April 12th, 2006
For reference, here are the categories one can use in the mode field of an Amazon Associates recommended product query string such as http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cafeaulait&o=1&p=16&l=st1&
mode=dvd&search=Whedon&=1&fc1=<1=&lc1=&bg1=&f=ifr:
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Posted in Web Development | 3 Comments »
April 3rd, 2006
I have a confession to make. About ten years ago, I was webmaster for a major photo agency here in New York. My first task was designing their first ever web site. We had lots of great photographs going back decades, and we decided that the best way to display them would be with white text on a black background. Why did we decide this? Because photo galleries have black walls.
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Posted in User Interface, Web Development | 16 Comments »
March 29th, 2006
Cool user interfaces have The Flow. They let you do what you need to do without consideration or thought. Poor user interfaces break The Flow. What do I mean? Let me explain by example.
This is my digital camera. More specifically it is the battery compartment of my digital camera:

The battery fits into this camera in exactly one way. Turn it upside down or around, and it doesn’t fit. I invariably try to shove the battery in backwards. Even when I stop and think about the problem and realize that my natural instinct of which way the battery goes is wrong, and deliberately reverse it, I still put it in the wrong way! I have no idea how Panasonic managed this, but they did. This device does not have The Flow.
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Posted in User Interface | 3 Comments »
March 29th, 2006
One comment has come up every time I’ve given my RSS, ATOM, OPML, and All That talk. As soon as I describe RSS/Atom as “push”, I know a hand’s going to shoot up and some techie is going to say, “But isn’t the feed reader polling the server every 30 minutes to pull down the content?”, and my response is always, “Yes, it is; but that’s irrelevant.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in User Interface | 14 Comments »
March 27th, 2006
If you’ve installed PHP in /usr/local as many people do, then your php.ini file is in /usr/local/php/lib. If you’ve installed PHP somewhere else, then you’ll find it in the corresponding lib directory. For instance, I like to put PHP in /opt/php5, so my php.ini file is in /opt/php5/lib.
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Posted in PHP, Web Development | 6 Comments »