“Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value? It’s time we learned the answers to these and other questions about web design.”

“1 Bit Audio Player is a very simple and lightweight Adobe Flash MP3 player with automatic JavaScript insertion. Its main purpose is to act as a quick in-page preview for audio files you link to from your website or blog. The player can be easily installed as a WordPress plugin or used stand-alone in any website. Small audio players will than automatically appear next to any MP3s you link to.”

“The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into ‘Human-Computer Interaction.’ In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on ‘interaction’ may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.” (Thanks Magnetbox!)

Jorn Barger: “I often complain to interviewers that ‘weblog’ is the least interesting of my many neologisms. Here’s a sampling of others…”

“When designing web applications, icons and images are used to enhance the user experience, give visual cues, and simply look sexy. For complex web apps, the quantity and resulting latency of icons and images used can greatly impact page load times…and developers, in most cases, generally try to reduce page load time with a sweet web app rather than increase it. To reduce latency in my apps, I use Image Concatenation! …The basic idea is this: Change X number of image downloads to 1 image download by making 1 big image that contains the X images.”

“The graphic portrayal of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization, which are intertwined with each other. They also connect with the rise of statistical thinking up through the 19th century, and developments in technology into the 20th century. From above ground, we can see the current fruit; we must look below to see its pedigree and germination. There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.”

“Full icon set replacement for Creative Studio 3 based on CS3 retail product box design. What’s missing is document icon for Contribute CS3 and few more small CS3 apps. I’ll do second part as soon as Adobe releases more CS3 apps to public.”

“On one of my web projects I’ve been working on, we needed to allow the user to edit some information on their profile page. I could have written an HTML form page and then written the php database updater, but why use such outdated interfaces? This is the era of AJAX, and you can’t deny it. AJAX is pretty sweet. I decided on using Flickr-like editing boxes to do the job. If you are not familiar with how flickr handles editing data, here’s a short summary.”

“It’s been just over 12 months since I posted our original Guide to CSS Support in Email and quite a bit has changed since. Sadly, the most significant of these changes was in the wrong direction, with Microsoft’s recent decision to use the Word rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer in Outlook 2007. We’ve written plenty about it already including an explanation of the reasoning behind it. More on its impact on CSS support later. It hasn’t all been doom and gloom though, a number of vendors have maintained or improved their support for CSS, especially in the web-based email environment.”

“An increasing number of artists are working with digital technologies and that’s posing some new and especially difficult preservation problems for museums. One difficulty is what to do when a work of art needs to keep a hard drive running, or maintain an Internet connection.”

“After a friend recently posted about trying to find the time to blog, I got to thinking: How do I find the time to blog? After some thinking, I came up with a few principles. In some ways, I’m the worst person to give advice, because my frequency of posting is terrible compared to any decent blogger. On the other hand, I’m the father of 3 children under the age of 4 (doing attachment parenting no less) and I work full time, so if I can find the time to post, then anyone can.” (Thanks Rebecca’s Pocket!)

“A simple website charges you less time. A complex website charges you more time. Time is your most precious resource… Complexity is like the peacock’s feathers. It is brash and impossible to miss. Complexity lets other people know how clever we are and how rich, because we can afford such complexity.”

“As Web 2.0 Buying Season winds down, it is pleasant to consider what was different about it. This time, for the most part, the buyers have been farmers, not butchers. They bought to nurture, not to kill… I worked at other places over the years. The great ones were small and created their own cultures. The not-so-great ones had almost always been good until they got too big.”

A weblog by Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs and co-creator of BlogPulse, that cover text mining, visualization and social media.

“If you’re a web developer, you’ve probably heard about XHTML, the markup language developed in 1999 to implement HTML as an XML format. Most people who use and promote XHTML do so because they think it’s the newest and hottest thing, and they may have heard of some (usually false) benefits here and there. But there is a lot more to it than you may realize, and if you’re using it on your website, even if it validates, you are probably using it incorrectly. I should make it clear that I hope XHTML has a bright future on the Web.”