NEWD

NEWD was very cool and I’m so glad I was up in Boston in time to meet some really great local designers. In fact it was not as local as you might think Dan and Ethan seem to have a little bigger draw with people coming out from Connecticut and the like. Dan and Ethan were great host and were really gracious to all the geeks who showed up. I think they enjoy the randomness of some of the people who do show up.

Because they knew techy web designers were coming the power went out in the general area. I’m still not exactly sure what happened as street lights were out as I was walking to the bar and the bar’s power was out but all the surrounding businesses seemed to have power. We ended up just going to a pool hall around the corner.

Networking is tons of fun and anyone who says other wise isn’t doing it right. I read some where recently that the average person can only have about 150 casual relationships (not the article but something close enough). Casual meaning if you bumped in to them on in a restaurant you would feel comfortable grabbing a meal with them. Now I don’t know if I’ve ever known that many people at one time but if I do in Boston I’m gonna see how many web designer connections I can make on my way to employment.

Gmail Settings

arrows in the inbox

I don’t know how many people have given the gmail settings more then a cursory glance but I was poking around before and found an option for personal level indicators. This little feature puts little arrows in front of your emails. One arrow denotes that your email address is specifically listed as a recipient among many and two arrows shows that you are the sole recipient of the email. This makes filtering email at a glance much easier and pulls attention away from any spam or list serves that might not be immediately important.

gmail settings menu

It’s a really small flourish that I wonder why it’s not turned on by default. Perhaps they make people turn it on just so they know what the little icons are. I didn’t notice this feature until recently and I never read about it any where so hopefully I’m not the last to know.

lifehack, gmail, gtd

Chris Pirillo, Cyworld and social networking

Recently, actually the same day iTunes came out with the podcasting update, I downloaded iPodder as I did not want to be left behind and wanted to see what all the noise was about. Few shows seems to have caught my interest since then. One that did catch my interest was The Chris Pirillo Show. I had never watched The Screen Savers on Tech TV as I was sans digital cable and so the reason the show stuck out was the focus on emergent web technology and the delightful banter between him and Ponzi.

Recently he interviewed Rick Kim from Cyworld which is a web service from Korea that has really taken off and seem to have 90% of Korea in the palm of their hand. Chis is usually a good interviewer because while he is very knowledgeable he does a good job of ‘pretending’ he doesn’t know what his interviewee is talking about to get better explanations out of them (I bet I can hear Ponzi laughing in the background already). This works really well in most situations when he does know what’s going on but when Rick came on Chris seemed to miss the boat of understanding.

Cyworld really is revolutionary in it’s inclusion of elements from other places. Chris blows the service off as some kind of glorified geocities where you have to pay for backgrounds but it reality it is so much more. If I had to define it, after doing some research on it, I would more associate it to SecondLife. SecondLife has a monthly fee like World of Warcraft but you can pay extra money to buy things like land or whatever. While there have been detailed studies of online game economies since Ultima Online every one always seems to be surprised when actual money starts to come in to the picture.

Cyworld is basically a social network. For free you can sign up for an account and you get a little page that includes a personal profile, diary, mini room, photo album, bulletin board and message board. Non of this is out of the ordinary and sounds a lot like MySpace that has (unfortunately) become very popular in the US. What is unique is the mini room where for free you get a small customisable avatar and an empty room. But if you want to decorate the room you have to buy little object with real money. The objects are cheep (under $2) and some even only last a limited amount of time. The object also are part of the social networking as you can buy gifts for others and these gifts end up effecting your friendly or sexy score.

The trick seems to be offering something for free and then making available other stuff to buy. It’s a model cropping up all over the place. iTunes is a free download and does a great job on managing people’s music and now it even lets you manage your podcasts. Oh and if you’re up to it you can purchase music from one of the largest online music stores in the world. Google Earth is a free download with amazing functionality and with a small fee can also be upgraded to even more powerful features. It’s this kind of pseudo-shareware that seems to becoming very pervasive in the online market the way it was with video games in the early 90s.

Chris really dropped the ball on this interview and really sounded insulting to Rick. Any company that is making $200,000 a day should be given more respect and understanding. After seeing TheFaceBook sweep through TCNJ and people truly becoming obsessed with it I can easily see Cyworld taking off in the US. Currently I see it’s main competitor to be MySpace in the obsessive social networking sphere. I wish it the best of luck and while I do plan on trying it (I’ll sign up for about any free service) I don’t plan on spending any money since I’m a bit cheep.

Cyworld, MySpace, ChrisPirillo, SocialNetwork, Korea, SecondLife

An Open Letter to TCNJ’s Social Software

I don’t know how you think the Alumni Social Networking web app is working out but I hope you are having the same problems I am having. On a pure usability stand point it’s badly designed. What I can talk about the most is the College Union Board neighborhood which I set up last summer as one of the few students in the system. Once I set it up there was no way to add events or add news. Now you might tell me that there is no way to add events for individual groups and that perhaps it is only a collection of events and news of people in the groups. I have no idea if that’s true or not because I’ve never figured out how to add either. There is also no CUB message board. how do you set one up? I have no idea.

I’ve liked the idea for College Social Software since I heard about it. The problem is that it’s so hard to navigate and is so frustrating that even I can’t stand using it. I certainly hope you don’t think it is a success. Just by watching the message boards and class notes it seems participation is lackluster. While you don’t need to compete with monster successes such as thefacebook.com (If you haven’t researched other social networks I highly encourage you to do so.) you do need a enjoyable experience that is flexible to the users needs.

If I heard right you even pay for this horrible experience. My recommendation is to get rid of it. I think the people who would end up donating through the site would donate anyway as you must love the school to put up with the horrible social application. There is a great open source social software called Aroundme. Not only does it come with some beautiful graphic design but it is very easy to learn how to use. Completely written in php it should not be hard for small additions to be written by the IT staff of TCNJ.

I hope the social software can be improved soon. Other wise students will always turn to facebook and never take a second look at what you are offering.

Sincerely, Stefan Hayden

Browsershots: a quick review

One of the hard parts of web design is conditioning yourself to out put code that works in all browsers. I don’t know how many people can code web sites with out needing to check to see if the code actually works, but I am not one of those people. Searching the internet for solutions there are services to check how your page looks in other browsers but they are all rather expensive for little college graduates like me.

The other solution that some subscribe to is called the “Avoid the Cutting Edge” approach. For the most part I am appalled by this approach as I can not think of any other industry that advocates staying away from new and better ways of doing business. I feel an “Understand the Cutting Edge” is a better outlook to have. It’s important to know what the new technologies can do. Yet no matter how fancy a new feature might be if it does not work in the dominant browser (currently IE) then the feature is dead in the water. Though I am waiting for the “Killer App” that will propel Firefox to the forefront. Some where out there is an idea that can’t run on IE and if implemented for everyone else the mass exodus of IE would begin.

Until that killer app comes I will continue to push IE as far as it will go and will need all the help I can get checking to make sure my web pages work in every browser with out spending a fortune. A long time coming some one has finally started an open source project that let you see your site in different browsers. Browsershots works by letting you submit a URL and it renders out PNGs of what it looks like in different browsers. I’m unclear exactly how it works but from what I surmise it has a central server that dishes out jobs to people who are running the scrip on their computer similar to how Seti@Home works. I downloaded the script and tried to see if I could figure out how to run it off my dreamhost account but did not have any luck. The project is still in it’s baby stages, though it has already handled some very large hits from del.icio.us and the like. When you submit your link it gets put in a pool and it renders out PNGs which you view on their site. This is a very public way of testing websites and would especially be a problem for larger projects that need to be kept secret. It would be nice if there was an easier way to run it privately, which it says it can do but it is not documented well enough for me to figure it out. Perhaps it could use a wiki for documentation to help speed the writing up as I would love to run my own version.

While it tells you the stats that the PNG was rendered with next to the image it does nothing to help you with any display problems you might have. Perhaps it might be a pipe dream but it would be amazing if it pointed out likely problems that different browsers will have with the code (XHTML, javascript, CSS) that you have written. I ran in to my own error as I got the error shown below and can’t figure out why. I get it for both my site and the one I’m working on. Let me know if you figure the problem out because as of right now I’m stumped.

my stange error