Archive for June 2004

There are free Usability Resource materials, some are only available in PDF. Included are several a nice, clean checklists that any process person would love. The materials are divided by stage of development: General, Analysis, Design and Evaluation.

Good Experience has an excellent article describing two scenarios in various settings – a restaurant, a dentist, and a Web site. It clearly shows why the wow factor isn’t going to have a lasting effect.

Look at the restaurant example. The food was not good even though the experience gave the diners something to talk about. Do you think they’re going to come back again when they’re hungry? The experience is probably only good for one or two visits, but no more. The wow factor only goes so far and then we get bored. What’s left? The truth. The food is bad. You can’t find what you need on a Web site. How many times do you plan to return after that? [ InformIT ]

Hot topic in the blog world is MT users are moving to WordPress. Some started before the MT pricing hoopla and others after. It’s understandable people got upset with the pricing change, but I believe the attitude behind the backlash was unwarranted. Unlike most companies, Six Apart listened and immediately adjusted their pricing. They also clearly stated that users can continue using 2.x at no cost and not upgrade to 3.x.

I respect the folks behind Six Apart and admire their work and ethics. They do produce a quality product. Speaking of MT, Molly and Porter have just released a book on how to use MT. It’s based on v2.x and it’s an excellent reference and step-by-step guide.

I mentioned that I don’t plan to change to another CMS because it’s time consuming to integrate the tags into my templates and MT does what I need. I installed WordPress to see what it’s about and the installation was speedy. Points for that. The only trouble I ran into was that wp couldn’t find the database. I needed to add the user name in front of the database name. That done, it worked and all I did was follow the 5-minute instructions installation.

I had originally tried out wp in an open source try before you install environment, but it doesn’t do it justice. Looking around at the interface, I’m instantly impresed with its easy-to-use interface that requires no help file to figure out. The features are power-packed.

I might consider using wp for my redesigned gotchas section. I have already converted the gotchas to match meryl.net and to use MT, but there is no data in there yet. So it would be a good time to see how much work is involved in converting an existing template to wp and to see what the big deal is about.

If RSS and XML has you befuddled and you want information in people-speak instead of programmer-speak, Really Simple Syndication should become a such a resource. It’s fairly new, but its goal is to help users know what to do with RSS without a PhD in XML.

Weigh in with your own two pesos to: What’s the best way to secure needed publicity? And without coming across negatively? Read more in SWOT Team: Toot Your Own Horn, a weekly column in which I’m co-authoring. I enjoy it because the readers are the real authors and I facilitate what they share.

Sometimes I miss the old days… the days when a new version of a software product didn’t come out for several years. My wallet and I could keep up. It’s darn impossible now and I try not to upgrade more than every other release.

Then I read what Molly had to say about her experience with Adobe’s Acrobat.

So if you’ve purchased an Adobe product version via download from Adobe’s site, and a new version has been out for a certain time, and you have a problem with that product, Adobe will not honor your license. You will instead have to upgrade to the newer product version, for a typically healthy upgrade fee.

Perhaps, it’s time to revisit the licensing rules as people own more computers. Personally, I use three computers on a regular basis: my desktop at home, desktop at the office, and laptop. I don’t believe I should pay for multiple licenses to install on all three computers when I am the only user. However, if I load it on another family member’s computer, then yes, I should pay for a license.

It’s become a problem for my family this past year as Paul has been unemployed for over a year and we needed licenses for an operating system and word processor to put on the kids’ computers as the OSes they had crashed and needed to go anyway.