Archive for December, 2005
Saturday, December 10th, 2005
I’ve been publishing some new lenses with Squidoo this weekend. I’m still getting used to the system, and I’m not sure whether this site will become very popular, but I was fortunate enough to get a few good URLs for my pages so it’s probably worth investing some time in developing them and seeing what happens.
I was fortunate enough to register book, board games, magazine and video as well as a few others. There’s not much to see now, but hopefully there will be soon.
It’s an interesting process putting a lense together — in some ways like any other page, but in others quite different. Without little control over the way things are presented visually, there is a fair amount of trial and error to get things right. My plan is to slowly build up my lenses over the next week or so, and then wait to see how much of an audience Squidoo is attracting before spending too much time on this.
Tags: books, web
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Friday, December 9th, 2005
Surprising news today—apparently del.icio.us has been aquired by Yahoo! in the same manner that Flickr was. It seems Yahoo! is leaving search algorithms to Google and focusing on the power of social bookmarks and tagging, also know as folksonomies. Both Flickr and del.icio.us became successful because of the way they let people tag content and search for new content based on tags, or browse through the bookmarks or photos of people with similar interests. When you look at the ways del.icio.us and Flickr are similar, this acquisition makes a lot of business sense.
Since publishing the Best Webcomics of 2005 post, I’ve been telling a lot of people about del.icio.us and encouraging them to start using it to bookmark their sites. Just this morning I added a plugin to the blog to make it easy to bookmark entries.
I’m not always happy to see larger companies continually aquire smaller innovative companies, but Flickr has remained a great service since being acquired—and so has Konfabulator for that matter. Let’s hope we see improvements to the service (the UI could do with some work) and it remains as open and flexible as it is now.
Tags: web
Posted in tools | No Comments »
Thursday, December 8th, 2005
Squidoo is a new service that was opened for public Beta testing today. It lets you easily create a webpage focused on a topic that you’re interested in. These pages, or ‘lenses’ as they’re called, allow experts on a particular subject to link to content, RSS feeds, and other web 2.0 services.
Page creators, or ‘Lensmasters’, focus on the information they’re adding on their particular topic and aren’t able to modify the page design. This gives the entire Squidoo network a consistent appearance that makes it easier for people to navigate between the increasing number of pages lenses. The interface for adding elements to the page is nicely done and uses many of the new AJAX techniques such as drag and drop content placement that we’re starting to see appear in “web 2.0” applications.
Squiddo is the creation of Seth Godin, the best-selling business author and speaker, and his involvement with this project has many people more excited about it’s prospects than you might expect from what at first glance is another community blog/wiki project. It wasn’t until this evening that I remembered where I’d heard Seth’s name before—he wrote The Bootstrappers Bible, which I read last year and found very insightful and inspiring.
I’m not sure if this will become as big as they’re hoping, but I’ve signed up for an account and will be putting some pages lenses together on topics I’m interested in, like webcomics.
Tags: blog, web
Posted in tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
After moving the blog to Wordpress there have been a couple of steps involved in trying to get Google to index the site the way it had been with the old system. I’ve noticed quite a few blogs running with the basic install, which gives you confusing URLs and page descriptions in search results. If you’re still running a default Wordpress blog, these two tips might be helpful.
The first thing you should do is setup the Permalinks for your blog. This is under Options > Permalinks, and unless you have a reason to do otherwise you might as well go with the suggested structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
This will change the URLs for your posts from something like this:
http://www.designmeme.com/?p=40
to this:
http://www.designmeme.com/2005/11/29/firefox-15/
Much better for search engines, bookmarks and putting into email.
After Google had reindexed the site I noticed the next problem—every page had the same description metadata, which meant every search result for this site listed the same text. That certainly wasn’t ideal.
I tried a few plugins and settled on using Head Meta Description, which automatically generates a meta tag based on the content of your posts. After Google once again reindexed the blog the search results changed from this:
Design Meme » Firefox 1.5
News, information and tips for designers, developers, and independent media artists.
to this:
Design Meme » Firefox 1.5
Firefox Version 1.5 came out today. If you’re not using it already, you really
should give it a try. Pages …
Again much better for people finding the content they’re looking for on this site.
The next thing I need to consider is the Optimal placement of the blog name in page titles and links.
Would this be better: Firefox 1.5 » Design Meme?
Tags: blog, designmeme, web
Posted in designmeme | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 6th, 2005
It seems to be the time of year when the “best of 2005” lists start appearing. Most of the “best webcomics of 2005” lists are basically, whatever the people working on that site happen to like. If they don’t like the genre or the artwork themselves, it won’t be on their list. I guess in that way they’re like mini Academy Awards… with a lot less glitz and glamour.
That got me thinking about del.icio.us, the social bookmarking tool I’ve been using this year. It lets you check how many other people have bookmarked a particular site. If you think of a bookmark as being a vote for a particular website, then the info from del.icio.us provides a fairly good listing of the Top Webcomics of 2005 as selected by the audience. I guess in some ways that makes this the Webcomics People’s Choice Awards.
I’ve only included sites that have received at least 50 bookmarks / votes from del.icio.us users. If I’ve missed your comic, please email me and I’ll add it to the list—however, because of the changing nature of del.icio.us, I may choose to start adding new sites in an appendixes rather than putting them into the list. The list will be finalized at the end of 2005, which means after that I’m happy to hear about your site, but I won’t add it to the list for this year.
So here they are—
(more…)
Tags: web, webcomic
Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments »
Sunday, December 4th, 2005
I was talking with my friend Aron West on Friday using the new Skype 2.0. It had been a while since I last used Skype… probably not since talking with Joey Manley back in the early spring. I remembered it being pretty good sound quality at the time—but not as good as the phone. The new Skype was much clearer. Maybe it was just the connections Aron and I were using, but it was easily as good as the phone. I can see myself using this more regularly now.
Aron is the drummer for MOAI —an Alt-Rock-Electronic band—and like mosts bands these days MOAI has it’s own MySpace.com page where you can listen to their music and get info what they’re doing. I haven’t spent much time with Myspace, but it apparently gets more hits than Google and has become very important for music marketing.
Tags: music, web
Posted in tools | No Comments »
