Post Archive

› March 29, 2005

Are E-mail Newsletters Still Effective?

The simple process of sending out a periodical e-mail newsletter to a list of subscribers has been around for a long time. It's also an easy way to gauge how many people are interested in your product.

But with the current flood of e-mails in people's inboxes, the newsletter has the potentional to become lost in the pile of spam. The incoming newsletter might even get flagged as spam.

We also know that people don't read, they scan.

However, with today's popular technologies such as RSS feeds and Blogroll services, people can stay updated about your product almost instantly.

So do newsletters still play an important role in today's interweb, or has it become an obsolete marketing tool?

Creating panoramas with hugin and enblend

8 pictures There are probably other (and better) tools for stitching pictures or creating panoramas, but anyway: here's a small writeup about how you can use hugin and enblend to do the job. [Note: the setup described here works on WinXP; installation instructions for other platforms can be found on the pages linked to below.]

First, take pictures with a 40-50% overlap. Using a tripod gives better results, but is not necessary. As my example will show, it is a bad idea to include both background and foreground objects. The pile of photos on the left gives you a (Picasa morphed) idea of the ones I made from the walking deck of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe.

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› March 18, 2005

DOM-Scripted Lists, Revisited

Speaking of speaking of javascript that enhances websites without complicating markup, harming accessibility, or even posing degradation problems, here is my own contribution. Following up on a brief article I wrote a few years ago, this expandable list implementation shores up a lot of the shortcomings of its predecessor. I tried to distill the concept of an expandable unordered list down to its simplest form, while still maintaining flexibility. I discuss some of the design decisions I made in the accompanying article, DOM-Scripted Lists, Revisited.

› March 17, 2005

More transparent javascript

Speaking of javascript that enhances websites without complicating markup, harming accessibility, or even posing degradation problems, check out Mike West here, here, and here, as he discusses the proper role of script-fu in our sites and web apps.

› March 16, 2005

Opera 8 beta 3 for Windows

So, the small Norwegian company releases another Beta. It's been some time since I last posted some substantial browser news here, and this release from Opera is worth a mention. Of all the browser development, Opera is the one I follow closest, because right now that's the browser where we see most changes happening. Let me list some of the things that has changed since the last Opera version I talked about, Opera 8 beta 1 (those that were in beta 2 will be marked so):

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Nifty Corners

Great discoveries and write-up by Alessandro Fulciniti in Nifty Corners: rounded corners without images. This is an English translation of an article written for the Italian site http://pro.html.it/.

The idea here is that CSS and some empty b tags are used to render rounded corners at the pixel level without graphics. What makes this interesting is that since it's purely decorative, relying on javascript to render the b tags, thereby removing any trace of markup clutter, seems easily justified. Clean markup and the lack of image load (background, masking or otherwise) makes this quick loading. Check out the detailed explanation and examples in Alessandro's tutorial, you might get as excited to try it as I am.

› March 14, 2005

HTML Validator Firefox extension

First, you needed to visit the W3C markup validation service in order to validate your web pages. Then, there were validation bookmarklets and the web developer toolbar. And a while ago, Nate reported on Ben Hammersley's XHTML Validator to RSS tool, which turned validation into a passive business—just having a peek at the relevant RSS feed now and then was enough.

The HTML Validator extension for Firefox (and Mozilla) makes life even better: instant validation of all pages you visit. Be sure to give it a try.

Microformats

After learning all about the microcformat concepts as explained by Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik at SXSW today, my head is all abuzz with ideas. A one second summary: informally formalizing small bits of markup that others can adopt and improve. Examples mentioned were hcard, hcalendar, vote links, and more, but the potential seems vast. Here's what I like about it:

  • Puts the "eXtensible" in XHTML by using the "rel" attribute and classes, and not introducing new stuff that won't validate
  • Democracy - it wont' fly if it isn't popular, which is true regardless of if you take that into account, and in my opinion the failure fulcrum for a great many techy concepts.
  • Informal evolution - many revisions breeds best results over time, but good results immediately
  • Tangentally shares the benefits we see from Dan Cederholm's simplequizes, exploration of the best markup choices for a given content type
  • Can be used now, simple by design, made for humans, modular

It was also pointed out that there is a tight potential relationship between the usefulness of these informally standardized ways of creating markup and the CSS that could be used to style such things. All of this makes me think that having an easy to reference, and logically organized library of such micro-formats and CSS "themes" to go with them could be quite a useful resource.

› March 12, 2005

A standards/CSS link dump

A bit of a standards/CSS link dump to make up for the lack of recent posts

› March 10, 2005

Nate at SXSW

Going to SXSW? Win free iTunes music by finding me.

› March 9, 2005

Congratulations Arturo

A quick congratulations goes to Web-Graphics author Arturo for winning the Airbag Ledger Paper logo contest. Nice work!

› March 8, 2005

Article at EMLlabs about FlashVars

Understand the basics of how to send variables to a flash piece, and how to make use of those variables, and you've got a powerful and useful little bit of the Flash universe in your hands. "Dynamic Content: No Middleware Required - Using FlashVars to make simple content changes" is a nice intro into the subject.

And on another note, while you're all hyped up on Flash, don't forget to check-in with Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) - the ingenious non-intrusive flash/javascript way to show headlines with your favorite font and flash player aliasing. Mike Davidson and the folks working hard on sIFR recently upgraded it to a 2.0 (rc4) release.

› March 3, 2005

Flickr and Photo Licensing

Green Layers by nospuds By now you're probably heard of Flickr, you might even have a free or pro account setup, and, if you're like myself and many others, you might enjoy the service immensely. So this post is about the photo licensing options within Flickr, which I think are worth noting, and in most cases - changing from the default setting.

The default setting for any photo uploaded into Flickr is "All Rights Reserved", this of course makes sense for folks new to the system. You, however might be a more accomplished Flickr user, uploading sometimes high-quality snaps from your digital camera, snaps that often would make great stock photos. Why not share those snaps? Flickr has folded the Creative Commons system into the administration interface, so you can apply a default license to all new photos you upload, and you can even modify all previously uploaded photos at once. You can choose from six licenses with differing permissions, by going to "Your Account", and finding the "Photo Licensing" link under the "Photo Settings" header. You can also set licensing for individual photos by finding the "licensing" link, near the stats for that photo.

Next step, join the Stock Repository group, and shoot your favorite photos to the group. That's where I found the photo you see here in this post, "Green layers", by nospuds, which he released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 license.

The bottom line: check out your license settings, you might be open to letting folks use your photos - everyone benefits.