Archives are often something that are left until the last minute and I don’t think anyone really considers how best to create them. Designers often throw together a chronological list of posts and leave it at that. However, I stumbled across a design by Kyle Meyer today that’s a brilliant solution to the archive problem. On his website Astheria, he represents his archive visually, altering the distance between posts to show fluctuations in frequency.
Clever, isn’t it? How is it done? Well all he’s done is dynamically style the list items, altering their top margin according to the difference in dates. I guess that this is done in a custom PHP script he’s written to grab and display his blog content. The rest is just done with CSS.
Here’s an awesome little piece of design; the Word Clock screensaver. All it does is tells the time in beautiful, simple type. It’s a neat idea implemented really well and if you have a Mac, I recommend that you check it out.
Co-founder of the Web Standards Project, Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the best known Web development personalities. His landmark book Designing With Web Standards, released in 2003, was updated almost two years ago. I picked up a copy the other day after reading many recommendations, so is it still relevant five years down the line?
Designing With Web Standards, Second Edition is a much larger and more comprehensive book than I anticipated it being, serving as an introduction to a range of topics. It begins by making the case for web standards, showing what’s wrong with (then) current websites and what can be done. It examines why they’re not perfect, but why they’re also the way forward. Zeldman then goes on to explain how websites can be made to comply with web standards.
It’s a book which caters for a wide range of users, from those who have just used the likes of Microsoft Frontpage to seasoned programmers. Zeldman writes in a style that everyone from site owners who are commissioning projects to those implementing them will understand.
Designing With Web Standards‘ main flaw is that it was obviously written for a particular period in Web development and because of this, its age shows. There are plenty of references to browsers like Netscape 4, which no-one uses any more and probably didn’t when this second edition was published.
Zeldman’s book was always going to make itself obsolete if Web standards became widely accepted, and so his appeals to redesign websites are a little futile for anyone picking it up today. This irony merely demonstrates the scale of the Web Standards Project’s achievement though and reinforces its values. Although it may not be need to convince current site owners, for those who are just starting in Web design, this is a superb primer for the technologies, issues and decisions that lie ahead. It may seem a little out of date, but it provides the context in which to appreciate why we use the practices we do today.
Although I began making websites in 2000, I’ve come from using nasty table-based layouts to writing standards-compliant code without really being pushed by anyone to do so. As I’ve grown up and learnt more about programming, I’ve gone from using code generators to writing it all myself. The transition to technologies like CSS hasn’t really come from an awareness of Web standards, but a desire to make things easier for myself. So although I was oblivious to Zeldman’s campaign at the time, Designing With Web Standards is still and interesting read and one that shows just how far the Web has come in a mere five years.
All of the information we create and use is either on your computer or in ‘the cloud’ of servers on the Internet. The choice between these two usage patterns is an interesting one. My email is all online via Gmail (although I access it via a desktop application), but everything else is on my own computer. My feed reader, calendar and task manager are all offline standalone programs. I don’t anticipate moving these into ‘the cloud’ anytime soon, but what about bookmarks?
Over the last few months, I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped adding many bookmarks to my browser. If I see something new, I either subscribe to the site’s RSS feed if I like it or simply remember where it is. I use the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox just below the address bar, but I rarely get to sites via the bookmarks menu option. More commonly, I use my Protopage to get to my most visited sites.
I’m thinking of slimming down my browser bookmarks to just my most commonly used ones, then shipping all the rest over to an online bookmarking system like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia. I’m wary of using a Web-based system though; how quickly will I be able to find links? Will the need to tag everything make it a less attractive prospect? It would be really interesting to see a study or analysis of the usability of different bookmarking methods.
On the new version of Thunderbolt, there are three news feeds in the right column of several pages. We take news from other sites using RSS, then display it for users to read. However, there’s one problem; if you rely on other people to provide a service, then you can’t guarantee that it will always work.
This issue has appeared a couple of times on the site when the feed from GamePolitics.com went down. This caused the RSS parsing script on Thunderbolt to timeout, sending loading times through the roof. So what can we do about it? The solution is to cache (make a copy of) the RSS feed every so often and if we can’t find the original site, we just display the most recent version. You could do this in a couple of ways; cache the feed yourself or let someone else do it.
FeedBurner offers a free feed distribution and publishing service. Once they’ve ‘burnt’ your feed, you point your users to your feed on FeedBurner (who check and update their copy during the day). The main benefit is the bandwidth you save through offloading your RSS to FeedBurner, but what we’re interested in here is the ability to ‘burn’ any feed you like.
So here’s the cunning part; you set up a FeedBurner feed for the site you rely on - GamePolitics.com in this case - and then point your website to it. So if the other website crashes, you’re not affected because FeedBurner will keep running using a copy of the RSS.
Sending other websites’ feeds through FeedBurner first is a bit like sending your email through Gmail to filter spam. It’s free and keeps your site running smoothly no matter what happens to the website you’re taking the feed from.
One thing that surprises me is how few people use RSS feeds to keep updated with news and blogs. Even though it saves users countless time, few seem to know about or understand what it is. Whenever I try to explain RSS, it’s hard to get across what exactly it does in a clear and concise manner. So if it’s difficult to communicate the value of new technology that’s essentially invisible, how do you do it?
Enter Common Craft, a company I found yesterday via Twitter, who they’d produced a video for. They use simple paper drawings to explain concepts like Wikis and social bookmarking in short and clear presentations. Check out their RSS video:
Common Craft then license better versions of these videos to individuals and companies, as well as creating custom ones for clients. It’s a neat way of explaining Web technologies to people and an inspiration for anyone trying to wrestle with a tricky concept.
My games website Thunderbolt has received a visual overhaul today, with a cleaner design and a number of new features.
The eighth version adopts a minimalist style which is designed to detract from article text and images as little as possible. I paid special attention to making the site as legible as possible and I’m really pleased with the result.
Aside from the visual adjustments, the new site also introduces comments for the first time and dispenses with the news. I asked myself what people enjoy doing the most and writing news was obviously that. Now the site is firmly focused on reviews, features and opinion, hopefully offering a credible alternative to the likes of GameSpot and IGN.
Co-founder of the 
Zeldman’s book was always going to make itself obsolete if Web standards became widely accepted, and so his appeals to redesign websites are a little futile for anyone picking it up today. This irony merely demonstrates the scale of the Web Standards Project’s achievement though and reinforces its values. Although it may not be need to convince current site owners, for those who are just starting in Web design, this is a superb primer for the technologies, issues and decisions that lie ahead. It may seem a little out of date, but it provides the context in which to appreciate why we use the practices we do today.
