Davin's blog

Category: User experience, web, technology

  • Thinking about affordances & convention in web design

    I wrote the following intending to include it in an email newsletter I send out. I had Chey read it and it seems the word “affordance” used in this way is a bit too esoteric. I’ve started trying to rewrite it, starting from the user-testing paragraph, but I’m having trouble writing about this concept without…

  • How HTML and CSS is like an egg hatching.

    A discussion has been building in a web developer community email list I receive. The discussion looks at the field of “professional web developer/designer/etc.” One of the posters wrote up a long response to many comments; one of the things he said struck me as true, but a shallow observation. It was this: Stuff like…

  • Dave Agnew’s web site

    Dave Agnew has been running his own business, Dynamic Control Systems, LLC, for over a year now (how long, Dave?). He’s a hired-gun, so-to-speak, designing and building control systems for conveyers, lifts, and other material handling equipment in the automobile/manufacturing industry. He’s the guy behind the machinery that, for example, takes a car door and…

  • Indenting blocks of code in Dreamweaver

    It is nice when you discover something new and useful in a piece of software you’ve been using for years. For instance, this past week I discovered that in the Code View in Dreamweaver MX, you can highlight a big block of code and tab the whole thing to the right, uniformly, by pressing TAB.…

  • Visual music searches

    This is cool. I searched for “Robert Johnson.” The image above is a very small snippet of what came up. The map it creates represents other artists in the genre, as well as nearby genres. Size of circle indicates performer popularity or influence. http://musicplasma.com/

  • Mooter.com

    Need to search the Web for something? Try this instead of Google (okay, I know you’ll end up back at Google, but this is cool, so try it once): Mooter.com. It shows your search results as a cluster diagram. So, for instance, if you search for our dear, lovable old “Noel Heikkinen,” you’ll find clusters…

  • Sort or search your email?

    So, my inbox has 294 messages in it right now. When it gets to around 500 or so I usually go on a crusade to bring it to under 100. This involves throwing messages into folders and deleting lots and lots of no longer important ones that I won’t need. So, this concept of not…

  • Hm, a bug.

    So, the background color isn’t showing in the Flash movie at the top. Any ideas? It wouldn’t have to do with the fact that it is not one of the sacrosanct web-safe colors, I would hope. Not sure. Using #eef. Eventually the fading photo thing will be working on each photo section. In time.

  • Two “separate” readings

    First, Digital Web Magazine is redesigned. I think it looks sharp, nice colors. I wonder how much the design was influenced by the IA site, Boxes & Arrows

  • Props to Capital Area District Library on their web site

    Was just looking up something on the CADL site for my wife, and, as is my habit, I took a quick peek at the HTML code (View -> View Source in Safari). I was pleased to see first that it appears to be valid XHTML 1.0, and quickly noted some nice uses of accesskey attributes…