First reactions to Buzz

February 11, 2010
None

By now, plenty of people have tried out Buzz. Here are a few things I’ve noticed that I think make it stand out among other social networking sites:

• Choose who sees what. Plain and simple select box, up front, every time you write a new post. And those users can easily see a list of folks who are also privy to the conversation.
• It tells you about new followers when you log in. Notice what it does not do: it does not clutter up your inbox with “Jim Beam is now following you” emails. Granted, it does clutter up your inbox with plenty of other stuff, but that is easily fixed. (Quick addition to that lifehacker article: also check the “Mark as read” box on the filter; you can rely on the Buzz interface to indicate unread messages.)
• Search! This is the upside to all Buzzes landing in your Gmail: you can always find an archived message. Need to find that link you saw in your Twitter feed three months ago about Super Bowl predictions? Good luck!

Oh, and need I mention the single click it will take me to add this blog post to my Buzz stream?

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The Standards of Tomorrow Are Obsolete Today

March 18, 2009 — None

Advancing the Web – Part 1 of 2

CSS 3 and HTML 5 are somewhere down the chute, and will eventually be widely supported. Both are highly anticipated. Both address a lot of today’s problems in the web design world. But neither is good enough.

I know I’m not the first to bang on this drum. In fact, I’m basically about to parrot back the biggest complaints. The reason for this is that I haven’t seen the problems of both specs brought to light in the same place, which seems like a rather glaring mistake; they need to work hand-in-hand. Solving the issues of only one does not fix the whole problem.

(Continued…)

Design in the works

March 11, 2009 — One

I know I said a while back that I was working on a redesign for this place. It’s true; I am. Just one problem: At about the same time, I received a Wii for my birthday. I hate to say it, but that thing is like crack.

So yes, the design is in progress! And it’s blue! (Which may not be a big deal to you, but I kind of secretly swore to myself when I registered elucidblue.com that I would never actually use blue in the site design. I just couldn’t resist, though, once I drew this idea up. Hope you’ll agree when the time comes.) The current theme annoys me more and more. Even worse, the HTML isn’t really semantically correct anymore, since I did a quick hack to break out of the particular structuring of the site I had been using. So I am eager for the change.

I’ve got the mock-up pretty much done in Photoshop, and will commence with construction soon. Of course, this week at work, I’m building the redesign of our system’s site, so it does feel a little silly to come home and do the exact same thing I did at work. What can I say, though, I love it.