6 years ago: "Which reinforces the idea I’m getting that we need unpopular links as much as we need popular ones."
A Radio site I made in 2002, exactly 6 years ago. And it's still around, you gotta hand it to them.
Or maybe the Amazon POST proposal (what's the status of this?) could serve this purpose. Although that won't do any image resizing or anything, it's just file upload.
- You sign up, enter your Amazon keys.
- You add a form to your site, where users can upload images. (The service could also provide bulk uploader programs and such.)
- Users submit the form, image gets uploaded to EC2, transcoded, resized etcetera, and stored in your own Amazon S3 bucket by the service.
- The service then POST's the results to a script on your server, with the metadata about this picture, which you can then enter in your database.
Is this a reasonable approach? I would certainly use this service if it was idiot-proof and affordable. Does it already exist?
via “In particular, working with him (…) he is one of the most professional people I’ve ever worked with. In the sense that, he thought through all of the formal relationship between a client and a professional such as himself. Obviously, very deep thoughts about this and, therefore he had very clear conclusions about what the relationship meant to both parties and how it should be conducted.
For example, I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you’ll pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you, you’re the client, but you’ll pay me’.
The best logo ever (via Simon).
Screencasts teaching code, only 5$ per episode? A new business model? Online teaching has potential, that's for sure.
The LiveJournal Policies make for some fascinating reading by the way.
The breastfeeding moms can once again use a picture of a breast as a profile picture on LiveJournal. "non-graphic, non-sexualized nudity" it's called. LiveJournal continues to serve its users and tackle the hard problems of community building.
A smart idea if you have kids/babies and live in the USA: instead of asking for presents (that get tossed aside), ask for contributions to a college fund. Freshmanfund.
How is Vox, the social blogging platform doing these days? Anyone know? According to Alexa and Compete, not particularly great, and I never got into it myself either.
http://www.uxsocial.org/: Youtube video interviews with UX people.
I tried the downloadable clients but it's too much stuff coming in, I prefer to visit twitter.com now and then.
Some even better Visio tricks in the comments.
I like the "new!" pattern Google uses. It's so old school it's new school. Plus, when do you get the use the <sup> tag anyways? (And that exclamation mark. It's new guys! New! Love it.)
It turns out that "community" is the official and best translation of "community" in Dutch.
A slideshow of Facebooks proposed redesign.
Tricks for IA: copy and paste from Visio
I've seen people export stuff in Visio into images, and then paste those into Word documents. There's an easier and better way: you can copy and paste stuff from Visio straight into Word, and it'll look better (and print nicer) too than if you turn things into images first. One disadvantage: you can only paste what you can copy, so backgrounds don't get copied along.
Interestingly, if you use a program like Windows Live Writer (which I use for this blogpost), you can also copy and paste from Visio straight into the program. The objects will be turned into images and uploaded. Funky!
Here's an example, copied from Visio.
ok this is cool. I just realized I can copy and paste straight from Visio into my blog editors (Scribefire or Windows Live Writer), and it shows up as an image! Not perfectly optimized, but that's cool. 
Google decides to be more open about their ranking systems: "PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger
system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle
phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query
models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today), time
models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and
some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and
personalized models (not all people want the same thing)."
test
Amazon web services now uses more bandwidth than amazon.com itself.
Check out UXSocial: A Not-for-profit Investigating Information Architecture in Policy.
The US eats a *lot* of corn:
The secret for going from zero to seventy million users overnight is to
avoid doing it all in one fell swoop. We chose to simulate the impact
of many real users hitting many machines by means of a "dark launch"
period in which Facebook pages would make connections to the chat
servers, query for presence information and simulate message sends
without a single UI element drawn on the page. With the "dark launch"
bugs fixed, we hope that you enjoy Facebook Chat now that the UI lights
have been turned on.
The alternative productivity manifesto. (via Jorge)
Session variables without cookies (via Simon): it turns out you can store session vars in windows.name, they persist between sessions, even between domains. The browser still has undiscovered secrets.
Jmaps: a handy library to display Google maps with all sorts of overlays and stuff with jQuery.
