Lars Pind

http://www.intersmash.com/300images/

Nice catalog of icons from a long list of large sites. Very useful for a quick glance of what styles are out there. Also some nice commentary, including this link to a breadcrumb trail with the arrows pointing in the opposite direction. (From Boing Boing)

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=S%27%2984%25RQ7%20%20%20%23%5C%0A

I’m glad to see that The Economist clearly acknowledges (subscription required) that software patents are problematic, although I wish they had gone into more detail on the parliament’s amendmends.

Clearly there may be cases where a better digital mousetrap is worthy of a patent. But if software patents are too easy to obtain, they may stifle innovation more than promote it. Europe needs tougher standards governing their approval (and perhaps shorter terms of protection).

Anders Fogh, are you paying attention?

For the first time in two and a half years, this site has been upgraded. It’s now running the latest OpenACS release, version 5.1.

I’m looking forward to being able to use the things I do with OpenACS on my presonal site again :)

There’s bound to be some glitches here and there. Please bear with me.

Also, some things aren’t enabled just yet. Like ratings. You can view ratings on photos, but not rate anything yet. And comments. You can’t see comments on photos yet. All your comments have been pulled over to the new system, though, so don’t fear that I’ve lost your contributions.

Jason Fried comments on the trend to launch sites in “beta” mode. Reminds me of the good old habit of marking sites “under construction”, back when people didn’t realize that sites were always under construction.

It’s very puzzling how Marc Fleury, the CEO of JBOSS, thought he could get away with posting anonymously and pseudonymously in various online forums around JBOSS.

I haven’t been participating in the JBOSS community myself at all, and I hadn’t even heard the rumours that this was happening, rumours which have been around since at least december.

What was Marc thinking? Did they think they were going to get away with it? Did they think it would be worth it, even if they did get away with it?

The most striking plain stupidity, though, morals aside, is that I’ve been writing web collaboration software since 1999, and it’s always contained code that captures the IP address of the poster, and a page that shows all contributions from the same IP. Why? This is why.

It’s an obvious use of the amazing photographic talent being showcased on the web to launch a collaborative online stock photography site such as sxc.hu.

A cursory glance suggests that the quality of photos is pretty good, and I like it that they’ve included simple collaborative filtering features like rating and comments.

I haven’t yet done the complete analysis to see if they meet my earlier design criteria for stock photography sites, but at least they’ve got the URL/linking part right. There’s a “My Photos” feature and some folders shared between all users, but I can’t figure out how to use them :(

StopDesign has a nice story on their experiences doing the new Blogger.com design.

What I find delighting is the talk about providing “helpful directions”, something which Basecamp also does a great job of with “Things you can do that you haven’t done yet” and other similar features.

Specifically, Blogger.com’s quick description of what a blog is (” A blog is your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more.”), combined with the quick tour is excellent.

What I’m thinking, of course, is that this is something we should do for .LRN as well, not just on the dotlrn.org site, but also as part of the software itself, so that both students and professors at a school using .LRN can immediately learn what the software does and how, and get started right away, without any additional help.

Apart from that, despite being a bit on the heavy side for my taste, I really like Blogger.com’s rounded corners, large icons, and most other aspects about the new design by AdaptivePath and Stopdesign.

I really like how the 6A team behind TypePad has simplified the process of adding an image to a blog post.

In the simplest form, you just pick a file to upload, and hit “Insert Image”, and after uploading the file to the server, a thumbnail is generated server-side, and the proper HTML is inserted to display the image and have a window pop-up to show the full picture when you click the image.

The advanced options include choosing thumbnail width and choosing the align attribute.

I like it when a good interaction design manages to simplify a process such as this to a really simple form which makes you go “Of coures! That’s how to do it!” Good work, folks.