Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
Monday, June 16th, 2008
Yes, this is supposed to be my Mute Monday post. But, I wanted to comment a little about it. This is an article put together by David Airey and featured in his blog under the title 5 Easy Steps to Build Trust Online. My advice would be to read through it and examine your business practices. Make sure you are doing your best to develop a reputation built on trust! Do you have any other good, solid tips on developing a trustworthy online presence? Let me know!
Popularity: 4%
Posted in Freelancing, Graphic Design, Internet, Web Designers | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
While this isn’t directly related to web design currently, it will affect us down the road with the technology advances it brings. It’s an interesting article. Here are some highlights. If you’d like to read the full article, you can check it out here.
“Scientists unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise. The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM’s Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world’s other supercomputers, according to IBM.
To put the computer’s speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today’s most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world’s 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.
The IBM and Los Alamos engineers worked six years on the computer technology.
The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. Although made from commercial parts, the computer consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines, and it has 80 terabytes of memory housed in 288 connected refrigerator-sized racks.
The cost: $100 million.
Turek said the computer in a two-hour test on May 25 achieved a “petaflop” speed of sustained performance, something no other computer had ever done. It did so again in several real applications involving classified nuclear weapons work this past weekend.
“This is a huge and remarkable achievement,” said Turek in a conference call with reporters.
A “flop” is an acronym meaning floating-point-operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. Only two years ago, there were no actual applications where a computer achieved 100 teraflops — a tenth of Roadrunner’s speed — said Turek, noting that the tenfold advancement came over a relatively short time.
The Roadrunner computer, now housed at the IBM research laboratory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., will be moved next month to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
But the computer — and more so the technology that it represents — marks a future for a wide range of other research and uses. “The technology will be pronounced in its employment across industry in the years to come,” predicted Turek, the IBM executive.”
Popularity: 3%
Posted in Design, Developers, Internet | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Microsoft is almost ready to release Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). The Beta version is available now for download here. I got it and played around with it and here is what I see.
It is pretty irritating that it is, again, not recognizing or translating the CSS just like when IE7 came out. The DIVs are all over the place. Can’t these people follow a standard of some sort? Do we, developers, really need to redesign our websites every time the browser manufacturers release a new browser version? I hope this stuff gets fixed when they release this thing. Ok, I got that off my chest, let’s get to the features of the new IE8.
Well, the coolest feature I see, that I will be using a lot is what’s called “Page Activities”. This allows you to Send a part of the page to your blog, define the selected word, map, pass the selection into Google search, send the selection to an email address and translate with Windows Live. All that by selecting a component on a page and select what you want to do with it.
I like the Map “Activity”. Here, in the image below, I am visiting a page with Restaurant listings. This one here shows the name of the restaurant, address and description.
If I wanted to see where, on the map, this address is located, before, I had to highlight the address and go to another page and paste the address into something like Google Maps. Here all I do is highlight the address.
As you highlight it you will notice a button with a green arrow show up. Click that button and you will get a menu of Activities that you can perform to this selection.
I select Map with Live Maps and a window appears that shows you the location on the map without having to leave the page. Awesome!!
The other cool feature of IE8 is called “Web Slices”. This enables users to subscribe to content directly within a web page. A good examlple is eBay. I want to be able to track a specific item. If anything changes on it, like bid or any kind of information, I want to know.
I happen to be in the market for an electric guitar so I do a search on ie8.ebay.com (a special IE8 enabled eBay page) for electric guitars. This is the list that it gives me. As I move my mouse over each item listed, a slight blue or purple border apears around the listing and a purple button shows up to the left of the item.
If you click the button, a confirmation box pops up to make sure you want to subscribe to this content.
Click Add and it adds a button in your favorites or links bar. The wording in this button will turn bold if there has been an update, you can easily see when something changed. Click the littel arrow on the right of the button and a box will display all the information from the item you subscribed for.
These are great little features but I really hope the functionality of the day to day browsing will not suffer from it. I hope they fix the CSS and JavaScript issues that are still around.
Have you tried IE8 yet? What did you see, what are the things you liked or disliked about it?
Popularity: 2%
Posted in Browsers, Internet | 1 Comment »
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Have you ever found yourself trying to remember lots of different things only to forget them later? I hate it when that happens. I’ve thought about carrying a mini voice recorder around to record thoughts, ideas, or a description of something that I saw, but it’s not practical. I often wonder how many things I ‘miss’ because I forget. As a web designer, it’s important to try and remember things that catch your eye or provide some sort of inspiration.
Evernote has come up with a clever way to assist people like me (and perhaps you too?). Evernote allows you to use your phone to record pictures, video or audio, it also allows you to capture information you have found on the Internet too. Once the information is captured, it makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime and from anywhere. Not bad!
So now, you can take a snapshot of a cool design, or record information you want to remember later on, and Evernote gives you the ability to retrieve it later on across multiple platforms. You can access the information from your desktop, phone, or Internet.
Check it out and let me know what you think of it. I’m going to give it a try.
**Also, I have to mention their logo as well. It’s a great, simple design. The elephant ties in perfectly with their tag line, “remember everything.” Elephants, excellent memories, they never forget…get it?! Anyhow, it’s a great logo. I hope Evermore catches on and finds itself useful to many, many people. It seems like a great idea.
Popularity: 4%
Posted in Internet, Logos, Resources, Tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
I found this article today at the SmallFuel Marketing Blog and it relates well to pretty much anyone who works over the Internet. The article is called “How to Get More Business by Commenting on Blogs.” I would encourage you to read it and glean some useful tips and ideas for your own business. I especially think that the section entitled “Targeting Your Market” is especially valuable for web designers. Check it out and let me know your thoughts!
Popularity: 3%
Posted in Internet, Making Money, Marketing | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Sound like a far fetched comparison? It did to me too at first! However, as I read the article, I began to appreciate the author’s ability to draw parallels between the two. When you get a chance, read the full article and let me know your thoughts on the author’s points. I would enjoy discussing them with you.
Popularity: 3%
Posted in Internet, Management, Websites | No Comments »
Monday, May 12th, 2008
Whether you freelance full or part time, it’s a great way to earn an income. However, there are certain guidelines that are good for every freelancer to remember. Freelance Switch has a great article called “26 Things that Could be Holding You Back from Freelance Success.” I encourage you to read the entire article. While every point may not be applicable for your particular situation, you may find a few points that are valuable to as you continue to work as a freelance designer.
Please let me know if you find a certain point very relevant. Perhaps we can expand on the point here at WDI and develop it into a larger article. Let us know!
Popularity: 4%
Posted in Graphic Design, Illustration, Internet, Making Money, Web Designers | No Comments »
Sunday, May 11th, 2008
It’s always nice to see a website get ‘refreshed and updated.’ However, when you are working on a client’s site redesigning and redeveloping portions of it, take into account the ten mistakes listed in this valuable article found at Devlounge. Do your best to make sure you don’t fall victim to one of these common pitfalls when putting your client’s redesigned website back into the public arena!
Popularity: 2%
Posted in Design, Internet, Web Designers | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you still have to respect Google and you should be willing to learn from them too. So, with that in mind, here’s some interesting information I found on their site. This is listed under ‘Our Philosophy’ and is entitled ‘10 things Google has found to be true.’ Here are the 10 things:
Focus on the user and all else will follow.
It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
Fast is better than slow.
Democracy on the web works.
You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
You can make money without doing evil.
There’s always more information out there.
The need for information crosses all borders.
You can be serious without a suit.
Great just isn’t good enough.
While not every single one of these points are applicable to every web design situation that comes up, they are still good points to ponder. Google has some in-depth explanation attached to each of these points on their own website. I would encourage you to read through them if you haven’t done so in the past. It’s a good idea to take a look at how a huge company (who pretty much affects the way every website on the Internet functions) operates and what drives them.
Popularity: 2%
Posted in Design, Internet | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Jacob Gube over at SixRevisions.com recently posted an an article with 7 excellent tools for evaluating the effectiveness of a website’s design. The tools he suggests are great for optimizing and analyzing a web pages layout. The thing that caught my eye about the article is that not only do these tools test the function of the content, they also review the ease of navigation, page loading, etc.
I’d encourage you to read Jacob’s entire article. While you may not use every one of the seven tools listed there, you may find one that meets a specific need for your web design services.
Popularity: 11%
Posted in Design, Internet, Layouts, Tools, Web Designers | 1 Comment »
