Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
Hello to everyone visiting from Digg.com and Del.icio.us today!
After publishing the X-Ray extension for Firefox last week I wasn’t exactly sure how to let people know about it. I applied to have it listed at addons.mozilla.org, but they’ve recently updated their policies and no longer accept extensions with external update URLs. That meant I’d have to republish the extension, and I hadn’t really wanted to do that unless I was adding some new features as well. So for the time being, mozilla.org wasn’t an option.
This morning I was checking out the new links at digg.com—a great social bookmarking site that’s very nicely designed too—and thought “what the hell—I’ll submit the link and see what happens.” While I figured that submitting a regular blog entry would probably be bad form, and wouldn’t have very many other people “digg” it (bookmark it), I really thought some people might like the new extension. The people I’d mentioned it to over on the blambot forum all seemed to like it, so I set up my new digg profile at and submitted the link.
I thought I’d get a few extra visitors and a little more feedback. I got a ton.
Today, the X-Ray Extension for Firefox was on the Digg.com homepage and currently has almost 1,000 people digging it. Del.icio.us users must have seen the link on Digg, because the extension also made it’s way to the del.icio.us popular page. Even better than the number of visitors was the great feedback. Lots of people emailed to say they liked the extension, and Thom Wetzel was nice enough to suggest a CSS fix for the background on the site! Thanks everyone. 
Tags: blog, designmeme, web
Posted in designmeme | 2 Comments »
Friday, December 30th, 2005
As 2005 draws to a close, I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t need to lose weight or quit smoking, and even if I did—those wouldn’t be very interesting for you to read about. What would be interesting—and by interesting, I also mean challenging—is to resolve to complete a number of different creative projects and post about them here on my blog.
Creative Project Resolutions
- Comic
After having worked with so many comic artists, been involved in a comic collective, helped start a comic printing company, and contributed to a book on comics, it’s somewhat surprising that I’ve never created one of my own.
- Design
Redesign this site. Yes, this is an inevitable one…
- Game
Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of reading about game design theory, and working on some ideas for what I think would make a fun board-game. This year I’m going to turn those ideas into a finished game and publish it.
- Music
Learn to play some type of musical instrument. The Ukelele is looking like a real contender here.
- Painting
At least 2 paintings I feel good enough about to put in frames.
- Software
It’s been a while since I’ve done much coding, so in 2006 I’m going to make sure I produce at least one interesting script, plugin, extension, or widget.
- Video
It’s been much too long since I shot and edited any video. This year I’m going to finish a 5 minute creative video and submit it to some type of competition or festival.
- Writing
Over the next year I’m going to try and improve the quality, quantity and frequency of my writing—both for this website and for other projects—whether they’re technical articles, creative writing, or contributions to collaborative projects.
Let’s see how well I can keep these resolutions. Wish me luck!
See some other people’s 2006resolutions.
Tags: blog, designmeme
Posted in designmeme | 4 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, March 29th, 2005
My brother Kevin has started a blog. Stop by and say hello.
It’s been a while since I’ve checked out Blogger, and they’ve added some new features. Social networking seems to be the current hot web topic, and thanks to Blogger’s acquisition by Google, the profiles for registered users demonstrate a nice method for linking people with similar interests together.
Tags: blog, Family
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Stuart Robertson