stargirl-designs.com Blog

One of my co-workers lent me an interesting book recently. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. It’s a short and easy read. The basic premise (and hence the title) is that you shouldn’t make the user work too hard to use or understand your website. I think the website I maintain at work, the AA Dept. website, does pretty well in that regard. And even if someone can’t find what they want, we have a link to the sitemap and a searchbox on every page. Hopefully that cuts down on user frustration.

Another usability rule Krug has is “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” I don’t think we can really apply that to our site. There’s no way to really cut down our explanations of various astronomical phenomena and algorithms.

In the next-to-last chapter, he mentions his three-second accessibility test for websites: increasing the size of the type. And he says almost every site he goes to fails. Ta-da! We don’t. You can increase the size of our type with your browser, no problem! Cool. Must be because I love Cascading Style Sheets to death.

I thought this article, the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time, from PC World was pretty funny. Number one is AOL. I never lowered myself to using their service, thankfully. Back when I was on dial-up I used Earthlink. My sister still has AOL, I’ve told her for years to get rid of them but I don’t think she ever has completely. Now, I don’t have personal experience with most of the things on the list, fortunately. But I have used RealPlayer, IE 6 (hate, hate, hate!) and Zip drives. Yep, nothing good to say about any of them.

Flickr is a big thing now. It’s an online photo sharing website. (You get an account and upload your photos for the world to see) I have my photo album on my netfirms account at the moment. I’m thinking of migrating them all over to Flickr. It’s actually similar to del.icio.us, in that whatever you save there you tag with categories and that’s how they can be seen by other people who are interested in that category.

A magazine for people who make websites: A List Apart. Hmmm, right up my alley.

I attended a very interesting seminar last night. “Emerging Standards in Web Design,” given by a web design and training firm called Antharia. The instructor, Jordan Dossett,talked about lots of great stuff. Keeping important stuff on your site “above the fold,” designing for the lowest common denominator user resolution (800×600), browser limitations, navigation, and, of course, the fact that web standards always changing.

I personally (as a user) hate Flash and have always refused to use or learn how to use it. She said a big thing now is using what’s called a “random rotate script” to create a Flash-like image that changes everytime the user changes or reload pages on a site. Which is EXACTLY what we made for the MIT CSR EPO website several years ago: two pics from Chandra in the top banner that changed with each reload. Guess I was ahead of the times on that one , although I must admit the javascript for it was implemented by one of my Harvard Extension classmates.

Funnily, Jordan turned out to be one of my sister’s pet sitting clients. She had talked to them at Antharia about doing the Pet Companions website, but it didn’t work out and I ended up taking it over. Ha! Nepotism beats talent every time! (Antharia is REALLY good)

I discovered something new yesterday. Del.icio.us It’s a “social bookmarking” site (and just about the coolest URL ever!). You register, list your favorite website, and anyone else can see your list. I like it because you can have your favorite websites at your fingertips anywhere you go, even if you don’t have your own computer with you. Now, for the social aspect, if I can just get some of my friends into it too…

I love my job. It’s not earth-shatteringly exciting but I feel like I’m learning so much! I just signed up for an XML class through HWG. I really know little about the subject (it stands for eXtensible Markup Language) but it’s supposed to be the next step in the evolution of web markup languages, past HTML and XHTML. I know ALOT about HTML and a little XHTML, which is really just the bridge between the two other languages. Apparently XML lets you write your own markup tags, if I understand it correctly. (I said I know little!)

I also want to convert all my websites to PHP, like we are doing at work to our site. It gives you lots more possibilities than just straight HTML. And of course, I’m done with tables for layout! Gots to put my CSS skills into full effect…

I started writing at work today what I want to call a “validation/accessibility manifesto” (my supervisor may object to that term, though!). There’s a lot of stuff we need to correct during our PHP conversion and since I’m the one who seems to know the most (or maybe that’s CARE the most!) about it in the department, it’s up to me to come up with guidelines for everyone else. I don’t know, it may turn into a rant about “what the hell is the point of coverting to PHP if we are going to have font tags everywhere”…we’ll see.

I recently become aware of a new kind of web advertising practice. I’ve only seen it on one site, although I’m sure others use it. And it is positively VILE. The person who thought it up should burn in hell. The site I’ve seen it on is ScienceDaily. For example a story on Neptune’s moon Triton has green underlined links in the text. These are NOT links to related stories keyed on the highlighted word, but instead rolling your mouse over them brings a pseudo-popup window that contains a link to a site wanting to sell you something that has perhaps a most tenuous connection or association with the underlined word. I can tolerate ads before, after, on sides of, or even as floating images in the article. But sneaking them into the text itself? That is so many forms of disgusting…

Thankfully, if you have the Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G extensions for Firefox (no one should use any other browser), this stuff gets blocked automatically.

The CSS class (CSS 2.1 in Depth) I have been taking through the HWG is over.  I am a big fan of CSS (cascading style sheets) and the final project we did for the class is a great demonstration of why.  We were given the html for a webpage with the instruction that we were not allowed to alter the html in any way.  We could only create a style sheet to meet the requirements the instructor set forth.  My version is here.  I chose the bright colors on purpose, to set the various section apart.  I know, it’s a little over the top!   A classmate’s version is here.  Now THAT is a real work of art!  AND IT’S THE SAME WEBPAGE!  (Or rather, the same html code)  It is our style sheets that make all the differences.

The idea is that html should only be used to give your content basic structure.  Everything else should be done with CSS: colors, fonts, sizes, margins, everything that gives the page its “look.”   A big advantage of CSS is that it makes it easy to give your entire site of many individual pages a consistent look.  And if you want to change that look?  You only have to edit the style sheet, not all the separate pages.

What can I say…CSS is just fun!

On a directive from my bosses to investigate the possibility of creating an RSS feed for our website, I forced myself to start using them this week. And I’m finding that RSS is pretty cool. It’s usually said to stand for Really Simple Syndication and it’s an xml file that allows users to read the headlines from a site (usually a blog or news website) with an aggregator. It makes it easy to see which of your favorite sites have updates on them, without actually going and checking each site manually.

Now, a lot of management software (like that used on blogs) will generate the rss feed code automatically. But since we have nothing like that at my work, I had to figure out another way of generating the rss file. I found the Listgarden program after a short search and had the rss feed set up almost instantly. Not bad for someone who barely knew what RSS was last week! Of course, we aren’t using it on our site yet. We are going to wait for the php switchover. But it is ready and waiting…

My aggregator of choice is the Sage extension for Firefox. Simple and straightforward to use.

I’ve gone to two DCWW workshops so far.

The first one, on PHP, was a great but TOO  SHORT overview of the scripting language at WestLake Internet Training.  I would definitely like to get more experience with it.  PHP is used to make webpages more dynamic and my own pages are pretty boring and static right now.   You can also use PHP in combination with mySQL to hook into a database and use its contents on a website.  Now, that is something I really want to learn more about.  But I think I’ll have to take a full mySQL class to get it.

The second workshop/seminar was on digital photography, another great but short overview.  This one was held at a Penn Camera downtown.  The woman who gave it, Melanie, has worked in photography for a long time and really seemed to know her stuff.  Most of the time was spent with her answering all of our questions about digital cameras.  I realized right off the bat that mine is woefully out of date. Looks like that might be my next big purchase.  And, unfortunately, we all have the same camera in my family so we are all in the same boat.  One thing I was excited to find out about was Washington Photo Safari.  Melanie is one of the people who leads these tours.  I may go on one this weekend.

I also attended a DCWW dinner bunch in Bethesda last Monday.  My sister gets together with fellow pet sitters to talk shop and this was the same kind of thing, but with web women! I’m just so excited to meet all these women who are as interested in web tech stuff as I am.

I went to a steering committee meeting on Wednesday of DC Web Women, an organization of women who work in the web field.  The main part of the organization is a mailing list, where we talk about web stuff, technology, jobs, etc.  But it was great at the meeting to hear about all the other stuff they do, and just meet all of the women who run it in person.  I am now signed up for two workshops and plan to offer my services to help with outreach.

The first workshop is on PHP.  I took a class in it years ago, through HWG, but I could definitely use a refresher.  We are in the process of converting our website at work to PHP, so it will come in handy. The other workshop is just for fun: tips and tricks for digital photography.  I love taking pictures but I’m a complete amateur without much of a clue about what I’m doing.  I get some great pictures every once in a while but I’m sure it’s just luck!

My new business cards finally came this week, and I picked them up this morning. I’m very happy with how they turned out.  Vistaprint does good work.

I have to admit search engine optimization is a subject that is a bit murky to me. I know of the importance of key words (words used in a search that you hope would lead a user to your site) and using them appropriately on your site and the importance of having other sites link to you. Beyond that…I would be lost.

There are a lot of firms out there who offer it and their fees can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Most are legitimate but some are shady. And according to Google (the most popular search engine around), NONE of them can claim a “special relationship” with Google and/or guarantee a #1 ranking. Google does have advice and guidelines for webmasters that might HELP their ranking, but they keep the full details of their ranking system a secret. And engaging in certain practices (this is where those shady SEO people come in) can even get a website banned completely from Google! I read recently an article about a company that’s suing Google because they were removed from the rankings. After their removal, their business dropped off almost completely. I guess that’s quite a testament to the search engine’s power.

Anyway, I’m thinking of taking a class on SEO so I can get my mind around all of this.

Another amazing thing about Google is how much people can find out about you by searching on your name. Of course, my name is common enough that a lot of irrelevant stuff comes up when you search on me. I don’t run marathons! But a woman with the same name does. Anything related to astronomy with my name attached is most likely me, though. I read article about people have been rejected from consideration because of what job interviewers found out about them on the web. You’ve got to be careful what you put out there on yourself on the web. People start blogs and post things on MySpace (a site I myself have always avoided) and sometimes don’t seem to realize that anyone with a computer can see it. And if you rant about your boss…you can quickly find yourself on the street. I do have have a personal blog too, although I don’t post in it much anymore, but the worst that has come out of that is someone I formerly dated yelling at me about what I said about him on it. I guess I should count my blessings! And no, you can’t have the link.