Evan Williams of EvHead.com believes that new website construction methods (AJAX, FLEX, widgets, RSS and others) are about to topple the long respected metric of “page views” for site popularity.

If pages are increasingly made up of pieces that may come from multiple sources with dynamic activity reducing the need to load new pages altogether, it may not be possible to view web log reports as before to determine site access levels.

Site successfulness and banner ad impression rates will have to be determined by new metrics yet to be described.

M Studio’s website falls into the “explore me” site navigation model which isn’t the best for everything. But this site does make one sit up and take notice - it’s attention getting! Also, their body of work contains lots of food for thought for good ideas to “borrow with honor”.

Happens all the time. There is a need for a list of countries in a publication or a dropdown control on a web site. This appears to be an exhaustive source of countries with ISO 2-letter codes as well as the three letter codes that the UN uses. Very bookmarkable.

The Gucci site has relaunched withl Script.aculo.us effects. The Script.aculo.us site has an new all DHTML effects home page too now.

All DHTML effects with AJAX provided data for the shopping bag. Wow, first Buell and now everyone’s doing it! (ha!) The bar just keeps going higher and higher. All of this is food for creative thought.

In a blog entry, Nicholas Rougeux gives a very slick way of presenting lists of checkboxes via CSS. As a design case for creative or usability work, think this should be considered another tool for the GS Interactive toolbox.

link

This is a technical issue but to be filed under “I wasted my morning on this so you don’t have to”. For those of you who find this a little too technical, here’s a good example of what a web app’ developer’s day can be like some days!

innerHTML. Microsoft came up with it. It’s not a W3C standard but because everyone supports it, it has become a de facto standard. And it’s nice. Instead of pages of “createTextNode, appendChild, createElement, setAttribute” calls you can just say:

document.getElementById(’myDiv’).innerHTML = ‘In the news…’;

…and be done with it. Unless you are in tables…and a few other elements. To quote MSDN:

The property is read/write for all objects except the following, for which it is read-only: COL, COLGROUP, FRAMESET, HTML, STYLE, TABLE, TBODY, TFOOT, THEAD, TITLE, TR.

Of course, Firefox has no problem with using innerHTML anywhere (Safari and Opera, untested - but I would bet…).

InnerHTML. Created by Microsoft. Perfected by The Mozilla Foundation.

Apple had a preview of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard yesterday. You can watch some of it’s gooey GUI in action here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/

Time Machine is particularly interesting.

TED is an annual conference dedicated to Technology, Entertainment, and Design. The conference hosts some extremely interesting people and touches on a wide range of fascinating subjects. They’ve now made available video podcasts of various speakers that I would strongly recommend checking out. This makes for great lunch-time viewing.

iTunes video podcast

TEDTalks Website