Fifteen years ago, I was sweating in a big room with no power. Four Winds was an island, isolated by flooding to the south and construction to the north. The fact that any of our friends made it to our wedding that day is a miracle, though it still comes in second to Amy saying, “I do.” One of the products of this marriage is a 7-year-old named Carter. He occasionally has some things to say.
Chris Farley as Captain Kirk
In honor of Evil Spock’s one-year anniversary as a blogger, I went with a Star Trek theme while testing out Fuzzwich’s mini-vid movie site. The short little tribute film pits two characters, Captain Kirk and Abraham Lincoln, in a Chris Farley moment about their original series episode together in 1969.
Run, don’t walk to Walk, don’t search
If I could imagine a search tool that combined what I love about complex networks and HCI, the tool AltSearchEngines highlighted today would be pretty close. With a gorgeous interface that is fun to use, Walk2Web is a new way to explore web sites from a specified starting point.
Our next contestant …
The perks to living in a Web 2.0 world is that anyone can enter and sometimes you win. When AltSearchEngines announced an essay contest for this week—seeking suggestions on how the 100 best alternate search engines could collectively up their market share to 7%—I realized how many challenges have come through the pipes recently.
Card Sort via Web
Most ideas are a Google search away from finding someone else who already thought of it enough to build a tool to share. At the start of the summer, I was thinking it would be great to have an interactive card sorting tool that would allow me to solicit input on grouping, prioritizing and categorization from people I would have to travel hundreds of miles to see. Thanks to a mid-summer tip from Tyler, enter OptimalSort.
Back to School
“We talk when the teachers believe we are working.”
TuningSchmuning
One of my summer goals was to get our web sites tuned up a bit, fixing the design issues that were almost corrected before my hard drive crash swallowed them whole. Helping the site analysis is YSlow, a browser plug-in for Firefox by Yahoo! that analyzes pages for speed and offers performance improvement recommendations. Checking the W3C validator, though, there’s quite a bit of coding to clean up before classes resume.