Jason from 37signals posted that bigger text can and should influence the writing style: The positive side effect of big text: less text. A bigger font means less text so you should think about what you write.
Archive for December, 2005
TagWorld: a combination of delicious, flickr and blogger
TagWorld is another tagging services combining tagging, pictures and connecting to people. And a music tagging feature. Seems that artists without a laleb can sign up. A bit of everything.
Persona fill out form
I started a redesign last month of our French corporate website and introduced the concept of personas. I organised a meeting and started with a presentation explaining what personas really are and how we could use them.
In the beginning the people in the room felt a bit awkward but in the end I got them telling stories about customers. I asked them to create mashups of customers they knew and mixed this information into personas. I got 18 personas out of the meeting and I consider the meeting a real success.
One of the things that started the people was my persona form sheet. I created a simple form that I could hand out. After my presentation everybody could fill out the paper form and create a basic persona. The form is based on the questions and suggestions from the persona toolbox George Olsen published in 2004.
I started the form with background questions; general information: gender, name, profession, age, location, interests or studies. The next thing is computer usage. This is difficult to know and I matched this information with the info from log files I have from the webserver (The Mac browser Safari doesn’t exist, strange but true).
The business relation part is about what type of client this is. If he/she is an important client, big client, small client. How many of these clients do we have or would like to have on our website.
The next sections, “Usage goals”, “Specific needs” are free form and this section needed a little talking. I asked to think about clients and why they would need a website. To convince their bosses? To find information about a product? A contact number? Etc …
The last section, “Context” is about the reason why the client would come to the website, where he works and how much time he/she would spend on the website and if he ever comes back to the website.
At this point I got all the forms and a lot of people looking at me. They were not sure what was expected and if they actually helped me. Then I asked each one of them to present the persona they had written down. I asked to tell a story in front of everyone. This allowed the others to review their own personas and see what was wrong, missing, or useless and correct these things if possible.
I was surprised what the people told me about their customers. You know, creating personas is not about being politically correct.
The form helped so if you want to use the form, download it [VISIO], print it [PDF] and rearrange it.Let me know if it helped you in getting the information you needed.
SitemapEngine.com : Get searched!
If you use the Google sitemap plugin, you can add your sitemap to this new search engine SitemapEngine.com .
Word Statistics Plugin for WordPress
The Word Statistics Plugin for WordPress gives you an idea of how many words and sentences you used. And it displays the fog, kincaid and flash reading level.
Freetag, an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications
The developer “GetLuky” needs some feedback on his class. A php class to add tagging to your webapp with documentation.
Using blogs for sharing information.
I recently installed Wordpress on a Linux server and the Umbraco
I used to work as an helpdesk agent and we had a huge web structure for
One of the things with
A blog is more then a website, it is a concept, a
- Question <> Title
- Post content <> Answer
- Post ID <> id of the FAQ
- And categories.
The categories can be used to link the questions and/or the manual pages to a certain release or a section. And the ID can be used to call a page with a specific template if you want structured xml or html for including the content directly on the page (don’t know how to do this with Wordpress, but it is possible in Umbraco).
Now the only thing missing here is tagging. As the FAQ is run on the intranet, we cannot use del.icio.us but I found FreeTag. It is an open source php class that comes with an sql file to create the additional tables in your database. You can use it next to your own application database (Wordpress in this case) and the manual [PDF] provides some sample code on how to get the tags in and out of the database.
I am still playing around with it but it looks like it does the job: tag objects.
Now that we have a website ready, decided which theme to use, we can start to use it and distribute the information on it. The RSS function can be used to show the latest additions on the start page of the webapp. Similar to the tips you get when starting an application. Use one category news, and use this category RSS feed on the intranet. Anything is possible.
You can make people aware of this thing called RSS and deliver everything directly in their mailbox with one of the many aggregators (Attensa for example) out there. There is so much you can do with just a simple blog.
Webapps van 37signals beste LittleCo innovatie van het jaar
Richard MC Manus wijst 37signals aan als top of the pops op zijn blog Read/WriteWeb. En voor wie 37signals nog niet kent, zou ik toch even gaan kijken en wat spelen met hun apps. 4 fantastische webapps volledig gratis en helemaal Web2 enabled.
Basecamp maakt project management, geen complexe spreadsheets maar gewoon een calendar, writeboards, messages, en nog veel meer.
Backpackit is dan eem tool om je eigen activiteiten te organiseren met reminders, to do lists. Sommige mensen gebruiken het gewoon om te bloggen want alles zit er in: RSS, comments …
Met Writeboards kan je teksten delen, herschrijven , en vorige revisies terug oproepen.
En dan nog TaDa lists, eenvoudige to do lists.
En alles met die yellow fade techniek, Ajax en met de hele Web 2 reutemeteut. Perfect.
En op hun Blog Signal vs Noise hebben ze nu ook een CRM aangekondigd.
Andere gelukkigen die vernoemd worden zijn buzz blogs zoals memorandum en digg.com. Niet echt mijn favoriete keuze als het om buzz meters gaat. Techmorati en Del.icio.us werken veel beter als het gaat om de blogosphere te volgen.
En voor de grote bedrijven prijs is Microsoft genomineerd om dat het ook op de trein is gesprongen met o.a. RSS integratie in Vista, en de Simple Sharing extensie op RSS .
Om er eentje van mezelf toe te voegen, moet ik toch het Umbraco CMS vermelden. Ik denk dat dit het enigste open source CMS is op Microsoft technologie draait en dat de moeite waard is. En dat is het zeker omdat het zo gebruiksvriendelijk is. De lead developer heeft zijn eigen blog draaiende met een aangepast Kubrick theme. Ja dat klopt, bloggen met standard based themes is mogelijk met Umbraco.