This subject has been beaten to death, but I’ve only recently been the victim of RSS overload. I often get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I have unread in Google Reader, enough that sometimes I’m afraid to open it. Eventually I just say forget it and mark everything as read. While I’d like to read everything, I just don’t have time. Some days I can sit for an hour and read, and even then I don’t make a dent.
I partly blame some sites that feel the need to post 10+ items per day, even on the weekends. It could also do with the fact that I am subscribing to more feeds than I should.
How do you deal with keeping your unread RSS items in check?
I use the Spotlight feature in OS X an awful lot. While some people would rather use things like Quicksilver, I like just hitting command+space and typing in what I’m looking for, be it a document or even an application I want to open.
That’s the inspiration for AJAX.search, a search system built on Prototype’s AJAX framework. It will make a call to a URL you specify and display the results under your search box like Spotlight (and now, like the search at Apple.com). From there you can hit the up or down arrow keys to select a result and then hit the enter key to visit the link.
I also built a Wordpress plugin that uses AJAX.search in the default search box, and in fact you can test it out on this site’s search box right now. By default the plugin will search all your posts and display them in the results grouped by category.
If you want to try it out on your Wordpress install, you can download the plugin here. There are still features I still want to implement, and it may not work on all Wordpress versions (I’ve only tested on version 2.2.1). Eventually there will be a configuration page in the admin to allow you to change a few settings, such as number of results to display and whether to show categories in the results.
Download the AJAX.search Wordpress Plugin version 0.1
If you’re using K2: make sure you turn off Advanced Navigation in the K2 options, since K2 has an AJAX search function that will collide with this one. If you want to keep Advanced Navigation on, you’ll have to comment out the Javascript in the K2 header file that sets up the K2 AJAX search.
If for some reason you are actually reading this blog and haven’t heard of Twitter, then I don’t know what to tell you besides, go and read the Wikipedia Entry. For the rest of us, you know what Twitter is, and you may or may not know this new form of communication is a subset of blogging called microblogging (this is news to me as of a few weeks ago).
I started a Twitter account a few weeks ago as well, after looking down my nose at it for quite a while. Will I continue to use it? I’m still on the fence about it.
One reason I like Twitter is a lot of the people I follow actually tweet about interesting sites they’ve come across, something cool they are working on, or news that’s usually relevant. That in and of itself makes me want to continue using it, and seek out interesting people to follow. But sometimes good information is intermixed with mundane things I really couldn’t care less about…like:
- On my way to work! (every day)
- Going to bed (every night)
- Getting ready to [INSERT SOMETHING I DON’T CARE ABOUT]
- Oops I meant to say [INSERT CORRECTION FROM PREVIOUS TWEET]
- or, most frequently: [INSERT TECHNOLOGY HERE] is [broke-ass/slow/dumb]!
Unless you had to battle ninjas on your way to work, I don’t really care. And yeah, sucks your Internet is slow and you can’t get to that site. But that’s the nature of microblogging. While some people might enjoy that level of detail, others (including myself) don’t find it particularly interesting.
The value of microblogging to me is not necessarily in knowing your friend’s initimate thoughts right that moment, but to broadcast ideas (read: marketing) to a large audience. A popular figure (or their marketing firm) can open a Twitter account and communicate almost instantaneously with their target audience. Bloggers can tweet about their new post and it reaches readers even before it hits their RSS apps. Google picks up Twitter links almost instantaneously (I’ve seen spiders visit a place on my site I’ve only posted on Twitter…in less than an hour after I posted it).
The future of microblogging? It will go the way most fads on the Internet go: early adoption by geeks, traditional marketers exploit it, SEOs exploit it, and eventually people will migrate to the next new thing that isn’t so mainstream. Rinse and repeat.
I finished a quick app for the iPhone that allows you to do a whois lookup on a domain to see if it’s available or not. I’m always out and about and think of a domain name, and want to know if it’s taken.
Why don’t you just use whois.net or something, you ask? Well first of all that site is packed full of bloat and junk that makes it a pain to look something up. Secondly, I have a sneaking suspicion that sites like whois.net harvest requests and register those domains if no one else does. And no, my app does not record lookups!
I built the app using a small PHP script and IUI. Check out the app at http://whois.onmyiphone.net
I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to HTML forms. I love creating them and coming up with ways to organize them that make it easy to use. But I consistently come across a lot of forms during checkout processes, or signing up for a service, that do things that don’t make much sense to me, and annoy the hell out of me.
One common thing I see is bad usability in dropdown lists of countries. Today I bought tickets to the Rilo Kiley show at the Crystal Ballroom from TicketsWest.com. I didn’t have an account so I had to create one. I filled out my shipping information and when I got to the country selection, I was presented with this:
Why do I have to scroll all the way down to select United States when there’s a 99% chance I’m probably FROM the US and ordering tickets? It’s really frustrating to have to hunt for my country in a huge list.
Solution: Group most likely countries at the top
Chances are someone from the US or Canada are ordering tickets to a concert in the US, not someone from Armenia or Algeria. So put the most common countries at the top of the list, then separate them with a visual indicator. Get rid of ‘Select One’, since it’s a really good bet your customer is in the US (or the country your site is most popular in). Also, be sure to leave the countries in the list as well, in case someone is used to having to scroll and find their country.
Little tweaks like this to forms will not only make your users happy, but it leaves less room for abandoned purchases. The easier you make it for your users to buy, the more likely they will follow through. Every little bit helps.
What do you think? What are other usability issues you see when you fill out forms?