Seattle.BloggersPub

I came across an interesting job post for a company, Blist, I’m fairly familiar with looking for a “Rich Internet Application Designer“. The “RIA Designer” position is going to become one of the most important jobs in the Rich Internet Application space. Jesse Warden talks about this a bit (his wife is a usability ninja)
What does […]

In Cameron Moll’s now classic A List Apart article, Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign he asserts that a redesign should only be done if there is good reason to do so. Of course, if you’re talking about a personal site, a good reason may be as simple as “I feel like a redesign.” A few months back I began to think about the possibility of redesigning my site. Again. My initial thought was to do a simple refinement/realignment, but after some deep thinking I decided to do a pretty substantial redesign. The process I went through to come to that decision was, I think, pretty interesting and relevant to the work I do for clients every day.

Episode 10 of The Flex Show is up and Jeff has part one of a great interview with Juan Sanchez from Scale Nine, the guy who makes all of those awesome Flex themes.
 Also announced in this episode is our Flex Builder contest. Adobe gave us some free copies of Flex Builder and all you have […]

One of the most fascinating things about blogging is finding out, after-the-fact, what types of comments, opinions, anecdotes or bits of shared wisdom will attract the most visitors.

For instance, since June 7th of last year, I’ve had only two posts that have been viewed over 2,000 times. The one with the most views is How to Restart Windows via Remote Desktop, which has been viewed over 3,700 times at the time of writing. The popularity of these types of posts is fairly predictable, given the fact that people in similar predicaments often utilize Google to quickly find solutions to their problem.

On the other hand, there are posts like On the Same Page. That particular post has been viewed over 2,100 times. The funny thing about that kind of post, though, is that I have no clue as to why. In that post, I mentioned God, Jeff Buckley and the Ferrari 360 Modena Spyder. So what’s the big draw?

I have my guess. What do you think?

Are you a web designer?

If so, take The Web Design Survey.

I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

While looking up some Coldplay-related news tonight, I stumbled upon this article over at the Telegraph. The article’s main content is followed by what seems to be a commonplace on news sites and blogs alike these days, a series of links allowing readers to quickly post the story on popular social news sites like Digg, Newsvine and several others. The Telegraph example in particular is actually fairly clean. I’m sure many of us have seen the icon farms that some sites tack on to the end of their content to allow this type of social interaction on a much wider (and much more annoying) scale.

The problem with this approach, especially as the web evolves and more and more social sites participate in link sharing, saving, commenting, etc., is that it becomes harder and harder for any one particular provider of content to ensure that users have one-click access to their site of choice. For instance, if you leave out a link to del.icio.us, your chances of getting me to interact in any way are pretty slim (other than the fact that I already have a “post to del.icio.us” button on my browser’s bookmark toolbar).

As more competitors pop their heads up (especially the ones that get really, really popular like Digg did), it becomes increasingly more difficult to provide majority coverage using the method employed by the Telegraph in the aforementioned example.

So what is the solution?

In my opinion, microformats are the ideal solution to this problem. As a provider of content, you can provide a single microformat along with your content that UAs like Firefox can watch out for on the user’s behalf. When such a microformat is detected, a toolbar item, extension, or some other chrome-resident entity can change slightly (I’d leave this behavior up to smarter minds) to indicate to the user that the content is ready to post to their social news or bookmarking site of choice. The list of supported sites could be similar to the list of options you see under your browser’s search bar in that there is a default set (for users who don’t know about or aren’t interested in the capability of adding their own custom providers) that is extensible.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how microformats solve these types of problems as well as the many others that people haven’t quite thought up yet.

If you’re like me and you’ve been watching the amazing Planet Earth series on the Discovery Channel, be sure to keep an eye out for the footage of a Red Panda in the wild that appears in the episode “Mountains.” If you didn’t already know, the Red Panda was the inspiration for the Firefox logo.

John Udell has a post about the implications behind the Silverlight DOM being accessible by JavaScript and implies that you could use Greasemonkey-like tools to actually rewrite Silverlight applications on the fly. One of the reasons he’s excited about this is that he saw a bunch of people able to learn and manipulate pages using […]

Kelvin: One of the many subtle joys of the new Newsvine. Call it a redesign. Call it Newsvine 2.0. Call it whatever you want, but today Newsvine is proud to announce the first major overhaul of our site since launching a little more than a year ago. It’s an exciting thing for the team and for the now 600,000 people who visit the site every month because it not only provides a hugely enhanced front… - Read Full Entry…

I missed the presentation by Ben Forta last night because at the last minute I was without a ride, and the buses were all going to take way too long, but an ex-coworker of mine, Ian Smith, was there and blogged his top 9 new features for Scorpio over on DownloadSquad. There’s a lot […]