CalPoly

Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web.

I’ll go so far as to assert that most technological advances are born from something that would be good for people using it. When we put stock in technology and try to be creative for creativity’s sake, we almost always repeat our mistakes. When we try and solve problems instead, we force ourselves to care. Innovation is a natural side effect.

This entire article (really more of an op/ed piece) is worth every minute it takes to read it. Really good. I could have quoted the whole thing.

Books wanted screen saver, originally uploaded by Kennedy Library.

I change my desktop wallpaper a lot. Here is my latest wallpaper — you can download it if you would like and use it yourself.

One of the reasons I was inspired to a.) make this and b.) share it is because yesterday I attended a “brown bag” session talking about copyright. Marisa Ramirez, Kennedy Library’s Digital Repository Librarian gave the presentation and it was both interesting and very informative.

Did you know that things created before 1923 are not protected by copyright?

This poster was created in 1918 by poster designer Charles Buckles Falls. I love it. Learn more about it at the Library of Virginia web site.

Click the link above to get to the image as well as to get instructions on how to get your own copy for your desktop wallpaper

Instead of being trapped in data we can instead extract information… leading to knowledge, wisdom. <-- Okay. That was my paraphrase. Watch this short talk about Pivot, a tool that allows you to see relationships within the information overload. Read Ted Talk: Gary Flake: Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?.

Now, that’s just nice. FontSquirrel. (Thanks Sterling)

Paddy Donnelly’s opinion on the fold (it doesn’t matter). Jury’s still out. Good food for thought. Read his treatise at Life Below 600px | I Am Paddy. (Via 37 Signals)

There is a great presentation on Educause about the recently deployed, optimized-for-mobile version of some NCSU Library services. Key takeaways for me included:

• Reminder of when to develop native (platform-specific) applications vs. use your web expertise for the mobile web (hey, if you’re not using the accelerometer to shuffle your catalog, maybe you don’t need an app for that!)
• My favorite: graceful degradation for 3 tiers of devices building on the MIT Mobile Web Open Source Project

• Much more from their project page

Now if we can only get access to all of our data…

A Plate of Color Palates

I love seeing groups of web sites based on colors — helpful to see a handful of red sites, a handful of yellows. Or, if you work at Cal Poly, a handful of green sites. How do different companies tackle and conquer? ColourLOVERS has a current round up.

ID Color Retrospect

And yea for tributes! ColorLOVERS also does a nice viewing of I.D. Magazine covers throughout the years, complete with palates and links to exact colors. Thanks ColorLOVERS!

Before I forget…

Two links from ThinkVitamin that may be of interest.

• Tags vs. Categories
• Mistakes Were Made: Making Interactive Maps With jQuery

I haven’t had a chance to try this out, but on first glance I am really interested in Mockingbird. And that tagline is really clever. They had me at the tagline.

After some recent user feedback, I found myself, once again, checking out the library usability studies over at Library Terms That Users Understand. (Today’s choice nugget: Databases = “the base that holds the data.” Yes!)

This is a great resource I come back to whenever we get feedback from users about terms they find confusing or I just want to think about how we could say it better. Check it out! Thanks to John Kupersmith at UC Berkeley for maintaining this collection…