RasterWeb!

In case it wasn’t clear, the Jargon File’s definition of hacker:

A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users’ Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

If still in doubt, get the full definition of hacker.

Daryl Hannah has a videoblog. Sort of… See dhlovelife.com

There aren’t really comments, or permalinks, or descriptions, or much metadata, and the feed is currently invalid. (The length attribute should be the file size of the video, not the length of playing time, confusing, I know…)

Still, I’m a big fan of Daryl (more for her green & organic living than for her movies) so I’ll cut her some slack for all the little issues, and it does say “full site this summer” so, maybe things will change.

I had been hoping that under the hood would be Movable Type, or better yet, WordPress, which would probably make some of the issues I mentioned go away, but no such luck.

So besides seeing valid XHTML served up as utf-8 rather than iso-8859-1, and proper archives, comments, and all the other little things, the content itself is great. Daryl, if you need help with your site, let me know… (P.S. Feel free to use embedthevideo.com)

(Update: The feed should be valid now. Thanks Daryl!)

When potential customers come to your web site, there is a chance they are doing so for information. I know, you think that people just want to be entertained, but occasionally, we want something from you, like a phone number or address. Make it easy on your potential customers, and don’t put your phone number or address in an image, or in a Flash movie, put it in text. Text can be easily copied from your website and pasted into an email, or address book, or calendar.

People appreciate being able to copy and paste text. They do not appreciate having to retype it. You will get the added bonus of having search engines index the text as well, which can help bring more of those potential customers to your web site.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say put it on all the pages of your site. Put it down at the bottom, in the footer. Trust me, people will appreciate this. I know I do…

Lucas Gonze had the following to say:

EmbedTheVideo.com is an entire web site which does nothing but generate a single block of HTML.

Yup, that’s about all it does, and it is insane that it’s so complex. To set the record straight, the site is just over 3 months, and this is how it started: I replied to a message from Josh Kinberg explaining (once again) how to embed video using the Video Popup Linkmaker he put online, and he replied that my semi-serious suggestion (registering embedthevideo.com) was a good idea. Domains are cheap, and I’ve got server space, so it happened.

So if you look at embedthevideo.com today, you’ll see the names of the folks who contributed to make it exist. I mainly fixed a few minor bugs, and supplied a nice URL.

I went to Taco Bell today, and I must say, the place is in need of a usability expert.

I walked in the door, and was able to determine which way it was to get in line, but not everyone could do this. I’ve been to some Taco Bells where you queue up from the left, and some from the right. Why not a standard! I got in line, placed my order, and then was given a ticket with my order number, which I could sort-of read. The number I saw on the ticket did not look like the number the cashier told me. I decided to go with what I thought the ticket said.

While I stood near the pickup area, with about 5 or 6 other people, I managed to block either the soda dispensing area, the entrance to queue up, and the exit (or entry) door. So as more people came in, they did not realize many of us were waiting for our orders and queued up behind us. Once they figured it out, they got in line, and all I could do was keep shifting around to block something else.

Now, it’s a small place, and it’s 1:00 PM, so perhaps this isn’t always how it goes down, but today Taco Bell got a 2 points out of 10 for it’s usability.

Taco Bell Usability Engineer signing off…

(Maybe next time I’ll actually get into the usability problems of tacobell.com)