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Blogs » Archive for September, 2007
User testing in Second Life
Oz-IA ran over the weekend in Sydney and it was a fantastic event.
There were some really interesting presentations, and while I didn’t get to all of them, without doubt the most interesting for me was User Research in Virtual Worlds, a presentation I highlighted earlier as being one I wanted to see.
Gary Bunker and Gabriele Hermansson, both from Hyro, spoke for close to an hour about their experiences in setting up and running an experimental focus group within Second Life.
Now that virtual worlds (such as SecondLife and World of Warcraft) are becoming vastly more popular, Hyro set out to build a research platform that would allow us to research users within those worlds, not only for their experiences there but also for their needs outside of it. We wanted to know if we could use virtual research – focus groups, interviews and user testing – in a practical way in design projects requiring complex user input. We also wanted to understand how user behavior would change between real-world and virtual forums.
Going into the presentation I was somewhat skeptical about how they might have conducted the evaluation, but by the end of the session I was really very …
SitePoint at Web Directions South & Webjam
The Australian web community is buzzing ahead of the Web Directions South conference in Sydney later this week. As usual, a contingent of friendly and fun-loving folks from SitePoint HQ will be attendance. Also as usual, we’re hiring!
If you’ll be at the conference, be sure to say “Hi!” to Lucas Chan, Matt Magain, Andrew Krespanis, or myself when you see us. We’ll be the pale guys in blue and orange. Oh, and watch out for a fun SitePoint freebie in your conference bag!
If you can’t make it (it’s in Sydney, Australia, after all!), be sure to watch SitePoint for extensive coverage from the event!
Wherever you are, we hope you’ll be cheering us on when they announce the winner of this year’s McFarlane Prize, for which SitePoint has been shortlisted.
No, SitePoint won’t be giving away free drinks at the closing night party this year, but read on if that’s your cup of … erm … long island iced tea!
Webjam
Of course, Web Directions South isn’t the only reason to be in Sydney this week! The day after the conference, SitePoint is sponsoring Webjam, where a bunch of web developers gather to show off their latest projects in …
3 Things About Cookies You May Not Know
If you’re ever stuck wondering why Live HTTP Headers and Firebug are telling you your “Cookie:” request headers don’t match the “Set-Cookie:” response headers you’ve just been sent, here’s a couple of points and gotchas worth remembering:
- A cookie can only be overwritten (or deleted) by a subsequent cookie exactly matching the name, path and domain of the original cookie. Even though a cookie with domain “.example.org” set by www.example.org is perfectly valid, it will not overwrite a previous cookie of the same name which was set against “www.example.org”. Instead, both cookies will be stored, and on subsequent requests only one will be sent.
- If multiple cookies of the same name match a given request URI, one is chosen by the browser.
The more specific the path, the higher the precedence. However precedence based on other attributes, including the domain, is unspecified, and may vary between browsers. This means that if you have set cookies of the same name against “.example.org” and “www.example.org”, you can’t be sure which one will be sent back. - The HTTP state object is called a cookie for no compelling reason according to the preliminary specification from Netscape.
SitePoint shortlisted for best Australian web site
The SitePoint Design Contests site has been shortlisted in the McFarlane Prize, which rewards excellence in web design by Australian web professionals.
I know that our development team have put in an enormous number of hours, factored in tons of user feedback to improve the usability, and really pushed the limits of how accessible a site displaying content from thousands of different users can be. See the SitePoint development blog and Lachlans’s previous post for a glimpse at what has gone into this development effort.
The winner of the McFarlane Prize will be announced at the Web Directions South conference in Sydney later this week.
Congratulations to all of the shortlisted sites!
Jeanne Jennings Speaking at ClickZ Email Marketing Conference
Jeanne Jennings, email marketing guru and author of SitePoint’s The Email Marketing Kit, will be speaking at ClickZ’s event, ClickZ Specifics: E-mail Marketing, next Tuesday October 2nd at the Hilton in New York City.
“ClickZ Specifics: E-mail Marketing” is an intensive, one-day event designed to educate, inspire, and instill confidence in anyone using e-mail to communicate with their customers and prospects.
If you’re looking to get to grips with email marketing, grab yourself a ticket today!
Databinding Protips Part 1: DataBinding 101
Basic hints and tips about using declarative databinding.
How to Boost Your Ad Revenue 70-110%, Automatically!
Did you know Google AdSense allows for 9 billion different layout/size/color combinations of its ad units? Do you know which one is the best for your site, or for that matter, which ad network will make you the most money at any point during the day?
PubMatic, a new service that just launched in “Alpha Mode”, will help you answer those questions by dynamically optimizing the ad space on your site.
Currently they work with Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, ValueClick, and Komli — and they are planning on adding additional ad networks in the future.
As part of the Alpha launch, they are looking to recruit 100 innnovative publishers. If they can replicate their early results, this could be boon to publishers everywhere who continually struggle to find and optimize their ad inventory across multiple networks.
And the Inaugural ‘Electric Floor’ Award goes to…
Gee, aren’t floors great? All flat and clean and smooth, they do a faultless job of preventing us from plunging headlong into the voids beneath them — a particularly useful trick in multi-story buildings.
It’s interesting to reflect that, although the wonders of electricity have been available for over 100 years, no one has ever sought to improve the humble floor by making it totally dependent on electric power to operate.
Floors that disappeared or collapsed whenever the power was cut — even if that was only occasionally — would be inconvenient, to say the least! While electricity has often been used to improve the usability of our floors by heating, cooling or lighting them better, no floor would ever cease its basic operations without the presence of electricity.
With this in mind, isn’t it remarkable that large, successful, multinational corporations can build the foundations of their online headquarters on a technology — in this case, JavaScript — that may or may not be available to their users. Disabling JavaScript completely disables the fundamental operations of these sites just as surely as would removing the floor from the company’s real-world lobby.
So, without further ado, I’m pleased …
PNG8 - The Clear Winner
I ran through this little Fireworks PNG trick in the Design View this morning and thought it was worth dropping in a blog post too. This is a method that’s been around for years, but I’m constantly surprised by how many people don’t know about it. Even in this office, I’ve had web gurus furrowing their brows and insisting “No, no … that can’t be right … can it?”
So, at the risk of having long-time Fireworks users yawn, roll their eyes and think duh!, here it is.
As you probably already know, PNG comes in two flavors — 8-bit and 32-bit. It’s the 32-bit version that gets most of the fanfare.
PNG32’s major characteristics are:
- It uses a flexible “JPEG-like” RGB color model, rather than a limited palette as GIF does.
- It employs a completely lossless compression method, allowing you to save and resave your image with no loss of quality.
- Lossless compression does come at some cost — PNG images are always much fatter than their JPEG equivalents.
- It can reproduce complex, graded transparency settings, similar to a PSD or TIF file.
Of course, Microsoft’s scant regard for the PNG spec (authored way back in 1996) meant that …
Web Design Business Kit 2.0
It’s hard to believe it’s been 3-years since the release of Brendon Sinclair’s “The Web Design Business Kit”, with it’s 14-pounds of glory and retro-orange cover design.
Since then, we’ve amassed 18 pages of customer reviews, and many more emails, from all corners of the planet. Among these, were many suggestions for a 2nd edition, as well as more than a few questions asking for advice.
With this in mind, early this year we commenced work on updating the kit to answer the most common questions, and provide the most requested documents (contracts!). After many months of work, and more than a few late nights for Brendon Sinclair (the author), we’re happy to announce “The Web Design Business Kit 2.0″.
What’s new in the 2nd edition?
Four New Chapters:
- Outsourcing For Great Profits
- Delight Your Clients
- Dealing With Those Pesky Clients
- Business Legalities
Five new lawyer-written contracts:
- Design Contract
- Hosting Contract
- Support Contract
- Ongoing Marketing Contract
- Confidentiality Contract
… and of course, 509-pages of advice on finding, selling, and keeping clients, 182 pages of time-tested documents, and a CDROM containing all the documents & spreadsheets in editable format.
Download your free sample chapters here.
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