BoofleBlog

www.dontclick.it is annoying as hell. The link is making its way around right now, and it’s an interesting experiment on how user interface design might work.

One of the things you can do at their site (if you can figure out how) is look at people’s mouse movements when they first come to the site. Without exception, it looks like people just sit stunned for a while as they try to figure out where to not-click.

The idea of a web page that doesn’t require a complete reload to display new information is appealing, but that can be done without giving up clicking. I’m just not seeing the benefit — we have a useful convention for how to navigate things on our computer screens — why on earth would we want to change it for no purpose?

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I need a pair of plugins to make Wordpress the perfect tool for our corporate intranet:

1. Upload files with new posts.
2. Color picker for writing posts (using a <span color="xxx"/> tag.

Who will write these plugins? Will it be (gasp) me?

Edited 11-June-05:

I’ve found a nice WYSIWYG plugin so the color-picker isn’t a problem. I’ve hacked the post.php file almost beyond recognition and now have a button on the Edit forms which allows the user to add a file. The html for the link is dumped right into the page content. I haven’t made it into a plugin because I just don’t think all of the hooks I need are available.

Edited 23-January-06:

The new version of Wordpress (2.0) has built-in fie uploading.  The color picker isn’t available in the basic built-in WYSIWYG editor, but since 2.0 breaks my customizations, I won’t be using it for work anyhow.

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This seems so obvious, and yet…

If you’re looking for a job, Google yourself before you send out any resumes. Google both your name and your email address. Trust me when I say that potential employers will do this before they bring you in for an interview and you want to be sure that you know more about yourself than the employer does.

You might also consider Googling any other information on your resume that the employer might look up (the name of the small company that you used to work for, for instance, or the obscure programming language that you claimed proficiency in).

I’ve been involved with doing interviews lately, and I’m stunned that candidates are surprised that we know something about them before they come in.

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If your pc runs Windows, you should be using Firefox.

1. Internet Explorer makes you more vulnerable than Firefox. Firefox may have just as many holes in its security as IE (though I doubt it), but because fewer people use it, fewer nasty people target those holes.
2. Tabbed browsing is really cool. If you’re like me (you’re probably not, but just pretend for a minute), you usually have several websites open at once. You’re reading an article which has a link to another article and you know you want to read both. My solution was to right-click and say Open in New Window. Then I had two copies of Internet Exploder running. With each extra article, I’d have more and more open windows and less and less sanity. With Firefox, you can elect to open pages in new tabs, so they’re all in one program and much easier to find.
3. Extensions rock!Firefox’s programmers made it easy to write programs which work with Firefox to improve your surfing experience.
4. Firefox squashes pop-ups. Internet Explorer has gotten better about stopping pop-ups, but Firefox is the absolute champ. There’s also a plugin to block banner ads so that you never have to see them again.
5. Google search is built right in. There’s a little search box, always available, which launches a Google search. No more going to Google and typing. No, no. That extra click is just more time than we’re willing to waste.
6. Live bookmarks are neat, even if you don’t bother with them. This is something that’s on the list because it’s cool, not because I find it useful. For those web-savvy folks out there who know what RSS is and who read syndicated pages, you can bookmark a feed and have the list of recent posts displayed when you click the bookmark. It’s neat, but I’d rather just use Bloglines.

Now that I’ve convinced you to use Firefox, let’s take a look at some of the best extensions:

• Adblock hides ads on webpages
• IEView lets you right-click to open a link in Internet Explorer (for the handful of sites which work better with IE)
• Tabbrowser Preferences let you have tighter control of your tabbed viewing
• ImageZoom lets you zoom in on images without having to save them first
• FoxyTunes gives you controls for your media player inside the browser — no more clicking around just to replay the last song.

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