Archive for the 'User Experience' Category

Delicious via: tag bookmarklet

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

I just got finished writing a new version of the del.cio.us whuffie bookmarklet. It’s a bookmarklet that adds via: tags to your bookmarks for attribution purposes, so you can have a little extra meta-data about where your links are coming from.

This idea was first expressed in 2007 by Ric Hayman, who also wrote a very nice post about the original via: tag bookmarklet. And a year later, Nicola D’Agostino picked up the meme and sparked another interesting conversation about attribution meta-data in Delicious.

I hope that 2 people ;) will also use and enjoy the new the del.cio.us whuffie bookmarklet.

Setting up Synergy

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Today I set up Synergy, which is quite bad-ass :)
I set it up for my 2 macs and PC at work.
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Page Titles

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Here is the classic Nielsen article on headlines.

The best practice as he outlines it is to place the most specific information about the page /first/ in the title.
Consider Macys.com. The following is a (hypothetical) nice, useful section title that could potentially be used:

“Fine China - DINING - Dining & Entertaining - Macy*s”

The most specific information comes first, then the name of the subsection, the section, and finally the name of the web site.
This is exactly the opposite of the common approach to titles :(

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Authoring accessible Web content

Monday, December 4th, 2006

This began as a post for the JAG internal wiki. After I’d gone to all the trouble of looking everything up and spelling it right, I thought it would be worthwhile to mirror the post here.

Here are a couple of basic pointers for building Acessible Web sites. I generally am interested in Accessibility, because it’s part of the Semantic Web vision. When I come across a relevant article, I tag it with accessibility. But I became especially interested after the National Federation for the Blind sued Target, basically because Target refused to add ALT tags to their images.

In no particular order, here’s list of core techniques:
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Windows Active Desktop is good for something!

Monday, April 24th, 2006

My main accomplishment today was the discovery of a use for Windows Active Desktop! I managed to get it so the Bryant Park Webcam is my desktop. The desktop refreshes every 10 minutes, just like the webcam. All this required was some serious drill-down into the Display control panel:

Here are the steps to get a webcam image displayed on the desktop; and set it so the image on the desktop updates with the one on the web:
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