You might have noticed links look different on my site. I had them styled without an underline for a long time and I realized I need to practice what I preach. Some usability issues came up at work recently and articles I read made me reevaluate my own site. The most glaring usability infraction were my link styles. I had removed the underline and bolded links because it looked good.
Bold text is normally used to add emphasis, but I changed that to represent links to other content. When it comes to usability, changing an accepted and widely understood standard is simply unforgivable. End users might not pick up on things like this, but it can impact their experience in a very negative way.
Tagged with: internet, usability, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
There's a ton of headphone/earphone/canalphone/earbud options out on the market and it can be hard to filter through the crap and find headphones that perform well while keeping aesthetics in mind. The white earbuds that come with Ipods have become a staple on college campuses where they help complete that all important hipster look, but they don't do much for the music you're listening to.
A few years ago I came across the Koss SportaPro headphones and was very impressed with their sound and comfort level. I handed those down to the wife to work out with and looked for another pair to use at work (programming requires good tunes). My requirements weren't too strict:
- Reasonably priced (under $50)
- Good sound quality
- On ear pads to allow in ambient noise (to avoid startling taps on the shoulder)
- Comfortable and easy to put on and remove
These few parameters helped eliminate a lot of products. I eventually ended up looking at the Sennheiser PX 100's, another pair of SportaPro's, and Grado SR60's (pricier and bulkier than I wanted). This
review at Dan's Data finally sold me on the Sennheisers and I couldn't be happier.
In the 2-3 years I've had the PX 100's I estimate I've put 1500-2000 hours of music through them. The best way to describe how they sound is that they don't sound like headphones. They're clear and fairly detailed without being fatiguing in the high end and quite possibly pump out the perfect amount of bass. I highly recommend the Sennheiser PX 100's if you are looking for a good moderately priced pair of cans.
Sennheiser PX 100 (black)
Sennheiser PX 100 (white) Tagged with: audio, gear, music, review
Posted under: Geek Stuff
The Blarg announced his number of visits a while back and I thought I'd take a look at some of my stats. I've been using Google Analytics for a while and I've got data back to Sept 2006. I started my blog in Oct 2005, but traffic would have been negligible that first year, maybe add 5% onto these numbers. So where do I stand?
- Unique Visitors: 47,295
- Visits: 61,400
- Pageviews: 102,244
Not bad. My Wordpress plugins make up the majority of my traffic, about 55% of the page views. A lot of those are single visit bounces, probably because I don't have my sidebar up on individual pages; might be a good thing to change. A couple other interesting factoids:
- About 98% of visitors have a screen resolution larger than 800x600
- 58.5% were using Firefox vs 31% for IE
I've been wanting to do a redesign and it might be safe to finally push out towards 900-1000 pixel wide layouts. Still have to take into account that people don't run their browsers maximized all the time.
Tagged with: google, traffic
Posted under: Geek Stuff
With the competition eliminated it seems Blu-ray player prices are
creeping up. I'm puzzled about the current player pricing which makes the PS3 a better option than the cheapest standalone player. Hopefully prices will come down as manufacturers finalize on the 2.0 specification and start pumping out more units. In the meantime if you need a nice upconverting DVD player for your standard definition DVDs, grab a Toshiba HD-DVD player on the
cheap, which cost about the same as any other upconverting DVD player with HDMI. I'm saving up credit card rewards to cash in for gift cards when prices are a little more palatable.
Tagged with: high def, movies
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Google has their GrandCentral service in beta right now and I signed up to find out more about it. GrandCentral is a telephony service that let's you route all your phone calls coming in and going out through a single phone number. Google provides you with a phone number and you link your phone numbers like cell, home and work to it. So what does GrandCentral actually do?
First off it let's people call you at a single number. When your GrandCentral number gets called, all the numbers you link to it ring (or however you configure it). That makes giving out your number easier since someone will be able to get a hold of you from a single number. This is also nice if you have numbers that can't be ported like home and work, just give out your Grand Central number. You can initiate calls from your browser: select the person you want to call and which of your phones you want to use. You get a call from your GrandCentral number, you pick up and then it calls whoever you chose.
At home and don't want to use cell minutes? Answer your home phone. There is also the possibility of putting your Grand Central number in your "Fave 5" if your cell provider offers that service. Another cool feature is being able to switch between your phones without interrupting calls. Just hit *, your other phones will ring, answer the phone you want to transfer to and hang up the other one. Could be useful if you are having a conversation on your cell and arrive home or you have to leave and want to seamlessly switch to your cell.
There's a few other cool features. You can screen calls like you could with old school answering machines: you hit 3 to pick up and listen as the caller leaves a message and then hit * to jump in. You can record conversations (both parties get notified) and forward or playback messages from your browser or by calling your Grand Central number.
The system is pretty customizable too. You can set how callers get screened based on if they are unknown or if they are in your address book. Have unknown callers go straight to voice mail and let them leave a message, but let your friends get right through. You can create groups and decide which phones ring for each one. You can record personalized greetings or rings for specific people and groups; friends could get a casual greeting, but business contacts get a more formal greeting.
Overall I think GrandCentral is a great idea if you actually need it. If you've just got a cell phone it might not be too useful. If you are juggling a cell, home and work it could be a pretty cool tool to have. Everything is free right now, but I think the plan is to charge for outgoing calls which might affect how appealing it is for personal use.
Blogger Invite
More Detailed Tour Tagged with: google, phone
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Oh yeah 100% baby.
Tagged with: quiz, science
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I went through my posts and found that more than half of them were simply dumped in the "Uncategorized" category that comes with Wordpress. I realized that I didn't like my categories and they were actually obstacles to me posting. I went through and added categories for what I had posted and want to post about in the future. I ditched a few and added catchall categories like "Life" and "Geek" to cover some of those miscellaneous posts. Also any post with a picture I took got stuck in "Photography". I guess my New Year's resolution for 2008 is to make my blog more interesting and cover more topics that I enjoy. For example, I love movies, but it seems I haven't posted once about them. The Movies category is empty and having it there will encourage me to post on that specific topic.
Tagged with: blogging, categories, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I use the plugin Bad Behavior on top of Aksimet to stop spam on my blog and something went strange with the old version I have; a blacklist started coming back with false positives but it has been fixed. So if you couldn't post a comment try again.
Tagged with: blogging, spam, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I've been a faithful user of Gmail for a little over 2 years now and one of the things I never really used was the built-in chat since most people use AIM to chat. The Gmail team released a new feature today that allows you to login to your AIM account and have your buddies show up in the "chat" list with your other Gmail contacts. I haven't been much of a chatter for a while and I even went through today and purged my buddy list of over 50 screen names.
The integration with Gmail is a little primitive (as is Gmail's chat), but it works great for the amount of chatting I do. The one feature that I would love to see is the ability to map AIM screen names to Gmail contacts so they don't show up twice in the chat list. That would be uber-slick. If you use Gmail try it out, hit the options button on the bottom left of the chat list.
Tagged with: email, gmail, google
Posted under: Geek Stuff
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