jtnt://life/unedited

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 ñ 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.

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

Vote.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.