everyday

via: Simple Bits

Some exciting news from the developers of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8! Basically they have reversed course on their previous decision to hamstring standards based web design by forcing IE8 to render all web pages in an identical fashion as IE7, unless explicitly told to do otherwise. Microsoft was planning on forcing web developers tell IE8 to render a web page according to web standards or else IE8 would render the page identically to IE7 (which has some shortcomings when it comes to standards).

This is definitely good news and I for one am glad to see Microsoft making a decision that makes sense for the web community at large.

Google Maps has added a new feature called “Terrain”. It overlays a street map on top of a terrain map. While this feature isn’t particularly useful for your everyday mapping needs, it could prove useful in a number of scenarios. What’s more, it is just another example of Google continually improving it’s products.

Unsubscribing from an email mailing list should be simple, one click simple. Microsoft makes the process relatively painful, except for one glaring design fohpah. The instructions to unsubscribe seem simple enough:

To unsubscribe, select the checkbox next to the desired communication(s) and click the Unsubscribe button below.

What the directions fail to explain is that the “checkbox” is entitled “Subscribe”! So I need to click on the “Subscribe” checkbox, then click the “Unsubscribe” button? That isn’t confusing at all.

Via: Ruby on Rails Weblog

Ruby on Rails turns 2.0 (but doesn’t want to celebrate yet). The wonderfully powerful and yet simple to use web framework has reached the 2.0 “preview-release” milestone. According to the venerable DHH, the actual release date for a finalized 2.0 will be some time in the future, after a number of (potential) release candidates. While I don’t understand most of what they have changed, I am happy to see Ruby on Rails moving forward while continuing to gather followers.

via: Signal vs. Noise

37 Signals, the amazing web design company behind such products as Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire, have introduced a new feature to one of their applications, namely Backpack [read article]. This feature allows a person to drag and drop items from various pages onto other pages. If this doesn’t make any sense, watch the video!

This company makes me sad, sad because I am in awe of their skills. While I fancy myself as a web designer and programmer, I really am just an amateur. This is ever so evident when looking at the offerings from 37 Signals. I would like to think that with enough free time I too could have these skills, but that is akin to thinking that, with enough time I could play in the NBA!

via: Digg

N.Design (a site I will be frequenting from now on) has a über-cool looking OSX dock for websites. If you are a fan of the Mac, as I am, you will certainly appreciate this. If you aren’t so much a fan of the Mac, then you should at least appreciate the look and feel of this navigation bar. Web 2.0, whatever that means, is certainly producing some interesting stuff!

In a stunning display of technical and graphic design prowess, AOL has developed a new technology that allows it to make exact duplicates of existing websites. As the three pictures illustrate, AOL’s main site (this is a beta site) has performed what was, until now thought impossible; an almost exact, pixel per pixel copy of Yahoo’s recently revamped website.

Hopefully AOL is just using this as a test. This is, after all, a beta site. Another fact to remember is that there are only so many ways to layout content on a website. A point will be reached where every possible permutation of a functional layout has been used. Of course this is sort of like the argument that, eventually every possible combination of musical arrangements will have been written. Possible, but not for many, many, many years. There really is no excuse for this, AOL must employ a whole host of software developers and designers that should be capable of coming up with at least a slightly original design.

via: Simple Bits

24 ways (to impress your friends?) has some interesting articles on web design, probably won’t impress many of my friends though.

Recently I have been working on an internet filter for my work. I work for a school district, so you can imagine that we take internet filtering rather seriously. What I have come across is an unintended side effect of filtering that is causing some rather large sites to be all but useless! I initially encountered this problem with Yahoo!’s image search. The search results are cached on Yahoo!’s own servers, so if a youngster were to search for “bikini” they would be presented with pictures of bikinis being served from Yahoo!’s servers whose original source could be something relatively safe, or something completely inappropriate. While these images are only thumbnails, they can be extremely inappropriate. The only way for me to ensure that these images are not displayed is to block all images from www.yimg.com (Yahoo!’s image server), this wouldn’t be so terribly bad if Yahoo! didn’t use this domain to serve ALL of it’s images and even it’s CSS! The second problem I ran across is sites serving content from a third source. I ran into this when someone complained that the menu images from Walmart.com weren’t showing up. After a bit of investigation, it turns out that Walmart serves it’s menu images from akamai.net, which we block because Akamai hosts everything imaginable. So, my advice to everyone is to not serve content from an untrustworthy source, and to host everything from your own domain, lest ye be blocked.