Wired.com: 20 years later
Twenty years ago today, Wired launched a seminal redesign of its website that helped catapult forward web technology and what our industry understood as possible for commercial websites. ~1,700 words
Wired.com: Ten years later
Ten years ago today, we pulled back the curtains on a redesign of Wired.com. The actual design and the code that rendered it are long gone. But they were significant in their time. The redesign of Wired News in 2002… ~500 words
A fairly thorough retrospective of Google and the huge impact the company had over the past year. Check out the list of releases and new ideas Google pushed in 2009. Impressive and scary at the same time. I wish the little blip about me leaving earlier this year weren’t present, though I’ll admit that’s how I found this article. This paragraph toward the end sums it up best:
Google in late 2009 is now covering or aiming to cover web apps, the browser that runs the web apps, the OS that runs the browser, and, according to rumors, even the computer that runs the OS.
Looking Back at Google in 2009
blogoscoped.comA whole new internet
I love the optimism in Janice Fraser’s latest essay for Adaptive Path: It’s a Whole New Internet. Normally, an article similar to this would have just been another link. I guess this one deserved more. Janice captures a lot of the enthusiasm and energy building up around a new connected experience. ~100 words
Feedburning
I’ve grown tired of the need to choose which syndication formats I support (between Atom and multiple versions of RSS). I’m not about to join the debate over which format is better. I simply don’t care. I acknowledge that RSS/Atom syndication is an important technology that has changed the way we distribute and access information. But my decision to publish a feed shouldn’t be complicated by which format or how many of them I publish just to ensure I cover all possible bases. ~900 words
Secure wireless email on Mac OS X
After more than a year of implementing my own measures, I think it’s time to help raise awareness of email security. And in doing so, document the way I use SSH to secure email when I’m on a wireless network. If you’re concerned about strangers having open access to your usernames and passwords, and all the email you send and receive while connected to a public wireless network — whether you use a Mac or not — you’ll want to read this. ~3,000 words
Presentation-related wish list
Those who’ve seen my presentations know that I use a browser to navigate through slides constructed with traditional HTML and CSS. The system I use works pretty well. However, I’m still missing a few critical components that could make HTML-based presentations even better. ~600 words
Life in the slow lane
Only when I’m forced to do something a new way do I recognize the variances in habits, routines, and expectations when it comes to living and working online. It’s sort of like being thrown back in time, taking with me the invisible knowledge of what’s possible today. High-speed access — and now, prevalent wireless high-speed access — is changing our use of the Web and our lives in ways that aren’t always immediately obvious. ~1,100 words
You could be next
Only a couple days left for the current Blogstakes contests. Win a three-book collection from The Onion or a hard-shell CD case. It couldn’t be easier to get entered if you already have a blog — just add a link to one or both of the contests somewhere on your site where others will find it. Nothing else is required from you. ~400 words
HP + Apple
This is interesting. HP and Apple are joining forces to create an HP-branded digital music player based on Apple’s iPod™. The device will be due out this summer. I had mixed reactions upon first seeing the news. ~200 words
HP ad perspective
After HP’s “you blog” ad attracted so much attention a couple days ago, I thought it appropriate to add a little more context, so no one thinks the campaign is entirely blog-focused. ~300 words
Well, don't you?
Spotted in the Montgomery BART station last week, I snapped a photo of this ad on the way into the office today. It’s part of a large HP campaign that has ads plastered all over the walls and floors of the Muni/BART stations. ~100 words
SwitchBack
Remember that confession I wrote a while ago? A sobering story of a designer who grew up on Apples and Macs, but gave into the dark side, jumped ship, and began using Windows. Well, it’s coming up on a year since I wrote that piece. Some of my friends were beginning to wonder if I was serious about shaking the Windows addiction. ~800 words
Mozilla advances
Mozilla Foundation charges out of the gates today with a handful of new product releases. Heavyweight full-featured browser Mozilla 1.5, lightweight standalone browser Firebird 0.7, and email/newsgroup client Thunderbird 0.3. ~300 words
Firestarter
News.com staff writer Paul Festa draws more public attention to Internet Explorer’s lack of full CSS support in “Developers gripe about IE standards inaction”. ~300 words
A year in Cornwall
Frank Leahy is a friend and former-colleague from Wired. Frank left Wired a couple months ago, and he and his family of four recently picked up their lives and moved to England, settling temporarily in what looks like an amazing location: Cornwall. ~400 words
VeriBadSign
Yesterday, VeriSign resorted to more anti-competitive, monopolistic tactics. With so many people, companies, and organizations upset at VeriSign for such an unethical move, we’ll see how long this scam lasts. ~400 words
Merging lines
Once devices like Sony’s UX50 handheld begin to fill breast-pockets of executives and shoulder bags of early-adopting gadgeteers, kiss goodbye the assumption that one “minimum resolution” exists to which we can design any interface. ~300 words
New ink for Inc.com
Congratulations to Dan Cederholm and team on launching a brand new Inc.com. The site sports a clean design, valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup, and a nice dosage of the CSS background-image property to pull in decorative icons and bullets,… ~100 words
Rebuilding a portfolio
Matt Haughey provides great insight into how he’s taken advantage of MT’s flexibility to manage his sites in Beyond the Blog. Here’s how I did the same for my new portfolio relaunched last week. ~1,400 words
Adaptive Path’s MT setup
Jay Allen posts an extended response to a commenter’s question about the use of Movable Type on the new Adaptive Path site. He provides a behind-the-scenes look at the MT setup, outlining each blog configuration and it’s purpose. He also covers static content blogs, template modules, and gateway pages created to simplify Adaptive Path’s content management through MT. ~1,100 words
Redirection complete
While I can change and control internal links pointing to my own content, lots of external links exist on other sites which point to files on stopdesign. I wanted to make sure as many of those links as possible still pointed to appropriate places on this site. ~700 words
Mid-process
The conversion to Movable Type is going smoothly so far. I’m continually amazed at the application’s flexibility, power, and speed. The ability to expand its functionality with the plugin architecture gives MT endless possibilities for small-scale sites like this one.… ~400 words
Changing wings on the plane, mid-flight
I’ve been talking about it for what seems like forever. Over the past week, I finally started to make the jump. If you’re reading this entry, the DNS changes have propagated to your neck of the woods, which means you’re… ~700 words
IE/Mac, rest in peace
With the confirmed news that Microsoft is ceasing development of Internet Explorer for Macintosh, a wave of sadness sweeps through the web design and development community. Three years ago, I was only getting my feet wet by messing around… ~100 words
Quark delivers for Apple
In January of 2002, Quark dumbfounded Mac design professionals by releasing QuarkXPress 5 sans support for Mac OS X. Because of Quark’s rush to release an already outdated product, Mac-based print designers have either held back in upgrading from OS… ~200 words
PNG, please
Two days ago, Jeffrey Zeldman brought to our attention a petition to encourage Microsoft to include proper PNG support in Internet Explorer for Windows. Yesterday, he wrote up a fabulous explanation of the benefits of the PNG image format,… ~71 words
Do you still Yahoo!?
In the current Google Age, we tend to default our web searching to one tool which finds what we’re looking for every time. Many of us subconsciously believe Google is the answer to Bono’s soul-seeking lyrics from 1987. With… ~400 words
In the year of our Lord
Based on recent experience with an indexing robot, I discovered a critical architecture flaw in the way I set up my calendar for viewing Log Entries by Day. Due to a bit of laziness, as well as intrigue of the… ~600 words
Blogger highs and woes
Thanks to the recent news and hype of Google’s Pyra acquisition, it seems Blogger has been quite bogged down recently. Lots of transfer errors. Connection problems. Most likely due to every Blogger user trying to post about the story.… ~500 words
HotBot redesign launched
Ah, I can finally talk about it. It’s so far off everyone’s radar that hardly anyone has noticed yet. Let’s change that. Another project I had a hand in design directing and pushing to XHTML/CSS (smack in the middle of… ~900 words
Representational language
I discovered an excellent resource over the weekend that I’ve been (and will be) digging through in my spare time. All of a sudden, I’m starting to understand the logic behind Braille by reading through the incredible information at Dotless … ~300 words
Middle of the road
Confusion seems to have surfaced around the Confessions piece I posted last week. Some think the article was wishy-washy and were hoping for a more definitive ending proclaiming loyalty to one OS or the other. Questions were asked like, “So… ~400 words
A different gravity
Last night, I received an email message from a gentleman named Mark. The subject was: appreciate your blog and designs. I’ve received quite a few messages like this recently. But there was something about Mark’s message that had a… ~600 words
Are websites public spaces?
The issue can’t escape mention, even though it’s a few days late. Robert Gumson and Access Now recently launched a suit against Southwest Airlines, claiming that Southwest’s website was inaccessible to the blind, thus was in violation of the… ~500 words
Futureproofing amps
The high profile Wired News redesign has attracted a lot of attention, primarily because of the Web standards we’re using, and the effort we’re making at keeping our code compliant and error-free. However, daily editorial additions continue to allow XHTML … ~300 words
CMS troubles
Wired News has used Vignette as a content management system for a few years now. Today, we discovered an odd bug that shows up whenever the cache (memory) was flushed (reset). Vignette is automatically inserting one html comment tag right… ~200 words
Portfolio/database work
Progress on the stopdesign.com redesign continues. I now have the entire portfolio entered into a sortable, reusable database. I’ve created a bunch of server-side scripts (ASP) to create each portfolio page dynamically based on two templates. One template drives the… ~200 words
Tiny screens
Since I haven’t jumped onto the wireless platform bandwagon yet, designing pages for the AvantGo channel has been an interesting challenge. Not too difficult, because there aren’t many choices. But that’s the challenge of it. It’s like trying to say… ~100 words
