February 2006

Yet again, being a music lover and all….I am sucked in to another online community. But Last.fm is different than others such as: Myspace, Facebook etc etc etc…forever.

This one doesn’t take 2 minutes trying to load someone’s crappy songs through some flash applet like Myspace. Man I hate that.

Last.fm has a beautiful layout and design. I’m no fan of pink mind you, but I think their colorscheme is excellent. It’s easy on the eyes, and for the most part (even though they keep adding features) it is a pretty manageable site. At first you have to do some searching around through all the text links to find your messages, favorite tags, neighbours etc but once you know where they are, it’s not hard.

Another feature that I know Andy loves is the recommendations based on what you listen to. They have music and reading (based on peoples’ posts) recommendations.

Another feature I found just tonight was my over all played albums. It actually shows all the album art ( see picture). Its pulling in from Amazon and it is really cool.

This isn’t the most relevant post, but I just wanted to let everyone know who hasn’t heard of it yet. Go check out Last.fm and use their RSS posting tools to post the latest tracks you’ve listened to on your site. Like we have on our sidebar. Or how I have on my site.

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I cannot believe Scoble single handedly created the top searched phrase on technorati today.

It’s funny brrreeeport beats out the Cheney news, the Olympics, and any other real news.

Now that’s power.

Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger ? Brrreeeport report

technorati tags: brrreeeport, internet, blog

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Not so many months ago a quick ray of light blinded the www and mainly the web standards community… new, smart and innovative uses of screen real estate. A perfect example of this can be found in Powazek’s footer. He even wrote a little article on it.

I recently changed jobs and am now working for a design firm as a graphic designer. Screen real estate is very important. Especially when building corporate websites. Once I walked through the doors on my first day, I was reminded of this once again…..and again….and again. Which makes perfect sense.

“Above the fold” is a term I now use and live by which means keeping the bulk of the content , especially the most important, above the 420px mark. Which means that ‘above the fold’ is assuming that everyone viewing a website has their screen resolution set to 800px X 600px.

This is done to keep the site as accessible as possible for the most possible viewers, even though others might have a higher resolution set. This way, by default, everyone can still view the most pertinent information, without having to scroll for days. And when you add in the navigational bars and tool bars that browsers have, there is even less real estate available.

I particularly have one large monitor. My resolution is set very high (1680x1050px). Therefore I have tons of real estate, which might make this seem bias. However, I agree with Derek. I think that if not now, sometime in the next generation of web design and development, as the way we build and perceive websites, real estate will be thought of differently. And on top of that, it will (hopefully) be thought of differently in a good way, by clients and everyday visitors alike.

If I put myself in a client’s shoes, I would want all my content (logo, slogan, about us blurb, navigation, etc etc) all as close to ‘above the fold’ as possible also. But when I take the client’s shoes off, I particularly like whitespace and my content spread out without having to have cluttered, thick borders separating a books worth of content ‘above the fold’.

So if you are a designer, building something for a client, ‘embrace your bottom’ as Derek once said. Be “riskay” and propose a non-cluttered example of real estate usage by utilizing all of your assets, like the footer.

And if you are a client, be a little more open to new ideas and get excited about being in a new wave of companies on the internet that don’t have the traditional, table-based, cramped, content-overloaded website. Your visitors will thank you.

So in light of Derek’s post, when your planning your next design, or planning to get your next design, think outside the box if you will…think… “below the fold” too.

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Apparently Richard Macmanus is the IE7 fanboy touting it as the next best thing in browsers. I have already disagreed with his notion of IE7 being a Firefox killer. This is an odd notion seeing how Microsoft’s IE is clearly still the market leader.

Here’s the deal: If you’re Firefox is running slow, uninstall some extensions. Remember, those extensions are not created by Mozilla so they have no control over how it uses the browser. Extensions make Firefox what it is and if it weren’t for that I would be using Opera. So don’t blame the browser for lackluster performance. Make sure it’s not your fault before spouting out about how it’s the browsers fault. Apparently it’s not an overwhelming issue or we would hear more about it.

? Is Firefox dropping the ball, like Netscape in 97? | Web 2.0 Explorer

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