I spent the past few days brainstorming on what a site should look like – centralized theme, simple interface, aesthetically…uh…not ugly – and mocked up a bunch of front pages in Photoshop. I was really just trying to get a feel of what various themes would look like; you can see how little time I spent, relatively, on the actual journal entries, the nav bars, etc. Creating a graphic that looks like a webpage in Photoshop is actually more painful than coding up the HTML + CSS.
RSS might be one of those things you’ve been hearing about floating around the internet nowadays. It’s a truncated listing of all the recent entries in a blog or news site, meant to be read by an external RSS reader of some sort every few minutes, and provides a summary of the recent post as well as links to the full content and anything else relevant. With so much content out there, an RSS reader can take in hundreds of feeds and save its user the tediousness of visiting each one in turn.
And as with all things Internet, there’s no standard and most people do a poor job.
Let’s start with what RSS is supposed to do: to aggregate feeds and present quick-and-dirty blurbs about a new blog entry or news article. It’s there so the user doesn’t have to refresh and check the site manually, so the content must carefully balance holding the user’s interest and providing too much content.
Due to recent problems with my host and their server’s paranoia of PHP picture manipulation code, I’ll refrain from posting pictures until they fix it or I get a new host. I guess I’m going to have to make an impact with mundane, trivial text.Anyway, a friend recently recommended a blog on Web 2.0 developments (you know, all that talk about online social networking, the power of the people and tagging and so forth…), TechCrunch. It helpfully lists a lot of startups (1) and the services they offer, the vast majority of which are free and have refined interfaces (AJAX enabled, think Google Maps).
I remember a while back, one of my computer graphics professors claimed that 90%+ of the population in the world needed some form of vision correction.
So it’s a good thing my girlfriend is going to be one of those people who’ll divine the fate of your eyes with a few letters, a light scope, and a few pieces of thin glass. Congrats to her, who just got accepted to the School of Optometry at Berkeley.
The path to an OD starts like most med-school-bound roads, probably back in high school somewhere. You wanted to help people out and make good money doing it, garner the respect of friends and family, and trot around a doctorate degree, so you decide that you’re going to stick to a biology or chemistry major (or in Berkeley, a MCB major).
I’m a tyrant when it comes to earphones (the small ear ones and not their larger cranial death grip cousins): I buy them, abuse them, wear them out in a few months, then feed them to squirrels. Then I kill off all their relatives and seize their estates.
Admittedly, I’m not much of an audiophile; I’m not the type who can tell the difference between MP3 and CD-quality immediately and I could care less about how heavy the bass is in simulating earthquakes. I’ve bought my share of crappy cheapo headphones (which I exchanged two-month-old broken ones for new phones at Walgreens on a regular basis as a student), but I didn’t expect much from them in the first place.
I also tried the much-praised Sony in-ear headphones that always seem to be on sale at Amazon’s. They violate your ears much like your physician during your annual checkup, but like the good doctor, it’s for a good cause, as the phones do provide much clearer sound and drown out most background noise. They also tended to explode (I’m guessing it’s the driver being overloaded or shorted) while in my ear.
But yea, for some reason or another, my earphones have a tendency to die short, unmemorable deaths. I do listen to a fair amount of music – 3 to 4 hours at work, usually on the train/bus/plane when travelling, on the computer when my roommate threatens to kick my ass – so they get worn out quickly. I’ve gone through 6 or 7 earphones in the past 2 years already, so here’s hoping that these new Shure E2g‘s are as good as advertised.
Ah, a reason for this here site’s existence and evolution. According to a CNN article about a week back, web surfers judge a site’s aesthetic content in a blink of an eye, just quick enough for them to scroll to yawn or hit the back button. It’s even tougher than that 3-seconds-to-get-your-attention rule they use for television.
True, if you have no content, all you’ve done is compel a user to take long enough to sip his coffee and then close the browser in disgust. But apparently, someone who stumbles upon a site will most likely only hesitate for a split second, sans coffee, to leave it.
A sad parallel to the canonical dateless wonder, Mr. “I’ve got all the personality in the world but I fell out of the ugly tree hitting every branch on the way down” Nice Guy.