Help me climb 70 stories in the Fight for Air!
On March 4th, 2012 I am going to take on Michigan’s tallest building (the Renaissance Center) all the way to the 70th floor by climbing 1,035 stairs. I am climbing in the American Lung Association’s Fight for Air Climb to help raise money for lung disease research, education and advocacy.
I am doing so because I am able. I can breathe freely and there are many people who are not as lucky. I am joining a team of likeminded Web designers and developers from Detroit on my journey, our team name is the “Quadzillas“.
I am writing this blog post because I would love your support
For the 2012 Fight for Air stair climb my team would like to raise a minimum of $1,035 dollars, or $1 for every step in the GM Renaissance Center.
We need your help! You can donate to one person, or spread it out among the members. You can donate $1 (one step) or $15 (one floor) or any amount you want! Either way you choose to donate is greatly appreciated! Or if you would like to join me I would be honored to climb with you!
Your donation to the American Lung Association will sustain their commitment to the prevention of all respiratory diseases including lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema and chronic bronchitis) and asthma.
Thank you for your support of my effort to raising money for this very important cause.
In: event · Tagged with: 70 lung, air, charity, climb, detroit
2012 New Year’s Resolutions
- Write a book
- Give an ignite talk
- Publish something 6 days a week
- Finish my office (floor, walls, desk, bookshelves)
- Truly learn Ruby on Rails or Python
- Beat my previous marathon time
- Grow EDU Snippits to a 1000+ visitor per week website
- Run a hackathon at Wayne State University
- Take public transportation to work at least once
- Be the best possible influence to Cecilia DeNardis
2011 Resolutions (3 success, 7 fail)
- FAIL: Learn sign language
- Just basically no time. Taking this off my list
- FAIL: Write a book
- Grad School totally got in the way of this one
- SEMI SUCCESS: Be a motivator in and outside of work
- No concrete evidence but I feel like I have been a motivator
- FAIL: Stick to a schedule of once every two weeks posting to .eduGuru
- FAIL: Finish my office (Floor, Walls, Desk, Bookshelves)
- FAIL: Truly learn Ruby on Rails or Python
- SEMI SUCCESS: Contribute to an open source project
- Continue to actively develop PHPSimpl and started WP Twitter Profile List Widget
- SEMI FAIL: No longer order meat
- Started out great for the first six months. I still eat meat, just not much at all
- SUCCESS: Run a marathon
- FAIL: Take public transportation to work at least once
- No excuse why I didn’t get this one done
In: thoughts · Tagged with: 2011, 2012, new, newyears, resolutions, years
The #NewNewTwitter in screenshots, my thoughts
Interested in the #NewNewTwitter? I was totally bummed by their “rolling out the redesigned Twitter over the next few weeks” and realization that it could be weeks before I could play with the desktop version. I have been following their changes for some time. By chance I tried their trick of updating my mobile app and what do you know, within a few hours I got the #NewNewTwitter on my desktop.
Playing around with it a bit I found some things I really like and others that I’m not a fan of. I break them down below.
Timeline
Actually pretty clean and I love the inline conversation view. Not a fan of having to click three times to get photos to appear large though. It took me a minute to figure out that there is “Compose a new Tweet…” input on the left side right under my user information, I actually find this quicker.
@Connect
They did a great job taking the information overload of the “Activity” tab and bringing some sanity to it. I found that the “Activity” is now located in the #Discover area, not gone, just placed with the “not exactly related to me” stuff.
Conversations
Clicking on a tweet brings up the conversation inline. I like this because the three column sidebar before just wasn’t enough room, especially if you didn’t have a high resolution monitor. I wish it brought up the entire conversation though, not just the replied to and replied tweets.
Lists
Again the interface took another hit against lists. This time they tucked them away under the User icon -> Lists. At least this time you can get to them all on one page instead of only seeing half and having to click another link to get to the full list in the #NewTwitter interface.
List Timeline
I really like the list timeline because it acts like the regular timeline. But my biggest complaint is the lack of context around what you’re looking at. I feel like this page needs a header or breadcrumbs or something to identify the list. Maybe it’s just me but the top left of the page feels too much like a user profile.
Direct Messages
If you use DM’s at all you already know they took a huge UI hit in the mobile interface and now it is confirmed they are equally as hidden in the web interface. Hidden behind two clicks, Profile -> Direct Messages. As you can see from the shot below they don’t even get a full timeline view. It’s a shame.
DM Conversations
Clicking in to a DM conversation the window doesn’t expand and space is pretty limited. For me this just isn’t enough room, I would prefer if more of the conversation was in view or at least you could resize the window. The style of the conversation is very nice, just wish it wasn’t squeezed in a tiny window.
The Little Things
When focusing on the search box all your saves searches come up below. This is a nice change from the drop down menu in the older interface. It puts the search in the same context as the user’s action.
As you move through your timeline and click to view and open photos/videos/conversations the tweets start to space out. As soon as you open a tweet they offer a nice little “Close all open Tweets” button at the top of the page. Nice little big detail.
Final Thoughts
Don’t get me wrong, I really do like the direction Twitter is going with the increased emphasis on conversations but I just can’t get past their continued hate toward Lists and now Direct Messages. By trying to pull in new users to explore they are excluding the seasoned users, but I guess that is what the Tweetdeck redesign is for.
Do you have the #NewNewTwitter yet? If so, what do you think?
In: opinion, thoughts · Tagged with: #newnewtwitter, design, interface, twitter
Why my dog has a twitter account but my daughter does not
I have been meaning to write this post for some time but to be honest time has escaped me this last month. Little things like being the technical director for TEDxDetroit, running the Chicago Marathon, hiring a project manager, hiring a full time developer, and the birth of my first child have kept my attention. It has been a fun ride filled with a lot of unexpected surprises.
@foxydenardis
As a lot of you know, my dog Foxy has her own twitter account, it is a great way to extend her personality to the world. Twitter is a source for instant information, asking questions and giving feedback to others. Almost immediately upon creating Foxy’s Twitter account she was followed by a handful of other whippets and greyhounds. They have been a great resource of information; twitter connects her to a larger community that just isn’t available in our immediate area.
I wanted something similar for Cecilia. Thinking about the people who would be following her I knew a Twitter account would not work. Only a handful of our family have Twitter accounts and frankly the user experience of Twitter if you are not familiar with it is intimidating. Long term I want Cecilia to choose the social networks she would be interacting with. Who knows if Twitter will be around in 5-10 years and I didn’t want to put her social capital in to a service that could be gone at any moment.
ceciliadenardis.com
I’m a huge fan of owning yourname.com, no matter what it should always be a destination to give public insights about yourself. For me, yourname.com is your resume, it is how the world sees you. Buying ceciliadenardis.com is the least I could do to give her an identity beyond our household.
I was reminded about this while listening to a talk by Clay Hebert at LessConf. The point he makes is when your child is graduating high school with a 4.0 and involved in three sports what is going to make him/her stand out? There will be thirty or forty other students graduating with the same credentials. Having a website where they can develop their writing skills, post about projects they worked on, and be able to explain to the world that what they are doing matters. There is no better way to know someone than exploring someones strengths than to see a history of them.
Using a domain as a single destination give us/her flexibility to what goes on it. Right now I choose to use Tumblr since it requires basically zero setup and is perfect for posting photos, this is what we plan to use it for until she can type. The other great thing about Tumblr is it allows people to subscribe how they want, via the dashboard, RSS or email. A side benefit is each post gets emailed from my email address (looks like I sent it personally) which allows family to reply directly to me. This may seem insignificant but in the past few weeks I have talked to and learned more about distant friends/family members than ever before. Twitter is a great tool but for this audience they just don’t understand it, talk to them about websites and email though and they know exactly what to do.
If you have a child I think the single best thing you can give them is theirname.com. It is cheap and has the potential to significantly help them in the future.
What tools are you using to document your child/children’s lives? Anything public? I would love to hear about what is and is not working for you.
Follow Cecilia DeNardis at: http://ceciliadenardis.com/
In: Social Media, thoughts · Tagged with: cecilia, foxy, tumblr, twitter, websites
Image Maps – Ability vs. Appropriate Use
I recently made a comment on an EDU Checkup episode about how the use of image maps was a negative aspect in the code of a website.
I promptly got the following comment:
I don’t get it. What’s wrong with image maps? Aren’t they still part of the HTML 5 working draft?
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/the-map-element.html#the-map-element
…doesn’t seem like they’re planning on phasing it out.
I wanted to take a minute to explain the difference between the official ability to use tags from the HTML spec and the appropriate use of those tags.
Yes, it is part of the standard
For me the issue with image maps isn’t their place in the standard, it’s their implementation. Tables are still part of the HTML5 standard but there are appropriate uses and uses that make the user experience far more difficult than necessary.
Let’s add some context
For example on the NEL site an image map is used to link to the social media sites. I can see the motivation behind using a single image for all the social icons to reduce HTTP requests. But that means the meta data behind the links basically is stating here is an image with some hotspots on it. It doesn’t give any insight into what is being linked on. Personally I think the better approach would be to list out each link in an unsorted list with an appropriate ID to label what the list is for. Then using CSS to display them next to each other, hide the text with a text-indent: -9999em and then use that same single social logo sprite to display the appropriate icons image for people can can actually view the site.
Image Map
Unordered List
This would allow the same visual result but add far deeper meaning to the HTML for machines and screen readers.
Just my two cents. I am interested in seeing examples of real appropraite uses of image maps, if you have any please feel free to comment.
In: thoughts · Tagged with: html, image maps, opinion, thoughts