Entries Tagged 'meta' ↓

I am happy to announce that I am back in Europe. Which is nice. Imagine, I was walking earlier on this street that was full of other people walking in all directions.

Hopefully my return to the Proper Timezone means that I will be able to lead a more ‘orderly’ life and that, in turn, will make it possible for me to blog more often. So stay tuned, I might even produce another post this week! If I do, I promise to try and even put some content in it.

If you are smart (which I am not sure is likely, given that you are wasting your time reading my crap…), you might have deduced from my previous post that I am actually alive and well. You might have also inferred that I have not abandoned this site (yet).

The last couple of weeks have been a bit weird, and I have not had much time to sit quietly at my own laptop and contribute some to the distributed cacophony this blogosphere thing is. I am afraid that the weeks to come won’t be any better, so I apologize in advance for the highly irregular posting that will happen in the near future. Hopefully it will stabilize soon again.

The reason for the weirdness is this new job I got. I was finishing up stuff at university one day, and the next day I took a plan to San Francisco, but got stuck in Paris, and eventually arrived almost 36 hours later to Mountain View. And 12 hours later I woke up, got my shit together and headed off to new hire orientation at Google. Odd.

I wonder how the hell do I manage to make my life more and more strange all the time. Fun.

Via Alt1040 I see that Jakob Nielsen has published his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 . Here is a summary:

1. Legibility problems: small fonts, low contrast.
2. Non-standard links: not underlined links, no difference between visited and not visited links, JavaScript, links opening in new windows.
3. Flash.
4. Content that’s not written for the Web: not short and ’scannable’ enough.
5. Bad search.
6. Browser incompatibility.
7. Cumbersome forms.
8. No contact information.
9. Frozen layouts with fixed page widths.
10. Inadequate photo enlargement.

Let’s see how does this blog do against this list.

1. The fonts look big enough to me, but they could be perhaps a bit bigger. The contrast is ok.
2. My links are not underlined, and I don’t differentiate between visited and not visited links.
3. There is no Flash here.
4. Hopefully the posts are short and readable enough. I am constantly working on this.
5. The Search box is the one that comes with Wordpress seems to work ok. No one is using it, though, according to my logs.
6. I tested this site with IE and Firefox. Hopefully it looks ok in Safari and other browsers as well.
7. No forms to fill here.
8. My e-mail and some info about me can be found in the About me page.
9. All the column widths are fixed.
10. There are no photo enlargement options.

It seems that I should work a bit on the CSS and make the links more usable, and perhaps enlarge the font. Changing the layout to liquid will be more complicated, because of the large header image. Perhaps I should skip the header image altogether.

As posting here is being, er, let’s say irregular, due to excessive workload, I suggest that while you await another fine post from me, you go and check some fine posts from other people.

For example, you can go and have a look at some interesting flash animations suggested by Bryan.

Or you can go and read Kathy’s thought-provoking post about how dignity is deadly.

If you want to improve your blog, you can read the tips on How to make a good blog archive pointed by Lifehacker.

You can also reflect on the Web 2.0 concept with help of the mindmap from Business2Blog.

And if you are, like, *totally* bored, you can help me to find a cool hostname. I need that for my new job.

I know it’s been a long time with no news. But now that holidays are over, cyberspace-littering in this corner of the net will resume. For the moment being, I have made some (temporary) changes in the template and sidebar.

While I concoct a post with some actual content, you can have a lok at my clipblog (feed).

Stay tuned for more news!