Darren Hoyt Dot Com | Archive for Web

August 2010

Mon 30^th

Moving Target

My favorite book on the film industry is William Goldman’s (The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) “Adventures in the Screen Trade”. What I love is there are no specific conclusions about filmmaking…

Sun 9^th

Community Expectations

Dribbble opened to the public last month while generating a lot of discussion about community and exclusivity. Drawar runs a great community of its own where this week users discussed what disappointed them about Dribbble.

Sun 14^th

Tweets to Remember

Specific blog posts can be credited with widespread influence of opinion. Can microblogging’s limited format accomplish the same thing?
Wed 10^th

Obama Theme, Republican Candidate

Today Geoff Fox tipped me off to something ironic: the website for Republican congressional candidate Daria Novak is using a WordPress theme I designed back in 2008 for Obama supporters.
Tue 9^th

Dribbble, Meritocracy and the Open Web

Last month I was lucky to be drafted into Dribbble by a fellow designer. It’s a private beta site with a lot of buzz. It will eventually grow and go public which got me thinking about the ramifications.

Sat 20^th

A Twitter I Would Pay For

To be blunt, I’ll admit: I’ve poked fun at Twitter since the very beginning. Because it seemed like fluff, like noise, because it reduced smart people to oversharing narcissists, because it created strange, artificial, disproportionate popular kid/unpopular kid/cult leader/sheep hierarchies. I felt dorky just saying the word Twitter.

Tue 3^rd

The Rise of Visual Browsing

This time last year at the annual TED conference, Microsoft Live Labs demoed an immersive media-browsing tool that literally caused gasps in the audience. Seadragon/Photosynth is exactly the kind of ‘3-D web’ experience people were hyping in the late 1990s, along with VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), as though they were poised to go mainstream.

Tue 4^th

Microsoft IE8 Team Reverses Targeting Policy

Zeldman cautiously supported the IE8 team’s previous strategy of default version-targeting whereas Jeremy Keith argued passionately against it. In the end, supporters of Keith’s argument prevailed in getting the IE8 developers to change their minds…

Wed 27^th

How does your blog display RSS info?

Back in the relative old days of 2003-2004 when orange RSS icons started appearing in the sidebars of websites, very few users knew what to do with them. Jeff Veen said said…
Fri 15^th

Advanced Streamline Techniques

You wouldn’t be able to tell judging by the tardiness of Mimbo Pro (ha), but I’ve always been (unhealthily) obsessed with finding ways to do things more efficiently. It’s what inspired this previous post (”Streamline Your Process: RSS Feeds, Bookmarks, Frameworks, Design Resources”).
Sat 2^nd

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post

What happens as your posts get published, ping servers, get indexed, get scraped, get syndicated, linked by other blogs and finally consumed? If you want to see the life cycle demonstrated in an awkward, unnavigable Flash format, Wired magazine has your number.

Mon 17^th

Streamline Your Process: RSS Feeds, Bookmarks, Frameworks, Design Resources

An old friend began learning web design last month, but said she was feeling overwhelmed by what to learn first, who to learn it from, how to keep track of it all, and how to do it efficiently. I made her some notes on the tools that work best for me. Mostly obvious stuff, but hopefully it will be useful to some…

Tue 30^th

Feedreaders and Wordpress Themes Vs. The Design Experience

One of the many reasons I prefer Netvibes to other feedreaders is the amount of options — headlines, summaries, tabs, thumbnails, widgets, and audio controls for podcasts. It’s a much richer experience that what we got in the early days of RSS, which was just a few headlines. Rich Ziade from Basement.org recently saw how Google Reader could detract from the visual experience…