Jack Baty - the archives

Years of jackbaty.com - archived

Top Sites’ User Experience Teams and Their Challenge

Good Experience: Seems that many of the top web sites have the same user experience issues as us little guys. One of the big challenges is mapping customers’ needs to site structure, specifically dealing with the problems caused by mirroring the corporate structure on its web site:

“Why should they conform to the way the company is organized internally? After all, the website is there for customers’ use, not for the company to show the world its org chart. So of course the customer will take any necessary path through the site.”

Mozillafirebird.org Is Moving

The folks from the Mozilla Foundation asked me if I could point the mozillafirebird.org .net and .com domains to the official Mozilla Firebird page. Of course I will. For now it does a redirect, and I’ll be modifying the DNS entries to point directly to their servers asap.

And Speaking of the New Templates…

I swiped a nice, XHTML 1.0 Strict template from OpenSource Web Design and dropped it in here just for fun. Not many people will notice, as the majority of people reading this are doing so from an aggregator. Still, it felt good to run through another XHTML/CSS exercise. Not a table in “site.”

Converting Entries From Blosxom to Movable Type

I had several hundred weblog entries formatted for use in blosxom, and couldn’t find any converters for creating a movable type import file from them. Being the resourceful fellow that I am, I wrote my own. It’s a Python script that is called from within the directory of story files. It creates a single text file, mtimport, for importing into MT. I know very little Python, but it worked. If you’re feeling brave, you can grab a copy of it for yourself, blosxom2mt.py

Did He Really Go Back to Movable Type?

Yes I did. It’s a long story, but here goes…

I wanted to create new templates for my blog, which uses (used) blosxom. In the process, I was trying to tweak a few entries and move things around a bit. Big mistake. I had all of the proper plugins (entries_cache, etc) but the file modification times kept getting munged up and I got pissed. I concluded that blosxom works best for simple blogs that are not frequently edited or otherwise messed with. This blog does not fall under that category! Besides, as nice as PHPetal has been, products like Zempt are even nicer. Besides, I was getting bored smile

Metallica Sue Canadian Band Over E, F Chords

Yet another reason to hate Metallica.

UPDATE As Matthew points out, the above story is a hoax. Jimmy Kimmel

and MSNBC both referred to it as fact, so at least I’m not the only one

who neglected to check his references. Besides, the fact that so many

people believed it to be true says something about the sorry state of

a formerly good-not-great band.

Usability Heuristics for Rich Internet Applications

A modern spin of Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics (1994) with Rich

Internet Applications as the subject. From [Boxes

and Arrows](http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/usability_heuristics_for_rich_internet_applications.php).

By the way, I hate the term Rich Internet Application.

Managing Large Image Libraries With iPhoto 2

From [O’Reilly

Network](//www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/06/17/iphoto2.html), some tips for those lucky Mac owners who are suffering

under the weight of managing large image libraries with iPhoto.