Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Underdog in Flemish is onderhond

Yahoo is doing some amazing stuff with search. One of the things they’re doing is allowing some selected third parties to customize search results. Here’s a screenshot of a vanity search with a customized result from LinkedIn. Nice! That is possible the nicest, best presented search result for my name that I can imagine, and it’s on Yahoo, not Google.

OK somehow half of the internet seems down?

I’m looking for some very clean and simple CSS code to create a dropdown menu with some links. No levels in the menu, just click on a link (or hover, although I prefer click) and a dropdown shows (white background, simple links, nothing more) with some links in it. Something like that. Suggestions? My CSS skills are negligable, that’s why I ask, and all the stuff I find on google is way overkill.

I’m playing around with a redesign of poorbuthappy.com, 1 of the problems is that there’s way too much navigation:

So after a little sketching and some HTML, I came up with this:

A kind of breadcrumb now serves as the main navigation, showing where you are and letting you go up in the chain. (You can go sideways too by clicking the little arrows, which gives you a dropdown.)

A lot less vertical space taken up, but also less clues towards the navigation. You don’t immediately see things like "pictures" and "forums". Which makes it less usable. On the other hand, it’s a lot less clutter and space, which I like, and likely makes it more usable. And I do have a nice sitemap at the bottom of each page, which I like and gets lots of clicks, so I’m not too worried about taking away navigation options at the top. It’s a bit del.icio.us-like too…

What do you think? I’d love to hear some comments.

“Reportedly digg is 50% Google traffic, About.com 85%, and Wikipedia 70% Google traffic.”

Indeed. Google Knol is a HUGE mistake. How can anyone trust them anymore to stay out of the content game - and this time it’s not just video, but text. Our lifelihood Google!

I’m still a little confused about Google’s knol concept. And the url’s are weird too: check out this one about Colombia that I made

“Yes, my version requires the most lines of code, but it is also the easiest to maintain and understand.”

No it fucking ain’t. Compare:

login($username, $password, $remember);

with

$authenticationController = new UserAuthenticationController;
$user = new User;
$user->username = $_POST['username'];
$user->password = $_POST['password'];
$user->rememberMe = true;
$authenticationController->login($user);

So Amazon’s gossip protocol caused the S3 downtime :)

What happens when every single person carries a camera?

“I said that already” Erlang. Smart stuff, couchDB.

If you like ethnography and web2.0, you’ll love Metagold - an ethnographic research blog about the Japanese phenomenon Nico Nico Douga, an extremely popular video sharing site where people can comment in a kind of video overlay (you have to see it).

Social design as urban planning: “The challenge is how we make it bigger while still maintaining the same
quality and sense of intimacy with now 7.2 million registered users and
23 million monthly unique visitors. It comes down to urban planning in
a way that a massive city like London has all kinds of cozy little
neighborhoods.” (Stewart Butterfield)

Gogrid is a competitor of Amazon EC2. Roughly similarly priced, but comes with free load balancing.

test

A so far undocumented feature in Google’s social API now lets applications suggest URL’s that might be of the same person. For example, enter petervandijck.com and get a bunch of related URL’s.

Practically, this means that when you sign up for a website, and it asks you to enter your websites, it can start suggesting other websites from the moment you’ve entered at least one. Nice work.

My Google profile page.

Speed continues to be really underestimated. Little known fact: Amazon internal testing showed that 100ms extra pageload time means 1% less sales. Google tests show that 500ms longer pageload (half a second) means 20% less traffic.

Meditate on those numbers for a moment, and then tell me your webteam takes speed seriously enough.

Live from Bejing: "Whenever I show Chinese websites to American friends who don’t speak Chinese, the friends universally have the same reaction — “Wow! That site sure is crappy-looking! Guess those guys haven’t learned how to design a good website yet, huh?”

"Most Americans are by now nodding their heads: “Yep. Love those US sites. Much more advanced. Clean, simple design. Not cluttered. Guess those Chinese guys will figure that out sooner or later.”

Great post on working with teams in India.

The mionews UI for friendfeed is a relief. If they expand to incorporate the basic friendfeed functionality, they might well kick their ass, although probably not.

Google is retiring their Adsense referral program (you could make money for people downloading Firefox, for example).

Belgium is incredible in the summer: festivals, markets and activities ALL the time, and often free. So that’s a plus.

Great post on scaling. (via Simon) Some good bits in the comments:

• We do TV advertising and have huge spikes within 3-5 seconds of the spot running. After maybe 20-30 seconds everything is back to normal again, with maybe +5-10% traffic (a normal variation).
• Times was an article that included links to the site. The article was one level off the home page (it was a section page). So, there you see the level increase and stay increased for about 20 hours or so (with some die down due to Times traffic behaviour). The Digg stuff, has a much shorter time frame. It is the life of an entry on Digg on the front-page. Anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, but rarely longer than that.

Visiting Google adsense now gives me this:

I love Japanese webdesign.

Insightful post by Steve Rubel about social search.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”. Specifically, they’re starting with some Wordpress plugins.

That’s 60 euro for a 500 GB drive on Amazon. Crazy stuff. Here are some of my older calculations of the dropping cost of storage: For investing US$10 a month, you’ll have accumulated 15 petabytes of storage space by 2020.

Year—price per 1 Gig
1980—500000
1985—80000
1990—9000
1995—1000
2000—15
2001—6
2002—3
2003—2
2004—1
…
2008—20 cents for a gig!

Fuck twitter I like blogging :)

IE sends FF a cake :)

Scaling tip: set lighttpd in front of Apache to handle http requests, redirect dynamic requests to apache and handle static files by itself. Ah, smart :)

A NYT article on Paul Otlet, the Belgian inventor of the library index card.

Ademloos, website over de nieuwe brug die in Antwerpen is gepland, en veel lawaai/fijn stof zou veroorzaken.

Yahoo is not bad at launching a certain type of content/community website. OMG for example is doing well: 2 million user comments the first year, and great traffic. Is Yahoo therefore only a “destination” site. Would that be so bad?

Great. The Firefox download page is down.

This is the right link (I believe) for Dakissa, the new videoblog on user interface.

Mock it up before you fuck it up.

New videoblog about user interface by good men Michael and Victor. Check it out!

“If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand.” - so true. (via)