xentek.net: enlightened internet solutions

Links for 2008-03-13 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Ableton Live: Enter the Dragger!
One way to organize a music set in Ableton Live

Links for 2008-02-17 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Superfish - Suckerfish on 'roids
CSS + jQuery = Menu Magic

Links for 2008-01-11 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600

JQuery: Collapsible Menu
A handy snippet to create a Collapsible Menu using jQuery. Performs its functions on a group of nested unordered lists.

Links for 2008-01-05 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Adobe Creative Suite fails "catastrophically" thanks to DRM
Click thru to see one of the best screen shots I've seen in a while.
Linux Commands Line

Links for 2008-01-04 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Email Standards Project
The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working wi
DataPortability.org
Standardized Data Portability is the next great frontier for the web. As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distrib

Links for 2007-12-28 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Avatars
A Mac OS X 10.5 Plug-in for address book that downloads GRAVATARS and PAVATARS for all of your contacts. Neat!

Links for 2007-12-19 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0600

BM Custom Login Plugin
Plugin to help you create a custom login screen for your WordPress installation.

Google Maps Mobile Adds My Location

Eric Marden — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 16:47:11 +0000

Google Maps Mobile, has just been updated to add a slick new feature that helps pinpoint where you’re at using the Cell Towers for triangulation. If you have a GPS enabled phone, it will use that instead. Its pretty accurate, so far - usually pulling my location up within 3 meters (with my new Blackberry Curve II).

After the jump is a video explaining how it works.

Amazon announces SimpleDB

Eric Marden — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:23:15 +0000

This is going to be huge! Combine it with their other services, and you have maximum scalability for any project. Media Temple (my current host) may lose me after all of this comes out of beta. I am already using S3 for backups and will begin rolling it into all of my upcoming podcast projects. I’ve been flirting with this Ubuntu AMI (Amazon Machine Image) on their EC2 platform, with good results. Keep ‘em coming, Amazon.

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Learn more and sign up here.

Wordpress 2.3.2 is Out

Eric Marden — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:22:40 +0000

Wordpress 2.3.2 has been released. A few security flaws were fixed, some performance improvements implemented, and parts of the XMLRPC interface updated. However, most fixes centered around suppressing DB Errors, and providing more tools to the WP Developer when the constant WP_DEBUG is set to true. More details here.

The Google Enigma

Eric Marden — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:13:26 +0000

Whenever a company becomes wildly successful in a brief span of time, it naturally becomes an object of fascination for corporate executives and even the general public. More than that, it comes to be presented as a new model for business success. Reporters and scholars scour its history and its practices, looking to distill general lessons for other firms to copy. Google is no exception.

For all its success, Google is still a young company, and it has yet to be tested by adversity. We don’t even know whether its approach to management, and in particular its approach to innovation, is a cause of its success or a product of its success — a crucial distinction.

Interesting stuff. More here.

Netscape Dead at 14

Eric Marden — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:14:21 +0000

AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be,” he writes. “Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reigns fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.

Who is really still using Netscape in the day and age of Firefox 2? More about this story here.

You Sucjk at Photoshop

Eric Marden — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:36:16 +0000

Pownce opens to public

Eric Marden — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 04:01:06 +0000

Pownce opens to public and just got a whole lot cooler.

War of the Worlds

Eric Marden — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:42:46 +0000

There is a technology war coming. Actually it is already here but most of us haven’t yet notice. It is a war not about technology but because of technology, a war over how we as a culture embrace technology. It is a war that threatens venerable institutions and, to a certain extent, threatens what many people think of as their very way of life. It is a war that will ultimately and inevitably change us all, no going back. The early battles are being fought in our schools. And I already know who the winners will be.

This is a war over how we as a culture and a society respond to Moore’s Law.

WordPress 2.5 is Out!

Eric Marden — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:28:04 +0000

This may be the biggest upgrade to WordPress since the jump from 1.5 to 2.0. There are numerous changes on the front-end and the back-end. The admin panel has probably seen the most radical changes, as it has been completely redesigned from the ground up. And they redesigned wordpress.org to boot! So that’s why it took 6 months for v2.5 to come out…

A quick round up of the new features:

Multi-File Uploading
Upgrade Plugins with a single click
Photo Galleries
A Dashboard you can Customize
Salted Passwords and Encrypted Cookies to increase the security of the project
A Media Library of all your uploaded assets
A WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess up your code (zomg!)
Protection against Concurrent Post Editing
Writing in Full Screen Mode
And a search engine that covers both posts AND pages (long the domain of a plugin)

You can read all about it in the official announcement.

Common HTTP Error Codes and Designing for the User Experience

Eric Marden — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:57:31 +0000

HTTP Status/Error Codes provide valuable metrics about the ‘health’ of an application and its use. As such, they should not be combined or hidden behind application logic – that is, the pages that are displayed should actually be throwing the correct Status Codes so that they can be properly logged by the server and/or Omniture. However, beyond that Producers and Designers should be mindful about the most common Error Codes, and what kind of information and tools should be displayed for users when these errors are inevitably encountered. Keep in mind that these are different from application logic errors (i.e. throwing Exceptions) and should be handled on a case by case basis.

Below are the most common error codes, and the way to treat them when designing for the User Experience of your site.

404 – Not Found
Should provide users the information that the page they were looking for is not at this address, and provide them with the tools in which to try to locate it on their own (search and/or site map browsing)

401 - Unauthorized
403 – Forbidden
Used when a page that normally requires a login was tried to be accessed directly. Ideally will send user to a login form (that in turn redirects them to the page they originally requested). If not, a message asking them to login and getting them to that page should be provided.

500 – Internal Server Error
502 – Bad Gateway
503 – Service Unavailable
These errors usually indicate that something went wrong – very wrong. These errors should be logged and the Developers notified some how. These need their own page so that these errors can be tracked down and fixed. Users should be told in very friendly terms (Opps! Something’s broken) that something went wrong, that we have been notified, and that they can try their request at another time.