

Get a free audiobook of the 9/11 Commission's Final Report Executive Summary from the iTunes Music Store.

Vote.

Evolt likes me! They really like me!

Or, rather, they like my recent search engine optimization paper, just published on the venerable site.

Evolt, in case you didn't know, is a "world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences."

Read up, and hook me with any comments, corrections, or suggestions you have. Try not to make too much fun of my picture.

p.s. Yes, this is the same as this SEO whitepaper, just on a different site and in HTML instead of PDF.

Baby Got Back, or Usability Ain't All About The Front-end

Which is more ridiculous?

Posting a URL in a web community forum with automatic URL-to-link functionality without including the "http://" (?), or the fact that no forum software recognizes a URL without the http:// with its URL-to-link feature?

Yes, the latter. I agree. No forum software I know even gives you the option.

Fill in obvious rant about not placing the burden on the site visitor and putting the site to work for the site visitor here.

MT3, Comments, TypeKey, Registration? Oh my! (Help.)

Update: Reloaded all the Comment templates, and it all seems to work more sensibly. Did I miss this part of the upgrade instructions or are they not there for me to miss?

I fancy myself a pretty intelligent and web-savvy guy, but I must admit that I need some help figuring out comment registration and MT 3.

FYI: Right now, I have unregistered comment moderation enabled, so as to not make commenting impossible, but still enabling me to deal with comment spam before it infects my site.

Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines

The Department of Health and Human Services has authored a massive paper entitled, Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines. The title pretty much tells the story.

This paper is nothing if not well-documented, researched, and plain old big in scope. 17 chapters, 128 pages, full of screen shots, and a handly little rating guide to help you quickly determine the relevance and strength of evidence of a particular issue. Usability out of a usability handbook. Fancy that.

Not only that, they've gone one step further and provided us with a web-based sorting tool for this rating system. They smartly realized that users/readers of such a cumbersome tome need many different ways to access and retrieve the information therein.

While you're there, check out the Usability University for upcoming classes and seminars on a variety of usability and accessibility-related topics.

Design By Levitra

Mr. Herasimchuk has redesigned his Design By Fire site, but it still looks like his inspiration came from the Levitra logo. Wink wink.

All joking aside, this redesign is a step backwards from its predecessor. Where am I on this site? Why is everything pushed down so far? Even the logo at the top is a good 150 pixels from the top, but more important all of the navigation is entirely below the fold on my little Pismo Powerbook. It also gives me dreaded horizontal scroll bars. Icky.

Web designers used to get panned for trying to design the web like print. Now, "top" designers are being praised for taking this tack. Andrei himself calls this out as a goal of the redesign, "One of my goals with this redesign was to break away from looking too much like a blog, and more like a dynamic printed publication."

This is possibly a good goal in part, as the majority of print design is much more readable than most web design. However, this redesign misses the mark. If I picked up a print publication that was this hard to "navigate," well, I'd put it down.

I think the Design By Fire redesign should be praised for attempting to forge a new path, but unfortunately the path it forges is going to get all its followers lost in the woods.

Side note: Allow me to point out the huge headlines he uses.

From Ma$e to Dr. Mason Betha and back to Mase

Harlem's back. Harlem World, that is. After 5 years away from the game and "livin la vida without the loca," Mase (aka Ma$e, Muder Mase), has a single out, appropriately titled, Welcome Back.

It's a bomb track, no doubt. It's also the next song you'll hear all over the place until you can't stand it. However, with a funked up version of the Welcome Back, Kotter theme song as the root of the hook, it's got serious staying power, too.

I've already listened to it five* times in a row. Head still bobbing.

Welcome back, Mase. Truly.

* Make that six times.

Bobby Fischer Detained; World Safer

The world was made safer today with the detention of Bobby Fischer in Japan. Fischer is wanted for playing chess in Yugoslavia 1992 in violation with sanctions imposed on the country.

It's about time this guy was brought to justice.

I will sleep easier knowing Fischer is off the streets and now unable to terrorize neighborhood park chess matches around the world. I finally feel safe fathering children.

The New Mos Def: "The New Danger"

Mos Def has finally stepped away from the camera long enough to complete a new solo album, The New Danger, due to be released on September 28th.

Fans have been waiting for a new full album since they first heard his amazing first album, Black On Both Sides, was released in 1999. Not that we've had to completely go without getting to hear his smooth flow. He faithfully shows up on albums and singles enough to keep us both satiated and drooling for more. (See my All Mos iMix for all the tracks iTunes offers that feature Mos Def as a guest.)

Or should I say, Happy Birthday, Will Ferrell?

The funniest man in show business today turns 37 today. (Tip o' the hat to Morning Edition on NPR.)

Glen, the Starbucks Commercial Guy

Thought I'd be nice and help spread the meme of Glen, the band Survivor, and their Starbucks commercial. I think Roy is the true star, though.

Enjoy.

There's also, Stacey. Leave her alone.

Installing OpenOffice on OS X plus one or two other things...

Don't let the title fool you. Installing and Tuning OpenOffice on Mac OS X, by Marc Liyanage, is way more than just another run-of-the-mill software install tutorial.

This article goes from installing X11 and OO all the way to getting a 3rd-party PDF generator plugged in and even loading up a Perl script to start Distiller (or a free alternative, Ghostscript) automatically. And he makes it sound so easy!

Check out his OS X software installers and tips while you're at his site. This is one smart man.

Thank You, Will Ferrell

Grab yourself some Afternoon Delight. (Alternate link, just in case - or if you just like MTV better than Rollingstone.)

Rapidly Accumulating Thoughts On Gmail

The multiple redirects upon login are alarming, at the very least.

Login often (all the time?) hangs upon logging in twice in one browser session.

A refresh usually remedies this. Still a pain.

Need a way to display messages by label differently. e.g. Show all messages that are not a certain label.

There are no headers for the columns on the main interface.

(Click image larger view.)

I mean, I know Google is known for their simple interface, but there are some things an interface just needs. Column headers (no matter how obvious it is what type of data are in the columns) are one of these things.

What's up with the weird code that runs the pages?

There almost nary an XHTML tag in the stuff - all JavaScript. Not only that (who really cares what the code looks like), which among other things makes right-clicking links in order to open them in new window/tabs, print, etc. impossible, since the browser doesn't recognize them as links per se and only gives you the generic options as if you'd clicked in space.

That's downright rude, if you ask me.

Slick use of layers and javascript to enable fast access to (and from) things like Search Options, Reply/Forward fields, Create a Filter, and especially the other messages in the same "conversation" (as Google calls a thread of emails).

Props on the accessibility front for offering keyboard shortcuts.

When viewing a conversation, there is no indication of which messages have been read, which ones haven't.

(Click image larger view.)

There is no way to save a message while you are composing it.

p.s. No, I do not have any invites to hand out. I was only cool enough to land my own invite until after they stopped giving those out. Sorry. You're first on my list if I get one, though. I promise.

To do two things at once is to do neither.

Multi-tasking wastes time. That's right. You heard me. So, put down your cellphone, and take your hand out of that bag of chips, and take your third eye off the TV and pay attention!

"...Scientists at Carnegie Mellon put subjects in an M.R.I. machine and asked them to listen to complicated sentences at the same time that they mentally rotated geometric shapes. The two tasks activated different parts of the brain, but each region was operating at a suboptimal level. Here, then, was high-tech confirmation of the common-sense wisdom of Publilius Syrus, a Roman philosopher from the first century B.C., who warned, "To do [two] things at once is to do neither."

Whitepaper: Practical Search Engine Optimization

My first attempt at distilling my thoughts on search engine optimization into an easily understood collection of words and phrases has been published and posted to the Erickson Barnett site.

Practical Search Engine Optimization: What works. What doesn't. Strategies and myths.

Enjoy.

Will the next version of Internet Explorer spell the end for pop-up windows?

The next version of Internet Explorer, Service Pack 2 (SP2), will contain a pop-up blocker which is on by default.

Now that the browser that over 90% of the world uses will kill pop-ups (finally) out of the box, will advertisers (and porn purveyors) stop using them?

We can only hope.

Update: Lomography

I'm not the only one.

Quote Gem:

"The world needs more non-conformists striving for the lowest possible quality!

Not."

Update: musicplasma: the music visual search engine.

Tip: Use the two inner-most areas of the concentric circles that define your selection point to zoom in and out. This took me a while to discover, but it's a gem of a find.

Wish #1: I should be able to minimize/hide the search/info remote control interface thing-a-ma-bob with a single click.

Wish #2: There should be single-click "show all" functionality as well.

Props: I get more impressed with this site the longer I play with it. This is in no small part because I get to play with the site itself.

musicplasma: the music visual search engine.

Musicplasma

Type in an artist or band name in the search box. See and interact with related artists.

I wonder, are they simply hooking into Amazon.com's recommendations?

No matter. This is cool. Way cool.

Lomography?

I've just stumbled upon this thing called lomography.

I think it's a load of crap.

These people are talking about spontaneous street photography as though it's something new, and, apparently, dependent on a certain type of low-tech camera.

Apparently these people have never heard of Gary Winogrand or his famous quote:

"I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs."

I spent an entire semester at SVA doing this sort of photography, and admittedly it turned into my favorite work in school. So, I understand these people's enthusiasm for the style and the freedom it makes you feel.

What I can't stand is the way they talk about this style/method/etc. in such cultish terms. How it's been turned into some kind of movement, made even worse by the fact that the name is tied to some product. The Lomo folks must be loving this.

So you don't look through the viewfinder when you take pictures. Great. So they're low-tech, ala millions of Holga (the refuge of every 2nd year photography student in art school) pictures before yours. Great. So these pictures are entirely personal. Great. Then why do you feel the need to yap on about them and put them up on the web so much?

A lot of these lomographs (it pains me to even think that word) are not as unplanned as they seem. They all look like pictures taken by that annoying kid in your (again) 2nd year photography class that is taking candids and off-center/kilter images to "break down the conventions of what is thought to be photography, journalism, and art."

Shut up. Now, get over yourself, and go take pictures that are really personal, not just stolen records of the most mundane parts of your life. (Really, I think all this is from a fear to raise the camera to their faces in public. To thrust the camera into view or admit to someone else - a stranger perhaps - that they are taking their picture. I'm sure you could psychoanalyze that more, but I won't.)

How come all this "personal" work has so much impersonal crap in it? A woman sitting next to a table with a lone coffee mug on it?

Oh wow. Genius. If you're not Nan Goldin, keep it to yourself. At least her pictures are of the interesting parts of her life.

Can I get a...?

The Weekly Standards is featuring a site designed and built by my firm, Erickson Barnett, this week.

Woot! Thanks, Adam.

HTML Pig Latin

I do not understand the benefits offered by so-called "text-to-html" converters (?), ala Markdown or Textile.

For the unfamiliar, the above-mentioned are tools which translate alternate text codes into HTML code. For example, if I typed *hello world* into Textile, it would translate that into <em>hello world</em>.

You're thinking, "This is nothing more than a markup language for HTML. And HTML is already a markup language."

You are wise.

Just when I had run out of things to learn, here comes this gem.

How is typing "An [example](http://url.com/ "Title")" any easier or faster than typing "<An <a href="http://url.com/" Title="Title">example>/a>"?

It's not. Even though the normal HTML version contains more characters to type, you can fly through it because it's a language you already know.

If you're like me, typing out basic HTML for links, images, tables, etc. flows as easily as iced-tea in the summer. The last thing I need is some other language to cloud my mind and step in as a middleman between what my fingers have to type (this new language) and what my brain is thinking (my beloved HTML).

Frankly, even if you were first starting to learn HTML (or a healthy HTML alternative), it's simply easier to learn and make sense out of HTML than these cryptic simplifications. If I told you that one asterisk equals italics and two asterisks means bold, how often do you think you'd forget that or get the two confused?

It's not just because you're getting older and more senile that you'd forget these, it's because they are completely random and contain no internal meaning.

How self-explanatory would it be for you to "View Source", see an asterisk, and determine that it means italics?

Quick, tell me what this code does:

**hello world**

See what I mean? And I just told you what the silly code does at the beginning of this post! (?)

For the same reasons pig latin is harder to speak or write than regular English.

I must be missing something. I know, having read both of their sites for months, that the developers behind both of the products slandered in this post are intelligent to a high degree. Not only that, I respect them.

So it baffles me to think that these venerable men have spent countless hours pouring over software that is so utterly useless and devising clever alternate languages for HTML.

These tools are like a hokey, web-based Pig Latin Translator forwarded to you by an annoying co-worker, but without the fun and goofy allure of the real thing.

Links. Pass it on.

On the designy tip:

• House Industries
• Wallpaper*
• Modular Dwellings

Gmail Ggeek

I received a coveted invitation to sign up for the Beta of Gmail, Google's 1 gigabyte web mail service, and I was visibly excited and even didn't take a call during the sign up process.

I am Gmail Ggeek. Here me Ggiggle.

This headline is not all that big.

Mark my words: the next fad in web design* will be huge (and I mean really big huge) headline text.

It started with Zeldman's redesign and continues on a new, bold (pun intended) level with the Coudal Partners redesign.

Who's next?

* The previous fad, still prevalent today, is the re-emergence of a huge picture with little apparent relevance to the site. (Gee, that's so artsy! I love artsy.) Coudal gets bonus points for clinging to this fad while at the same time furthering a new one.

Internet Explorer is a security nightmare. Download Mozilla Firebird. Pass it on.

I just sent the following email to all of my friends, telling them to pass it along to everyone they know. Join the movement!

Quick and Simple:

IE is insecure and makes your computer vulnerable to hackers. You should download the below browser now and never use IE again.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

-------------------------------------------------------------------

More details:

Now, you know I am not one to trust the US government, but they've gone and said something with which I happen to agree.

Basically, Internet Explorer - the internet browser most of you probably use - is rife with security vulnerabilities that can allow a hacker into your computer, to greatly simplify things. You can see how this could be problematic. You'd be lucky if all that happened is someone erased your hard drive, and didn't go in and steal your Excel file with your passwords in it, or your Quicken database with your checking account info in it, etc. You get the point.

The best solution put forth is to not use Internet Explorer, and I wholeheartedly agree with this recommendation. The browser you should use is called Mozilla Firefox, and it has the added benefit of having a built-in pop-up blocker.

Download Firefox here: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

You should download this now and never use Internet Explorer again.

If you get fucked by a hacker because you didn't do this, don't come to me for help. I'll only point to this email and tell you, I told you so...

Thanks for listening.