blog.rightreading.com

Google Wave, currently in beta, seems to be an effort to combine an online document feature (Google Docs) with a live chat feature (Google Chat). Contacts can collaborate on documents in real time. I haven’t tried it yet, and I wonder if the simultaneous live editing feature doesn’t get a little chaotic.
Anyway, I have a [...]

Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole recently released an interesting Wordpress theme called Basic Maths. Like Vinh’s own blog, Subtraction (which the new theme somewhat resembles), Basic Maths aggressively foregrounds the underlying design grid. In fact, you can even hit a shortcut key combination to superimpose the grid over the blog as you’re working on it.

Recently Wired magazine asked a group of designerz to reenvision Craigslist. According to Wired, “Visitors arriving at craigslist are confronted by a confusing homepage cluttered with links most people will never click on. Overall, the user interface is in dire need of an organizing principle that guides you to the details you seek while filtering [...]

Seattle-based design/branding firm Methodologie (not sure why they use the French term) have created a useful guide to web canvas size. As you may be able to see from the above detail, they estimate that everyone on the web can see a 760 x 640 px screen without scrolling, that 92 percent can do the [...]

The blog of the museum for which I do publications recently appeared on a list of “100 best curator and museum blogs.” The list was attributed to someone named Emily Thomas at onlineuniversities.com. That was nice, but there was no explanation who Emily Thomas is or how the list was arrived at, and a visit [...]

Which search engine gives the best results? Sure, Google’s by far the most popular and has the largest infrastructure. And there could be interface preferences to take into account. But just in terms of sheer relevance of results, which is best?

I mentioned earlier that I was working on a blog for the Asian. I’m sure it will continue to evolve and get refined as we figure what works and what doesn’t, but we have now announced the blog, and there is more and more content going up, including:

Education director Deb Clearwaters on tea master Sen [...]

I’ve been setting up a blog for the Asian Art Museum.  We’ve been putting up a little content but haven’t announced it yet, so I’m kind of letting the cat out of the bag with this post — consider it a special private preview for Right Reading readers.
Maybe one of those readers can help me [...]

I have been busy constructing an index to my 7 Junipers site, which is devoted to Asian Art and Culture. The index in process is accessed via one of the site’s navigation tabs. Tag clouds are often seen in sidebars, but I think they work better as pages. At 7J I made a brief post [...]

Here’s a cool thing. I received an e-mail yesterday from Dave Kellam, someone I didn’t know. An excerpt:
Just found your blog today, via India Amos. I’m an aspiring book designer, and it’s been fun poking through your site. One of the posts linked to another post (http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/09/03/wordpress-plugin-wanted/) about wanting a WP plugin. I’ve created a few [...]

Today’s guest post at ForeWord Magazine is about how book publishers can increase traffic to their websites.
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Over the past several days at least four of my blogs have been producing “error establishing a database connection” messages. This has been caused by server-wide loss of the mysql database connection at my host, midphpase, who claims the problem is now fixed. For how long, who knows? (Html pages, like my top-level home, rightreading.com, [...]

This is probably pretty easy if you know what you’re doing, but it’s not easy for me.
What I want is to call up today’s date in the format month+day, make that the anchor text for a link, and assign a particular link to each day of the year (perhaps calling the links from a table). [...]

It has long been accepted that hotlinking is an evil practice that steals the bandwidth of others. And indeed it is a free bandwidth ride, and one that hardly ever is accompanied by credit for the originator of the image. So there is a kind of malicious satisfaction in changing the hotlinked image to something [...]

This is post that will be of interest only to WordPress bloggers. Fernando Briano, a programmer based in Uruguay, has created a simple WordPress plugin that produces a list of posts by category. You can adjust the number of items shown, but the adjustment is global — it would be nice to be able to [...]

Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” Words that appear more often are presented more prominently. The site will make word clouds from text that you provide or from urls or even from a del.icio.us user’s tags. It’s so pointless it almost becomes interesting.
What if some well-known American writers [...]

DoFollow: it was a noble experiment. But it brought me a lot of thin or spam comments that benefited no one. I spent a fair amount of time either deleting these or agonizing about whether they had a shred of content and should be spared.

A little self-promotion here, tinged with a bit of nostalgia for the early days of the web. Blog.rightreading.com readers might not have chanced upon my Book of Days, over at the html wing of this site. This site’s origins go back to December 1994 when we launched the website of Mercury House, the book publishing [...]

According to Jacob Nielsen, in a post of nearly 500 words, such as this one, readers can be expected to spend an average of about 45 seconds on the page, an amount of time in which they might read some 187 words, or less than three-eighths of the content.
In a study called “Not Quite the [...]

A website called Books Written By is documenting authors’ sites on the web. It has assembled screenshots of many writers’ websites; the screenshots link to the sites themselves (although it takes a couple of clicks to get there from the main page).
It’s a good idea, nicely executed. While some of the authors represented are not [...]