October 1999

Helllllllllllooooooooooooooooooo… Anybody reading this besides me? ;-) If so, take a look at the site I just soft-launched last night, the Unitarian Church of Montclair, NJ and let me know what you think.

The new Webmonkey. Funny, I’m currently designing a portal-like site at work, but I briefly worked on a proposal for some new business and my screen schematics looked like, what else, a portal, ’cause that’s the frame of mind I’m in. Others working on the proposal said, “It looks too much like a portal” and…

Making note of the gorgeous horizontally scrolling artwork: s k y l i n e There aren’t many examples of well-executed horizontal content on the web, and even few original works for the web that can be

evhead created this super-neato addition to Blogger allowing us to add a hyperlink and blog entry by right-clicking on a page. It only works with IE though. This is just about the last straw that will break Netscape’s back for me. I experience this surreal refresh phenomenon where half of the old page stays around…

A play on my post below, I guess it’s just a matter of time before there are epinions about ematter and ematter about epinions. Matter I’ll do both, promoting my ematter on epinions (I wonder if there’s an official place for authors like on Amazon?) and write an ematter article about the sociology of epinions.

An enjoyable read, informative, and free: How Fatbrain.com chose their name. I love getting an inside look at the crucial and not always so pretty operations of Internet companies.

While it seems a lot of other bloggers are offering their epinions, I chose to offer some ematter. First, because the idea of selling content in the form of encrypted files is a similar model to something I’m doing at work. Second, it feels more like being published. Even if you get published on a…

Note to self: make entry on Lambertville and the Inn

Some photos from college. Believe or not they’re barely touched up – that’s natural fog. Makes me pine for my old Pentax K1000. This guy even includes a .wav file of the shutter sound! What a nice touch.

I like how the proprietor of the nubbin is proud of her cat photos and not averse to exposing details of her life to the world. I really must do more of this. Here’s a photo of Limerick (mostly my girlfriend’s cat but a little mine too):

I’m at LivePerson right now trying out this live support thingy. Gotta admit at first I was genuinely afraid to initiate this conversation – maybe I’m just too shy. Interestingly they let you choose from among four different “operators” – there must be some interesting psychology behind who chooses a male or female or what…

Confusing chat with sales support. At first the idea of chat-based support seems silly, but given that you may be tying up your only phone line, or want support while you’re shopping, or surfing from your WAP phone, I guess it’s not so silly.

I’m trying to use the Open Directory Project search engine instead of Yahoo!, but it’s a difficult adjustment. Lulled into an easier way of phrasing queries like “creating a taxonomy” by Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, et al, I’m back to having to just type key terms, since Open Directory will search and retrive the “a” in…

peterme just landed a job as creative director at epinions, which makes me think about the epinions business model and sociology more (are sociologists studying this stuff? They should). I’m comparing a book reviewer who works at a newspaper to a book reviewer at epinions. Let’s see if I can do a table freehand… newspaperepinions…

I never cease to be amazed at Jakob Nielsen’s conformist philosophy. Take these two passages from his newest Alertbox: “It is much harder to say what good things to do since I have never seen a website that was truly stellar with respect to usability. “ and (in a list of things that will “will…