A List Apart is conducting a survey of the web making profession.

“Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.”

Amazon is having LOTS of problems today - their S3 service (and store) have been nothing but errors for over an hour now.
http://blog.linkdiagnosis.com/?p=16

Google has some new software that allows you to add social features to any web site. Google Friend Connect. It also works with existing social networks as well. Including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. Watch the video, it’s potentially very cool stuff.

» Read more!

Thanks to Andre for putting this one out there. Fantasy Interactive, http://www.f-i.com. Check ‘em out. You won’t be disappointed.

There is a Firefox extension called No Script which allows you to police the activity of certain sites. The idea being, greater security when using JavaScript. Ajaxian had an article on it:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/making-javascript-safe-with-no-script

I found one user comment had something interesting things to share:

“NoScript seems to be one of the most popular extensions from the Firefox repository. So my assumption is this: a lot of people use it and do not grant access to JS on less known sites. So, it is becoming a necessity to use progressive enhancement. Libraries like Ext seem to totally ignore this approach. Try any of their demos and you’ll end up watching the loading indicator forever or read a heartwarming “JS … will make your life much easier” at the script.aculo.us site. This is not to blame these particular libraries specifically, as all of the JS frameworks are actually made for Javascript libraries. But it seems a lot of us forget about building something that takes accessibility seriously. Both http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm indicate that currently, 6% of web users don’t have JS. That’s more than the total market share of Safari and Opera together!
Shouldn’t we forget about our favorite scripting languages and focus on what degradability every once in a while?”

http://spanish-portuguese.berkeley.edu/

Ok, here’s another interesting site that displays content in new and unique ways… I’m not saying it’s great design mind you (but it IS good)…just interesting when you look at the overall thoughtful blend of technology and design. The designer/programmer manages to break webconventions without losing the intuitiveness of rummaging thru the site and finding necessary information (like the logo is kind of buried in the middle of the ‘visually-cluttered’ header). And it’s chuck full of cool stuff w/o looking or acting too geeky.

There are several things to discover here and I’ll list just a few:

1. many interesting custom illustrations that load randomly as a page refreshes

2. a blog between professors and students based on a customized version of word press

3. simple navigation

4. the layout changes depending on browser window size; small screens automatically view ALL the content in 2 columns, larger screens in 3 or 4.

5. javascript animates the interface (there’s a nice fade in and out of content) and rearranges content whenever “read more” links are activated

6. from what I’ve read, it’s written in XHTML, CSS and Javascript, according to web standards and usabillity guidelines…or as steven says, “it’s clean under the hood”.

7. it’s designed and developed by Miguel Ripoll who, interestingly enough, has studied the History of Art / Musicology and Comp Lit! Check out his site here: http://miguelripoll.com/

Ok, have at it!

http://demos.mootools.net/

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.

For wine lovers, I give you Cork’d. What Flickr does for pictures, Cork’d does for wines. Members (free) can manage a catalog of favorite wines, tag them by flavor qualities (smoky, peppery, etc) and be able to find new wines by these tags. Even searching for “Drinking Buddies” with similar tastes is possible.

The user experience of this site is among the best I’ve ever seen. Even simple things like examples entries for each field in forms has been thought out. “Fun to use” does describe Cork’d. There is a lot of “we should steal that idea” here.

As the creators of the site say, “This is something [we] built quite simply because we wanted to use it.” This is a very nice piece of work.

Dan Cederholm of Simplebits, one of the industry proponents of standards-based web design, was the creative drivers behind Cork’d and has written up a very nice blog entry on his experience with the effort.

Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic was the application developer behind Cork’d and has his own blog entry on the experience. Yes, Cork’d is a Ruby on Rails site.