Archive for March, 2007
Mar
23
2007
at 10:57am
I was starting to think this trend was over, but then I came across a couple of sites today that have some of the worst cases of tiny text I’ve encountered in quite awhile.
Please, stop making your font sizes so miniscule that nobody can read them properly! I could increase my font size in my browser (zoom in in Opera) but you shouldn’t have to make me do that. It’s annoying and I’m lazy. For many sites I’ve even had to build user stylesheets just so I don’t have to keep increasing the font size every time I visit. My opinion is that font sizes should always be set just a little bit smaller than the browser default size (between 80-90% of normal, depending on the typeface. Both of the examples linked above use Trebuchet, which needs to be bigger). This works well for a normal range of screen resolutions. If people like them larger or smaller they can change their browser preferences.
Even the W3C agrees with me.
So quit it 
(Just as I was posting this I came across a post on YouMoz demonstrating that when tested, page views actually increased when the font size was set a little larger. This site was targetting seniors but I think the same could be true for other age groups as well.)
Posted in Accessibility, Usability | 5 Comments »
Mar
22
2007
at 10:38am
In the old days, webmasters would compromise content and usability to fit in more keywords and better “optimize” their sites (see the first diagram in that aritlce). Now we are looking at compromising our content and usability to better target linkers and therefore search results. Is this a good thing??? (Check the long comment by “identity” towards the bottom). I have seen some sites that are obviously attempting to cater to the digg crowd and, to be honest, I find it really annoying.
Read more…
Posted in Design, General, Marketing/SEO/Monetization | No Comments »
Mar
16
2007
at 4:50pm
I’m finally able to use my new laptop! It took forever for Liam to get the latest version of Ubuntu downloaded and installed, and all my files copied over and everything. Well, I guess I should backtrack a bit.
Originally we had ordered a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed. The first laptop we wanted had just been purchased by someone else. So then we asked for our second choice, a 14″ Lenovo. When it came in stock at the shop it turned out to be a French laptop! I thought this might be okay but then they sent me a photo of the keyboard and man, French keyboards are really different! I’m a touch typer so I need things to be in the usual places. Finally we settled on a 15″ Acer Aspire 5602 (1.66 Intel Duo processor, 1GB ram, 120GB hard drive).
Read more…
Posted in General | No Comments »
Mar
15
2007
at 7:51pm
We’ve got two new articles up at A Padded Cell, both by me:
11 Practical Reasons to use CSS for Layout – the “semantics” approach is lost on so many people. Hopefully a different approach will help.
and
7 Things all Webmasters Need to Know about SEO – it continues to surprise me how little webmasters know about search engines!
The overabundance of numbered list headlines is unfortunate. I admit it. That’s just what seemed to be best for these articles. We won’t continue to write this many lame digg-bait style headlines, I promise. There will also be more articles by people other than me (I hope!). Liam is writing some 
If you are interested in writing for us please take a look at our contribute page.
Posted in General | No Comments »
Mar
13
2007
at 4:19am
I had originally written this post for this site but I decided to try posting it at YouMoz instead. In case you’re not familiar with it, YOUmoz is the user-generated component of the SEOmoz site (my favourite search/marketing blog!). My article on search terms was posted today:
Search Words vs. Company Words: Targeting Long-tail Searches
Enjoy!
P.S. My new laptop is here!! Well, it’s at home with Liam right now. I let him open it while I’m at work. Will post about that later
Posted in Marketing/SEO/Monetization, Writing | No Comments »
Mar
09
2007
at 9:39pm
I am considering using a wordpress plugin that would help me track my feeds. This plugin only offers full text RSS feeds. I’ve been a little wary of full text because I’ve heard about problems with people scraping content. There is a further discussion of this problem here and here.
I’m not quite sure what I want to do about this. I know I do want to do something different with the feed. It’s pretty crappy right now - all it has is a broken-off piece of the first paragraph and a bare url link to the post. Not so nice.
What do you think? Would you like it if I had a full text feed instead? I can’t imagine there are more than 3 people subscribed to my feed (pathetic, isn’t it?) , but I still want to make you happy :) It sounds like most people on other sites prefer full feeds. I tend to prefer partial sometimes, just because I like going to the site and I tend not to when there’s a full feed. On the other hand, there is a lot of content I would probably never read if the authors didn’t offer a full text feed.
I am starting to come around to offering a full text feed istead of partial. What I need now is more people reading (and linking to!) my content, not any side benefits that might come from visitng the actual site. I don’t have any advertsing here anyway so I’m not bothered about that.
By the way, if you know of any other good RSS plugins for WordPress please let me know.
Posted in General | 3 Comments »
