From Salon. If you have not figured it out already, the avatar, the small thumbnail sized picture you use on Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places, can say alot about you. This blog post describes six different issues to consider as you pick and change avatars.

Awhile back, I found Xobni, a software tool with an odd name that should be in every version of any email software. Now they have a Plus version, for $29.95, that solves the major issue I had with the software. Both the free and paid versions are a huge value if you collect a lot of email for projects.

Xobni works as a plugin to Outlook. When you set up, it can take a few hours for the software to index thousands of emails. But that is a small price to pay for the features. Once indexed, Xobni sits on the right side of Outlook or it appears when you call it. Typing in part or all of a name or search term in Xobni calls up all your emails from that person or emails that contain that term. You also get the contact information from your address book. And attachments. And email threads, the chains of email by email subject line, nested and sorted by date. The ability to dig out ancient and obscure emails in seconds floored me the first time I used it.

Xobni also is useful in going back to tell your clients the exact email, by date and subject line, that had the information you sent them months ago. You know the phone call: the client calls up and says, “Did you ever do this?” Lawyers and anyone who needs backup often months later will find Xobni extremely easy and helpful.

While I religiously create project and client folders in Outlook and sort email every day, Xobni makes it possible to avoid that chore. Indeed, Xobni really is a totally different way to look at your email and work with it. Which is the reason every email client should have a current email view and the Xobni view.

The only issue I’ve found happens after I archive my emails, when my Outlook file goes over 2GB which happens every year. Happily, Xobni keeps a copy of the text of emails, and contact information, but not the attachments. Often that’s all I need.

Their new Plus version, however, includes the ability to search across multiple Outlook files. So I can have old archived emails as easily found as the ones in my current email file. The Free version still is limited to one Outlook file which may be fine for most people because it keeps the actual email text of archived emails (assuming you run Xobni before you archive your emails, of course).

Bottomline, Xobni is well worth a try if you have to manage large amounts of email. And even if you don’t the ability to quickly find any email based on author or content is amazing and valuable. The free version has a lot of capability. The Plus version, at $29.95, is a huge value even if you only use it to search across your archived email files with their attachments. It’s a small price to pay to support useful innovative software.

However, as the numbers of systems grow within an organization, so does the effort needed to maintain the quality and consistency of the user experience. For many organizations, it is now impossible to assign much, if any, time of a user experience specialist to all implementation efforts, and experience has shown that the UI guidelines and principles approach to propagating a single user experience standard does not scale well.”

From Boxes and Arrows. Besides a quick discussion of issues around how traditional guideline documents don’t scale, and alternative solutions, this article includes an excellent set of links to UI pattern libraries.

However, articles like this are a mile wide and an inch deep. For example, some of these free services take up to 60 minutes to notify you if there is a failure. There also could be lag time between the time the monitoring service is notified and the time they send an email or SMS to you. At least one solution involves placing a file on your web server, which yields more detailed data to monitor. In short, the free option for many of these services is limited in ways that might not be useful. So it is caveat emptor, or buyer beware.

I have played with Montastic and Basic State. Montastic is fine. Basic State yesterday caught a server failure within fifteen minutes, which is great for free. Their daily status emails also are useful. I’d also check out the comments on these articles for more vendors. I found Server Density that way.

My recommendation is to compare all services, try the services that meet your needs and then, if you need to, pay for the service. Despite what these articles promise, it is possible but unlikely you will find a free service that does exactly what you want. But free is enough to try these services, to find what works for your website(s).

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 Expression Web SuperPreview. Found while searching for the next best thing after Multiple IE, an earlier solution to let web designers and developers test their pages in multiple versions of the Internet Explorer web browsers. Multiple IE is no longer supported, and IE8 is out, so Microsoft’s Super Preview software looks like a decent alternative. (The only problem? Take a wild guess. The software is bloated, 250MB. Probably worth it since it is a Microsoft solution to a Microsoft problem. But you’ll need extra time to download their software.)

Other options appear to be IE Tester and Xenocode Browser Sandbox.

The most lightweight option probably is WestCiv’s X-Ray bookmark utility. It is hands down the slickest utility for web designers. Select the X-Ray bookmark then click any part of any web page and see all sorts of useful detail. I can’t get X-Ray to work with IE6, to show me all those nasty bug effects, but X-Ray does work on IE7, Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. So it’s a very lightweight easy solution to figuring out how your pages are being rendered across multiple browsers. And how somebody coded a neat web page design.

UPDATE (8/22/2009): If you install the Xenocode Browser Sandbox, and want to remove it, be aware that you may need to remove multiple instances of their software through the Windows Add/Remove Software screen. Also, in your Windows Task Manager (Ctl + Alt + Del), in the Processes tab, Xenocode software shows up as Spoon-Sandbox.exe. It’s a bit obscure. I had installed Xenocode for testing only to see, months later, that every day it loads spoon-sandbox.exe even though I don’t use the software. If you’re compulsive, like me, and want to know what is on your computer, now you know.

UPDATE (11/13/2009): Today there is no need to download software like Super Preview to view your application in different web browsers. Adobe’s BrowserLab currently is free and available anywhere with a modern browser. It’s easy to use and displays the full range of bad browsers, specifically, IE6 and IE7 on both Windows and Mac. But it also shows Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Browsercam also has updated their service to display your pages at a variety of screen resolutions. I have used Super Preview and while it is useful, it is harder to navigate than BrowserLab and the latter does not require a massive download and installation of software.

UPDATE (02/15/2010): Added a link to the release Microsoft Expression Web product. Unfortunately, the SuperPreview software is no longer free. You have to buy the whole software package. BrowserLab probably is the better option, as a result, unless you need to identify exactly what is wrong with how Internet Explorer displays your web page. In that event, SuperPreview provides excellent detail about the code and makes it relatively easy to find and fix problems.

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 organizing really big software teams by creating one super duper überprogrammer writing the top-level functions, while handing off the implementation of the lower-level functions to a team of grunt junior-programmers as needed. They called this position program manager. Simonyi is brilliant, but this idea, not so much. Nobody wanted to be a grunt junior programmer, I guess.”

From Joel on Software. This is an excellent, perhaps exhaustive, description of how best to manage software development projects. It’s a wonderful read, too. This article is excellent background for non-programmers as well as anyone involved in software programming.

In theory, software development should be amenable to the same processes used for any large scale creative project, for example, paintings where the assistant(s) set up the general work and the artist fills everything in, architectural photography (same dynamic: assistant(s) set up, the photographer comes in to add value), and so on. But software is notorious for failing when traditional organizational methods are used, as Spolsky notes in the quote above.

This article also has great insights, for example, making sure the program manager and programmers are peers and equals. This guarantees debate. Otherwise, if programmers report to the program manager or, worse, the development manager also is the program manager, then there is no debate among equals. Bottomline, the software program manager must be an advocate for the user and must earn the respect of the programmers and win them over to their user-centric solutions.

Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired 20 months ago. It is intended to simplify the way people handle phone calls, voice mail and text messages. The service will initially be made available only to existing GrandCentral subscribers; Google says the general public will be able to use it in the coming weeks.

Google Voice allows users to route all their calls through a single number that can ring their home, work and mobile phones simultaneously. It also gives users a single and easy-to-manage voice mail system for multiple phone lines. And it lets users make calls, routed via the Internet, free in the United States and for a small fee internationally.”

From the New York Times (sub reqd, content free only a short while). There’s also interesting commentary from Learn Online (which links to demos) and John Batelle at his Searchblog.

While most commentators focus on the Fortune 500 aspect (who will Google drive out of business next?), the most powerful story about Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) is what it offers small businesses and consultants. They no longer will need a dedicated business line. They can use Google Voice to screen calls, route calls, and handle all the telephone-related tasks currently handled on a one-off basis. For businesses that don’t need a PBX to traffic calls to multiple numbers, Google Voice will be a very useful tool.

I’ve been lucky to use Grand Central for years and it makes a huge difference to have a universal, follow me everywhere, phone number. It even one day got me out of cleaning my teen age daughter’s locker at middle school when a client called just as I was about to start helping her clean out her papers and books. Sadly for her, I had to take the call.

When Google Voice is available to the public in the next few weeks, I highly recommend you look at signing up. The only problem I’ve seen in converting from Grand Central to Google Voice is that my Grand Central inbox disappeared and with it my contacts. For me, I simply have to recreate my contacts. For others, that might be a big deal.

From stubbornella at github. The slide presentation does a good job of explaining the problems with current CSS coding, for example, the lack of  CSS code re-use. However, I’m leery of CSS frameworks like Blueprint because (in my view) they go too far and create too much code and require too much learning to implement easily across many websites. Not to mention they can be difficult to maintain if the next coder is not familiar with the CSS framework and has to fix the CSS styles. That said, improving how you code cascading style sheets is an important topic and worth reading about different possible solutions.

From Smashing Magazine. A basic but thorough list of what should be in a portfolio website. Includes links to articles about creating an online portfolio and examples of excellent online portfolios. Basically this is a great article that covers a range of issues related to creating an effective portfolio website: what’s included, how to create one, and examples to inspire and give you ideas for your site.

From Simple Bits. Includes some examples using conditional statements to isolate IE6 web browsers without affecting the ability of everyone else to see your site as you intend. His link to the Rissington Podcast solution is priceless: basically use conditional statements to insult IE6 users. While not business-friendly, it is amusing given how many productive hours designers and coders have wasted tweaking their CSS designs to work with that browser.

Currently IE6 is the browser web designers and coders love to hate. I was surprised recently to see that less than 40% of visitors to this site use any version of Internet Explorer (over 50% use Firefox, yeah!). Truly the browser wars are over. In the meantime, some clients have visitors who insist on using IE6 and this item provides a few links to using conditional statements. Also, last year, I blogged an item, How to Target CSS Styles to Internet Explorer 6 and IE7, which has additional links on the subject.

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 I’ve learned. Though this list is geared towards one-hour sessions rather than panels and workshops, some of the same principles apply.”

From Authentic Boredom, by Cameron Moll. This list has some interesting ideas, from using Keynote on a Mac instead of PowerPoint to acknowledging that if you’re a first-timer you’re likely to fail. As someone who has written speeches for others, I also was interested to see he does one slide per minute, or 45-50 slides for a 45 minute presentation. Includes a link to the Event Apart guidelines for speakers. If you have to do a presentation, this is a good resource.

In a healthy software engineering culture, team members engage their peers to improve the quality of their work and increase their productivity. They understand that the time they spend looking at a colleague’s work product is repaid when other team members examine their own deliverables. The best software engineers I have known actively sought out reviewers. Indeed, the input from many reviewers over their careers was part of what made these developers the best.”

From Coding Horror. This is a fun look at one way to improve your programming: asking a peer to review your code. Not in a formal way, necessarily, but in a thoughtful way that puts a different set of eyes on your code. Includes some interesting data about how peer reviews improve code, as well as a link to a new book on the subject of peer reviews. And the WTF cartoon by Thom Holwerda is priceless.

From Woork. This is a good canonical list. The comments include a link to a variation on CAPTCHA that I’ve seen recently, in this case, you count the number of pigs, rubber duckies, and apples when you sign in at Firepages.

From UX Matters. This article makes the case for including accessibility into usability testing, as well as some of the issues involved when well-intentioned rules actually make it harder for people to access a site, for example, using alt tags to restate what a screen reader already provides. Includes quite a few good links to other resources on the topic.