Archive for August 2002

Scene360 has put together a nice article after speaking with 23 zines and design portals from around the world. Each one answers four questions For the Love of Design and Digital Web is included.

If you turn off the sound at The Official Harry Potter Website, the navigation doesn’t work! All the items on the left and right won’t act upon clicking, but the stuff up top does. Tsk tsk.

Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville – Interview from Webreference Update Newsletter. Hear from the authors of the brand new spankin’ Polar bear book speak out on how IA has changed, selling IA, IA benefits, controlled vocabularies… boy, this is going to make it tough for me to match when I interview them for Digital Web in December.

Thinking back to when I wrote real letters to pen pals or family members when away from home — I tried to recall how I wrote such letters in comparison to email… besides having carefully selected, cute stationery. Ah ha. The letters were typically two hand-written pages long as opposed to one or two paragraphed emails.

An email takes little effort. Hit NEW, enter email address, type meaningful subject, and say what you gotta say. A letter, hoo boy. Find paper, look up address, find stamp, find pen that works, write… shake hand to release the pain… write more… repeat. Since it takes this much effort, it would be nuts to limit it to one to two paragraphs… unless you’re doing a postcard.

I’ve reacted to emails with anger, sadness, frustration, happiness, and a whole wide range of other emotions. The anger and frustration wasn’t always necessary. It was the way the person worded the message. The person may simply be sharing a couple of facts, but it’s easy to make it an aggravating letter instead of an informative one.

My brother stinks at email writing and online chatting. I try not to go that route with him too often. He comes across brash. Hey, he’s a nice guy. Just doesn’t e-write well. Mom, on the other hand, writes in her personality but like someone who is not technically inclined. Her long emails rarely have paragraph breaks. If I lose my place… it’s a game of hide and seek to regain my spot.

Salon.com Books takes a look at You Send Me by Patricia T. O’Conner & Stewart Kellerman. It promises not to focus on grammar, spelling, or any of that stuff you learned in grade school. Instead, the authors focus on the etiquette of writing emails. From the reviews I’ve read, it sounds like common sense. However, there are many who haven’t figured it out.

One of my favorite e-newsletters is Janet Roberts’ Ezine-Tips. I don’t know how she does it. Doing an issue five days a week while discussing a variety of topics on the subject of managing an ezine.

I started sending out occasional emails to a mailing list providing them with information on new articles in meryl.net/articles. Alas, I haven’t put as many articles in there as I have in the past due to book and other projects.

If I did a regular ezine, it’d be done in a similar fashion to Janet’s. Keeping articles short, taking advantage of hard returns, punctuation, lines, anything that would make it easy to scan, use meaningful subject headings with the ezine’s name — which is short for the sake of using creative subject headers, put the URL at the top for those who want to see the HTML version (I don’t have the luxury to offer both HTML and text versions), include instructions on how to unsubscribe (sniff, sniff) and other useful information.

Sometimes, her ezine is very short, and it’s a good thing. She’s kind enough to send us something each day during the work week. We might get tired or fall behind in our ezine reading. Since hers vary in size and are scannable, it takes no time to read each one.

That’s probably my problem. I’d like to offer information on too many topics instead of just one. Anyway, beside the point.

I liked Janet’s issues on spam filters filtering out perfectly acceptable words found in legitmate ezines. One of the key items I like in an ezine is instructions on how to unsubscribe. Guess what spam filters are filtering. Yeah, “to unsubscribe.”

I immediately shot an email to her after receiving the article and wrote, “SpamKiller filters emails with “be removed.” Oh boy. It’s like The Borg. Spammers keep adapting to whatever technology we use to fight them.”

With Yahoo changing certain words and filters doing what they’re doing, I wonder if any legitimate ezine will make it to our emailboxes or if we’ll have to start learning SMS sp3ak to read ez1nes using l3tt3rs and #s to duck sp@m f1lters?

Hmm… maybe it’s just as well that I’m not writing an ezine and instead doing a something on paper that doesn’t go through filters unless you count editors.

Cannot find server is what I’ve been seeing at Amazon since about 5:15 PM. Can you just see them scrambling and panicking?

Karl Dubost clearly and succinctly answers questions at W3C on How to achieve Web standards and quality on your Web site. Biggest point — NO, Web standards won’t take away a designer’s creativity. [Link Shirley]

Business 2.0 on Lord of the Rings: The Quest for Buzz is a great example of using the Web to help a business. Yeah, it’s a movie, but movies are a business. The official site uses a good strategy — partnering with many other fan sites.

Too often, sites devoted to one topic compete with each other instead of help. When I wrote an article about Harry Potter on the Internet, I learned about many of the sites, which referenced each other. That, and Google. Also, good for these sites is the online community. I noticed many of these folks became buddies and even went to see the movies together. This can work for sites that aren’t entertainment-related — when it’s done right and the audience is considered.

More on that in a formal setting much later. Meanwhile, forgive my silence. Got a first non-profit organization newsletter to get out and fight to regain much needed energy for the next five chapters of el booko. I won’t give you boring details on the health stuff — but it’s muy aggravating. Plus, I spent way too much time trying to fix meryl.net/articles over the weekend.

Evolution of a Backyard takes you on a journey from the hillside to a mini-lake.

Evolution of a Backyard takes you on a journey from a hillside to a mini-lake. OK, so that’s a fancy way of putting it. It’s process of building a pool in hot Texas.