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April, 2007 Archive

Table-Based Layouts = Pure Evil

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

My friend Dmitry from Sydney posted a shot of me during my WebDU presentation. He took the picture during one of my favorite slides.

Posted in Humor, Just for Fun, Web Design | 2 Comments »

ABC News Redesign: A Case Study In What Not To Do

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

One of my favorite news websites is was ABCNews.com. They recently redesigned their website and destroyed most of what I liked about it. Their old design was similar to the New York Times. They had an easy to read home page that made all of the headlines visible. I could quickly scroll down the page [...]

Posted in Commentary, Review, Web Accessibility, Web Design, Website Review | 3 Comments »

Husband and Wife Traffic Building Smackdown

Friday, April 27th, 2007

A fellow web designer has recently started a public battle with his wife on the Internet. It’s not what you think though — they’re battling to see who can have the most popular blog within the next twelve months.
Gerard McGarry and his wife Lisa run a popular reality TV blog in the UK. They decided [...]

Posted in Humor, SEO, Search Engines, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Growl Pepper Plugin for Mint

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

In my last post I talked about the PHP Growl notification class I wrote. A few readers emailed and asked to see a larger, working example of how to use the code, so I’ve written a plugin for Shaun Inman’s popular Mint software. Growl Pepper will notify you whenever certain events happen on your website. [...]

Posted in Open Source, PHP | 2 Comments »

Send Growl Notifications Using PHP

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Most websites have alert systems built in that can notify you whenever something goes wrong - a database crash or Apache error for example. Often times they’ll send an email, save the problem to a log file, or even send an instant message. I’ve seen some systems that will page your cellphone. Most of the [...]

Posted in How To, Open Source, PHP | 1 Comment »

Website Auction: Saying Goodbye To An Old Friend

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

There are a lot of websites for sale at any given time. Often times, webmasters will create new websites, stuff them with content (often stolen from other well performing websites) and then ramp up the traffic with unscrupulous traffic generating schemes. They do all of this in the attempt to sell it as a content [...]

Posted in Search Engines, Website Marketing, Website Review | No Comments »

How-To Parse RSS Feeds With Google’s Feed API

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

Tired of processing RSS/Atom feeds in your app? Today Google announced their new Google AJAX Feed API that will do the parsing (and caching!) for you. It works great for Javascript developers, but what if you want to use a server side language like PHP? Here’s a quick (and totally unauthorized) hint to let you [...]

Posted in Google, How To, PHP | 3 Comments »

Regarding the NewsFire Product Activation Debate

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

There’s been a lot of talk over the past couple days about a blog post by Charles Miller where he recounts his trouble re-activating his copy of David Watanabe’s NewsFire RSS reader.
NewsFire uses a network based activation scheme to validate that it’s a licensed copy. Charles says that he was trying to re-activate his copy [...]

Posted in Commentary, Tech Industry | 2 Comments »

Google AdSense Home Page Gets A New Look

Thursday, April 12th, 2007

Although some designs are probably too late to save — cough, Orkut — Google did a very nice job redesigning their AdSense entrance page. The old design (taken from Google’s cache) sports the same super-low-quality thumbnail that’s always been there, along with their oh-so-boring layout.

The new design is much cleaner and tight. The fluid layout [...]

Posted in Google, Google Adsense, Web Design | No Comments »

Breadcrumb Navigation: Hierarchy or History?

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Breadcrumbs are a form of secondary navigation for websites. They’re useful, because they:

show the user where they are
provide one-click access for section hierarchy
are small and take up very little space
are potential SEO keyword targets

I try to use breadcrumbs whenever I can and I find they’re particularly useful on sites that have a deep hierarchy. However, [...]

Posted in Usability, Web Accessibility, Web Design | No Comments »