Reblogged from WordPress.com News:

Want to receive WordPress.com notifications instantly, even when you’re not on WordPress.com? Add the new WordPress.com extension for Chrome and as soon as you get a new follower or a new like on one of your posts, a notification will appear in your browser: Simply click the icon to view your latest WordPress.com notifications: Start following new blogs without visiting WordPress.com The Chrome extension also makes it easy to follow sites from your WordPress.com account by displaying a Follow button …

Reblogged from WordPress.com News:

If you feel like it’s a chore to keep up with all your favorite blogs, you can now read posts from all the blogs you follow (even the ones that aren’t on WordPress.com!) in one convenient place on the WordPress.com home page: Your reader displays all the posts across all the blogs you follow in the order they were published, with the most recent content appearing at the top. You’ll see an excerpt of the introduction to each post, the first image in the post, and thumbnails of any other images that the post …

Web users tend to act like sharks: They have to keep moving, or they’ll die.

Fact. With as busy as we all are and as convenient as the modern web is, this is more true than ever before. With the recent SOPA Blackout day, a dedicated Twitter account retweeted the cries of scornful users whose loss of the immediate Wikipedia access they’ve come to expect had many of them in a tailspin of emotion. Had these users taken the time to read the 3 sentences presented to them (instead of the content they were expecting) they would have noticed it was a purposeful protest and not an outage or the government shutting them down.

Innovate when you have a better idea (and everyone you show it to says “Wow!”) but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.

This happens to all savvy internet creators eventually. You have a great idea, maybe you even mocked up some designs or wireframes, but instead of it being revolutionary it’s a remix of old ideas that break tons of existing conventions. What you end up with is Frankenstein’s monster; a babbling clod of an idea that everyone is afraid of, even if it just wants to be loved.

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Enough said.

If you look up navigation in the dictionary, it’s about doing two things: getting from one place to another, and figuring out where you are.

As the web becomes increasingly connected, more and more navigational elements are infiltrating our once flat and simple world. Remembering to keep primary navigation simple and secondary navigation to a minimum is becoming increasingly difficult to do.

Left to their own devices, development teams aren’t notoriously successful at making decisions about usability questions. Most teams end up spending a lot of precious time rehashing the same issues over and over.

Fact. This happens all the time, even individual Automattic projects. Everyone has great ideas with years (decades?) of experience behind them to prove their opinions are the best ones. Thankfully, these “religious debates” end up being constructive for everyone, and we’re all really good at settling down and agreeing before anything bad happens (even when it comes to reblogging.)

Resist the impulse to add things. When it’s obvious in testing that users aren’t getting something, most people’s first reaction is to add something, like an explanation or some instructions.

Very often, the right solution is to take something (or things) away that are obscuring the meaning, rather than adding yet another distraction.

See navigational elements above. As newer and more capable technologies are introduced and as more systems are introduced to work on top of more systems, it’s easy, as an expert to throw all-of-the-things at existing not-so-good things.

Consistency among browsers: workarounds and hacks are still required to ensure that your CSS works across all browsers, but these will fall away as browser makers continue to improve their CSS support.

This made me laugh, and then cry, because it hasn’t really improved in the past 10 years. We’re still prefixing our CSS styling with browser specific tags no differently than we were writing browser specific HTML for Internet Explorer and Netscape. I’m all for a progressive and competitive web, but don’t make me think about what CSS convention I should use or what browser to favor.

But above all, be of good cheer. Building a great website is an enormous challenge, and anyone who gets it even half right has my admiration.

Building great websites is hugely difficult. Thanks to a bunch of really awesome open-source projects and the thousands of contributors, it’s easier than ever to make awesome looking and working websites. I’m really happy to be a part of something I both enjoy and believe in, and it’s books like Don’t Make Me Think that I enjoy rereading every few years to keep my priorities and abilities in check.

Notice there is no P in it.

Reblogged from Lens Cap:

]]> http://johnjamesjacoby.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/this-is-what-happens-when-game-developers-think-up-new-drinks/feed/ 0 johnjamesjacoby Click to visit the original post http://johnjamesjacoby.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/more-time/ http://johnjamesjacoby.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/more-time/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:05:43 +0000 John James Jacoby http://johnjamesjacoby.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/more-time/ ]]> Today’s Daily Post asks:

If you needed more time, where would you take from? Lets say you had an emergency this week that required you to spend an hour, every day, taking care of something you don’t currently do.  Where would that time come from? What would you drop first?

I spend a little over an hour winding down at the end of every day. I use that time to catch up on email, read the news, skim through my Words With Friends games, and tie up any mid-level priority type lose ends. My guess is that time would get shorter, and I’d probably eat into my sleep-time a bit too.

I know that the answer to this question *should* be “I would work less” but I enjoy what I do so much that it’s difficult to not do. Maybe I’d work a real 40 hour week instead of the 60-80 range it ends up being when you count communication, coding, OSS dev, and just general work related distractions.

Maybe I could find a way to delegate this new 1 hour thing to someone else; I kinda like the routine I’m in right now.