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Recently I've been skimming through Defensive Design for the Web by 37signals and have found a few good tips for creating web forms, help and error messages. It's not the best book that I've seen on web design, but it's easy to read, and illustrates its common sense guidelines with good and bad examples from popular sites.
At the end of the book there's a design test that you can use on your own web site, to see how it rates.
When Things Go Horribly Wrong
As a customer, my worst web site experience was with the Westin Hotel, while booking accommodations for a conference. I selected my arrival and departure dates, then clicked a button to view room information, so I could decide which type I wanted. I closed the room info window, completed the booking, and got my confirmation, which I quickly read, then filed.
About a
Continue reading Defensive Design
Last Friday I arrived in my office about 8:30 AM, ready to tackle several small projects, and get them sent off to clients. Full of motivation and caffeine, nothing could stop me. Nothing, that is, except a dead Internet connection. The first clue was MailWasher, lying on its back with its paws in the air. No email was coming in or going out.
Excellent! I couldn't get to YouSendIt and upload or download client files. A client asked me to check some files on their network, but Citrix doesn't work either, if you can't connect to it.
So, the first hour of the workday was spent muttering, assuming the connection would be back up shortly. That didn't happen, so I spent 1/2 hour on the phone with the ISP's tech support, diagnosing and fixing the problem.
Apparently my static IP had become a little too static, and that was fixed
Continue reading Where's My Internet?
Do you have the inner strength to throw out old books?
I love computer books, and bring home way too many of them. Things were bad enough in the old days, when I had to leave my office and drive to a bookstore, in order to buy books. Then the miracle of online shopping occurred, and now I can browse through the Amazon catalogue any time of night or day. A few mouse clicks, and there's a pile of books headed to my front door.
The shelves in my office are crammed to capacity, and it's time to purge some of the books, or buy new shelves. Since I've run out of wall space, additional shelving isn't really an option, so purge it is.
The Toss Pile
Here are some of the books I'm releasing into the wild today. The internet has changed a bit since I started using it,
Continue reading Purging the Bookshelves
I use Google to do web searches, and am pretty efficient at finding things, in my humble opinion. Last week my son sent me a link to All My Faves, which lets you find things, but in a completely different way than Google.
The Home page has rows of web site logos, grouped in categories such as Travel, Sports, Finance and Tech. The top row has weekly favourites.
There's a Weekly Faves tab, that has archived links from earlier weeks, and there's a best of 2007 row at the bottom of that page. Also, there are specialized tabs for Travel, Entertainment, Kids and Shopping.
This could be a great starting point if you're trying to generate ideas, or find new sources of information (or entertainment!) Instead of starting from a narrow search term, and digging in to different sites, All My Faves lets you start from the forest, and
Continue reading Find New Sites With All My Faves
Every day, I skim through a long list of blog posts, in Google Reader. I've accumulated the items in my list over a few years, and would hate to lose it.
Now I'm sure that the fine people at Google take very good care of my feed, and I don't have to worry about it. However, just to be on the safe side, I make a backup copy of the feed every couple of weeks or so. Then, it's on my computer, and gets backed up onto the external drive too. Belts and suspenders might not be fashionable, but they can prevent embarrassing situations.
Here are the steps for exporting a backup file from Google Reader. Other RSS readers should have something similar. This technique is also useful if you decide to change to a different RSS reader. You can export from the old one, and import in the new
Continue reading Back Up Your RSS Feed
Moved to the Excel Twitters archive:
Excel Twitters 20080816
When you're travelling, you probably bring your laptop, so you can do some work and keep up with your email. Some of the ritziest hotels that I've stayed in charge for daily access to their wireless network, or you can trudge down to the lobby for free access. At other, mid-priced hotels, the access is sometimes free. If you're paying an exorbitant rate for the room, can't they throw in a couple of dollars worth of wifi?
If you're planning a trip, the following chart, from Book of Joe, shows which hotel chains have free access, and which chains charge for it, or make you balance your laptop on your knees in the lobby.
If you have trouble finding a nearby wireless network, the Wi-Fire might help you find something a bit further away. I haven't tried it, but there have been many times that it would have been
Continue reading Find WiFi While Travelling
If you had asked me a few days ago, how much I download and upload each day, I'd have had no idea. Apparently some cable companies in the USA are testing metered internet service. I haven't seen this mentioned for Canadian companies, but if it works in Texas, it will probably arrive here soon enough. If you know your current usage, you'll be able to select the best plan for your needs.
To measure your daily transfer rates, you can download the free utility, NetMeter. I installed it last week, which went very smoothly. The icon sits in the system tray, and you can click on it to see a graph of your current usage.
Right-click on the system tray icon, to change the options, or to view your totals and projected totals.
You can also view Daily, Weekly and Monthly reports, and export them as csv files.
Continue reading Are You Ready for Metered Internet?
If you're trying to stay on top of the news in Excel or another area of interest, you can create Google Alerts to update you automatically. After you create an Alert, you can add it to your newsreader, and read it with the rest of your feeds every day. I prefer this, instead of getting Alerts by email.
Create a Google Alert Log in to your Google account, and click on Google Alerts Enter your search topic, and set the other options for the alert. Click Create Alert, to open the list of Alerts Add the Alert to a Newsreader
These steps will vary, depending on your browser and newsreader. In this example, I used Firefox and Google Reader.
In the list, click on the search term link In the toolbar of your browser, click the RSS Feed icon. On the Feed page, select a newsreader from the drop down
Continue reading Send Google Search Results to Your Newsreader
Moved to the Excel Twitters archive:
Excel Twitters 20080810
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