Comments for Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease

Comment on Review of “Selling usability: user experience infiltration tactics” by John S. Rhodes

John S. Rhodes — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:32:53 +0000

p.s. I can ship internationally through my store! :-)

Comment on Drupal considered dangerous for startups? by Adulmec

Adulmec — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:36:27 +0000

Well, I think Drupal has come a long way from the time this article was written. I think D6 is a appropriate choice for many startups that have limited resources devoted to what they want to build. It depends what type of company you are. But there are more problems that can appropriate solved with Drupal in less time and on a smaller budget than not. We just launched a basic site in Drupal in a short time and are more than happy with it (a taxi firm directory).

-Daniel

Comment on How to install ELGG on dreamhost by Eric

Eric — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 03:27:10 +0000

trying to install elgg1.5 on dreamhost and during setup I get a data folder not writeable message , pretty sure I made it 777 writeable.
I put it (the empty dadt folder I created per txt) in the elgg folder is that the wrong place

Comment on Drupal follow-up: why I still think Drupal or any generic CMS is dangerous for many startups. by Derek

Derek — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:17:52 +0000

The first rule of Drupal that you must obey if you want to live in Drupal Nirvana is — ‘”Don’t hack core” — You may think that it is impossible not to hack core. I once thought this way too. Then I learned how to use Drupal. There is a plethora of documentation and other information at Drupal.org that will help in your development efforts.

You mentioned that you had to hack core to display your nodes in different orders… you can use http://drupal.org/project/views for that.

The beauty of Drupal is that most of the stuff that you want has already been developed and you can just drop it onto your server and go. Drupal’s modular architecture encourages a fairly high degree of standardization among contributed modules.

At any rate the essence of what I wanted to say is this: If you find yourself hacking core, then you probably don’t know what you are doing… My brother and I have not touched core for any projects using Drupal later than 4.7 (At that time we did not know what we were doing either)…

I really think that anyone wanting to just explore a free and fairly easy to use CMS should look into Drupal.

Drupal’s power and flexibility are not for the casual web publisher. These people will be comfortable with the ease that WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, etc. have to offer. A person wanting a blog would only be interested in using Drupal if they would also like to say: sell subscriptions, build their own content types, define their own blocks, regions, menus, and so on. Drupal gives you the ability to do pretty much whatever you want.

Regards, Derek

Comment on Drupal considered dangerous for startups? by Post Free classified ads

Post Free classified ads — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:57:03 +0000

Nice post. When startup is successful I really like Drupal’s scalability. I love it when I just build a blog out in drupal and then the startup NGO begings gaining some traction and a couple months later the same core site is handling the organizations event system and housing a private intranet ect… it makes the clients smile knowing they have a development platform that happens to have a great cms.

Comment on How to install ELGG on dreamhost by Melanie

Melanie — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:05:24 +0000

I made the change and I’m still getting the error.
Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4.

Comment on Drupal considered dangerous for startups? by humble

humble — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:28:06 +0000

Drupal is great-but the growing pains of a startup require attention-and Drupal can really pull at the limited amount of intellectual resources (your staff) you have..Drupal should be viewed as an objective to bridge over too unless you have the resoures to have SMEs on hand to deal with drupal..Resources-a good linux sys admin who knows mysql and has worked with Drupal, a PHP developer whose worked with drupal and a Community contributer or mod developer..
Even with those in place for a startup-its tough.

Comment on Upload and download speeds with TATA Indicom in India. by Wolf

Wolf — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:05:25 +0000

Gives you some perspective… thanks.

Comment on What the hell is a chupacabra? (aka the elmendorf beast) by TigerGirl

TigerGirl — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:07:53 +0000

That was not a head of a man what they saw was something else…cause human eyes dont glow in the dark.
When a saw the video e was totaly suprised by that “thing”. I stopped in the moment that he turns the head to watch who did that noise…and i thought like: I EXPECT THAT THIS DOESNT HAPPENDS TO ME!
P.S.-One more thing, if something is writted bad is because im portuguese.

Comment on Designing the relationship between content and locales by Designing the relationship between content and locales » jarango.com

Designing the relationship between content and locales » jarango.com — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:36:01 +0000

[...] Peter Van Dijck: “I am trying to gather thoughts on the various structures and patterns that occur when creating multiple versions of a website in multiple locales.” [...]

Comment on Information architecture and user experience in Belgium by Karl Gilis

Karl Gilis — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:06:11 +0000

An interesting blog on usability from Belgium. http://webusability-blog.com/

Comment on Balsamiq mockups review by Nick Hibberd

Nick Hibberd — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:55:28 +0000

I too have used it for a number of months and I think the sketchy style is what makes it so good. When putting together a project spec I can slip in quick designs that illustrate a point, rather than detailed images which tend to be interpreted as the finished article. I wouldn’t use it in place of proper wireframe software, but it does a job for me.

Comment on The Maori versus Dewey by Chris

Chris — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:08:46 +0000

Who says there can be only one catalog? Increasingly fast computers and vast data storage capacity should allow for more than one catalog of the same information — or better yet, one database but multiple architectures to search the database. So, I log in, then choose which search architecture suits me. Cooperative “tagging” helps in this, as long as the taggers are knowledgable and serious in setting up their architecture.

Comment on Balsamiq mockups review by Steve

Steve — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:21:53 +0000

I’ve used Mockups for several months now, and like it very much. It makes me more productive, and I can build mockups for a project in a fraction of the time now, and do not need to rely on any assistance from a developer. I like the comic font, as it is useful when interacting with users. I like the linking, and will try to create a master as outlined in the video (haven’t done that yet). I think that if there were an easier way to create a master without the import/export chore, it would have most of what I need. I have demo’d Axure and iPlotz also. They are good products. Where Balsamic excels is in its usability. Please keep it simple to use in future releases !!! The other products behave more like development tools sometimes, in my opinion. I am a systems analyst and have no desire to use a developer’s workbench. Thanks for a product that is truly intended for an analyst.

Comment on by Andrea Resmini

Andrea Resmini — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:16:41 +0000

Peter,

thanks for supporting the initiative.

As for the PDF-only thing, it’s really PDF-only *now*. We needed the Journal out, and PDFs were already being produced during the revision stages, so that was easy and quick.
But we are currently working on the individual XHTML pages for all articles (should be available early next week), and on RSS feeds, and on uncountable other things we know the web site is missing or does poorly.

I mean, I totally share the irony, and you know I take this things personal: I wouldn’t stand the Journal of IA delivering poor UX if not for just a brief period. ;)