A few weeks ago, we purchased “Karaoke Revolution - American Idol Encore” for my Nintendo Wii. Most of my family is obsessed with American Idol, and thought the game would be a lot of fun to play.
Unfortunately, the game just didn’t even come close to living up to our expectations.
(more…)
The new version of WordPress has been released. It’s the 2.5 version and I just upgraded HTMLCenter. As a reader you should see the same experience as always. The backend admin has been completely overhauled and so far, it is damn smooth. Things are in some different places but it takes advantage of a variety of newer technologies and the posting tool is sweet. I am very impressed. There are tons of new features, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has an overview of all of the features.
Here are some other good reviews of Wordpress 2.5:
As many of you are aware, it is rather difficult to create an accessible “quick link” menu (sometimes also called “jump menus”) because most of them require javascript.
For those of you that don’t know what a quick link menu is, it’s generally a dropdown menu, made from a typical form “select” element. Then, when a user chooses one of the options within that select element, the page automatically redirects to the location associated with that option.
For instance, in the top corner of all HTMLCenter pages, there is a quick link menu called “Top Links”.
For a lot of users, these types of menus are extremely useful. Designers generally use quick link menus for one of two purposes: a) to provide a quick, easily locatable list of the top content on their Web site or b) to provide a list of the headers on a long page, allowing the users to quickly “jump” to the appropriate section of the page.
The problem, though, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, is that they all require javascript in order to work properly. That’s great for the users that have javascript enabled, but it really can cause problems for those that don’t have javascript.
I have come up with a solution to that problem, though. With the solution described below, the “quick link” menu is initially written as an unordered list. Then, I use javascript to convert it to a standard “jump menu”. That way, if the user doesn’t have javascript within his/her browser, they get a nicely formatted unordered list of the links instead.
Molly at DemoGirl has created a video that takes a look at several sites and their usability. On her Twitter piece, I could add a million items but one I would absolutely add is a way to do a multiple delete on the direct messages. Deleting one at a time is time consuming and my bet is that by adding a mass/select delete option, they could reduce by millions of messages.
Check out our 30+ usability tutorials.
My supervisor at work e-mailed a nice accessibility resource a few weeks ago. The “Division of Instructional Technology” at the University of Wisconsin has put together a good collection of videos and podcasts related to Web accessibility. The in-house videos are narrated and led by a blind man named Neal Ewers, who works for the Trace Research and Development Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The videos are extremely interesting to watch, and very informative. If you have considered improving your Web site’s accessibility, I highly recommend visiting the site and watching each of the videos.
What is web accessibility & why is it important?
Web accessibility is about making your website accessible to all Internet users (both disabled and non-disabled), regardless of what browsing technology they’re using. In addition to complying with the law, an accessible website can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business.
Please read the articles, Benefits of an accessible website - part 1 and Benefits of an accessible website - part 2 for more about the importance of web accessibility.
Your website must be able to function with all different browsing technologies
The first and perhaps the most important rule of web accessibility. Not everyone is using the latest version of Internet Explorer, with all the plug-ins and programs that you may require them to have for your website. Different browsing technologies can include:
A site called Hulu, which has been talked about a few times over at CenterNetworks, has gone public. It has been in private, invite-only beta mode for about six months.
Hulu per day for the last 30 days.
Get your own chart!
There is a very quiet buzz about Hulu on the Internet. An old friend of mine blogged about the other day, making it sound much better than it actually seems to be. In one sentence, Jon said “I have been able to catch up on shows that I didn’t watch the first time around”. However, when I visited Hulu, I found that there isn’t much potential to catch up on episodes you missed, unless you just missed them within the last few weeks.
I visited Hulu for the first time expecting to see a huge collection of full episodes. Unfortunately, what I found was a site with a decent selection of series, but only a handful of episodes from each series. Hulu doesn’t seem to offer any episodes of new shows that you can’t currently find on the network sites (probably because Hulu is actually owned by NBC and NewsCorp - NewsCorp is the parent company of Fox Broadcasting).
It may just be me, but as long as the networks continue to offer streaming video of full episodes from their own Web sites, and as long as Hulu continues to hold only a handful of full episodes for each series, I just don’t see the point.
Anyway, you can check it out for yourself by visiting Hulu.
I am happy to announce that I am finally back from the dead. My Internet connection at home was restored sometime on Friday.
It has been hell this past month now being able to get on the Internet from home. On the plus side, I have spent more time playing Wii over the last month than I probably have over the last year. On the negative side, I haven’t really been able to blog very much, and I haven’t been able to do any Web development from home. A few simple bugs in the private developers’ release of my CMS application went unresolved for an entire month because I wasn’t able to work on it.
The good news about that, however, is that I was able to get the bugs fixed, and add a few more features within a few hours of getting my connection back yesterday.
Imagine you’re driving along and due to a road closure you have to follow those conspicuous yellow detour signs. You’re now on an unfamiliar road, but because of the signs you confidently proceed, comfortable in trusting the arrows to tell you where you need to go.
Then there’s a roundabout and no sign. Do you turn left? Right? You’re lost and have two choices; turn back and find an alternate road you know well or blindly drive around and hope for the best.
Websites are very similar, no matter what their ultimate goal is, your site visitors need to intuitively find their way around. Too often, general website navigation and orientation disappears or changes on internal pages.
In fact, with websites this point is even more pertinent as users can just ‘evaporate’ and leave your site, instead of being forced to drive around aimlessly!
Around here we know that developers are no (April) fools. As we get ready to relaunch one of the longest running, independently-owned Web development resource sites, we are excited to announce our 30 days of Web developer interviews. Each day during April, we will post an interview with a Web developer. The developer can work for a large company, a startup or be an indie. We are looking to interview a diverse set of Web developers from around the world.
If you are interested in participating, please send an email to allen =at= htmlcenter.com and include the following:
We expect a large volume of responses so only those who are selected will be notified. Thanks for your interest!
  |
Subscribe