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Jack Baty – Director of Unspecified Services

Pipchip.com Better than a chain

Pipchip.com Better than a chain letter, meaner than a Beanie Baby, funnier than a Pet Rock… PipChips are the latest craze to sweep selected portions of the American midwest (we’re growing, but slowly). It’s everything you could expect from a little plastic disk with a cartoon face on it. It’s all about the trip.

The Mental Game of Debugging

The Mental Game of Debugging 10 suggestions for helping to find and fix bugs in software. Your results may vary, I’m still having trouble with pipchip.

Lighthouse – The doubts about

Lighthouse – The doubts about Vignette I love hearing stuff like this: Vignette – and rivals like Interwoven TeamSite and Broadvision – still often run a poor second to the do-it-yourself solution. You see, the core content management task is relatively simple: create a database schema in a robust relational database, shove your content into it and whack on a front-end interface to manage elements such as workflow. Hey, we do that!

Avoiding the Abandoned Shopping Cart

Avoiding the Abandoned Shopping Cart Mark Hurst takes issue with solving the problem of abandoned shopping carts by adding more technology, rather than making things simpler. A Wall Street Journal article instigated it. I’m with Mark.

On interpreting access statistics This

On interpreting access statistics This article is pretty old, but does “hit” on the problems with using web server statistics to measure people, which is what everone wants to do.

Personalization so rarely works that

Personalization so rarely works that it’s almost always a bad idea to attempt implementing it. This article from lighthouse discusses this, and points to some Forrester Research studies which seem to support that fact.

Who Says Design Should Be

Who Says Design Should Be Simple? This newmedia.com article by Andy Ihnatko discusses some of the ideas behind/beneath Nielsen’s book. He’s right – everyone should read it. Not because it’s gospel, but because it will make you think a little more.