If you are not familiar with xkcd, I suggest that you run over there right now and spend the rest of your day going through the archives. Some of the funniest, geeky cartoons can be found there – and it is updated frequently.
Here is a little infographic from testking.com – I would have placed the whole graphic here, but it is a little wide for my site, and besides they deserve the traffic for the work.
I feel like I spend hours arguing for and against certain font choices based on rather ancient stats on what computers have what fonts. I tend to be a minimalist, Arial, Helvetica, Times [New Roman], but with this I might be able to expand a little bit on that beaten path.
Unrelated: I have been working on a site that utilizes fonts from webfonts.fonts.com, which has been pretty interesting. There have been some quirks, formatting and style issues, but in general it has been working out pretty well. If you don’t have much traffic, they have a free service which is useful for testing. For you designer types I would recommend a look at it – it will slow you pages down a little, but overall we have been very happy. I will have a better idea about cost once we launch and are out of beta testing.
I don’t really know why I am posting this, other than I find it completely fascinating. Who has this kind of free time?
24Ways.org has started its Advent calendar for 2010. There seems to be a wealth of information here each year, which can be found in the archives for previous years. The posts tend to span a wide range of topics and not all may be of interest, but I am sure you will find a few that are right up your alley.
This video has my entire IT department laughing out loud. Not exactly SFW language, but very funny.
Today I came across two articles that I found really disturbing.
The first is from The Hill, Dick Morris wrote an article “Obama vs. Freedom” about possibly subsidizing news media. Now I can’t think of anytime in the last 4 years that I have known about Dick Morris that I have agreed with him, but on this point I will. I think government tied into financially with news outlets to against everything I believe in. If you are liberal minded, take a look at the comments – they are unbelievable [thanks to a Drudge link]. You have to read between the lines, but fundamentally the story seems to be logical. Journalism and government do not mix.
Then my buddy Milo sent me a link to an article on TechCrunch by Paul Carr “A Death of A Thousand Hacks: New Forbes Editorial Genius In Bold Plan to Kill Forbes”. Read the article, it will scare the hell out of you. Going with what seems like a scattershot approach to journalism. Take thousands of terrible articles and hope that one is good. It is all about SEO and page views – whether they are useful or not.
Today I am very depressed about the news media – when NYT goes paywall it will be the last nail in the coffin.
Well there is a lot I would like to do on this blog – but I haven’t gotten to step one. I would like to change the icon – or maybe the theme altogether, but no – no progress.
I am still trying to figure out what I am going to write about, but work keeps getting in the way. Six or more projects that each require my attention, but none get the attention that they need.
Be patient – at some point I will get my act together and will start talking about UI, SEO and content management systems like I had planned to.
Maybe at some point there will be something of interest here, but for now I am only experimenting. The source of this blog came from a conversation about how if you work on the web you should have a blog. I am not the sort to actually place everything out on the web – so I won’t. This blog will touch on subjects that I will come across in both my work and sometimes my personal life.
There will be nothing juicy – just items that I am thinking about in what spare time I have. If I ever get followers I am hoping to ask questions and develop some converstations – if not it will serve as a way to flesh out concepts and maybe test development of the WordPress system. I have only installed about a dozen of them and I am constantly changing how they work – of course to a point where I cannot upgrade them due to breaking functionality for components modified for a previous system. I will try not to do that here.
This is just the beginning – so be patient – I will try to find my voice quickly.