Why the lucky stiff shows us how far is too far.
WARNING TO ADOBE PHOTOSHOP! DO NOT MAKE A FILL TOOL THAT THOMAS KINKADE CAN USE TO FILL THE EARTH AND GROUND AND ATMOSPHERE WITH HIS MASTERPIECES!! HE WILL CLICK ON IT!!
Today’s Frazz is a good Frazz. Link will be unavailable after May 20 2004.
Update: The Frazz series continues and the unofficial Frazz RSS feed. Enjoy.
Amazon’s wish lists now offer priority rankings. To celebrate, I’ve updated mine.
Amazon has also started their own search engine at a9.com. Something to keep an eye one. Some of their neat tricks include:
Search Inside the Book: In addition to web search results we present book results from Amazon.com that include Search Inside the Book. When you see an excerpt on any of the book results, click on the page number to see the actual page from that book. (You will need to be registered at Amazon.com.)
URL Short Cuts: At A9.com you can search directly from the browser URL box by typing:
a9.com/querySearch History: All your searches at A9.com are stored on our servers and shown to you at any time from any computer you use. Clicking on a link performs the search again. You can hide the window at any time and a password will be required to open it again. You can edit your history, for example, to hide an entry.
Web Search: Web search results are provided by Google.
The Worms 3D Demo for OS X is available now. Go forth and have wormy fights!
Although she is an important media personality, I don’t think anyone would describe her as a journalist.
Last weekend I read through Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think and Nielsen & Tahir’s Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed. And now for your pleasure, mini reviews!
Don’t Make Me Think: Steve Krug does a bang-up job of covering a lot of ground in a clear and concise way. It’s 4 years old, which dates some of the examples he uses but all the principles he teaches are still very relevant. The user testing section alone is worth the price of the book twice over. Anyone with any kind of stake in any web project should read this book. I’m going to read it again this weekend.
Homepage Usability on the other hand, is not quite as useful. Which is not to say I didn’t learn anything from it. I did. There is a lot of good information in the book. It’s just not very usable. Externally, the book is large, square and floppy. It’s very difficult to read without sitting at a table. Internally they fall victim to their chosen format. Most of the book is devoted to deconstructing the homepages of 50 websites. They display screen shots and spend a few pages evaluating all the usability issues with the site. They have great things to say. But because every single site is it’s own section they have to cover every single issue for every site. It very quickly devolves into tedious redundancy. They try to counteract this by adding a review section at the front that goes through their findings statistically. But I even had a hard time with that section knowing that everytime they said “2% of site’s reviewed” they were only talking about one site. Read it if you have a vested interested in usability issues. If not, read Don’t Make Me Think.
Next on the list:
It’s completely off topic, but this is a much better idea than setting up a lemonade stand.
BitTorrent is a great tool for downloading large files very quickly. It does this by sharing the burden. Everyone who is downloading also uploads. So the more people interested, the faster it downloads.
The problem I’ve had is that my uploads choke up my connection so my downloads go very slowly. The solution is to limit my upload speed. The other problem is that the OSX GUI version doesn’t let you limit upload speed. So I’ve been using the command line tools, which work very well. The problem with the using the commandline tools is that there is a good chunk of typing involved and I don’t use it very often so I have to look up the aruments everytime. So I came up with this line to add to my .profile which makes using the commandline easier that even the GUI:
alias btdl='~/Applications/BitTorrent/btdownloadheadless.py --max_upload_rate 16
--saveas ~/Desktop/incoming/ --url `pbpaste`'
Line break added for web display. It should all be on one line.
Now all I have to do is copy the URL for the .torrent file I want to download, open a terminal and type ‘btdl’. And it downloads what ever I want directly to my incoming folder.
Using this method I was able to download both Beatallica Albums (The Beatle’s songs with Metallica’s style) at an average speed of 22mb per second. Thanks to Matt Haughey for the Beatallica tip.
I’ve secured myself a seat at seriouSeries No. 3, a free panel presented by a pile of local web professionals that I have a lot of respect for.
Thanks to Armin of SpeakUp for putting it all together. To save my self the typing, here’s what he says about it:
Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners / Photoshop Tennis / Jewelboxing, Jason Fried of 37 Signals / Signal vs. Noise / Basecamp, Naz Hamid from Gapers Block / Absenter and Jake Nickell, Jacob DeHart and Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Skinnycorp / Threadless / Yayhooray will all reveal the secrets to their internet fame and fortune. If they don’t, I do plan to make them fess up in an unapologetical questioning session following their own presentations.
Exciting!