templatedata

Perhaps unusual contenders in the world of web design, Business Week have handed down their 10 Commandments of Web Design. Generally they provide some good advice but I can't quite believe the put "Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections" (position 4) above "Thou shalt make content king" (position 10).

Georg's wise and calming presence is sorely missed, and we are both delighted and a little jealous to hear how happily she has sea changed. However, after a flurry of organisational restructuring, Templatedata is proud to announce that its doors are open once more to the comings and goings of the blogosphere.

In the meantime, the University has realigned its web teams slightly.

Web Services as was has now merged with the Publications team to form Digital & Print Media (www.usyd.edu.au/dpm). This unit provides a one-stop-shop resource for cross platform (ie both print and web) publishing. At the same time, ICT (www.usyd.edu.au/ict) has been refining its service and its ownership of the technical side of the CMS. Between us we hope to meet all of your web development needs.

The new DPM team is falling into place nicely. You can expect to hear regularly from some of our team members both here and in an eNewsletter, as well as other guest contributors from around the Uni, including:

Nick Evans (Web Editor)
David Jessup (Web Development Officer)
Alex Motyka (Web Development Officer)
Danielle Warby (Web Officer, Economics and Business)

So then. Watch this space.

The good people at A List Apart have produced a Primer for those new to their site. Even if you're familiar with the site, it's worth taking a look.

If you’re going to build a house—or a website—you need the right tools. A List Apart offers hundreds of articles on design, markup, style, accessibility, usability, and more. We’ve selected a few that you might want to start with. (Think of this guide as one of those reassuring brochures from Lowe’s or Home Depot, but about websites instead of ceramic tile.)

Jobseekers will think twice about employers who lock down work internet access, a senior Microsoft executive said today.

“These kids are saying: forget it! I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to work at a place where I can’t be freely online during the day,” said Anne Kirah, Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist.

(Yes, I want to know what a 'Senior Design Anthropologist' is too...and I thought my title was stretching the boundaries.)

I have often wondered what it would be like to work somewhere where internet access was restricted. I always imagined it would give employees the message that they were not to be trusted.

It's hard to imagine life without the web isn't it? (Well, my career-path so far would certainly have been VERY different it hadn't been around). I have been pondering this today as it seems it is the 15th birthday of the WWW. To celebrate the occasion you may wish to read a copy of Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the birth.

Joshua Porter at Bokardo looks at the smackdown betwen the design teams of Google and Yahoo.

Bring it on.

I've moved house. Again. And one of the things I hate about moving house, aside from the obvious things, is the lack of internet access that can occur.

I'm waiting for my ISP to sort the move of my cable connection and in the meantime I have no access, not even dial-up as I have no phone as yet.

Anyway, the point of this moaning is that I have realised that I am afflicted by some kind of disease and today I found a name for it: continuous partial attention.

One of the many changes that web developers are having to adjust to is that it's much harder to conceptualise and prototype a rich internet application than a simple page-by-page one. We've all been a meeting where a BA, PM or designer has tried to do this with something like PowerPoint, and have since realised that PowerPoint just don't cut it.

So, to cut long story short, here's here's a much cooler way of doing it in Visio.

Selling essays over the internet eh? It's a shocking by-product of the cut-and-paste age. Even worse, when you finally land a job and you realise it involves writing the essays and you found the job on your university's job website.

Oops.

Experience-enabling design: An approach to e-learning design

This paper draws inspiration from diverse media to understand what constitutes experience. In doing so, it seeks directions for building experience into design of elearning products.

Conference: Enterprise Architecture on the edge – moving forward through SOA

The game theory of penalty kicks

Economist and soccer fan Ignacio Palacio-Huerta talks to Gelf about the Minimax strategy behind penalty kicks and why the most famous PK is called a "Panenka."

Create change

This website will help you understand the changing landscape and how it affects you and your research. It also offers practical ways to look out for your own interests as a researcher.

Now available for your perusal. (I have nothing to add to that as I haven't had a chance to have a look at them yet).

If you've ever designed anything for a client you will know all about the difficulty in talking people out of their own design ideas. This is particularly common when designing front end web stuff. It's really difficult to avoid just saying 'no, that's a bad idea' when you KNOW it's a completely haywire idea that just won't work. It can be colours, IA, labels, content. Some people seem to see 'their' websites as an extension of themselves and thus have total control over the design, even though they have hired 'specialists' to do the job. I often wonder why they waste their money...anyway, if you've ever experienced this you might do well to read Derek Powazek's post 'The Art of No'.

Instead of saying 'No' and getting ourselves into a twist, and annoying the client, we should try asking 'Why' and getting the client to think about why they think their idea is better than ours. Sometimes it will be. Sometimes they will realise they have no good reason to run with the idea.

I know my clients don't want to be designers – that's why they hired me. And even though it may seem like they're making design choices for me, they're really just trying to solve a problem using the only language they know. It's my job to deconstruct the request, and that takes more information. If I can get the client to verbalize the problem they're trying to solve, we can come up with a better solution together. I can talk them through the ripple-effects that come from any solution. In the end, my client gains a better understanding of the role of design, the site gets a better solution, and I don't feel like I've been micromanaged to death.

Now, if only it were that easy...

I can't keep up with Google's new releases and features but this one caught my eye: Google SketchUp was announced on their blog yesterday. What does it do? 3D modelling.

The new Google SketchUp is for the do-it-yourselfer, the hobbyist — really anyone who wants to build 3D models for use in Google Earth. Go ahead and model that new kitchen, or deck, landscape your virtual garden, or impress your teacher with a roller coaster or medieval castle. When you’re finished, place your model in Google Earth. There! The beginning of a virtual world.

I wrote something like the post below and put it up, only to see Andrew's below. Ah well. I would also like to add to his post:

They've also launched an online catalog called Infax which includes details of 946,614 BBC radio & TV programmes, dating back 75 years

Google Calendar has launched.

Nooooooo. Or yesssssss. Depending upon your position on the OS divide.

Yes, Macs that run Windows. I mean, noooooo.

This has absolutely nothing to do with web development, or the University but I just HAD to post it for your procrastination pleasure.

Songtapper allows you to tap in the tune of a song and it will identify that song for you. Especially good if you have a snippet of a song and have no idea what is. I tested it with, ahem, Madonna's Hung Up. And it worked. Spooky.

Something that slipped under my radar and as I have been flogging the NLA today I thought I would mention that the NLA is working with Flickr to get us general public people to share our photos with them.

Now you can contribute your images to PictureAustralia by loading them into our two groups available on FlickR, PictureAustralia: Australia Day and PictureAustralia: People, places and events.

Via LibrarianInBlack.

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Google have expanded their empire yet again with Google Page Creator. Their marketing guff says:

We're testing a new product that makes creating your own web pages as easy as creating a document in a word processor. Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There's no software to download and no web designer to hire. The pages you create are hosted on Google servers and are available at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com for the world to see.

Don't bother trying to get an account today, they're overloaded and just taking email addresses.

To be honest, I don't know how well this one will go. It just seems to be replicating a number of services already available. Then again, everyone had webmail before gmail came along and now it's de rigeur to have a gmail address...

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Flock is a new browser that is now available in a warts 'n' all developer preview and I am very excited about it. (Well, I'm blogging this on a Saturday so that gives you an indication of how excited). It's based on Mozilla code and integrates del.icio.us, blogging and flickr. Could this be the first Web 2.0 browser?

More at ZDnet and Boing Boing

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• VW adding a USB interface into an armrest
• SMS an ISBN and get a price - in Australia!
• Yotophoto - a free stock image database
• Thomson Peterson's EDU feed directory

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Not directly related to the web but interesting nevertheless: Rodcorp has a post about the way people work, with a focus on creative types.

We're interested in the habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work.

They have even listed Dashiell Hammett...

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Via Usability News:

This project wants to map your first encounters with the World Wide Web. It is part of a larger project entitled "A Decade of Webdesign" that culminates in an international conference in Amsterdam, January 21-22, 2005.

As a core part of the project, beginning before and continuing after the conference, the organisers have initiated what they call an 'open research' website/database into the first decade of web design. The online forum takes the form of a visual and textual timeline generated out of a self-customizable questionnaire.

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First you could use GMail as a mountable filesystem for yer Linux box, now there is a tool that allows you to use your GMail account as an extra storage space on your PC. If you fancy prettying up your account you can reskin it with a custom stylesheet. Find a lot more at Aimless words, the unofficial gmail blog. And if you want a GMail account I'm givin' 'em away. Email me, I'm in the phonebook.

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There is talk that Google may be on the road to developing a browser. They have even registered gbrowser.com...

Which reminds me, if anyone wants a gmail invite I have some to give away.

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