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“To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization. Development teams — usually incorporating a user experience specialist — then reference this documentation during implementation and upgrade processes. However, as the numbers of systems grow within an organization, so... 
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Recently came across two articles about free website monitoring tools, Top 10 Free Website Uptime Monitoring Services, from Design Live, and 12 Excellent Free Tools for Monitoring Your Sites Uptime, from Six Revisions. Both articles are good for identifying possible services to use. Both have some overlap in the services they document. (I’ve also covered this topic before, Website Monitoring... 
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“How many times have you had to debug your web pages on virtual or multiple machines running different versions of Internet Explorer? Or had to wait for a slow web service to return renderings of your pages? You don’t have to do that anymore. Now you can debug your pages on multiple versions of IE on the same machine that you use for Web development.” From the MSDN Blog about Microsoft... 
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“Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t. Charles Simonyi, the brilliant programmer who co-invented WYSIWYG word processing, dated Martha Stewart, made a billion dollars off of Microsoft stock and went into space, first tried to solve the Mythical Man Month problem of... 
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Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms. Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired... 
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“How do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? Nicole first presented Object Oriented CSS at Web Directions North in Denver. Since then, the response has been overwhelming. OOCSS allows you to write fast, maintainable, standards-based front end code. It adds much needed predictability to CSS so that even beginners can participate in writing beautiful websites.” From... 
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Raju Mazumder at Style PHP has an interesting set of classes he wrote to interact with Facebook, for example, to get user profile information, send notifications to the Facebook user, and publish news feeds. This looks to be a very useful way to avoid creating these basic Facebook interactions from scratch.  Read More →

“A personal portfolio website is all about promoting you. You are a brand, and your name is a brand name. No one is going to know about your brand unless you get it out there; and if you’re a Web designer, developer, writer, gamer or any other type of creative, then it’s essential that you have a good portfolio website.” From Smashing Magazine. A basic but thorough list of what should... 
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“Completely ignoring a browser in terms of CSS is a wonderfully freeing thing. It certainly can’t be done on every site. The important thing to remember is that it’s a site’s statistics that should determine what level of support you decide to offer.” From Simple Bits. Includes some examples using conditional statements to isolate IE6 web browsers without affecting the ability of... 
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“I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful ones. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. Below are 20 things... 
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“Busy practitioners are sometimes reluctant to spend time examining a colleague’s work. You might be leery of a coworker who asks you to review his code. Does he lack confidence? Does he want you to do his thinking for him? “Anyone who needs his code reviewed shouldn’t be getting paid as a software developer,” scoff some review resisters. In a healthy software engineering... 
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“In the past days I received several requests from my readers to suggest some CAPTCHA scripts and services quickly to embed into a web page. This post proposes a list of ten interesting scripts and services you can use to provide protection from spam bots and ensure that only humans perform certain actions.” From Woork. This is a good canonical list. The comments include a link to a variation... 
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“Such problems often come from trying to make a Web site accessible without understanding how people with disabilities actually use the Web. The challenge for UX designers is to find ways of including real people with disabilities throughout the design process, starting with initial user research and going all the way through final usability testing. This gets back to the issue of familiarity.... 
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“At the 2008 Serious Play conference, Tim Brown, CEO of the superstar design thinking firm Ideo made a fascinating presentation about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play, which can now be found on YouTube. He begins his talk by covering familiar ground, such as our tendency as adults to want to categorize things immediately (which limits the possibilities that were able... 
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“While CSS can be used to create sexy websites, writing CSS can actually be an artform by itself. The way in which CSS is created, structured, and maintained can be a thing of beauty.” From ThinkVitamin, from a few years ago. Depending on how you learned CSS, it is fairly hard to tell if you code CSS efficiently or not. This article describes some best practices. And I intend to write an... 
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“If you’re not peering over the cubicle wall, hoping that the global economy won’t affect your workplace, you’re either a Trump (or a Hilton) or in a watertight business—or possibly you’ve had your head in the sand. It’s mighty tempting to throw your hands in the air and declare, “I have no control over this!” But here’s the thing: you do. Maintaining our industry’s health... 
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“These buttons just launched in Gmail yesterday, and they’ve been in Google Reader for two months now. The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior. They’re also... 
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“About two years ago, my then-9-year-old and I worked on a cool project to program Lego Mindstorms to fly a RC plane, which we cheekily called a Lego UAV. (And were then, even more cheekily, accused of “weaponizing Lego”–UAVs are export controlled as weapons!) It worked, amazingly, and was a lot of fun. Then, as sometimes happens, I got obsessed, while he moved on to other things.... 
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“These caching techniques have evolved in terms of effectiveness and accuracy, but may be improved further to allow for greater cross-browser functionality. In this post, I share a “CSS-only” preloading method that works better under a broader set of conditions. Previous image-preloading techniques target all browsers, devices, and media types. Unfortunately, certain browsers do not load... 
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“Code refactoring is not to be confused with code optimization. Code optimization is a completely different ball game, where the goal is to run the program as fast as possible by using as few CPU cycles as you can. The focus during optimization is to speed up the program, if it impedes code understandability then so be it. On the contrary refactoring may at times make your program slower, albeit... 
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