lab188

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Effortless Headlines

Firefox has built in a feed to the BBC News for several versions, with the name Headlines in the bookmarks toolbar. I use it frequently to get a quick overview of world news. Since the bookmark is driven by RSS, the titles of the articles become the links in the toolbar. The links are short, succinct, easy to scan, and make it simple to get a quick overview of breaking news.
Writing well, doing so on a short time schedule, and with an economy of words is hard work. Distilling complex issues into scannable, readable bits takes effort. When it is done well, the effort expended behind the scenes isn’t apparent until you think about it, or until someone points it out.
Jakob Nielsen noticed, and pointed it out on Alertbox:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html
He views the craftsmanship of the BBC News headlines from the usability point of view. And reflecting on my use of them in the Firefox RSS feed, I see that usability should lead to an almost effortless use of the object. I should be so lucky to even approach that level.

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Greening the PC: A presentation at the Center for Business at JCCC

I used these resources during the presentation. These links were good at the time of the post, but will likely degrade over time.

The introductory quiz, with answers, from the Sierra Club.
Searchable database of EnergyStar compliant computers.
Green computing from Treehugger
The Electronics Takeback Coalition is a clearinghouse for electronics recycling. Scroll down the home page to find the clickable map of responsible recyclers.
Techsoup, a technology resource for non-profits, gathers fresh links for computer refurbishers and donors on their site.
Computer Hope has some good information about battery recycling, and a comprehensive list of manufacturers providing recycling for their products. I couldn’t find a date on their site, so check links for timeliness. 
Apple and Dell will recycle your old equipment regardless of brand when you buy new equipment from them.
Free Geek, in Portland, Oregon, has a constantly updated list of resources. They accept donations.
The EPA’s e-cycling site has pointers for both individuals and businesses.
eBay’s Rethink program connects donors, recyclers, and recipients of electronics.
A good guide to buying green when shopping for a computer at pc.com.
Ars Technica breaks down a custom-built, green PC component by component, from February 2008.
Drop the battery habit, and get a bag with embedded solar panels. Not cheap, but very high on the cool meter.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

The Short List of Things to do in Kansas City

This admittedly short list of things to do and see in Kansas City leaves out most of the high profile attractions. After all, most people can find the Plaza, and figure out how to watch the Chiefs or the Royals. This list takes you to some other, less traveled, but perhaps more significant places, events, and restaurants. Most are urban experiences centered around downtown KCMO, but a few are further afield.
First Friday at the Crossroads
City Market
Strawberry Hill Museum
Crown Center
Cosentino’s Market downtown, 10 E. 13th, between Main and Walnut. Parking available on both the Main street side and the Walnut street side. Easier access to the store from the Walnut street side, and parking spots reserved for shoppers there as well.
Chinatown Market at 2nd and Grand, just north of the City Market. They stock an amazing range of groceries from around the world. They don’t limit themselves to Chinese products, but include Mexican, Indian, Indonesian, and others, as well as a huge fresh and frozen seafood department. Worth the time for a visit.
Christopher Elbow Chocolate has fabulous, inventive, and drop-dead gorgeous chocolate. Stop in on First Fridays for $1.00 samples.
Case Park, at 8th and Jefferson, has a fabulous view of the rivers, the downtown airport, the West Bottoms, and Kansas City, Kansas. The park is a great spot for watching the Air Show in the summertime.
Quality Hill
Cathedral of the Assumption
The Hotel President and the Drum Room. Check out the lobby and the Drum Room for an updated look of one of the remaining prestigious hotels from Kansas City’s wide-open days.
Bob Jones Shoes stocks over 100,000 pair of shoes. Tell the clerks your size, preferences, and price range, and they’ll bring you shoes until you run out of decisions. Excellent prices on top-tier shoes.
The National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial deserves at least 2 hours, or maybe two visits, to absorb the museum’s content. Go during warm weather and take the elevator to the top of Liberty Memorial for a great view of downtown. The walls at the top are 5 feet high, making the visit comfortable for people not accustomed to heights.
The former TWA Building The former corporate headquarters of TWA now houses Barkley Advertising, the building being rehabilitated after many years of vacancy. Get a picture of the replica of the TWA Moonliner once found at Disneyland.
The Connie Museum, dedicated to propeller driven aircraft with a Kansas City emphasis. Worth a visit.
The Hair Museum, devoted to jewelry made from human hair, is a bit farther afield in Independence, Missouri.
The Steamboat Arabia Museum, located in the City Market, is devoted to the cargo of the Arabia, a Missouri River steamboat sunk close to Kansas City in 1856.
Union Cemetery, located just south of Crown Center between Grand and Gillham Road, is the burial site of many early Kansas City residents. Called Union Cemetery because it was the common cemetery of the Town of Kansas and Westport, sets next to Union Hill, one of the city’s early neighborhoods.
Elmwood Cemetery is one of the other great cemeteries in Kansas City, with twelve former mayors and over 800 Civil War veterans buried there.
Hallmark Museum is dedicated to Hallmark Cards and the history of the company.
Boulevard Brewery Tour. Now the largest brewer based in Missouri, Boulevard hosts factory tours. Make tour reservations on their web site.
Roasterie Coffee hosts a tour Saturdays at 9:00 a.m. Get a taste of Kansas City’s other home brew.
The Folly Theatre, Kansas City’s oldest historic theatre, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Barney Allis Plaza, at 13th and Wyandotte, was a park, now converted to a public space and site of the Kansas City Explorers World TeamTennis team.
Ilus Davis Park, at 10th and Oak, is a nicely landscaped park in the heart of the government district downtown. Free wifi is available.
The Old Kansas City Public Library, at 9th and Oak, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
St. Patrick’s, was renovated and opened in late 2008.
Garment District Museum, at 801 Broadway, illustrates the history of women’s clothing manufacturing in Kansas City. For many years, the garment trade was the city’s second largest employer. Call ahead to arrange a tour.
Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral, at 13th and Broadway, dates to 1895, and underwent renovation in 1987.
The Star building, or press pavilion, houses the printing operations for the Kansas City Star. The glass clad building, between Truman Road and 17th Street, Grand to McGee, supposedly allows passerby to see the presses in operation. I can never see anything clearly through the tinted glass on the building, so a tour is called for. Unfortunately, I can’t locate anything on the Star’s web site about building tours.
The Money Museum at the Federal Reserve lets you pick up a gold bar, see large amounts of real money moved around, and other fun things to do with filthy lucre. Check the web site for specific information.
Savoy Grill, one of Kansas City’s landmark restaurants, is worth a look. And while you’re there, check out the Savoy Hotel lobby. Ask to see one of rooms. The breakfast included with the room rate is like no other hotel breakfast you’ll find.
A walking tour of French Kansas City by the Chouteau Society is worth the time to understand the influence of the French on early Kansas City and the Santa Fe Trail trade. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to locate a web-based version of the walking tour brochure. So, look for the large brown and gold historic markers downtown.
The sculpture and fountains at the State Street building, 801 Pennsylvania, include a stream flowing from the courtyard at the main entrance, and follow a staircase down to Washington. Well worth the walk in spring and summer.

Places to eat include:

La Bodega serves tapas, great wine and sangria on Southwest Blvd. Happy hour, especially on Saturday afternoon from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. is not yet widely known. Happy hour is half off many tapas, the wine list, sangria, and beer. I’d suggest the Cline Mouvedre.
Ponak’s, on Southwest Blvd., serves Kansas City style Tex-Mex, and is a stand-out among many similar restaurants in town. Their Margaritas have many fans.
Garozzo’sat 526 Harrison, just 3 blocks from where I live, serves St. Louis style Italian.
Anthony’s, now in its third generation in the same family, and 30 years at the same location, has the best sugo in town. If you have lunch, ask for Linda and tell her I sent you. They’re at 701 Grand.
7, between 6th and 7th on Walnut, is an upscale Italian restaurant.
Al Habashi, in the City Market, has a grocery and restaurant. The gyros and falafels are excellent.
Pizza Bella, at 1810 Baltimore, has excellent wood-oven pizza, and inventive antipasti.
Cafe Sebastienne, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art at 44th and Warwick, consistently serves inventive, high-quality dishes.
The Blue Bird, at 16th and Summit, serves eclectic food from local and organic farmers.
Happy Gillis, at Pacific and Gillis in Columbus Park, and walking distance from home, serves bistro and diner style food in a neighborhood store-front.
Fiorella’s has the best barbeque in town. And serves it with style in the Freight House district.
Cashew, at 20th and Grand, offers a two story bar and grill, overhead doors in place of windows for a wide-open feel in warm weather and a great location in the Crossroads.
Bristol, a long-time Plaza restaurant, moved to Leawood, then opened this location in the Power and Light District. Great seafood, and a Kansas City tradition.
Christopher Elbow makes incredible chocolate with a surprising and wide palette of flavors. Stop in on First Friday and buy a sample for a $1.00.
Cupini’s, at 12th and Main, serves Italian food, pizzas, and fine accompaniments.
Vietnam Cafe, at 522 Campbell, just across the street from Holy Rosary Church, serves exceptional Vietnamese food.
The American, in Crown Center, serves fabulous food in a gorgeous setting. AAA 4 diamond rated. One of the top Kansas City restaurants in the fine dining category.
Babycakes is Kansas City’s original cupcake shop. Over the top cupcakes, none of which are on anyone’s diet. They’re located in the City Market area, one half block east of Grand at Missouri. Missouri is the first cross street after crossing the Grand Street bridge into the City Market.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Hey, Bri, I posted the list! Dead Tree Resources: Web Design Books

This is a short list of books that might be helpful for people doing web work.

From Sitepoint, a great book on The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
Two excellent CSS books from Eric Meyer provide a great foundation for building CSS driven sites: Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design ” and his follow on book, More Eric Meyer on CSS
Steve Krug’s short and sweet book on usability, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
Another short and consise book, Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites, 3rd Edition
Design principles and approaches to standards-driven web sites from the master: Designing with Web Standards, Second Edition
A book of checklists for site creation may help assure that all of the bases are covered, from Sitepoint: Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists
Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works: Cotler and Goto’s book on the process of bringing a site to life is not a design book, but a project management or process book. An excellent resource on how to get started.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Gift ideas for the technologically inclined: A Center for Business presentation

Here’s a short list of gift ideas for the technically inclined for this Christmas.

The walking alarm clock from The Walking Alarm clock
Jura’s internet connected Jura’s espresso maker
Wireless digital thermometers
The Demy, a kitchen safe digital recipe reader
Kensington’s USB peripheral sharing
Not techy, but a good tool: Dual ended spatula
Gelskins for mobile device users
Netbooks, small form factor notebooks, great for browsing, wireless access, and social software, are available from many vendors, including Dell
Das Keyboard, the original keyboard without key labels, now includes a version with labels. Still with excellent touch, and a great gift for people doing a great deal of typing
Universal hard drive adapters can help reuse and extend the life of older hard drives taken from obsolete hardware. There are many available, including Apricorn’s hard drive adapter
Clickfree’s no touch backup assures that backups aren’t missed or forgotten.
Personalized books with your child’s photo and name on the cover, and integrated into the storyline and illustrations: Exploring with Dora
For Wii fans, we can now have a Star Wars light sabre
Not techy, but nicely done toys from Leapfrog: Fridge magnet toys
The 20 Questions game, done up as a tech toy from Radica
Griffin helps us keep our desktops free of clutter with Simplifi
Easy video transfer without a computer from Pinnacle
Nowtransfer vinyl records and cassette tapes to CD with an all-in-one unit
Personal GPS locators from Zoombak
Travellers with laptops might appreciate a Mini surge protector and USB hub
For laptop users having to navigate TSA security often, this case from Targus is worth a look.
Not quite in time for Christmas, a Thermal leak detector from Black and Decker looks great.
There are many iPod docks combined with alarm clocks, but the latest from iHomehas good sound quality.
The digital dog tag from Digital dog tag uTag is a great gift for travellers.
Viewsonic released a flat screen LCD TV with Flat panel TV with built-in DVD player

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Internet Marketing class, November 18 and 19, at JCCC

These links to web resources may be helpful to you after the class is completed.

Google webmaster tools:
Tools for site status, statistics, diagnostics, content submission, and sitemaps, among other worthwhile tools.

Domain name registration at GoDaddy
Thousands of registrars will help you register a domain name. GoDaddy has the mind share right now.

Thousands of hosting companies will host your site and your email address. Here’s three hosting the sites of my customers.
Web hosting by Dreamhost
Web hosting by media temple
Web hosting by 1and1

Build your own 404 error pages to replace the browser defaults. Friendly 404 pages keep the visitor around, and may help you, the web editor, to find problems missed by other link checking tools.
Custom 404 building at Plinko

Keyword development tools will help determine the unique sets of terms site visitors might use to find your site.
Keyword development with Wordtracker Wordtracker is a paid service, but offers a free trial with limited scope.
Keyword research using AdWords
Keyword density is calcluated in a formula:
Density=keyword frequency divided by total words on the page
Density of 7% is appropriate, while density of 10% and above results in stilted language and possible penalties by the search engines. You’ll need a worthwhile Keyword density checker

Adding search capability to your site helps visitors locate the information they desire more quickly. You can find and configure search for your site from
Custom Google search engine
Roll your own site search
Free site search from Atomz
Search Builder at Yahoo!

Usability and findability is critical for any site. Jakob Nielsen’s site, Jakob Nielsen’s Useit.com

Social networking tools can complement existing sites. Depending on the need, you might consider using:
My Facebook profile
Twitter
And you’ll want to find people using Twitter, so you’ll likely want to use Twitdir
Watching trends and looking for blog mentions can be done at Technrati
For a corporate approach to social software, you might take a look at LinkedIn
For sharing bookmarks (or Favorites in Internet Explorer speak), ma.gnolia

Books with companion web sites that cover the range of web work include:
Web Redesign 2.0. Kelly Goto, one of the co-authors, runs a web consulting company. The company’s site has content worth spending time reviewing.
Web Style Guide, now in a third edition, is an exceptional book, condensing a great deal of web design content into a short book.
Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is another well done and short book on usability.

Email marketing covers a wide range of topics and skills. Here’s a few companies that will help shoulder the load.
Mail Chimp has moved into my top spot. Their preview package, showing how the email will be handled by various platforms and email clients is invaluable.
iContact does a very good of making it easy to send and track email campaigns.
Campaign Monitor, like the others, offers a trial period to evaluate their product.
Constant Contact is a fourth email product offering similar features to the other packages. Using the trial period to evaluate each package is worth the time.

Blogging tools include:
Blogger, from Google is a free blogging service that can have you up and running in a few minutes.
WordPress is extensible and a large number of developers build plug-ins and customized content management tools for WordPress users.
Movable Type offers a mature platform for blogging.
This blog runs on Expression Engine

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Safe Connections: Anti-virus and anti-malware tools

Viruses have become less of a threat to personal computing, and exploits that rely on social engineering techniques are rising. It is possible to avoid them, but the sophistication of the attacks needs more sophisticated tools to remove the infection.

Most anti-virus packages contain anti-malware components. No-cost and low-cost tools include:
AVG
Avast
Eset
Clamwin

The threats now arise not from email, but from other vectors. These include plugins to web browsers, such as Flash or Adobe/Acrobat Reader. What’s needed is a tool to inventory system software and the state of updates. These tools include:
Secunia
Belarc Advisor

Specific tools to detect and clean anti-malware include:
a-squared
Malwarebytes
Windows Defender

You may need to test, so the eicar anti-virus signature is helpful:
Anti-virus test signature

A more radical approach is sandboxing, that is, setting aside a separate area of memory to run suspect programs. These tools include:
Sandboxie
VMWare

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

What’s New in Social Software: Presentation at the Center for Business and Technology at JCCC

Taking a cue from Facebook’s News Feed and the idea of followers, many applications in the social networking software space now use the friends and followers metaphor to pull people back to the sites. Ma.gnolia, the social bookmarking tool now supports following of other ma.gnolia users. Much like the approach Facebook took with News Feeds, aggregating followers allows users of the SNS sites to quickly peruse the activities of other users of the service. Rather than search for bookmarks tagged by topic, following other ma.gnolia users works by reputation and allows me to utilize other people as filters for topics I’m interested in following.
If I trust a specific ma.gnolia user to bookmark content that is relevant and useful, then I’m likely to follow them. As a ma.gnolia user, my profile on ma.gnolia shows me their bookmarking activity, and avoids the need to visit many different profiles to see their recent bookmarks, or check their status. That usage pattern also keeps me as a user involved with the site for longer times. If I’m selling ads on the site, then the exposure to ads increases, and the site owner’s potential revenue should increase.
Twitter takes this follower and news feed idea to a simpler level by allowing me to add 140 character posts that are less than a blog post, but more than a status post. Add the cross fertilization of Twitter applications, and the idea of “What are you doing now?” spreads into other areas. I liken it to being at a large party where I know some people well, a lot of other people less well, and a whole group of people I know of, but I’m not yet acquainted with them. Twitter allows me to drop in on conversations among all of the party goers and eavesdrop or reply if the conversation provides an opening. Like any party conversation, the topics veer toward banal, but also useful, sometimes entertaining, and most always opinionated.
These links may help you get a handle on this trend.
You can catch me on Twitter: Keith Krieger on Twitter, LinkedIn: Keith Krieger on LinkedIn, or Facebook: search for Keith Krieger.

Who’s following (or not) on Twitter?.
Trying to find someone or something on Twitter? Try Twitter Search.
Watching buzz? Looking for people talking about you, your company, your interest on Twitter? Try Tweetscan.
Looking for blog buzz about you, your company, your interest? Try Technorati or Blogpulse.
Get Satisfaction is another Twitter search tool.
50 ideas for using Twitter in business.
More Twitter tools.
And if those aren’t enough ideas for you, how about 140+ Twitter tools.
Skout: Location status and what you’re doing status delivered via cell.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Effective Search Strategies presentation resources

I’ve posted the short set of links to resources for the Effective Search Strategies presentation. Please let me know if you have any questions about the techniques reviewed.

Friday, September 05, 2008

Marketing a new browser

Most everyone in the web design world has commented on Google’s browser, Chrome, as to its bugs, deficiencies, and the possibilities of it taking market share from everyone. I find the marketing of Chrome to be interesting, in that Google’s extremely simplified home page gives the link to download Chrome very high visibility. Google rarely adds links to their home page, so the Chrome link is especially noticeable. That placement may have a bigger impact on the uptake of Chrome than anything else.

Amidst the Chrome talk, Microsoft quietly noted that IE8 will fully support CSS 2.1. This is quite a jump from previous versions, but we will need to see if the general release will actually do so. And while this would be a good thing, a substantial percentage still use IE6. Moving that user base from the browser they’re comfortable with to a standards-compliant browser will be a challenge. And unlike Google’s home page, Microsoft’s broad product range makes it difficult to highlight a single release. On the other hand, Microsoft does have Automatic Updates. . .