See Oregano, a Multiuser server for Flash clients, written in Java and released free and open source.

Good Experience: Seems that many of the top web sites have the same user experience issues as us little guys. One of the big challenges is mapping customers' needs to site structure, specifically dealing with the problems caused by mirroring the corporate structure on its web site: “Why should they conform to the way the company is organized internally? After all, the website is there for customers' use, not for the company to show the world its org chart.

The folks from the Mozilla Foundation asked me if I could point the mozillafirebird.org .net and .com domains to the official Mozilla Firebird page. Of course I will. For now it does a redirect, and I’ll be modifying the DNS entries to point directly to their servers asap.

I swiped a nice, XHTML 1.0 Strict template from OpenSource Web Design and dropped it in here just for fun. Not many people will notice, as the majority of people reading this are doing so from an aggregator. Still, it felt good to run through another XHTML/CSS exercise. Not a table in “site.”

I had several hundred weblog entries formatted for use in blosxom, and couldn’t find any converters for creating a movable type import file from them. Being the resourceful fellow that I am, I wrote my own. It’s a Python script that is called from within the directory of story files. It creates a single text file, mtimport, for importing into MT. I know very little Python, but it worked. If you’re feeling brave, you can grab a copy of it for yourself, blosxom2mt.

Yes I did. It’s a long story, but here goes… I wanted to create new templates for my blog, which uses (used) blosxom. In the process, I was trying to tweak a few entries and move things around a bit. Big mistake. I had all of the proper plugins (entries_cache, etc) but the file modification times kept getting munged up and I got pissed. I concluded that blosxom works best for simple blogs that are not frequently edited or otherwise messed with.

Yet another reason to hate Metallica. UPDATE As Matthew points out, the above story is a hoax. Jimmy Kimmel and MSNBC both referred to it as fact, so at least I’m not the only one who neglected to check his references. Besides, the fact that so many people believed it to be true says something about the sorry state of a formerly good-not-great band.

A modern spin of Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics (1994) with Rich Internet Applications as the subject. From [Boxes and Arrows]1. By the way, I hate the term Rich Internet Application.

Teenage girls speak a different language. For proof, see my daughter’s blog. I didn’t teach her to write like that. Oh well.

From [O’Reilly Network]1, some tips for those lucky Mac owners who are suffering under the weight of managing large image libraries with iPhoto.

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox discusses the many usability issues surrounding using PDF files to display web content. “Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that’s it. Don’t use it for online presentation.” Amen brother!

[Jon Udell]1: “It seems kind of unfair, doesn’t it? First, developers have to understand and accommodate users' habits. Then we have to deliver solutions that add value while surreptitiously encouraging users to adopt better habits. Finally, we have to bring to the surface, examine, and modify our own deeply-ingrained habits. That’s a painful and psychologically hard thing to do. But happy users are not the only reward. The habit of breaking habits will serve you well.