Most of the people I know suddenly experience, that it suddenly is impossible to use the "View source" functionality in the Internet Explorer. The problem occurs due to a bug in IE if you've set your Temporate Internet Files too high. If you decrease this seting to less than 80MB, the problem stops. If not, try to delete all temporary files.
IMPORTANT Update: This sounds strange, but if you have a shortcut to Notepad on your desktop, it will also prevent you from viewing source!!!
Update (feb 26, 2004): From my unique user tracking system www.maptheuser.com I can see, that Microsoft during the last 24 hours has visited this page 10 times and spend quite some time here. I hope they are doing a fix for this problem now.
If you are doing (like me) the first interaction design sketches on a whiteboard, you can use the magnets from Magnetic Elements. It will set you back around $40, but I guess it's a bargin. If you don't like them you can always use them on your fridge!
In an interview with Steve Krug, he gives a great definition of what the work of an interaction designer is:
"I sometimes think the best analog for my job is a "show doctor"--the person who comes in while a Broadway show is still in out-of-town tryouts, watches the whole thing, and says, "I think it would work much better if you moved the cowgirl dance number to the start of the second act, and killed the love ballad altogether." I'm a fresh pair of eyes (which is vital, because if you've worked on a web project for any length of time, you know it too well to see it clearly) and an outsider who can advocate for the interests of the end user because I'm not involved in the internal political struggles."
Steve Krug is the writer of the book "Don't make me think!"
Do you know where your visitors are comming from? No, but wouldn't it be cool to know?
I have created a cool tool, which visualize where users are comming from, when they visit my homepage.
All visitors are shown on a world map, but I will add more detailed maps from US, Europe etc. later. The product is still in beta test, and I need to draw complete new maps, because the one I'm currently using are not precise, and dots are placed in the oceans.
Feel free to test it here. Please let me know what you think! If you would like to add this functionality to your website, please contact me and you will be able to subscribe to a service for visualizing your users.
Today I just tested ClickTracks and what a great tool for analysing your website. When doing interaction design, it is very valuable to know how users are navigating through the site and ClickTracks can tell you that - right on top of your pages. A client application is installed in a few minutes, and if you have your web server logs available on your computer or by FTP, ClickTracks will scan the log and visualize it! Of cource it would have been great if you didn't have to install a client application to view stats, but I can live with that!
This sure beats Webtrends, hitbox and livestats!
Well - why do you have to be sitting in front of your computer, when you are bloging? You don't! Audblog has found the answer - If you have your blog running on one of the main weblog systems (like movabletype, blogger, livejournal or radio) you can just call a number (in USA!!) and leave a voice mail, which will be added to your weblog! I just tested it and it works just great. I just deleted my entry in order to say, what I just have written, but I only got one free :-( It is unfornately only possible to pay for more using PayPal, and I havent opened my account. This can take up to 30 days!! Insted you can see the demo here.
I just discovered this article about categorization software. This kind of categorization will be a must in the future to navigate through all the available information I think.
Now after a very silent period since divine filed a chapter 11, FatWire acquires divines CMS products which previous was Eprise and Open Market.
The price is still a secret, but from Line56, it sounds more like FatWire is buying customers than products. I do hope they will continue the Content Server - great product. The Participant server will hopefully die :-)
These guys couldn't find the Ctrl+Alt+Del keys in their car:
"The Thai finance minister was on his way to a meeting became trapped in his car when the onboard computer of his BMW malfunctioned, shutting down the engine, locking all the doors and windows, and sealing him and his driver in. With air running out, they found out the hard way how well-built the cars are, and had to have someone come around with a sledgehammer and smash one of the windows after they failed to kick one out from the inside."
Read it in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Instant Messaging (IM) is a pain if your customers and friends are using different systems (MSN, AOL, ICQ,...).
There are a few out there (jabber,...) but I do prefer Gaim, which is an open source project and it is doing fine.
The main reason for me to use Gaim is that it will save all my conversions automaticly - in MSN Messenger (which I have used so far) you must do this manually which means that I forget it.
Before you install Gaim on your Windows platform, you must have the GTK+ Runtime Environment installed. After that you can install Gaim.
Today I just discovered FeedReader, because NewsGator started a while ago to claim money for their great product, and I will not yet spend $29 for reading weblogs.
FeedReader is a great product which is easy to install and easy to operate. The version 2.5 I installed is an Alpha-version so there are still a few bugs, but they are easy to live with.
When new entries occur in one of the weblogs I subscribe to, a small window pop's up in my lover right corner of my desktop - cool.
(Here is a dump of my version where you can see the blogs I'm currently reading)
Today it was now official - Web500 file for bankrubcy so now it is official. It was stated in todays Computerworld, but I mentioned it yesterday here :-)
I just discovered a great Open Source tree view in Windows style on sourceforge. It is called NanoTree and is developed by the Danish company Nano. I just tested it in IE, Opera and Mozilla and it worked great.
A few weeks ago, TJ Group in Denmark was according to Computerworld closed and along with that their CMS. I don't think that their system will be missed by a lot :-)
Yesterday, a rumour about one of the more visible systems Web500 filed for a chapter 11 - according to Niels Hartvig. I still wait for something official, but the rumour about Web500 has been out a while. I never came to see their system in deep - I have had about 5 meetings with Web500 through the last 4 years, but they always forget the promised developer, which could explain about their system. They announced a .NET version some time ago, but it shouldn't be very stable yet - most of their old customers has yet not upgraded their old versions.
There are still too many small Danish CMS out there - FDIH launched a new site CMS finder a few weeks ago. This should be a help to customers seeking a CMS solution, but I don't think you'll find any help here. The vendors have explained about their systems, but who trust that? You should read it as: "What the vendors promised that their systems can't do more than" ...