Thoughts

Designed by Braggadocio

I do web design and development consulting in my free time. I always strive for quality and originality in my designs. It never fails to amaze me how people always fall for cheap, imitative designs, simply because they’re flashier.

These “web designers” promise more traffic, more exposure, better looks, more and better everything, and of course they don’t deliver on any of those things, except on the surface. Yes, the designs may be flashier, and buttons might move, or the top banner might be in Flash, and it might do something that’ll make the site owner go “Wow”, but that’s all empty. It doesn’t do anything for the site’s substance, nor does it do anything for the search engines, because the site hasn’t been properly coded for them. Or, they’ll design the site in Frontpage… The telltale signs are easy to spot: _vti files are everywhere, the page weight is large, and the graphics just aren’t that good. But people fall for this stuff!

It never fails to amaze me… It leaves me speechless, really. I compare the bragging with the product delivered, and I can see the wide gap between what’s been promised and actually created. Yet the site owners don’t see it. How can I make them see where the real value lies?

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Thoughts

Who is the most famous Christian of the 20th century?

The answer will surprise you, and the background information given in the article will shock you. This is definitely recommended reading. The parallelisms between this “most famous Christian” and what’s going on today in the States may make you utter a nervous chuckle.

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Thoughts

Microsoft iPod Parody

This is pretty funny! MS just owned up to making this iPod parody video themselves.

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Reviews

New Google Calendar

Just read about Google and its work on developing CL2 – a web calendar. The link will take you to a page with screenshots. CL2 will be done in AJAX, like Gmail, and it’ll be tightly integrated with it, but what I think is really cool is its integration with other calendaring products, like iCal for the Mac. Yay! Integration and information-sharing across programs is always the way to go!

If CL2 and iCal could work seamlessly, and if CL2 would provide a dynamically generated web page which would combine multiple iCal calendars, that would be ideal. What bothers me about iCal is that it won’t let me combine my Home and Work calendars into a single view when I publish them to my .Mac account. If I could do that with CL2, that would be great!

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Thoughts

Lawrence Lessig's presentation on free culture

I highly recommend viewing the presentation given by Lawrence Lessig on free culture. I’d been really annoyed by DRM and certainly recent implementations of it by Apple did nothing to help the case for it. Then I viewed this presentation, and it really opened my eyes to what’s going on out there, and why there are more and more restrictions on content. It was given in 2002, and if you look at what’s happened since, you can really see the changes! They’re for the worse, not better – so please, take 20 minutes to watch it or download the transcript, and do your part to save our collective works of culture! Thanks!

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