Tamlyn

The @trendingtopics Twitter bot tweets the topics that people are talking about most on Twitter. There’s also an RSS feed if you’re interested. It’s a very low tech solution and it’s not guaranteed to work but I find it quite useful.

Phew! It’s been a while. I actually compiled this mix back in May or June but didn’t get round to finishing it until now. Once again there’s no theme other than music I’m currently enjoying – or at least, was enjoying 4 months ago!

Web addresses are horrible. They’re difficult to remember and poorly understood. Which is why I found the recent trend of suggesting search terms instead of quoting a URL interesting.

I read an interesting letter yesterday from Ecotricity, my electricity supplier. I received it a couple of weeks ago but hadn’t opened it because i thought it was a bill!

Note: cross-posted from the PlusNet Community site.

Myself, Sam & Matt went out to Sheffield city centre on Monday afternoon for a spot of user testing. It’s the first user test I’ve run in the wild, previous times have been with friends & family or work colleagues. It was an interesting afternoon and we certainly learned a lot.

I had a quick play with Google Lively this morning. I’m going to avoid the obvious what-the-hell-is-Google-doing-releasing-a-shit-imitation-of-Second-Life question that everybody else is asking and instead look at some of the usability issues I encountered.

The car doctor unexpectedly had the car valeted, washed and partially resprayed. It looks pretty good now so I felt I had to do something about the junk that has accumulated inside. Here is a selection of the things I found.

Here’s a screenshot of a typical NME.com page at a resolution of 1280×1024.

38% of the page is adverts. 10% is content (18% if you count the picture). As if that wasn’t bad enough, they use such a huge font that they only manage to fit 49 words of content on an entire screen!

Luke Wroblewksi’s new book on web form design, cunningly entitled Web Form Design, is an excellent work. It’s very easy to read (I breezed through chapters 2-6 last night) and full of screenshots and bullet-pointed, actionable design guidelines at the end of each chapter.

Today’s Gmail Labs announcement got me thinking about ways to allow users to customise a site. Greasemonkey is amazing but the problem is that the scripts are stored with the browser on the client-side. So if I install a script to enhance Gmail on my desktop, I will still get the unenhanced version when I log into Gmail on my laptop. But since the user script is just a bit of JavaScript, couldn’t Gmail allow me to install the user script on the server and then serve it back to me wherever I choose to access Gmail from? It’s only serving me the scripts I installed so it’s no more of a security risk than client-side Greasemonkey.