iPod Touch - Portable Portfolio
I’ve had my iPod Touch for almost a year now. It probably would have been an iPhone, but alas, I live in Canada, the land that Steve forgot. Sure, I could buy an unlocked one on craigslist ($650 CDN for a 16gig?), but how much more useful would it really be with a neutered Roger’s or Fido data plan.
As I’m doing a lot of creative work and designing in Illustrator these days, I have found the ability to carry around a digital version of my portfolio to be incredibly useful. Using the photo app that’s built into the iPod, I’m able to load it up with a bunch of images that I can carry with me.
Of course, with the iPod, the ability to browse a web based portfolio is only really possible when a wi-fi connection is used. Ultimately, with the iPhone, the ability to browse from anywhere with decent cell coverage will only make it easier to use a web based portfolio (or flickr, facebook, myspace, etc)
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5 Ways to make Improvements to your Website
I see so many web sites lately that could improve their usability by making some changes. Some of these are fairly quick and easy changes, and some might require a little more work, but I think it’s worth it. This is Part 1 in a series on Improving your Website.
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Use a favicon.ico for your site
I think every major browser now display’s the favicon.ico in the browser’s address bar. You can see mine up there right now. The lower case h icon that is to the left of my Address. Browser’s will also use that icon when you add your site as a bookmark. It really helps to make your site stand out from the default icon.
In Firefox, the favicon.ico is displayed on the tab, and when you have multiple tabs open, it’s great to visually see which tab has your site open. Finally, many online services that accept an URL or address use the favicon.ico to represent your site. It’s worth it to stand out in a crowd.
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Provide an RSS feed
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on who you ask. Both seem to be fairly accurate representations of what RSS is. Many sites (News, Blogs, Events, Social Networks) now publish content in this format called RSS. What RSS allows users to do is to ‘Subscribe’ to your content using an RSS feed. It’s kind of like an opt-in newsletter. Without using email. I use a free Mac software RSS reader to read my subscribed content. The content comes from all over the web. Several blogs, some eBay notifications, some Google notifications, a few web comics and my server’s status page are just some of the feeds I subscribe to.
So, you’re probably wondering why I would do this instead of just browsing these sites with my browser. First of all, my RSS reader will check for updates several times throughout the day. If you update your blog/site/listing, and I’m subscribed, I’m going to get a notification about it right away. Once I’ve read it, it will go away, unless I choose to save it, archive it, post it, bookmark it. This gives me a lot of control over what I read, when I read it, and how I read it. I can use a Web based RSS reader, an iPhone (if I had one) RSS reader, or a Windows/Mac based RSS reader.
In the absense of RSS, how will I know that you’ve updated your website? Email? Please don’t. I could come back and visit your site every day. How inconvenient is that though. Especially when you multiply that by the number of site’s that I’d like to keep track of. Say yes to RSS.
This video provides a very nice overview of what RSS is and a few ways of using it.
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Get rid of the splash page
Say goodbye to the splash page. For the most part, they place an unnecessary step between your users and your content. I’ve noticed that this is still used on many sites here in Canada for languages. They have a splash page with a link to English or French. See Future Shop & Fido for examples of this.
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Make your content easily linkable
Make your content easy to link to. Content that can be easily linked is more likely to get passed around. While javascript can provide some cool effects and other things, sometimes it gets in the way of being able to pass around a link. YouTube recognized that and made their content easy to link to and easy to embed in any other site. I think it worked out pretty well for them.
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Use CSS, not tables to layout your website
When I first started building websites, back in 1995, we didn’t have tables. When html tables were introduced, all of a sudden, there was a way to structure a page. At the time, it was the only way to do it. Lets flash forward 10 years. CSS now enables very complex site structures without using tables at all. Tables are still useful. For tabular data.
Yael Naim: My new favourite CD
When the Macbook Air was initially released, the commercial used the song “New Soul” by Yael Naim. It wasn’t until I heard it again recently that I took the time to take a closer listen to the entire album, Yael Naim
Welcome to visitors from Australia
Indeed, I was surprised to see a bunch of traffic in the stat’s coming from Australia. And all of it direct, not coming from Google or some other search engine. It seems that the Youth Mental Health Foundation in Australia has launched their site headspace.org.au.
You many want to go there, if that’s what you’re looking for. Otherwise, feel free to browse around here, although, I’m just getting started, and there isn’t much to look at yet.
Color of the bikeshed
… the apparent ease with which one can get approval for building a large and complex project (such as a billion-dollar laboratory) compared to the difficulty of reaching consensus to build something conceptually simple — because everyone involved wants to add their own opinion.
Color of the bikeshed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Voice for the Community
Here’s a video that I assisted in getting up on the Interweb.
A Voice for the Community from Heart City on Vimeo.
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Recommended DVD
Freaks & Geeks
