Some food for thought.

December 02, 2002 | 4 Comments

You ever just get through typing a really good blog entry only to loose it along the way? Well, that is just what happened to me. I spent about 30 minutes on this great entry and lost it all because I hit a link from my email which caused the browser window I had my entry in to load the new page, when I went back, my entry was empty. Bad contingency design there, I guess, although I don’t think that’s ever happened before. WTF?

On a related note, I got an email over the weekend from Adam Greenfield, and I guess something similar happened to him when he tried to comment on one of my posts. I guess it hung on him. It’s too bad, I’m sure he had some good things to say. In any case I hope that doesn’t happen often.

So, I’ve been really busy — and quite a bit drained in the evenings — thus the lack of good stuff here at Asterisk* lately. I’ve got several really big projects going on down at the hospital and they are all coming due at the same time. My days are going fast and all I want to do after work is play video games and watch TV. With the holidays and all that, it leaves little time to do anything else. Ok, that isn’t totally true, I did put together some cover options for Digital-Web Magazine — we’ll see if they get used, I’m sure they got lots of good stuff. They do great work over there.

All I can do is say sorry, and point you in the way of some really good stuff out there on the dub dub dub. Here we go:

Over at v-2.org, you can find part two of the Nathan Shedroff interview. A good read, although I think most Web designers wouldn’t need nor want to nit-pic these two disciplines apart and just accept them both, as well as a few others, as part of a well rounded understanding of Web design. Within reason of course, I can see how in some cases (Amazon comes to mind) they would each deserve a place of their own, but in my experience — they are both just aspects of good Web design.

A good introductory article about accessible Web text by Jim Byrne is worth a read, it’s a bit long and you might already know most of what it has to say, but I found it a nice refresher and something to keep around.

I’ve come across some interesting pieces on Flash Remoting. The first is an overview of the concept and the second, and I quote, answers the question “How can we learn from Wal-Mart and turn that into more usable Flash content with a better experience for our users?”

Patterns for Personal Web Sites makes a decent attempt at defining a pattern for making an “excellent” Web site.

And lastly, here are a few blogs I’ve been reading in the last few weeks.

Adrian Holovaty

Hypergene MediaBlog

Matt Jones

Noise Between Stations

Daring Fireball

Filed under: Web General