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Design connections
A couple days ago I stopped into the Com Arts building at Michigan State University to meet a new professor in the journalism program named Karl Gude. [Karl’s blog] I heard about Karl from my friend and colleague Liz Weber who handed me a clipping from the MSU News Bulletin which explained that Karl had…
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Can robots.txt prevent a dead page from being removed from a search engine’s index?
Problem: Pages taken offline 4 months ago are still indexed by Google and Yahoo! In the course of work this week, we discovered that Yahoo! and Google still have record of a section of a website we removed nearly 4 months ago. Surely the search engine robots had revisited the pages, repeatedly received 404-File Not…
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Restricting search indexing to sections of a web page
If you think about websites as having different page types, with each page type having different sections within it, such as content sections, navigation sections, and footer sections, it becomes apparent that the value of a particular page is defined by the content on the page that is unique to that page. Sections like footers…
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XML file of shooting ranges in Michigan
As another small step in this process of manipulating a data set to upload to Google Maps, I took the cleaned XHTML I had from a few days ago, and used TextWrangler to do some quick search and replaces on the source code in order to produce this XML file. ranges-data.xml Next, I think, I’ll…
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Sample KML structure for the shooting ranges data
And here is a sample of what the intended shooting ranges KML feed will look like.
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Clean XHTML of shooting ranges data
My goal is to upload a comprehensive list of shooting ranges to Google Maps (see prior posting). So, to accomplish this, here are the steps I’ve thought of.
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Read: Everything is Miscellaneous by Weinberger
I just finished “Everything is Miscellaneous” by David Weinberger. Fantastic read for information architects! I found it thought-provoking, educational, and humorous. I find myself thinking more creatively about designing information in my work. To honor the miscellany, I actually read through the Notes (references to sources used in each chapter), Acknowledgments, and the Index at…
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Usability in Packaging
A couple evenings ago I attended a presentation by Laura Bix from the MSU School of Packaging. The presentation was about how Laura and a couple of her graduate students have been employing user experience design methods in the package design process. The short of it is, they’re doing great work. I appreciated seeing usability…
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We need a “credit” attribute in XHTML
The XHTML 2.0 draft document by the W3C includes some promising attributes for elements. For instance, a navigation list could have a role with a value of sitemap. I.e.: <nl role=”sitemap”> That’s cool. Think on that a bit, o ye of semantic persuasion. The potential benefits of this type of specificity in standard markup is…
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Congratulations, your bank account has been deleted!
I actually got this feedback from a website a couple days ago. It struck me as a funny confirmation.