MIT Per­sonas shows you how the Inter­net sees you
Enter­ing your name into the text field unleashes a nat­ural lan­guage pro­cess­ing engine that pro­files your online iden­tity. When it’s fin­ished, you end up with a col­or­ful, visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your Inter­net per­sona. To really under­stand it, you need to give it a try.

# tagged: internet, mit, personas

Design pat­terns col­lec­tion on Flickr
A great col­lec­tion of UI design pat­terns from Chris Messina. He also has a bunch of other col­lec­tions for design inspi­ra­tion in his Flickr pho­to­stream.

# tagged: design patterns, user interface, web design

Free fonts
A nice run­down of free type­faces you can use in your next design project. I really dig Tire­sias Info­point.

# tagged: fonts, typography

The White Bal­ance Project
A col­lec­tion of white bal­anc­ing pho­tos (most fea­tur­ing yours truly) Allie took while work­ing through her pho­tog­ra­phy classes.

# tagged: photography

Cus­tom tax­onomies in Word­press 2.8
Justin Tad­lock explains how to mod­ify your theme’s functions.php file to allow for cus­tom tax­onomies and enabling you to orga­nize con­tent like /​people/​jeff-​​siarto or /​meat/​porterhouse. Thanks to Brad for point­ing this out.

# tagged: taxonomy, wordpress

301 Domain Redirects

One of the most reused snip­pets of code I write is a bit of Apache con­fig­u­ra­tion that I put in my .htac­cess file to do Google-​​friendly 301 redi­rects. I typ­i­cally use them for two pur­poses: First, to redi­rect traf­fic to my active site from other URLs that I own (some­times my site is listed as jeff​siarto​.com). And sec­ond, to kill the www in front of my domains (read more on the www debate).

301 redi­rects tell the browser that a page has moved per­ma­nently and will force search engines to update their records and drop the old URL—avoiding dupli­cate con­tent prob­lems.

Redi­rect traf­fic from an old domain to a new domain

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [r=301,NC]

Redi­rect traf­fic that uses the www sub­do­main

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

0 | tagged: htaccess, modrewrite

Space­ship Col­lab­o­ra­tive
A new Chicago start-​​up founded by Jacob DeHart (of Thread­less fame) and his wife Mis­cha focused on cre­at­ing fun and inno­v­a­tive projects that raise the bar for com­mu­ni­ties and ser­vices. This is also the crew behind the soon-​​to-​​be awe­some foodie site Culi­nary Cul­ture.

# tagged: chicago, design

HTML 5 Weekly Review #3

It was another slow week on the HTML 5 spec front but not with­out some great dis­cus­sion from the Zeld­man camp. In lieu of any real break­ing news, I’ve pro­vided some inter­est­ing links to more read­ing on HTML 5:

HTML 5 Drag and Drop
A write-​​up on the fea­tures and usage of HTML 5 drag and drop in Fire­fox 3.5.

23 Essen­tial HTML 5 Resources
Another list of resources and peo­ple to fol­low regard­ing HTML 5.

HTML 5: Good News/​Bad News
If you’re still a lit­tle con­fused and over­whelmed with every­thing that’s going on with HTML 5, XHTML and future of the web, David at ODF Tools has writ­ten a post that may help clear things up.

Site of the Week: An Event Apart
The redesign of An Event Apart was done by Eric Meyer and the folks at Happy Cog. It’s been up since the begin­ning of the year and was one of the first higher-​​profile sites to switch to an HTML 5 DOCTYPE. Eric goes into more detail here about why he used HTML 5.

0 | tagged: html 5

Rub­ber Ban­dit
A beau­ti­fully designed and built rub­ber band gun com­plete with inter­change­able bar­rels and pack­ag­ing that fea­tures the Archer type­face from H&FJ. Check out the schemat­ics too.

# tagged: design, typography

HTML 5 Weekly Review #2

This week in HTML 5: Say good­bye to Ogg The­ora, John Resig on HTML 5 pars­ing and Edge Rails switches its DOCTYPE.

No Spec­i­fied Video Codec for HTML 5
ZDNet reports that HTML 5 author Ian Hick­son has decided to drop sup­port for the open source Ogg The­ora video codec for­mat as well as Apple’s H.264 for­mat. Both are being pulled because of oppo­si­tion from other browser ven­dors and Hickson’s approach to ven­dor involve­ment in writ­ing the new spec. This means that HTML 5 will not spec­ify a codec for use with the video ele­ment.

HTML 5 Pars­ing
John Resig talks about one of the most widely sup­ported sec­tions of the HTML 5 spec: doc­u­ment pars­ing.

New Rails DOCTYPE
In a recent com­mit, the main scaf­fold­ing tem­plate files in Rails were switched to the HTML 5 DOCTYPE. A short dis­cus­sion of the changes can be found on Hacker News.

Site of the Week: UX Lon­don
The guys at Clear­left have done a great job recently in show­ing that HTML 5 is mature enough to be used on pro­duc­tions sites. Not only do they use it on their own site, but the design they did for the UX Lon­don con­fer­ence fea­tures HTML 5 as well.

0 | tagged: html 5

MIT mobile web­site
I’ve always thought that MIT had one of the most inter­est­ing aca­d­e­mic web­sites. Their mobile site and full-​​screen coun­ter­part are no excep­tion.

# tagged: iphone, mobile, web design

iPhone web design gallery
A nice gallery of web­sites opti­mized for view­ing on the iPhone.

# tagged: iphone, web design

Snow Stack: 3D visual effects using web stan­dards
Amaz­ing 3D effects with OS X Snow Leop­ard and Webkit using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Flash and Sil­verlight must be los­ing sleep at night.

# tagged: css, html 5, webkit

HTML 5 browser imple­men­ta­tion wiki
A good sum­mary of cur­rent browser sup­port for HTML 5. It’s a wiki so check back often for updates or help con­tribute by adding your own.

# tagged: browsers, html 5

The Learner’s Jour­ney in prac­tice
O’Reilly Edi­tor Brian Sawyer talks about the Learner’s Jour­ney and the process the Head First team uses to get to a fin­ished title.

# tagged: head first, writing