So Much Stuff |
Whatever Ben Chinn feels like laying on you |
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sexistentialcrisis.com
I found this blog and it’s a new favorite. Smart, funny and yes – sexy. Sexy seems to be everywhere now, I mean it’s something that people aspire to in a way that I never considered for myself. I always wanted to be intelligent, respected, even cool; but sexy? I guess I always assumed that some people were and some people weren’t and that’s all there was to it. But clearly I was mistaken. At some point sexy became something that everybody had a right to, like free speech and inexpensive televisions. Geeky? Sexy. Short? Sexy. Bald, fat, stupid? Sexy sexy sexy. British? Um…sorry.
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"…don’t get me started on the [Nobel Prize] academy, whose prejudice against the United States and failure to recognize Philip Roth is beyond scandalous. “American Pastoral” alone merits the Nobel several times over. A further prize, for proving the creative fecundity of late life, should be accorded Roth."
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Koko Taylor R.I.P.
I had the pleasure seeing Taylor perform a couple of times when I lived in Chicago. Queen of the Blues is a tough title to live up to but I don’t think anybody would dispute it in her case.
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Posting from Textmate
Browsing through the Textmate bundle repository I saw a Tumblr bundle and had to give it a try. Just fired up a new textmate file using the Tumblr template posted directly from within Texmate. Will be pretty impressed if this works.
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Jon Stewart's Extended Interview with Cliff May
The interview with Cliff May was not shown in its entirety on the Daily Show but can be seen online. One more reason we love the web.I’m a big fan of Jon Stewart but not of his interviewing style; he spends less time asking the tough questions than he does giving his own answers. Nonetheless, this is a great interview, mostly because Cliff May is able to present a cogent and reasonable argument for the treatment to which we have been subjecting suspected terrorists. I think his argument is wrong for many of the reasons that Stewart does, but at least May was being honest in his position.What’s sad is that Comedy Central is the forum in which this conversation is taking place.I think there’s a problem here that has been missed, which is that these terrorists represent a class of prisoner for whom there are no clear rules governing their treatment. We don’t want to treat them as prisoners of war and we don’t want to treat them as common criminals. Cliff May rejects the Geneva Convention because Al Quaeda is not a signatory and we have to interrogate these folks somehow, right? Terrorism is not included as an act governed by the International Criminal Court so there’s no help there either. Maybe we need to treat terrorists differently from other prisoners – I don’t think so but I think there’s a case to be made there. The point is: who gets to decide?Surely, in the United States, these kinds of questions should be addressed by elected officials in conversation with the American people. They should not be addressed behind closed doors by White House lawyers in memos that we only find out about after a leak. By all means lets decide what to do with terrorists, but let’s have rules for all of them that everybody knows about, rather than sending mixed messages to soldiers and intelligence agents.Because then you get Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and do we prosecute or don’t we and how much is too much and now we can’t prosecute these bastards in the courts even if we wanted to.
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This is how to Talk about Technology
Obama’s White House has employed the internet in ways not imagined by previous administrations. It’s too early to tell if this will be effective but one thing is for sure: Obama knows how to talk about what he’s doing. Check out his video clip explaining his “Open for Questions” project. It’s clear what he’s doing and why and doesn’t get caught up in the technical process of making it happen. “We’re going to take advantage of the internet to bring all of you to the White House to talk about the economy”. This one sentence sums up the project stating its goal by using a metaphor that everybody can understand. He could have said “We will leverage technology to provide personal input to public policy decisions”. But he didn’t – that’s one reason he gets to work in a round room.
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Home Pages and Navigation
The folks at Plumbline Studios just posted an article a few weeks ago, Just Click the Logo! which argues that web sites should to the home page from a logo image and not include an explicit “Home” link in the navigation. I’ve worked with Plumbline a few times and respect the work that they do but in this instance I have to disagree with them.
The article is in response to those clients that don’t know to click on a site logo to get to the home page and insist on having a home page link. I would agree that generally people overstate the importance of a web site home page. A home page should get people off the that page and into the deeper content of the site. Unfortunately stakeholders in a web design often become obsessed with that page to the detriment of more crucial parts of the site. Even though it may not be the most important page, there are still many good reasons for including a global link to home.A home page often serves as a sign post, showing visitors the way to points of interest. after visiting one of these points, visitors may want to revisit the sign post to find where else to go. Plumbline’s post states that “in the case of an editorial or news site, there is usually something new to see when you hit the home page” and only for those sites a link back there would make sense. This assumes that for other sites, the visitor sees the home page first. What about search traffic? Search engines drive visitors to any page of a site that matches their search, often bypassing the home page entirely. At that point they may very well want to check out the home page, because they’ve never seen it before.Another argument Plumbline makes is that the home link “entices the user to back out” of the site content rather than drilling deeper in. (Entices? Really? I don’t think I’ve ever been enticed by a simple textual home link to do anything at all.) This is the same argument I’ve heard against including external links on a web site – that you are encouraging the user to stray from the path you’ve chosen for them and leave your site entirely. The truth is that the user is always one click away from leaving your site and the only way to keep them there is to hold their interest in what you have to offer. If the user stops digging into the content of a site it’s because she isn’t interested in what she’s found or is looking for something else. In that case going back to the home page may provide another path through the site that could be more useful.Even if getting to the home page is useful, why include a textual link in the navigation? Isn’t a link on the logo good enough? After all this behavior is a widespread design convention and people should know that clicking the logo takes them to the home page. But they don’t. Even the author of Plumbline’s post admits “I find myself explaining to people that to get home, they just click the dang logo. Is it not intuitive?” Well clearly not intuitive enough.It makes sense that for a designer clicking on a logo is easy – it requires responding to a visual image based on its character and position. But not everybody is as visually oriented as your average designer - there are more verbally focused users who scan the words on a page to orient themselves. For these people text can be more useful than imagery (especially if the imagery is not clearly representing the desired action).Text link or logo link? The answer is going to be different for different web sites, but there’s arguments to be made on both sides. Plumbline presents a good case for the a logo link – I hope I’ve balanced the issue a little here. -
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What I Love About Blogs
Okay, so this dude writes a blog post about Safari 4’s top tabs (which I hate) and in passing mentions the interface of my favorite web development tool, Coda. Then this other dude who actually was one of the developers of Coda responds, in his own blog, about how the said interface was probably a bad idea but they’re trying to fix it.
Best of all, I agree with what everybody had to say. Safari’s tabs sort of make sense, but still suck. Coda’s “now it’s a file editor tab, now it’s a site library” behavior is really odd but once you get used to it only detracts a little from the joy of using a great product.
Shine on you crazy bloggers.
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A Little Extra Marks a Major Change at the NY Times
The New York Times has added a feature called Times Extra to its website. Khoi Vinh gives a nice rundown on his blog but what’s really amazing about this is how this moves the Times closer to a fully exploiting the website as a medium. Basically, Times Extra adds related links to certain stories, and many of those links come from the Times’ competitors. The image I’ve included of a Times column shows stories from the New York Observer and The New York Post. I think this is huge. The paper of record has, in a small way, relinquished its claim to the exclusive attention of its audience and accepted that all content on the web is connected no matter where it comes from. Web content succeeds not only by what it says but by how reveals other content. This is what makes the web unique: it’s not about text, or images or even video – it’s about links. Good to see the Times shifting to accept this reality.
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