Tony recently remarked on Twitter : Readwriteweb write the most thoughtful intelligent pieces around, and it’s worryingly indicative of our culture that they aren’t read more I have my own, somewhat selfish, reason to praise this particular tech site. ReadWriteWeb’s lead writer, Marshall Kirkpatrick , is a big fan of Huffduffer . What an astute young man! He even made a screencast for Read Write Web . Huffduffer Screencast Seriously, I’m pleased as punch with this. … Read the rest here
I rolled out a new addition to the Huffduffer home page earlier this week. If you aren
Take a look at the line-up and schedule for UX London next May. It’s going to be fan-bloody-tastic. I’m particularly excited about seeing Scott McCloud . When Kai found out that I had never read Understanding Comics , he very kindly sent me a copy. Now I understand what all the fuss is about. It’s a superb book and extremely relevant to interaction design …hence my excitement about Scott McCloud’s appearance at UX London. … Read the rest here
When I added collectives to Huffduffer , I wanted to keep the new feature fairly discrete. I knew I would have to add an add/remove device to profiles but I also wanted that device to be unobtrusive. That’s why I settled on using a small + / - button. The action of adding someone to, or removing someone from a collective was a clear candidate for Hijax . … Read the rest here
Huffduffer was launched thirteen months ago. I almost missed the one year anniversary but for an astute huffduffer who pointed it out . It’s been quite a year. Just over 2000 people signed up and huffduffed over five and a half thousand audio files . I’ve been tweaking the site fairly regularly—and blogging about it here —fiddling with forms , machine tags and sparklines . Today I launched the biggest update to the site so far… Read the rest here
A few months ago, Jakob Nielsen wrote about password . Specifically, he wrote about the standard practice of the contents of password fields being masked by default. In his typical black/white, on/off, right/wrong Boolean worldview, Father Jakob called for this practice to be abolished completely. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Apple take a more empathetic approach, acknowledging that there often very good reasons for masking passwords. But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer the user the option to disable password masking if they choose … Read the rest here
I’ve already described how machine tags on Huffduffer trigger a number of third-party API calls. Tagging something with music:artist=… , book:author=… , film:title=… or any number of similar machine tags will fire off calls to places like Amazon , The New York Times , or Last.fm . … Read the rest here
It’s common practice for sign-up forms to include duplicate fields for either password or email, where the user has to type the same thing twice. I deliberately avoided this on the Huffduffer sign-up form . Not long after Huffduffer launched, I was asked about this ommision on Get Satisfaction and I defended my position there, citing the audience demographic. I still think I made the right decision although, in retrospect, I’ve changed my position completely from when I said, I can see more value in a ‘confirm your password’ field than a ‘confirm your email address’ field. Thinking about it, getting a correct email address is more important. … Read the rest here
It’s common practice for sign-up forms to include duplicate fields for either password or email, where the user has to type the same thing twice. I deliberately avoided this on the Huffduffer sign-up form . Not long after Huffduffer launched, I was asked about this ommision on Get Satisfaction and I defended my position there, citing the audience demographic. I still think I made the right decision although, in retrospect, I’ve changed my position completely from when I said, I can see more value in a ‘confirm your password’ field than a ‘confirm your email address’ field. … Read the rest here
So, remember when I posted all those episodes of Simon Singh
So, remember when I posted all those episodes of Simon Singh
Beer o’clock in Brighton begins shortly after work ends on a Friday evening. That’s when the geeks of Brighton unshackle themselves from their keyboards and monitors to congregate in a pub. If the weather is good, it’ll be a sunny pub . Last friday the Clearlefties descended on The Eagle where we were joined by Ribotians and others. Glenn showed up and we proceeded to geek out on our usual favourite topics; microformats and data portability. He had spent the day hacking on a Firefox plug-in. … Read the rest here
The newest episode of Radiolab has the highlights from one of their occasional live events. This one revolves around the deliberately contentious premise of television vs. radio. AV Smackdown
After I started rewarding machine tagging on Huffduffer with API calls to Amazon and Last.fm, people started using them quite a bit. But when it came to displaying tag clouds, I wasn
Back in January I was part of a double bill with Jon Tan , entitled Skillswap goes typographic . It went down really well so I thought I’d better tie it all together here. My talk was on “Facing up to Fonts” the blurb for which went as follows: Browser support for the typographical aspects of CSS is gradually increasing. Things are on the up. Richard will be trouncing the myth of web-safe fonts, demonstrating how to go beyond bold, detailing the technicalities of font embedding and exploring the commercial and ethical minefield therein. The introduction of font embedding in particular is a long-awaited step in the right direction… Read the rest here
I just got back from a geek event down the street:
While I was in Nashville for the Voices That Matter conference , I sat down for an enjoyable little chat with Nikki McDonald. It began with a discussion of my uncanny resemblance to Severus Snape before moving on to more webby matters. I also had a great three-way chat with Christopher Schmitt and Steve Krug . Christopher has posted up a transcript of the conversation If you
While I was in Nashville for the Voices That Matter conference , I sat down for an enjoyable little chat with Nikki McDonald. It began with a discussion of my uncanny resemblance to Severus Snape before moving on to more webby matters. I also had a great three-way chat with Christopher Schmitt and Steve Krug . Christopher has posted up a transcript of the conversation If you
After I wrote about the hoops I had to jump through to get Amazon
After I wrote about the hoops I had to jump through to get Amazon