I don't really expect Typepad to work anymore, so I'm writing this test post to see if it even publishes.
BTW: Everything is now all restored, sayeth the Typepad leaders, but the permalink on my previous entry shows a 404 showed a 404 five minutes ago. Nice. Looks like all is restored..... I'll get you next time, Gadget!
If you want to know a little more about what I've been up to lately, I've actually given two interviews the past few weeks (and one more next week):
Ben asks about blogging and post-college entrepreneurship and David asks about 9rules business strategy and what differentiates us from other networks.
Next week David's publishing another interview with me where I talk about social interaction, blogging, and the two-way web. Good stuff!
I bought this domain a few years ago with the hope of creating a social bookmarking type of web service. Unfortunately I never found the time, and then del.icio.us came out! Oh well, time to sell it.
The starting price is $200, and the Buy It Now is set for $350, and if the auction goes over $800 I'll throw in my design services to put together a new SavedLinks.com logo for you! Cheap!
(BTW: If you want to buy it but don't feel like going through SitePoint, just send me an email: mike AT businesslogs DOT com.)
Update: It was sold for $350.
Alright, I've had just about enough of all this. No, I'm not talking about government-related politics .... I'm talking about political feuds and rivalries in our damn industry.
People refusing to work with someone else because of something that happened years ago, backstabbing at conferences, unintelligent blog posts which then force me to respond back and make you look like a damn fool (who shouldn't be allowed to do any work in the blog industry), and now emails sent to all corners of the web globe saying that the web application my buddy is making is a rip-off, when I know the truth.
The problem is that I know about everything. I'm always in the middle, hearing both sides, listening to everyone, and everybody just needs to grow up and get over their little personal issues. Yes, this is business, but we're in this industry as a whole and by sticking together everyone will benefit as a whole. Don't screw over friends, don't badmouth things that aren't out yet, don't judge a book by it's cover (or a website by it's domain name), don't be two-faced, and don't be an outright liar.
They sound easy to do, so why do I constantly hear about well-respected members of the web industry not doing them?
Grow up people. Everything that goes around, comes around. Karma's a bitch and she knows where you sleep.
Whew, I feel better now!
Roses are red
Violets are blue
My automatic pencil sharpener rocks
So go buy yourself one.
Sorry Garrett, I tried.
I thought I'd share some of the ways I deal with bugs in my layout, leave some comments about your own ways if you feel others will benefit.
1. Check the layout in Mac IE5. I don't care what anyone says about Mac IE5 being an inferior browser, it keeps me honest. The Tasman rendering engine is still one of the best out there, and more often than not, if your design breaks in this browser then there's probably an inconsistency in your code as opposed to it just "not looking correct". Safari is very forgiving about overlapping padding/margin spaces so if it looks good in Safari but is bonked in IE5, then tweak the code until it looks good in IE5 and that will probably fix your bugs with both browsers.
2. Add some borders. The most common CSS bug in my work is when a floated element is too wide (or not wide enough) and some content gets pushed down because of it. Most likely the problem is with the 1) width of the element, or 2) padding/margins of the element. In order to exactly identify what part of the box-model is the culprit, slap some border: 1px solid red; on elements to find out precisely where its boundaries lie. A useful tip for doing unordered list navigation is to put a border around both the list item and the display: block'd link in order to determine why things aren't looking right. Usually a one-line padding rule can fix/break your work.
3. Write tight code. Are you using both padding and margin on an element? Is it really needed? If one of those isn't needed, then add the values together and stick them in one or the other. The reason for doing this is twofold: it makes for tidier CSS and it is now 50% easier to track a layout bug.
4. Kill those margins. As you know, most block-level HTML elements have a default padding and margin associated with them. When designing paragraph styles, one of my favorite things to do is to slap margin: 0; on the p style and just use padding to work it. Now I don't have to worry about margin-collapse and can have better control.
I've been writing CSS for awhile now, so as I start to code I already know where browser bugs usually show up. I try to keep my XHTML as semantic and tight as possible, and my layout as uncomplicated as possible. I've written before about using background images to make complicated layouts easier and I still feel it's good practice to get into. Why rely on browsers to make your overlapping, floated, bordered, round-cornered boxes pixel perfect if you could use a background image to accomplish the same effect?
Just some thoughts. What are yours?
Courtesy my new iSight and my buddy Colin. I'm the smaller head with the blue steel look. Ain't technology great?
The first stage of my portfolio is live, and I expect to be rolling the rest of it out sometime Wednesday night after I come back from Seattle. As some of you might know, my phark.net domain name has been nearly blank for awhile after I moved all weblog postings over to TypePad, so it's been sitting there dormant in heightened anticipation :)
Right now, only the Web Interface section is up, but the rest will soon follow. It's been 100% certified in Safari, IE5 for Mac, Firefox (both platforms), but not IE6 for I don't have any Windows boxes laying around for testing. I've been told it looked a bit goofy in IE6, but I did some blind tweaking that may have cleared up any issues. Please let me know if it looks weird (a screenshot would rock!) and I'll jump on the wagon as soon as I get back from Seattle. And if you thought I'd rollout my portfolio without using hoverless current links or image replacement then you're just crazy!
I feel that many portfolio sites are overdesigned, where the design of the site overshadows — or is better than! — the work presented inside of it. I've iterated through at least 15 separate designs for my portfolio, and I think that this one works best and is flexible enough to allow many different types of content to be displayed. The logo and typeface at the top is set in Knockout from Jonathan Hoefler, a cool sans-serif that I'm pretty sure is used in Newsweek magazine; the lower-case 't' is a dead giveaway.
I got my iPod shuffle in the mail today, and it's even smaller than I thought it would be! The form factor is almost exactly the size of a cigarette lighter — with the USB cover on it is 1cm longer — but about 40% thinner. The box that it came in is approximately the same size as two CD jewel cases stacked on top of each other, and is really well-designed just like all Apple product packages. I think what I like most about the package is the triple-ligature 'ffl' in "shuffle" .... makes me all tingly inside :)
Another update... I added some things to the Web Interface and the Writing part. The rest will be uploaded soon. Check out this two-level tab navigation interface code that I randomly found on my web server last night! I think it was for some client work I did in Chicago but I can't remember, anywho, it works in Safari, Firefox, and IE5 for the Mac. I'm not holding my breath for IE6 though, but feel free to check it out, learn from it, and the usual fun stuff.
This is why I love the web, because faithful reader (and extraordinary, award-winning web designer) Marko from maratz.com volunteered to help me out in a pinch and do some CSS-debugging. You may not know of his name, but no doubt you've heard of his work, including one of the best web typography resources out there. Thanks Marko, you rock.
66% of the BusinessLogs team will be attending the Blog Business Summit in Seattle, with 50% of that two-person team presenting there. What that means is Matto and I will be basking in the warm glow of the Seattle sun while Paul stays at home in Tampa. Matthew is set to speak on Corporate Blogging, while I stand by the wayside and look forward to speaking at the next Blog Summit hopefully 6 months from now.
We're sponsors of the BBS conference, so we get some goodies that other firms may not have — a big advertisement stuck in the conference slideshow presentation, and a b/w PDF flyer to go in attendee's goody bags. Apart from the 4384 things I have to do this week (if you've seen my AIM away message lately you'd know what I mean) I got to design both these items. Check 'em out!
Slideshow Picture (300KB) and PDF Insert (70KB)
After I get back from the left coast on Wednesday, I will be high-tailing it to Virginia to meet with the fine folks at Fairfield Language Technologies (makers of the award-winning Rosetta Stone language learning software) for a job interview. I was contacted after they saw my post about full-time employment and am excited to finally meet with them face to face. Wish me luck everyone!
Over at our company's weblog, Matto and I will be moblogging the conference as much as we can so keep an eye out. Other than that, if you wanna chill while I'm in Seattle feel free to email me mike{at}businesslogs.com and hopefully we can get together. See ya on the flip side.
By now I'm sure all of you have heard that Apple Computer is suing Nick DePlume (aka Nick Ciarelli) because of rumors he posted on his site Think Secret in an effort to find the sources of all his great information. My take on the suit is that they have no business suing Nick, because he's not the one who broke any NDAs. Apple seems to be using the suit just to find out his sources, but it's unfounded anyway so I'm sure a court will throw it out.
After reading this article at Harvard's website, it divulges that Nick is actually only 19-years-old and is an undergraduate student there — he's been running Think Secret since he was 13! Good for him, and I hope all goes well for him in the lawsuit.
I was reading the CNN story describing how Gonzales admits he made mistakes with no further elaboration, and further down in the article CNN discussed how Republican Senator from Utah (what? a Republican from Utah? whodathunkit!) Orrin Hatch said to Gonzales "you've acted, I think, with the highest honor as White House counsel." Then I was thinking about how my respect for Mr. Hatch just dropped a little bit, which proudly puts it in negative numbers based on his straight-up hypocrisy regarding software piracy and I decided to visit Senator Hatch's eyesore of a website just for shits and giggles.
After viewing the source for his website and noticing the nested tables and un-alt'd images, I decided to do a little detective work and see if his site passes Section 508 guidelines like all public sites (like his Senate website) are required by law. Big surprise! Seeing his site slide through the Bobby verifier was akin to seeing a dead fish flop around on the asphalt sans water. 49 instances of missing alt text and that's just the beginning.
So as a good little accessibility pundit, I tried to somehow bring this criminal act (yes, a gov't website not being accessible breaks code 29 U.S.C. ‘ 794d) to the attention of his offices to see what the repercussions will be. I used the contact form on his website to get in touch with him about this matter, but I doubt he'll actually pay attention to me. I know this because the "thank you" screen after submitting the form says "I cannot get back to you personally if you are not a Utah resident."
But we'll see what happens :)
I have a cool weblog post coming down the pipe sometime soon, but it will take some time to write. In the meantime, in an effort to allay my guilt of infrequent postings, here are some links that have interested me the past day or two:
John needs some XHTML/CSS help ..... might you have the skillz to play on his level? Dopey user email posted and replied to on the Googleblog. This guy calls the 867-5309 "Jenny" number in every area code and documents what happens. Hilarity ensues! The BBC talks about getting Dooced, aka, fired because of your weblog. San Francisco man stun-gunned, maced, and rubber bulleted before shot. Pennsylvanian dude goes ballistic over Burger King's lack of french fries.
Last night I got a straight flush (7-8-9 of clubs) while playing three-card poker at Turning Stone Casino. The payout was 40:1, so you can imagine the black chips flowing forth into my hand while my gaping jaw hit the table and my eyes got as large as golf balls. Right after I won that absurd amount of money (which was desperately needed by the way, I'm a pauper in real life) I ran over to the 3-6 Hold 'Em table where my two friends were playing and I couldn't spit the words out of my mouth fast enough. I ran directly to the cage, cashed my dough, and laughed a little bit as the big-faced bills spilled into my awaiting hands.
I walked briskly out to the lobby and pulled my cellphone out in dramatic twisty/showy flair in order to call my girl and tell her the good news. As I got it out, I saw a girl with a drink cart and I decided that I wanted to grab a Coke before I made the call. She got the soda out, and as I pulled the wad of green out of my pocket in order to tip her, all my money flew dramatically out of my hand and landed on the floor and on her drink cart. We both immediately bent over to pick up my bills, and when I bent over I forgot that I had a soda in my hand so I promptly spilled that all over my cellphone which was in my other hand. I didn't pay attention to it at the time for I was trying to get my money, but after the money was accounted for I noticed that my screen no longer worked and the phone was vibrating constantly. About two hours later my phone miraculously decided to turn on, so I called Eleni and then decided that I'd go to Verizon today in order for them to check it out.
While waiting at the Verizon store (aka, the last ring of hell) this kid started talking to me about this LG phone I was looking at. Turns out he's an IT person at LeMoyne college near Syracuse, and we got to chatting about multi-processor motherboard design, the benefits of 64-bit applications, Raid-0 SATA hard drive configurations, and other fun stuff. Then he decided to tell me his life story.
In highschool, as a Sophomore, he decided to hack into his high school's network in order to snoop and see what he could find. Turns out he hit the motherload, and found a directory simply named "Tests" which had all midterms and finals for every class in the highschool. He and his friends stored every piece of data found in the folder locally, and then sold the questions and answers to the tests to excited students at $100 a pop which netted him slightly over $8k in profit.
From the profits acquired by his wrongdoings, he and his friends decided to totally geek-out and build a rocket-propelled lake kayak using jet fuel stolen from a Lockheed Martin secure facility in Syracuse, NY. The only reason they did that, is because at the time, the guy I'll call Matt M. happened to have a cozy little internship at Lockheed doing Department of Defense goodies. So he used his security clearance to gain access to the jet hanger, then sneakily made it past some security guards late at night and stole 100+ octane jet fuel for their satanic creation.
That weekend they went up to White Lake and attached the kayak to the rocket engine (!!!!) they made out of all industrial-quality parts. Unfortunately, they cheaped-out on the hoses attaching the fuel tank to the engine, and the rocket blew up and burnt down a train car that was behind the testing grounds. As the train car kept burning, they booked it out of there in Matt's car. Unfortunately, as they were driving away, State Police cruisers rolled up on them after noticing the blaze and brought them to jail.
After Matt's father posted bail, the guys found out that one of the students who bought the final exam answers decided to rat them out, and now they were being brought in on federal hacking charges via co-operation between the State Police and FBI investigators. Matt was only 16 years old, but was facing life in prison because of the Three Strikes law and the three felony charges that lay in front of him — hacking, arson, trespassing and theft of government property.
Luckily, Matt's father is a bigtime physician in the Utica area and was able to pull some high-powered attorneys for his young son facing life in prison. The legal team managed to combine all three felony charges into one criminal mischief misdemeanor, and Matt got away with 200 hours of community service (which he only did 10, and forged the rest.)
Even if the story is totally false, damn do you meet some interesting people all because of spilt soda :)
I remember in the movie Office Space, Peter and his buddy talking about what they would do if they "didn't have to work" — where the answer to that question is your true calling in life. Well if I "didn't have to work", I'd most definitely want to be in one of these positions, so the following are my dream jobs:
Lead Human Factors Researcher at IDEO. IDEO is an internationally known design firm that specializes in moving from research, to prototype, to product very successfully. They make stuff you can pick up with your hands, interact with, and put on a shelf. I want to lead a team of 3-4 people whose sole purpose is to speak with people in the target audience and get their feedback about the product we're designing or redesigning. I want to sit down with a potential user, buy them coffee, and speak openly and intelligently about their feelings regarding this product. What are they trying to accomplish? What emotions or fears stand in the way of accomplishing that goal? What other products have they used, and what was their experience? Then I would take that information, generate reports and presentations, and others working on the project would take my advice and weave it directly into the product's design.
User Experience Designer at BMW Group DesignworksUSA. DesignworksUSA is BMW AG's North American design arm. DW has worked on the Z4, the X5, and the new Rolls Royce Phantom (which I happen to see driving around Bethesda, MD last weekend!) and is continually working and competing with the design headquarters in Munich for the latest BMW designs. I want to be in a position where I can design the interior space of an automobile based on usability testing, research, and interface design best practices. I'd love to measure where the average hand comes down on the door arm rest for the average driver, and stick the power window buttons perfectly right there. Or to make a center console arm rest move with the chair so that if the seat is lowered, so does the rest. Or to make an in-car entertainment/computer system that isn't as awful as the iDrive. When a consumer buys a new car, I'd like to think that many hours of ergonomic research went into the design of the inside of the car as well as the outside.
So what are your dream jobs?
The Porsche USA homepage was redesigned using XHTML Strict and CSS. Ooooooh baby!
The old homepage was really ugly (look at interior pages for a hint at the previous design) and I actually went to the Porsche site less because of the old design. It appears as though Porsche has only redesigned the homepage and not internal pages, but that's okay because this is a gigantic step in the right direction.
The old homepage had a smaller, less noticeable (as if a giant gold and red badge could be less easily seen) Porsche logo, and this new site clearly separates it out into its own block of whitespace so that you can quickly identify this as a Porsche. It also appears as though they re-anti-aliased (I think it's a word) the typeface because it's definitely less jaggier now than it used to be.
A car site is nothing without big photography and it's tough to have an image that's larger than the one on the new homepage — it spans the full width of the content area and even has a cool transparent navigation section on top of it to seal the visual effect. The four mini-sites on the bottom of the page are each represented not only with a link, but also with rectangular imagery that keeps the user's interest even on the bottom of the page.
Something else that caught my eye is the sheer width of the website. It's way past 800px across which means that they weighed the business factors and actively chose the wider with homepage. Wow, that's really exciting.
The navigation technique is really nice, and I've always been a fan of the alternate pixel fake transparency effect even though it's not used very often. The entire navigation is done using absolute positioning of non-semantic divs, but you know what? I don't care because this is a step in the right direction and nitpicking doesn't do any of us any good.
Full imagery at the end of the navigation drop-across is very nice, but it does take some time to load especially if you're on a dial-up connection (not me ... dual OC3 pipes). Even though it sounds blasphemous, I would have liked to see the navigation/header done in Flash so it would load quicker and not have to pound through hundreds of lines of Javascript. Mercedes has a nice Flash nav on their site (well, damn, I think all car sites do) so maybe they should think about that as well. Of course then it would be inaccessible, which is a big deterrent, and I don't know any of the surrounding business factors either, but it's just my quick suggestion.
Whenever a large website redesigns with web standards (validating or not, semantic or not) it's a huge plus for the professional community. If you check the CSS file you can tell that some skillful people wrote this CSS. Box model hacks, backslash IE5 hacks (with funny developer comments), alpha transparency filters, -moz-opacity rules, I love it! I'd like to commend the entire web team at Porsche North America and any subcontractors for a job very well done.
Feel free to stop by Campaign Monitor to read what happy customers are saying, or the Basecamp website to peak at some of their new case studies, or even the "Everything Basecamp" weblog to read what one subscriber did and how it's now a feature of Basecamp.
Whoever that Mike Rundle character is, he sure gets around :)
My friend Didier is working on a project right now at Ivrea that relates memories with the music playing in the background of that memory. Like when you first met your girlfriend at the club and a specific song was playing, or the tune that was on the car radio when you ran into a deer, stuff like that.
He needs lots of user data to make the project work, so please fill out this quick form to help him out. Thanks, and pass it on!
The Car Blog is a go! TCB (The Car Blog) is a blend between a car forum, a weblog, and an online magazine, and is a place for car people to go and vent or rant about the world of automobiles. I did a better job of explaining the site on the About page, so go check that out if you want more. This blog entry isn't about explaining what TCB is, it's about giving you the nitty-gritty about the design decisions I made, why it looks the way it does, and the CSS ballyhoo and tomfoolery that powers the visuals. So let's get into it!
Successful car site design incorporates heavy imagery and a deep sense of visual amazement, because when it comes down to it, we like to buy and look at cars that we think look good and car websites are the same way. When I started out sketching initial concepts for TCB, I knew that we needed a solid header graphic that incorporated big-time car imagery for some off-the-bat visual punch. I went over to my favorite photo resource, stock.xchng, and found this gorgeous photo of a Ferrari 360 Modena against a blue sky. After some Photoshop color-shifting and slicing, I achieved an effect that I think lures your eyes down the page more because of the slicing's vertical orientation.
The typography choice for the logotype is DIN, even though I was originally considering Interstate. Both typefaces are examples of auto-specific fonts, where in the U.S., Interstate (or an identical twin) is used on all interstate highway signs. Just look up at the green rounded rectangles next time you're driving, and you'll noticed the slanted ascender tops which are its dead giveaway. I ended up choosing DIN because it is the German equivalent of Interstate, and I love German cars. DIN is one of the most recognizable sans-serif typefaces out today, and if you just look around a little bit, it'll pop right out at you. Oh, and the B-Logs font is Myriad Pro, but you already knew that ;)
I've never been fully in control of a website that has advertising on it before, so I was really excited to make the ads on TCB not as ugly as other ads on the web. Coudal and John Gruber have done a fantastic job deploying text-only advertisements on their pages that are integrated into the design, and I went to school on their examples in order to make the TCB ads work as well.
We have three different ad placements on TCB, and each one has their own design style and physical area on the page. The "Premier Ad" is underneath the Leading Article area on the homepage (as well on top of the content in the individual entry pages) so because of its placement, it needed to be tightly integrated with other elements on the page so I wouldn't throw-up when looking at it over and over. I reused the blue from the header graphic and navigation to get the color scheme for the Premier Advert box, and then kept the rounded-box metaphor going as well. The top part of the div was done using a background image (nothing fancy), and I used a superfluous display: block'd span element underneath it to round the bottom as well.
The advertisement at the top of the Shortlinks box needed to 1) not look like an "ad", and 2) blend into the style of other shortlinks. What I did was simply use the same style as other ones (except not in an unordered list, and no light grey background) and add a background image on the bottom that alerted users that it was an advertisement in the same manner as the Premier Ad on the left. If your gamma is correctly adjusted, the background of the rounded "ADVERTISEMENT" rectangle should match the lighter grey underneath other entries over there.
And then underneath the Shortlinks box we have our third category of ads — the least intrusive, and also the least "styled". I made these simple because once your eyes get to the section of the page where those ads would be, you're most likely reading the main page content and I didn't want to force a visual saccade over there which would throw your reading off. These don't have rounded edges like everything else, or do they? And this brings us to our next section.
When we were talking about the design of this site way back in the summer, we decided the baseline browser would be IE6, which makes development a whole lot easier. The cool thing, also, about developing for high-level browsers is that we can do things with the CSS that we normally wouldn't think of. Some of that stuff included Mozilla- and Safari-specific styles to spice it up a bit.
-moz-border-radius — A Mozilla-specific style that rounds the corners of a block-level element. It was used in those instances where I felt multiple divs just to accomplish a rounded corner effect wasn't necessary (like the light-grey shortlinks entries, as well as the advertisements underneath the shortlinks). Also, enough people are out there using Firefox so I thought a nice segment of the population would benefit from such stylings. And if you're like me, and use Safari instead of Firefox...
text-shadow — This effect was implemented in the latest version of Safari (Jaguar users, I think you're out of luck) and it looks wicked cool. I actually use this effect extensively on the homepage: the current navigation tab text, the leading article title, the leading article subtitle and category, the author/comment count div, the sidebar links, and also in the footer. So if you're using Safari, you get an extra treat that others don't :)
The navigation of the site uses an inverted tab style that I've used in the past, and thought it would work well here too. Sliding doors are in effect, however I've been using that technique since before Doug gave it a name :) Some really intricate-looking design effects were achieved quite simply by using background images. For an example, the navigation tabs appear to overlap the underlying color, but that entire unordered list just uses this background image to make it appear complicated. Also, to make the Shortlinks header appear to be offset from the Leading Article header, I just stuck that image in the navigation's background as well. Boom! Effect achieved with no CSS headaches.
Even though in the header you can click on both the TCB and Business Logs logos, the top header graphic is all one image. In an effect similar to the old imagemap idea, there are two divs up there with transparent backgrounds that "cover up" where the clickable areas appear to be. You can see this for yourself if you hover about 20px left of the left edge of the B-Logs logo ..... it's still clickable.
This wasn't the most complicated CSS design I've worked on (the gov't work I did was, go figure) but it's the design I'm most proud of. My test for a website is if I get sick of the design before I even launch it, but for this one, I was excited to show off my work and see what people thought and haven't gotten sick of it yet :) This site is also really rewarding for me because our writers are very influential people in the design community (Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, Didier Hilhorst, to name a few) and working with them on a project was really great.
This site wouldn't look like it does now without the help of my usual beta testing and feedback team: Paul, Matto, Nigel, Mike, and Alex. Thanks guys.
And that's it. What do you guys think? What would you change? Any bugs? Let's hear it, good or bad.
For the Windows users in my audience, here is a screenshot of what the site looks like with Safari-rendered text-shadowing. Makes you want to buy a Mac, eh? :)
I'm selling this laptop on eBay.
So in case you want to buy it, feel free to bid!
When my boys Keith and Mike take pot shots right to the face from Ethan on the damn WaSP website, then I knew I had to reply on my weblog with my own thoughts regarding validation and other fun stuff.
If you link to a CSS file at the top of your website, and when I scroll down I see lots of divs and semantic goodness, then that's good enough for me. I can't recall the last time I busted out the validator and ran through a brand new site. Usually I open the source, check the doctype, and I'm good to go.
I don't think people are remembering why there's even a "web community" to begin with. Remember the standards movement? Remember banding together to fight evil table code? Let's jump off each other's backs over validation, because you know what? It's childish and unprofessional.
Or let me put it to you this way: would you rather have an XHTML Transitional page with some errors, or an HTML 4 page with no DOCTYPE? We need to all stay on the same side of an argument because we're fighting for the common goal. At least we used to be.
Here's a purposefully incomplete list of some skills and terminology associated with "my profession": usability, cognitive walkthrough, scenario-based design, interaction design, user experience, heuristic evaluation, information architecture, UI design, formal usability testing, horizontal- and vertical- prototypes, and user-centered design methodologies.
To be a usability professional — whatever that "really" means — you need to have overly-specific (and confounded) terms and phrases for things that do not need them. I tell the client that I am "using scenario-based design processes to improve the information architecture" when that really means that I'm "thinking like a user in order to make the site easier to move through". Wow, wasn't that easier to understand! Why is it that people feel the need to jargonize things in order to sound as though they know more than they actually do? Why is it that people who work specifically on the user's experience with technology specialize so much and seem to be proud of this specialization? If I ever categorized myself as just a "heuristic evaluation expert" or "navigation designer" or "usability testing professional" then I don't think anyone would feel the great need to hire me. Specialization may be good for some fields, but if you're a user interface designer and don't know the first thing about information architecture then I won't hire you.
It is so very interesting to me how so many companies don't "get" usability and the user experience. For once and for all, let me say this: all a company has is its reputation, and what customers think about their product and that's it. If your product sucks, or is difficult to use, then a potential customer will go and buy a different widget from your competitor. If your product sucks, then the approval of your company drops, and you'll make less money. Oh my god, I just simplified the entire field of product design and economics into one sentence, but it's true.
Here's an example. Method's dish soap was a brand new product with absolutely no market penetration prior to its launch, you know, a brand new company and all. Then it launched, and people realized it was a genius example of industrial design and aesthetics, so they bought a ton of it. Now Method is moving past companies in the soap industry (if there is one!) and gaining market share every single month. Game over, good design wins. See how easy it is! Now what if every company would realize that good design means everything? Don't you think that consumer products would be easier to use? Hell ya they would.
The entire user experience field is just applied common sense to me. Who's going to be using the product? Okay, now what would they need in order to accomplish their task? What other products have they used before, and how much do they know about similar technology (meaning: what other products are they "used to"?) Now Joe Schmo and 50 other people complained about this feature, let's evaluate it. There we go, the entire user experience field compacted into a paragraph.
This entry is not a rant directed towards practitioners in the field of UX, but is directed towards businesspeople who don't know squat about our profession. Until corporations realize that "well-designed products = more money + more customers", there will always be consulting firms making truckloads of money that have a staff of 20 User Interface Designers, with another 5 Information Architects, 2 Human Factors Researchers, and one User Experience Group Director.
And by the way, IconNicholson is still looking for a User Experience Group Director, so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go apply for it.
I'm sure everyone who reads my blog reads Paul's as well, but just in case, I wanted to announce that BetFest.com is now live!
An all-star cast of Andrei Herasimchuk, Paul Scrivens, and Jeff Croft are writing for it (as well as yours truly) and new writers are sure to pop up too. Andrei has loads of tournament experience so his stories are always fun, and Jeff and I will be adding our own stylistic flair. Expect entries from me along the lines of "and then this *total amateur* comes out of nowhere and raises me" or "I thought I had the nuts, but was obviously mistaken" or something to that effect :)
Anyway, just because I like to talk about design once in awhile (you wouldn't be able to tell that from the last few entries on my site) I thought that I would talk briefly about the work I did on the BetFest logo.
Paul came to me around midnight a few weeks ago to ask if I could whip something up for the BF header. I'm a sucker for pro-bono design jobs, so obviously I took the case. I started off by thinking about what people associate with poker, and usually, couch-jockeys and small-timers (like myself) who play poker watch it on TV all the time. When I watch it on TV, I usually think of the ESPN "World Series of Poker" 
logo with it's "wicked worn look" and western-style text. Now that I had a "look" I wanted to emulate, I moved my creative journey over to Veer in order to find a typeface I could use, and immediately Dekoria by Fountain Type popped out as the top candidate.
Unfortunately, I hadn't any type budget to work with, so I decided to go with freely available typefaces instead. Remembering back to when Greg discussed some free Gothic-type faces from Mr. French, I moved over there and found a quirky and unique sans-serif, Tanek. It was perfect.
Now that I had my typeface (something that wasn't as infinitely recognizable as Interstate or Meta) I needed some photography to work off of. I pulled up the stock.xchng and searched for "poker" and after some browsing I came across this picture of a deck of cards that looked cool.
Okay, now that I have the typeface, some kind of concept, and the imagery, it's time to open Photoshop.
In Photoshop I started out by taking the stock image and dropping it's transparency so that it could be used effectively as a background with text on top. I positioned it so that the Ace coming out from the deck was almost centered as to continue with the "centered" look the rest of Bet Fest has.
Next, I got a little inspiration from the "ESPN" type in the logo above, and how it's bulged around a centered point to show a little flair. I set the "Bet Fest" logotype in Tanek, added a low pixel-width white stroke and drop shadow, then used Text Effects to bend it around a center point.
The horizontal lines around the word "OF" in the ESPN logo gave me the idea for the lines in the Bet Fest logo. I thought it evened out the heavy logo type colors, and made it a little more substantial. Next, I added the obligatory card suit imagery (from Wingdings I believe lol) on the left and right, and let those colors dictate the color of the logo — which Paul then made the colors for the entire site.
Paul changed some things on the Bet Fest site, in a way that the background image of the deck of cards would no longer work. So I sent him a version of the logo without the background, and that's what's up on the site right now. For those of you who are curious, below is what the logo originally looked like. Oh well. :)
I don't know what it is with people.
Please explain to me how knowledge of multi-tier database management systems, ASP, Microsoft Frontpage and Access, and possibly PHP/MySQL and crontab usage is only worth $150? Consulting fees usually don't run much below $100 per hour, so I'm assuming this person wants their database setup, all PHP/ASP scripts written/debugged/deployed in about 90 minutes.
And some people wonder why hiring talented programmers is so difficult — maybe it's because morons like this guy devalue their work on a regular basis and tick them off.
Even though this would normally be posted to my linklog, I thought I'd take an entire blog entry to talk about it.
Chevrolet.com Redesigns wtih XHTML and CSS
The sidebar navigation uses definition lists, I mean how sweet is that?!?!?! I don't know who redesigned it, but they did a really amazing job. Another notch in the "commercial website uses web standards" belt!
RealNetworks dropped the price of their songs today to $.49 and launched an Anti-Apple Website which touted that music users "want freedom of choice", a ploy to get Apple to let RealNetworks make more money by letting their music store downloads play on the iPod.
They also launched a petition which tried to garner signatures from people frustrated by the want to play RealNetworks' music store downloads on their iPod. Can't..... hold back...... laughter.....! It sounded like a good idea to a moron Real marketing executive, until hundreds of Apple fans left comments like "Why is [BUFFERING...] Real [BUFFERING...] even still in busi[BUFFERING...]ness?" and "Hurry up and die Real, do the computing world a favor." Needless to say they will not be sending that petition to Apple.
Lots of news sources picked up on this story ("Hey, somebody is calling Apple the meanie, let's capitalize!") and I'm not going to bother linking them here because they pissed me off enough already. Basically, here is what these articles are all saying:
Article "Facts": RealNetworks is trying to give the user the power to decide what to do with the music they purchase online. Apple shuts out competitors because the iPod only plays iTunes Music Store AAC-encoded music, and RealNetworks wants to put the power of "choice" back into the users hands. Why doesn't Apple make everything a standard?
The Truth: RealNetworks is losing millions of dollars on their failed downloadable music platform because everyone realizes that the iTunes Music Store (in flawless combination with the iPod) is a great way to buy and listen to music, and the Apple iPod still plays all MP3s that you download illegally and rip from CDs. Real reverse-engineered Apple's DRM codec so that its songs would temporarily play on the iPod, that is until Apple released an iPod update a few days ago and stopped that hack from working anymore. The iTunes Music Store and iPods work on both Windows and Macintosh platforms, whereas the RealNetwork music store does not work for Macintosh.
So RealNetworks is touting user choice — but where the hell is the choice in platform? So basically they are only targeting the iPod users who own PCs. Ahh, but that's what no journalists are picking up on — the fact that the entire campaign is to give users back the choice, however RealNetoworks doesn't support the Macintosh! Open architecture my ass!
Sorry I'm ranting. If you want a better explanation of the situation, I highly suggest reading John Gruber's take on this situation. It's a long article, but *oh so brilliant* the way he tears down one author's article sentence by sentence.
My buddy Honus drew up his own interpretation of something Real might do in the future if they can't get their music to work — make their own iPod!
I think it's fair to say that talking about actual traffic figures for a personal weblog has become faux pas in the blog community, and I'm not sure why. So to break the random tradition of keeping web and user statistics hidden in a vault somewhere, I'd like to share the hardcore numbers behind my weblog.
TypePad has no way of tracking unique visitor stats, so all I go by are pageviews. On a regular weekday, when I haven't written anything that was picked up overnight by the blog or Mac community, my site receives between 1000 and 1600 pageviews. Usually when I write about Mac-related stuff, I email the editor of MacSurfer just to let the community know about it. As soon as they link to me, I get an additional 1500+ pageviews that day and the day after, until my link is no longer on the frontpage and no one sees it. When both Jeff Zeldy Zeld and Cameron Moll linked to me within a day of each other, I received an additional 2000+ pageviews each day last week on top of my normal traffic. And to give you an idea of the pull Paul has in the web world, when he linked my redesign up on CSS Vault, I received 5000+ pageviews over the course of a weekend.
If you follow car news, you'll know that BMW is bringing a coupe version of its 1-series hatchback to the United States this Fall/Winter. I wrote about this new 2-series coupe back in April, and you probably read it and passed it off as just another weblog post, but it definitely wasn't.
If you do a Google search for "BMW 2" something strange happens. Out of 4.5 million indexed hits for that search term, I'm the number one result. At least 75% of my daily traffic comes in from Google to that page, from queries like "2005 BMW 2", "2005 2-series", etc. Dozens of car forums in all different languages have linked to that entry, used the pictures, and quoted me. I get emails all the time from random people just wanting to talk about cars.
My recent post about the new 4-series coupe didn't get many comments, but that doesn't mean it's not being seen. Three days after I published that entry, Google found that page, and I'm now the first or second hit on Google for the query "BMW 4" and that has been driving traffic to my site for the past few days now. Because of all this, I seem to have a corner on the concept/future BMW car audience — a very good thing to have because it all has to do with a project I'm currently involved in ........ :)
There are people who specialize in the field *cough* of Search Engine Optimization. They call it a science, when really it's just tricking search engines into thinking the content you provide is valuable enough to give it a high search ranking. Anil Dash made "SEO Experts" swallow their words when he won the Nigritude Ultramarine contest because he had actual people and webpages linking to him instead of ghost pages or fake domains.
Within the past year or so, the following well-known people have linked to me: Jeffrey Zeldman (3 times!), Dave Shea, Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Paul Scrivens, Cameron Moll, and Joe Clark. My Google PageRank is now significantly higher than many other sites, simply because well-visited websites have linked to me in the past. PageRank can be thought of as a reputation network, where websites with good reputations (high traffic) validate your own reputation by sending their traffic to your site. Because of that phenonmenon, things that I write about on my weblog tend to get picked up quickly by Google, and shoot to the top of the search results within days. Basically anything that I write about, if you Google the topic related to the entry title, I'm on the first page for a week or so after I write it, then I fall off.
The downside to only tracking pageviews and not hits and other statistics is that I cannot find out how many people are reading this entry right now from their feedreader and not clicking through. I personally wouldn't care if everyone read my blog from within <insert RSS app here>, but I would like to know how many people subscribe.
If there are any other questions you have for me in regards to high-trafficked pages, more statistics, etc., please feel free to leave them in the comments and I'll answer them. This weblog wouldn't be anything if it weren't (for you pesky kids!) my readers, so I kow-tow to y'all.
I know you've said to yourself before: "Self, where in world did Kottke find the link to that weird movie? How come Boing Boing is rockin' the cool links, and I never find anything cool? Why is it that my linklog feels more like a news story regurgitator than a fresh treasure box?" I know how you feel, I've been there, and am usually "still there". So I'm going to give out some hints on how I find interesting websites and where I find them.
I visit the Drudge Report and CNN all day long. But in the past few weeks, I've changed my news aggregating ways so that I can breeze through more information, more quickly. In my feed reader of choice, I have a folder that is dedicated solely to news RSS feeds. I have every RSS feed listed on the Reuters syndication page, most of the Bloomberg RSS feeds (you can find them on MyRSS), and some other news sites. But those are just the tip of the iceberg.
I love to check out del.icio.us to see what other prople find facinating today. For beginners, I recommend the "popular" page which lists the most frequently linked webpages for the past 24 hours. From there, you can find the link to the Popular RSS feed, which is another feather in your fresh content finding cap. If you are addicted to information like me, you can subscribe to del.icio.us RSS feeds straight from the categories you find interesting: like funny, cool, business, design, and many others. These are updated constantly throughout the day, so make sure to keep your aggregator open at all times!
Blogdex is an amazing resource to find out what the blog world is into at the moment. I found out about the Weblogs.com meltdown almost a day before everyone else in the blogosphere did because of judicious Blogdex surfing. Once you find something interesting, "Track the Site" to find out who else thinks it's cool as well. Find out what they had to say about it, who else they linked to, who links to them, who commented, and so on. You'll be amazed at the information you can find only a few levels of separation away from the source.
I can't tell you how many hundreds of RSS feeds from weblogs I subscribe to, but generally it is all the most popular ones. I like subscribing to Comment feeds as well, because then I can find "new people" from which to find information. The feed list is constantly changing, because I delete and subscribe to feeds all the time.
Basically, that is where I find my information. News sites, geek sites, blogs, design sites, aggregators, and bookmark sites — I'm definitely an infoslut. Separating the cream from the crap is a small price to pay to find interesting stories, and once you get linked from a site like Slashdot or MeFi, you'll find that all the pain was worthwhile.
Everybody is making their readers jump through hoops to get Gmail invites, but I won't do that to you.
I have 7 2 0 invites left. First 7 people to comment on this post that they want one can have one. No strings attached.
Comments were turned off cause all the invites are gone.
Big up to my buddy Michael Simmons for pointing out that in Dan Cederholm's new book, I'm mentioned on Page 209!!!!!!
Wow! Can't really say much more than that. I'm going to buy the book tomorrow!! (not like I wasn't going to buy it soon anyway lol)
I can code in Java. I can connect Java to a database, pull entries out in XML format, and write a web service that can interface with the whole shebang. I can write a Perl script that will automatically work with the web service to pull content out and put it on a website.
But I'm not a developer.
I can code in PHP. I can write a PHP script that will use the web service, pull the XML-formatted data out of the database, and then output it to a PDF on the fly so the server can email it to you.
But I swear I'm not a developer.
I can take that XML, transform it server-side with XSLT, and spit out the cleanest XHTML you will ever see. Then I can format those semantic tags with standards-compliant CSS and make it work on your browser and your PDA and your internet-enabled refrigerator.
One more time, I'm not a developer!
What I do is make stuff better. If a designer is having a hard-time hand coding the entire site, then I'll build a database backend powered by whatever tool I happen to choose. If a web service will make a certain software process faster, then I'll write it. If a user interface slows down an e-commerce transaction too much, then I'll make it more usable. I just fly in whenever a person is having a difficult time with something, and make it better.
Think of me as the Usability Superhero.
Stupid comment spammers, always one step ahead of me. I promise I don't endorse any of their links. I apologize if it stunted any of my readers, I'm still trying to figure out a solution.
Hey TypePad people out there! How do you deal with comment spam?
There's a storm a-brewing over at Josh Kaufman's website, and I'm right in the middle of it.
Here's the rundown: The company who produces the PulpFiction RSS feed reader used Josh's CSS tab example without adhering to the Creative Commons copyright attached to that page, and all other pages of his site. Josh called him on it. He denied that he copied.
Now guys, the code is identical. Same names for XHTML tags, same CSS rules, same everything. For some random reason, people in the design community are harping on Josh for even bothering to try and enforce this copyright.
They're calling him dirty names.
They're throwing low punches.
It has officially hit the fan.
If you feel strongly about this issue and feel the need to voice your opinion, please do so on Josh's site. He needs all the help he can get.
I downloaded MT 3.0D, dragged everything over to my FTP server to check it out, and promptly realized (afterwards) that I copied a virgin MovableType config file over top of my highly tweaked and modified config file for my phark.net setup. Oops.
The entire goal of getting it running and setup was to check out the new interface. I don't really care about the comment registration features (well, I care in the sense that 6A better bring improved comment management over to TypePad so I don't get spammed everyday) but truly want to play with the new CSS interface that the 6A team has been touting. Peep some screenshots.
The reason that I'm excited to check out the new MT interface is not because I'm all 'bout web standards (which I am), but because now I don't have to hack ugly table code in order to design a custom MovableType backend system for clients. In the past I had to goof around with bulky .tmpl Perl + HTML files that MT uses to parse its system, but now that everything is done with CSS, I can just upload a new stylesheet and some images and get to crackin'.
Separating style from content is great isn't it?
So now that the new MT is run all with CSS, I could theoretically design my own MT backend, upload it for clients, and make the "MovableType" name invisible in the interface. Hmm, maybe I'll try it out.
We just couldn't keep it to ourselves any longer: BusinessLogs.
By we I mean myself and my incredibly talented and brilliant business partners, Paul Scrivens and Matthew Oliphant.
About a month ago we were all chatting online and we just started coming up with ideas on how to communicate better with people. We all have extremely extensive experience (whoa) with weblogs, their architecture, the weblog community, and their usage, and we felt as though the idea of a weblog can extend way beyond the simple "hey, this is what I did last night with my friends, check out some pictures".
Weblogs are an untapped two-way communication device that organizations and companies can use to manage information. We can already see how project management is simplified through weblog technology, why not other things? I'm talking about brainstorming sessions. Knowledge management and technical documentation. Press/product release statements, and so much more.
Imagine BMW's North America site with a weblog right on the homepage. A top-end executive or designer writing everyday about their design process, their goals, how much they want to please their customers, current trends, and so on. A BMWeblog (sorry, had to do it) would put a friendly, inviting face on such a large company — putting them directly in touch with the people who matter the most, their customers.
This is the potential that weblogs have, and this is what we hope to communicate to our future clients. Stay tuned.
I woke up this morning to a quick link from Todd Dominey's weblog — he pointed me to the new MovableType 3.0 pricing, so obviously I clicked-through...
$69.95 for the personal edition? That's about $70 too high.
I've been using MovableType's personal version for about 18 months and never had to pay for it. I don't make any money off of its use, and neither does anyone else, so why do I need to pay for it?
To me, it's like downloading a demo version of Photoshop so that I can use it to edit some photographs for a college class I'm in. I don't need the full version because I only use it for one specific purpose (class photographs and images) so the full version doesn't pertain to me. Say Adobe comes along one day and says: "no more demo versions, the new purely-educational-and-not-for-profit version of Photoshop is $299 pay up, or use something else", what do you think I'm going to use? That's right, Paint Shop Pro baby.
Now this is not completely analogous to the current MovableType situation, but it's very similar. To Six Apart's credit they do still offer a free version of MovableType, however the link is buried so far down in the IA of the site that I doubt your average web surfer or newbie blogger will find it. Unfortunately, it comes with no support from Six Apart (meaning their support forum I'm guessing), no addition to the "Recently Updated" blog list on their homepage, and the biggie — no support for multiple authors, and a cap of 3 weblogs. What does this mean exactly?
Say you are a newbie web user and want to start a weblog. You have never heard of Blogger, so you go immediately to what all your friends tell you is a great way to start a weblog — MovableType. You jump on over to MT's website to download yourself a copy of it (since all your friends were telling you how great it is because it's free for personal use) and you can't find it. The only thing you do see is how the lowest price this will cost you is almost $70, and you don't even know how the thing works! You just want to install it and have fun with it, so why should you pay before you use it? And you don't see the free version of MT listed anywhere, because you're not that savvy at picking out 10px type near the bottom of a webpage.
So what is a web newbie to do? Do some Google research, and jump on board to Blogger. Hell, even Blogger's homepage looks better.
My friend Heather Lawver blogs about the terrible tech support she encountered at her domain name registrar's office. You may remember her from previous episodes of my blog where we cruised around in a BMW Z4 in Virginia all day.
As if Mondays aren't by definition eventful enough, three influential organizations launched their new sites today: Blogger, MP3.com, and Dave Shea's web design company Bright Creative. Following Paul's writeup on the differences between TypePad & Blogger, I feel as though I owe it to myself to write down what I think of these three extremely different sites.
Doug Bowman teamed up with the moneymakers over at Adaptive Path to launch the redesigned (and Google-powered) Blogger. Doug talks about some nifty VIP stuff regarding how the design came about and design process involved — and to be honest, it doesn't matter. The site is hot no matter what anyone says of it, or who put it together.
I love it because it just spews out the brand image right into your face. It's big, chunky, fun, creative, young, and a whole lot of other buzzwords all rolled into one web application. The redesigned logo must have stirred Doug's creative juices, because a site this thoroughly enjoyable definitely must have been great fun to create. Crazy good job man.
So MP3.com launched today without much fanfare. The only reason I even saw it is because Doug linked to it from his weblog. It's black, it's grey, it's got pixel fonts, and stuff isn't kerned well. 
Look at the picture in the top right corner of the site (copied here) — I know pixel fonts are tough to kern through Photoshop, but get in there with a 2600% zoom and clean up those gaps!
He uses web standards, so they get slight props for that, but in this day and age redesigns don't get noticed unless they're standards-compliant anyway. On inner pages, he uses an incorrect Sliding Doors implementation and leaves a noticeable gap between the tabs and the bottom-border in Safari (and Firefox, IE5, etc.). I know this is a beta version, and stuff is bound to be goofed-up, but c'mon. Most designers use Macs, and if your site doesn't look good in any Mac browser, expect to hear some grumbling.
Dave Shea quietly launched his design studio today, but as soon as you open up Bright Creative you don't think much about it is quiet. Maybe that was the effective Dave was going for, or maybe he just wanted to differentiate himself, but holy crap it's red. It wouldn't be so bad if the content area had a little more contrast between the text and the background — but it doesn't — so the piercing #F00 comes right through and distracts the hell out of me.
To go right along with low-contrast readability, the type on the subsection headers is so incredibly thin that it just disappears into the background. Same with the main header text. Oh well. It just proves that Flash + CSS + XHTML != usable site.
You are a company who has lots of ideas, but doesn't have the current infrastructure in place to manage those ideas efficiently. Thoughts get lost, and invariably, the money to be made from those ideas goes down the drain. Thousands of dollars a month might be lost this way, but you have no way to fix that leak.
How should you manage this knowledge? What could to be done to capitalize on these untapped opportunities? How do you kick ideas around with colleagues in a meaningful and productive way?
A late night update courtesy my buddy Alex — he put together a very nice redesign of the W3C's Validation Engine. Now this is the type of proactive approach I'm talking about, taking bad questionable design into your own hands and making it better.
I don't think of usability as a "well-designed" product or interface, I think of it as a well-formed conversation between a person and the object with which they are interacting.
Interface design doesn't just apply to computer interfaces or the handle on a coffee pot (for you Norman fanatics out there) — an interface is the bridge that both an object and the user cross in order to accomplish some goal. The interface is where the communication between a person and an object takes place, and a "well-designed" interface is one that easily facilitates this exchange.
To be an interface designer, one must be well-versed in the intricacies of communication. The processing, translation, and flow of messages between two linked parties is what's important here, not the medium. This is why interface design is so important — because it's not just someone who knows how to prototype in CSS and likes user-centered design, it's someone who understands the goals and needs of all parties involved, and makes hard decisions in order to benefit them both as much as she can.
I see myself not as a pure "interface designer", but as an information designer — one who takes a set of goals and intelligently manages those goals through design. Information is passed from the application/object to the user (through the interface), and then is responded to by actions the other party takes. I think an example might be good here:
There are many different types of users associated with this service; people trying to sell an object, people looking to purchase an object, and others who just like to browse. Now these aren't all of the user types associated with eBay, but it'll serve as an example. Those people are on one end of this communication bridge, with eBay's business goals on the other. eBay is trying to entice you into purchasing an object, on which they receive a commission. They are trying to make the process of 1) going to the site, 2) navigating the listings, and 3) purchasing an item as easy as possible for an end user, because that will make them money in the easiest possible way.
Now those business goals are woven into the site's interface, somewhat invisible to the user. The placement of the search box, the allure of colors/prices, the busy layout — all of these are little ways to bring you deeper into the site so that you might purchase something.
The difficult part is designing the interface in such a way that it communicates the application's goals while meeting the user's goals at the same time. If I'm trying to find a vintage shirt, I want the search interface to be as clear and helpful as possible so that it aids me in my browsing. If the UI is inherently friendly and easy-to-use, then I will be able to find my shirt more easily. This balancing act between the two sets of goals is what makes a certain interface usable, when one party's goals compliment and are complimented by the other party's.
I had a lot of time on my hands while driving back from my main man MO's place, so instead of contemplating the universe and solving whirrled peas, I was simply thinking about how easy it is for people to get in touch with me.
So basically, I'm on a generic instant messenger client every moment of every day. When I'm not currently at my computer, you can tell how long I've been away from it (say, 15 minutes). Then if you get really inquisitive, you can check my away message and find out exactly where I am, and usually when I'll be back.
If knowing "when I'll be back" isn't enough, you can call my cellphone. If I don't pickup or leave it in my car (like usual, stupid me) then you can leave a voicemail which I'll receive the instant I see my cellphone once again. Still not good enough?
You can send me an email. If I forgot to fire-up my messaging client, and if my cellphone is on silent, most likely I'm in front of a computer somewhere (either my place, or in the labs, or whatever), and I'll be checking my email feverishly just in case something important lands there. And if none of those work, here's what you do.
Leave a comment on my weblog. Not only will it show up at the top of the homepage indicating you recently commented, but I check my weblog for recent comments wherever I am. Make it say something completely off-topic like "MIKE YOU IDIOT... you were supposed to meet me at Chili's a half-hour ago, where are you?" so I pick up on it right away and call your cellphone.
And if none of those work, and you're not really in a rush to contact me, feel free to send me a postcard. I may forget to pickup my mail for a few days, but I'm sure sometime in the next week I'll get it and promptly forget to call you for a few days. But that's just me.
Just like everyone else, I get spam. Spam in my inbox, spam in my comments, spam in my referrer listings, spam everywhere! A few months ago — after being bombarded by those vial email programs just about enough — I decided to fight back. Here are some things that I do to combat our common enemy, in all of his various forms:
Email Spam — a lifelong struggle
I own the domain phark.net, and while my true email address is mike at phark.net, any email sent to that domain gets auto-bounced to my catch-all box. I use Apple's Mail as my email app of choice because it does a great job of catching Junk Mail right out of the box. But to combat these new-age spam pirates, I needed a technique that was a bit more industrial strength.
I don't give my real email address out to just anyone (not even RIT knows about it) so by being selective when I give it out I'm lowering my chance of spam. Whenever an online service asks for an email address to signup (Yahoo!, ESPN, Pepsi, New York Times, etc.), I tell them an email address that corresponds to the name of the service — yahoogames@phark.net, nytimes@phark.net, pepsi@phark.net, and so on. They're all valid email addresses, and all get sent to my catch-all box, but as soon as I see that I'm getting spam addressed to any of them, I set up my Mail program rules to delete all incoming mail to that address automatically. Not only is this a useful way to isolate and trap spam messages, it's also fun to see which companies sell your email address out to spammers! I can't tell you how many times I'd get THE EXACT SAME spam message sent four times in a row, each one addressed to pepsi@phark.net, yahoogames@phark.net, and nytimes@phark.net. Coincidence? Nope, because I've never given those email addresses away to anyone else.
Now for a more client-side approach to spam sniffing, I went into the Junk Mail settings, and clicked on the Advanced button. From there, I changed things around to look like this:
When Mail thinks something is spam, that's good enough for me — so it deletes it before I ever see it. To facilitate the growth of Mail's AI, the few messages that do squeak through, instead of just deleting them, I identify them as spam so that it learns a little more. And just to nail those pesky Nigerians and Viagra peddlers, I set up this Rule:
Comment Spam — the anonymous enemy
Whenever I write something on my blog, Google eats it up. 
Because of that, my blog is prime target for spammers looking to find a large audience. TypePad (currently? I'm not sure) doesn't have any sort of spam protection for people who use its blog service, so I'm going to have to manufacture a homegrown remedy. I was thinking of having an image with randomly-generated numbers next to the "Submit" button so that you'd have to type the numbers in to comment, but that might alienate visually-impaired users and I don't want to do that. So for right now, I'm still trying to figure out a plan.
How do you fight the good fight?
This was an email that I sent to The New York Times comment/suggestion address:
After registering with the New York Times to receive articles via email, I have been inundated with spam messages. How do I know that you specifically sold my email a
