clue free

The 80s marketing term “user friendly” begat one of the classic Unix quips: “Unix is user-hostile” (or: “Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about who its friends are.”) Web portals, everyone’s favorite 90s busybox, very quickly became user hostile as distractions were, well, kind of their whole purpose.

Readability is a useful/controversial bookmarklet that strips away all the crap you find in typical web portals these days:

Even though AdBlock Plus has nigh-magical abilities to make certain websites bearable, the problem has gone beyond paid-placement ads as the site itself is screaming almost as loudly to draw you into another of its corners, like Wikipedia with colors. As the ALA article mentions, what should be an act of “reading” withers to “browsing”, a descriptor that was okay-I-guess in the era of black & white internet (which, ironically, grew out of a no-design, content-heavy, academics-only web.)

I don’t agree that publishers “just need to find something users are willing to pay for” (they won’t, and neither will they.) But I do think that a page could be taken from the attitude some forward-thinking internet music/game vendors have taken, which is to trust your users. While everyone else was DRMing everything up, these guys took a step back and said, “hey, if they’re already trying to pay us, why don’t we not assume they’re trying to steal?” The nuance in publishing is different, but the attitude is the same: goad the user into pursuing topics/authors further, and if you’ve done your job right, they probably will. “People get disinterested halfway through! We need to keep pulling them through to other pages!” Oh, boo hoo. They’ll probably be back tomorrow, and maybe next week. Until they figure out your content sucks and they move on to your competitors. You got the short-term ad bucks, but lost the war.

MySpace always looked like an abomination, but… what the hell? This looks bad even for an in-development site. There are at least three design motifs at war here.

Dark blue and black text on a dark grey background. Very good, Timmy! Next week we will learn our times tables!

Recently appreciated in webbyland:

• volll is an incredible Hungarian design firm with an incredible web site that asks you to not only scroll down, but scroll up. Hat tip to them for bringing all this stuff in at just over 500k.
• Really love the NYC Subway aesthetic Filipe Fortes is using. Regarding his featured article of the moment: there is a half-assed attempt at maintaining a vertical rhythm in CF’s design, strictly via CSS, but yeah, those darn images keep throwing everything off.
• Creepy ads of the 1950s include the self-slicing pig. (An incredibly badly-drawn self-slicing pig.)
• Video of an amazing ninja dog escaping from a cage (and probably then dashing off to rescue Predator-era Schwarzenegger.)  cf.: ninja cat.

By the way, kudos to the WordPress team for including “Schwarzenegger” in their auto-spellchecker.

Some days, it feels so good to be a web geek. Earlier this week, I [two years late] discovered jQuery, a JavaScript library. It takes most of the pain out of making your fancified whiz-bang Web 2.0 pages go, go, go. Even better than that, their logo is based on the DEVO energy dome (their former tagline being “new wave JavaScript”.) I get the feeling they won’t end up getting sued over it, unlike some megacorporations.

Today, I find this:

Ajaxorized has released a GPL licensed image manipulation script called Phototype. Phototype is a client/server-side library, based on prototype, which provides image manipulation functionality. On the server, it uses the PHP/GD framework to render the image. While the client is an interface that makes these features easily accessible in JavaScript, including the ability to chain effects.

Phototype supports: image rotatation, resizing, flipping, drop shadows, effects, grey scale, captions, as well as an addChuckNorris() method [for all you Walker, Texas Ranger fans]