I was greeted with the first part of the title today when I click on a Goggle link for “Discussing: A Better Image Rotator: A List Apart”. Was it because there was a page or script error? Did someone forget to do redirects? I’m not sure, but It looks as if the content has either moved or been removed. In either case as the W3C says, “Choose URIs wisely”.”Few things are more annoying than going to your favorite shop and seeing that the shop has closed or moved without giving its new location… The shop owner may have had a lot of good reasons to do this, but invariably the cause for this unpleasant situation is lack of good planning and management.”rnSame goes for Web resources… “W3C Tip of the day, Choose URIs wisely”””Since I learned of the …

With AJAX and other asynchronous web applications right around the corner, the question we must ask ourselves as designers is – how are we going to move our interfaces towards a more user-centric paradigm (which is fully supported by these emerging technologies)? “The web is changing, and it will come in several phases. The first step is already going on with site likes Flickr, Google Maps, and Del.icio.us which offer personal and community functionality. These AJAX based web apps are some the best sites to ever hit the web. Still, as far as presentation goes, you’re still not seeing the next generation of websites. As Emily Chang from Artcodes states, “For me, the promise of a “new” web technology is the ability to 1) simplify my life as a blogger/web publisher/content producer and 2) to enable my site visitors …

There are many CMS downloads out there however, as a designer I find many of them hard to use and sometime nearly impossible to style. Read on because relief is on the way.”MuraveyWeb is here and it’s free for the downloading. When you look at the demo it may not look like much but, it is built on the Ruby on Rails web framework, and for an early release has quite a bit of functionality. Dmitry V. Sabanin is the author of this app and his intention is a lofty one. “”His aim is to develop a system where a developer can focus on information architecture, user experience and the styling of the site. Over the next week I’ll be testing the system and let you know how it goes. rn

Search boxes and results seem to be a natural extension of the capabilities inherent to AJAX. If your blog is running Movable Type (MT), I found a great example of how to implement an inline search using AJAX, complete with a progress bar and same page search results. “Jeff Watkins wrote a great AJAX web app to display your search box, and results in a hidden div which slides down when you hit the search button at the top of the page. I found this to be a very good use of in-page AJAX. The reader doesn’t have to go to another page to see the search results and they see the progress bar which gives them an indication that the search is taking place. Additionally, having the search box hidden at the page leaves more room for at the …

In the latest article from Blogma, “Doing the Mambo over open source” by News.com’s executive editor Mike Ricciuti, Max was quoted in the Blog community response section at the bottom of the article.rn

Max Kiesler and Ideacodes have been invited to Microsoft Search Champs v4 to take place in Redmond at Microsoft HQ from January 24-26.rn

Have you ever gone to a website from your favorite search engine looking for some information you need only to find it, and the text is unreadable? Low contrast websites have gone from the realm of art and design sites to the mainstream at an alarming rate. “As a web designer for nine years, I have seen many web design trends take off and die. I’m hoping low contrast design takes the latter path. As a designer, I never thought I would go the way of Nielsen, but readers do go to websites for the content. If they cannot read it, they will leave. Or worse yet, they have to copy the content from your webpage and paste it into a text editor so they can read it. “”This construct is particularly prevalent in tableless CSS websites. My guess is …

How would you like to work for several years on a volunteer basis developing an open source product only to be thrown off the project for another case of corporate greed? I recently opened an email from the Web Standards Group to find out that Mambo will have a very different face in the coming days. “Unfortunately, Miro the Australian company who holds the rights to Mambo has decided to take control of the future development goals out of the hand of the core developers and try to turn it into a profit-making venture. “”If you’ve seen the Corporation you’ll know this is because corporations only exist to make a profit and this is what drives all of their decisions. This is a classic case of corporate greed.”rnWhat can you do about this injustice? Stop using Mambo and stop …

How would you like to automatically ping 49 services from your blog’s control panel with one click? I found a new ping service today will do just that.”I was searching Technorati this morning for ways to ping more sites, and came across an article at Web Traffic Ideas on a new ping service called Pingoat. I did a post and received almost all of the pings immediately. “rnKing Ping and Pingomatic are great services for blog promotion however, the new kid on the block is Pingoat and they will increase your pings by over fifty percent if you currently use King Ping or Pingomatic. While Ping-O-Matic and King Ping only cover 20 and 18 services respectively, Pingoat will ping 49 services at one time! Pingoat also makes your posting easier by supporting XML-RPC pings. This means you can add Pingoat’s …

How would you like to decrease the load time of your bloated CSS file by up to 85% in less than five minutes?””I recently found a link to fiftyfoureleven.com and their great article, ”The Definitive Post on Gzipping your CSS. When I saw this the first time I almost fell out of my chair with excitement. The dream is real — you really can cut the load time of your CSS file by more than half with just a few lines of code — and you don’t need a computer science degree to do it. What do you need?  Either PHP or Apache. If PHP and Apache don’t make any sense to you then hang on for a few days as I’ll be posting a how-to of my own that expands on these for newbies.  If PHP and Apache aren’t …