Complex Spiral has a nifty new site. If you need a reason to check it out, start with Eric Meyer’s article, Containing Floats.

Jakob Nielsen: On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users' key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here?

Bug reports, feature requests and questions regarding PHPetal may now use CVStrac at the following address: https://jackbaty.com/cgi-bin/cvstrac/phpetal CVStrac: “CVSTrac implements a low-ceremony bug tracking system for small to medium-sized projects using CVS for version control.” At first it looks too simple, but I’m finding it very useful.

Keith describes how I feel exactly… It’s weird, every time I put myself in a social situation with a lot of people I almost never enjoy myself for more than a few minutes. But everytime I get invited somewhere and don’t go I feel like I’m missing something.

It all started one weekend at our office about two years ago, probably on a Saturday. I was bored, so I thought I’d try installing [It all started one weekend at our office about two years ago, probably on a Saturday. I was bored, so I thought I’d try installing]2 on an old desktop machine. I knew nothing about any of the nix operating systems, and I was just sure I was missing something important.

information architecture for designers looks like an interesting read.

Sitepoint article: Flash Player Detection Techniques Unearthed.

Too many emails today riddled with the SOBIG.F virus. Steve Friedl posts some helpful header_check rules for us lucky folks using Postfix. The header checks have blocked 15, wait, 18 infected messages in the past 20 minutes.

Most web developers don’t seem to have much empathy for disabled visitors who might visit a given web site. This site demonstrates what it might feel like for someone with different impairments to visit a site which doesn’t consider them.

Ever wanted the opportunity to redesign Jakob Nielsen’s admittedly bland, but very widely read useit.com? Well, here’s your chance. A contest, endorsed by Mr. Nielsen, and judged by some of the best in the industry. God, I wish I were a designer!

From The Myth of Discoverability… If, as a designer, I tried to weasel out of this, by giving everything equal attention in the design, I’d ensure only mediocrity. By treating everything equally, I’d force customers to make choices of prioritization, which generally, they’re not so interested in doing. Most people are glad that the steering wheel in their automobile is easier to discover than the fuse box. They expect that whoever designed the automobile, or web site, is making good basic choices in their interest, so that they don’t have to think about it.

Paula Scher, in her book Make it Bigger, discusses the negotiation process that goes on between the designer and the client. A correlative to this rule is that apparently simple jobs are rarely that. When a client once tried to persuade me to cut my fee on a “simple” job, I told him that I needed the money to pay for all the changes he was going to make. He insisted that the project was uncomplicated and that there would be few revisions.