A Bloy and his Blog

Rather than blog about every session I attended at Internet Librarian, I’m just going to just focus on the ones I thought were the most interesting.

Designing the Digital Experience
presented by David Lee King.

David told us that basically this is a 30 minute, presentation version of his book by the same name (which I had heard about before and was why I wanted to attend this session).

There are three paths to the experience:

Structure – Create an experience by making the website easier to use. A well designed experience should stay out of the users’ way. You should focus on developing parts of your site that users visit often. Don’t spend too much time on things users only do once a year. Look at your website with a critical eye, think about what would make people stumble. Figure out goals from there, don’t forget the “don’t make them think” philosophy.

read the rest of: Internet Librarian: day one

Internet Librarian always sounded like a real interesting conference, and I’m fortunate to be able to attend this year’s edition. The conference for me began with one of the preconference workshops, Web Manager’s Academy; Redesign 2.0. The session featured four librarians presenting several informative talks throughout the day. The two presentations I found the most useful were “User Experiences” which covered engaging website users and enhancing their experience, and “Usability Research” which included things like preference testing, affinity mapping, and task-based testing.

read the rest of: Internet Librarian: preconference

One of the long term projects I’ve been involved with at work was quietly unveiled this week, the Edgewood History Collection.

The project is a collaboration between myself and several other members of the library staff. My responsibility involved designing and developing the collection’s Home and About pages, as well as the page templates for the digital collection management software (the pages that actually display the items in the collection). The software we’re using is a hosted version of ContentDM.

Some of the things in the Edgewood History Collection I found interesting include:

read the rest of: The Edgewood History Collection

For a while now, I’ve been looking for a decent method to display larger photos on this site (some pictures look so much better at larger sizes). I finally settled on Highslide JS, a very nice javascript thumbnail viewer. Just click on the photograph to zoom out to a larger version. It also lets you drag the larger image around, and open up multiple images at once. Pretty slick, huh?

read the rest of: Now with photo zoom

A couple of useful links for web developers…

XRAY is a brilliant little bookmarklet. Just click it, and then click on any element in the web page you’re viewing. XRAY will show you information on class, ID, inheritance hierarchy, position, size, margins, padding, etc.

XRAY works with Firefox, Safari, Camino, and Mozilla. Found via Zeldman.

Better Writing Through Design from A List Apart makes a case for focusing on the written word, and gives tips on writing better copy for your website.

Great web design reflects the way we interact, and the primary vehicle for that interaction remains text. We share, we chat, we comment, we tag, and we do it all via the written word.

Like many other workers of the web, I’ve been using Firefox’s web developer toolbar for a long time.

Smiley Cat Web Design posts 10 Things You May Not Know About the Web Developer Toolbar. What a great list. Among the features I didn’t know:

• Edit HTML: I use edit CSS all the time, but I had no idea you could edit the HTML. Sweet!
• View Color Information: Get a complete list of colors (and their HTML codes) used on the site.
• Display Element Information: View class, id, attributes, ancestors, position, etc. of any element.
• And a bonus from the comments (more good tips there), CTRL-SHIFT-Y shows you the styles associated with an element.

Found via 9rules Design Community.

Several months ago I started linking to sample MP3 files, when I write about music I’m listening to. Since then I’ve been looking for a simple way to add a Flash player to stream those files right from the page. Today I found a post by someone who discovered the Google player used in Gmail can be used on any website.

Update, July 13: It seems Google has changed the parameters of the player and it no longer works properly. The good news is I have found a decent player which I can install on this site.

read the rest of: Streaming MP3 files