My friend Eric turned me on to this handy app for media conversion. Maybe you can use it too.

http://www.formatoz.com/

Guy Kawasaki just launched a new blog index site, Alltop.com

In this site are his picks of folks most influencing the web. He titles it egos. Nice group.

Often when analyzing a client's needs, I try to find ways to use the Web to impact all aspects of their business, whether it's old-school web content, rich media or social apps.

This article, Harnessing the Power of Social Applications, on MIT's Sloan Review site does a great job of describing how to use "groundswell" to benefit business and has several prime examples.

Ted.com

Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers

Library of Congress

Browse some of the digital collections. Awesome.

Did you know many historical photos are part of the public domain and may be usable for commercial purposes? Just make sure to check usage rights first.

Although I have not thoroughly explored it yet, MailChimp seems to be a promising email distribution service worth a look.

The Viral Garden is a blog about marketing by Mark Collier. He lists the top 25 marketing blogs each week. I'm not sure how he gets his data, but it's a nice resource.

A nice resource for books and articles on everything web. Including chapter excerpts.

It’s often useful to have custom tool tips (mini info pop-ups located by your cursor when you hover over a link or other HTML object). The stock tool tip created by using ‘alt or ‘title’ attributes in the A tag are ugly and do not allow for custom formatting. Here are two good solutions that are flexible.

OverLIB - A JavaScript library created to enhance websites with small popup information boxes to help visitors around your website.

Walter Zorn DHTML Tooltips - A cross-browser tooltip JavaScript that can be customized in multiple ways.

A nice implementation of overLIB.

Allway Sync is a free file and folder synchronization software for Windows. Allway Sync uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and more.

Slide Show Pro is a component for Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8 that helps you display pictures on your web site. With over 60 customizable options, SlideShowPro works how you want it to, and can easily be styled and resized to match your existing site design — all with a simple point and click user interface.

Control what directories web crawlers, or robots can access by having a robots.txt file in the root directory of your site. More info can be found at robotstxt.org

Other than content, inbound links are the most important factor in search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM) and should be part of any SEO program. Google’s PageRank system relies on these as well as Technorati’s Popular Blog ranking system. There are a variety of ways to get inbound links: link swapping with other sites, paid link ads, index sites and having other sites just link because of good content. Here’s a couple resources for analysis, tips and tools:

MarketLeap - SEO company site with info and tools
Good tips from TextLinkAds
More SEO Tools  
Alexa – Ranking information
Internet Search Engine Database

NetLingo.com has thousands of definitions about the online world of business, technology & communication from technical terms to text messaging acronyms

A super simple technique on a site to tell humans from spamming apps:

Ask a question on your comment form like:  "six plus seven equals what?" and validate for the correct answer.

TypeCulture Academic Resource - a directory, archive and educational aid for design students, educators and professionals who are seeking information about type; its history, manufacture, use and artistic significance.

Information architecture, communication, graphic design and presentation, Mr. Tufte is the man. Whether your a Graphic Designer, or a Project Manager his knowledge will help you. Check out the Ask E.T. section to learn more.

on Squidoo

When and Where
Monsanto on Friday, November 10, 2006 from 8:00a.m. - 5:00p.m. The conference is filling up fast. Only 100 participants allowed to register.

How Much
$30 before July 31st and $45 after August 1st. All proceeds from registration fees are used to fund conference logistics. The conference continues to be maintained by a "grassroots" organization -- all planning, coordination, presentations, etc. are done by user experience practitioners for user experience practitioners.

Keynote Speaker
Dirk Knemeyer. Dirk will be presenting "The Future of Digital Product Design."

Interactive Poster Session
New this year -- a poster that will be created by participants during the conference. We'll provide a space for you to share your favorite research, technique, and tool sites and we'll publish it after the conference for all attendees.

Click for Agenda

Registration
When you register for this year's conference, you'll be asked to complete a section with your personal information. You'll then be asked to pre-select the sessions you would like to attend. This allows UX06 to ensure that they have the proper facility arrangements for each presentation. Spaces will fill up fast, so register as early as possible to ensure you get to attend the sessions of your choice.

After you complete registration, you'll see a link to PayPal. A special thanks to Gateway CHI for kindly offering their PayPal account as a way for us to collect registration fees. Your registration payment is a separate step and can only be completed by using a PayPal account that is either linked to your bank account or by using your credit card to pay your registration fee.

All proceeds from registration fees are used to fund conference logistics, meals, etc. If you cancel your registration, your fee WILL NOT be refunded. Registration for STLUX06 is open now through November 1st. Register by July 31st to receive the Early Registration discount. For security reasons, no on-site registration will be allowed; if you want to attend, you must register by the November 1 deadline. Register using the link below: (a big thank you to Maritz for the very generous donation of their registration tool)

https://www.meetinghq.com/group/101005647?wslid=attendee

Questions?
Jennifer Ruffino
jennifer.ruffino@monsanto.com
314-694-4649

There have always been good resources for JavaScript online. But recently there’s been some robust libraries created and made available that do everything from animation to AJAX. These libraries are ways for novice developers to quickly implement complex JavaScript functionality into sites while adhering to good programming rules.

One problem with some of these libraries, if used in their entirety, is the file size they can add to a web page. Often it is best to just incorporate the code that does what you need and delete the rest – if you know how to do that. Here are a few of the most popular.

Script.aculo.us   

“script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, compatible and, ultimately, totally cool JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly, Web 2.0 style.”

jQuery  

“jQuery is a new type of Javascript library. It is not a huge, bloated, framework promising the best in AJAX - nor is just a set of needlessly complex enhancements - jQuery is designed to change the way that you write Javascript.”

Yahoo! User Interface Library 

“The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources.”

Forms on the web are vulnerable and subject to malicious behavior. With the explosion of forums, wikis and blog comments, programs having been created to spam these useful communication mechanisms. Often these forms do not require any authentication. Users can simply complete the form and submit it to post their comments.

A newly popular technique for prohibiting malicious applications from submitting forms are CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) Security Images. These are images created at runtime that have a random sequence of numbers and letters that are distorted so only humans can interpret them.

CAPTCHA image
 

There are several code examples and small libraries online that illustrate how to implement this feature, just Google. Here are a few:

ASP
http://www.tipstricks.org/

PHP
http://phpsec.org/articles/2005/text-captcha.html
http://www.evolt.org/securing_forms_random_image

ASP.NET
http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/43986.html
http://www.lanapsoft.com/products.html

While this is great for forms exposed to the public, many developers are also using them on login forms. I don’t understand this practice. One would think a properly implemented password would be sufficient. The image just complicates matters and some are barely legible by humans. I know Yahoo! displays them for subsequent attempts to submit an authorization form, but not on the first try. I guess that’s a compromise for usability’s sake.

I’ve never claimed the title of web designer. I find good designers to work with on projects, but I’m very slowly stepping into the realm of web design. Sure, I’ve designed a few sites, am pretty good with Photoshop, have an art degree, a professional photography career and worked with some very talented people, but that isn’t the same as being a designer, although it hasn’t hurt. As part of my continuing education in design, I study typefaces; good designers use type well and type is tough – so many choices – so much bad use.

Type is so important. It is the thing people stare at most when looking at a web page and the web is not type friendly. The low, screen resolution destroys subtlety in rastorized type and the limited variety of system fonts for HTML text can be boring. However, new web design trends have focused more on typography. Mixing serif and sans-serif styles in unique ways, oversized headline type, pixel fonts and CSS techniques haven given the web new flavor and improved readability.

I have found several notable font resources in my quest to learn more about type. Here are a few favorites:

http://www.fontlover.com/ - portal

http://www.fontscape.com/ - portal

http://store.adobe.com/type/index.html - nice histories for each face

http://www.emigre.com/ - cool type foundry

http://www.p22.com/ - artistic fonts

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx - yes, Microsoft. They have a nice resource list and have been doing quite a bit of R & D into new screen type faces.

An article on Vitamin by David Greiner from Campaign Monitor sharing some good info on building HTML emails.

There have been locator services available for sites for various fees, but just a couple years the only way to build an inexpensive store locator application was using zip code longitude and latitude data. This data was available from a variety of sources, but it is all the same data from the United States Postal Service and US Census Bureau. This data worked well, but lacked street level detail. Each zip code had a center-point (long. & lat.) based on population and as a result, distances of locations close to each other were inaccurate and the data was only for the US.

Recently released scientific data allows us to simply create very accurate and detailed world-wide, store locators by using new technologies:

Google Maps API  - This cool API is a free service that allows one to easily embed Google Maps into web pages with JavaScript. It’s still in beta and has a few bugs, but generally works very well.

MapQuest Open API - This API also uses JavaScript to easily integrate routing, geocoding and mapping into your website.

Maybe it's time to upgrade that old store locator.

With Flash 8 came new and improved Flash detection. Adobe has a nice article/tutorial on their best solution yet.

Here's a ton of information from the development team at Macromedia Adobe.

I was browsing a site this morning and wanted to see the source code, which I often do, and quickly found out I could not access it, nor could I save the page. Wierd. There are ways to control, by script, the right click menu, but this was different and prompted some Google research. I came across HTML Protector. It looks like a neat little utility. One of the best features -- it prevents email grabbers from lifting email addresses from web pages. Nice.

All JavaScript Rich Text Editor.

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

Came across a new web design/dev site with some good contributors and articles. Vitamin is a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs.

It seems search engine optimization (SEO) is on the forefront of every web site owners mind -- the holy grail of getting visitors to their sites, or so they think. SEO companies are in high demand. Here's a site with a wealth of current, useful information on the topic.

Internet Search Engine Database

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control.

Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list.

There are also examples for using float and selectors.

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/

Nice article on common sense SEO and site content published on the Internet Search Engine database site.

http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1401/1/SEO-versus-Marketing:-The-Fine-Art-of-Copywriting

Back in 2003 Microsoft was sued by Eolas Technologies for a patent infringement. The technology in question is how Internet Explorer handles the inclusion of objects (ActiveX controls) such as Flash, video and Java applets in web pages.

On April 11, 2006 Microsoft is scheduled to release an update that makes the browser compliant with the lawsuit’s requirements. All IE browsers shipped after that date will also have the update installed. This change will affect thousands of sites with embedded content. This content will no longer automatically display in web pages. Users will have to click a prompt to view the content. This will greatly affect the user experience.

The Fix

Sites will have to change how objects are included in the HTML mark-up to prevent this rude disruption. Click here for a Google search on the topic. Here are some resources with more information:

MSDN Instructions on How to Activate ActiveX Controls

MS Knowledge Base Article

Adobe Developer Center

What about other browsers?

They are also in violation of Eola’s copyright, but they haven’t been sued yet. Netscape, Firefox, Opera and Safari have not done anything. Time will tell what will happen to them.

I ran across this excellent resource for building standards compliant web sites using ASP.NET 2.0. The information presented here is useful for any platform. It covers doctypes, mime types, broswer issues, accessiblity and some good tips for forms.

I read so much Microsoft bashing online it was refreshing to read how they have addressed a lot of problems with server control rendering in the new version of ASP.NET.

DropSend helps you do 2 things:

• Send files of up to 1 GB
• Store files online

Handy-dandy!

Sometimes I over look the obvious. I'm always looking for good people to help me with web projects: developers, designers, Flash experts, writers... I find some by word-of-mouth, but most by using the web.  Franki Durbin, a designer friend, turned me onto to Creative Hot List the other day when I was looking for a Flash animator. It's a good resource for finding freelance talent and folks between gigs, and since it's run by Communication Arts, the design community is well aware of it.

http://www.shauninman.com/ -  Shaun Inman is the designer/developer responsible for Designologue, Mint and IFR. Originally from the Boston, Massachusetts area, he now resides in Baltimore, Maryland.

The IFR technique is very cool. Limited font selection on the web is always the bain of the designer and this is a slick way around it.

ASP.NET offers an easy way using GDI+, the .NET Framework wrapper assembly for Microsoft's GDI (Graphics Device Interface) technology, to generate dynamic jpgs to use for dynamic text if that's your platform of choice, but the Flash method is completely client-side and platform independent. It's probably a bit faster too.

rubyonrails.com - the coolest thing since sliced bread?

15seconds.com - long time ASP and ASP.NET site

dotnetnuke.com - Popular portal framework built in ASP.NET

CsharpCorner.com - C#, ASP.NET resource site

aspalliance.com - tons of ASP and .NET info

4guysfromrolla.com - many times this site has provided answers to ASP and ASP.NET questions. Great Forums.