by Bud Parr on November 20, 2008 | permanent link
Carrie Kania (Olive Reader blog), publisher of Harper Perennial, is profiled in The New York Observer. Carrie says about her job in the article:
“Basically, they said we need somebody to come in and really look at the backlist,” Ms. Kania said. “To look at what we’re doing with Aldous Huxley, and Sylvia Plath, and—you know, the backlist is just gold. It’s a beautiful backlist. I mean, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 100 Years of Solitude. You know? I mean, my God. The fact that I get to put a new cover on The Bell Jar? That’s crazy!”
As we live more of our lives online it’s easy to get lost in all the passwords we’re forced to carry in our heads and it’s tempting to settle on something memorable that we can use for a lot of sites/accounts. But the following should come as a real
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by Bud Parr on September 19, 2008 | permanent link
As we live more of our lives online it’s easy to get lost in all the passwords we’re forced to carry in our heads and it’s tempting to settle on something memorable that we can use for a lot of sites/accounts. But the following should come as a real warning:
“Yesterday, it was reported that wannabe VP Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked by a perpetrator wishing to find incriminating information in her emails. It was not done using some strange computer security vulnerability. It was not done by guessing her password. It was done just inthe same way as Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account was hacked some time ago: by guessing the answer to the respective owner’s security questions. For Paris Hilton, it was the name of her dog. For Sarah Palin, it was her zip code, date of birth, ad where she met her husband.
How hard is it to learn somebody’s zip code? Not that hard.Try the whitepages. Date of birth? Easy for a public figure – try Google. This will take you less than a minute each. Now, we know that Sarah Palin and her husband were high school sweethearts. The answer to this question turned out to be “Wasilla High School”. All in all, it took the reported hacker less than 45 minutes to break into the account. In fact, using your pet’s name appears more security conscious than using zip code, date of birth and where you met your spouse.”
- IT World
This goes for personal as well as professional accounts. We suggest using long, non-word passwords, which may even include characters like ^#& and odd, perhaps even incorrect answers to security questions. These of course are not memorable, but there are many programs out there that will store them for you and your Web browser does too; Firefox is particularly good with handling passwords, although I’d suggest keeping them in another secure program as well (if you want suggestions for password storage programs, just drop me a line and be sure to mention if you’re on a mac or pc). Also think about changing your most important passwords from time to time. Organizations should have a formal protocol for this.
There is hope for our increasingly overloaded info-age life. Standards are being created to both increase security and make access easier. Some of those are very high-tech, but one standard, OpenID seems to be catching on widely. OpenID, according to Wikipedia is a a service that “allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.” I’ve been using it for a year or so at least and like the layer of security and relative simplicity, but it takes adoption by myriad Web applications and Web sites to be useful and we’re not there yet. Some of the services that use OpenID are Blogger, a free blogging service (owned by Google) and Basecamp, a project management system.
by Bud Parr on May 09, 2008 | permanent link
The New Jersey Star Ledger has a terrific profile of our clients Laura Schenone and Nancy Gail Ring whose blog JellyPress.com we just launched.
Laura Schenone and Nancy Gail Ring were profiled in the Star Ledger and at Philly.com. The site we built for them, Jellypress.com is even mentioned. Here’s an excerpt from NJ.com:
“Cooking is a bright spot in our shared history. Nourishing one another and making sustenance—these are good things to pass on if you can,” noted Laura Schenone, 46, of Montclair, author of the newly released “The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family” (Norton, 2008) as well as “A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances” (Norton, 2003).
With Nancy Gail Ring, 51, of West Orange, an artist and writer, Schenone has created Jellypress.com, an illustrated culinary blog that features “Antique Recipe Road Show,” which solicits questions about old recipes, and “Not To Be Forgotten,” which adapts an old recipe to contemporary life. “My hope is that it will get people interested in thinking about how food connects us from past to present,” explained Schenone. “There seem to be more people looking to the past for sustenance,” noted Ring.
A former pastry chef and author of “Walking on Walnuts” (Bantam, 1996), a culinary memoir that chronicled her experiences in Manhattan restaurants, Ring learned to make the mandelbrot, rugelach, matzo ball soup, brisket and kugel of her Eastern European ancestors from her mother and grandmothers. “I still feel like my grandmothers are in the room with me when I’m baking,” she said.
I keep up religiously with the guru of Web usability, Jakob Nielsen and while his work is mostly of interest to professionals, he often publishes tidbits good for anyone in the process of getting their site up and running.
As a Web designer/developer the biggest issues I face are the
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by Bud Parr on May 06, 2008 | permanent link
I keep up religiously with the guru of Web usability, Jakob Nielsen and while his work is mostly of interest to professionals, he often publishes tidbits good for anyone in the process of getting their site up and running.
As a Web designer/developer the biggest issues I face are the constraints of speed and space, which essentially come down to thinking about the variety of audience that my site might encounter. Here are some notes from Nielsen’s latest newsletter that speak to those constraints:
Two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:
(1) Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB: a growth rate of 82%/year.
(2) Despite this obesity epidemic, observed response times for U.S. users with broadband decreased from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds per page (average across 40 big business sites) from 2006 to 2008.
My comments:
(a) First, let’s remember that almost half of the Internet users still don’t have broadband, particularly in rural areas. In fact, FarmersOnly.com explicitly decided to design for dial-up access.
(b) While 2.3 seconds is better than 2.8, it’s still 130% slower than the 1.0 seconds required for optimal user experience and a true sense of flow while navigating.
(c) In the past, big images were the largest offender, but now response times are delayed by the inclusion of ever-more external objects, code snippets, and “widgets.” Keep a lid on it. The biggest contributor to interactivity is still the ability to navigate fast and furiously.
The bold formatting is mine because I think those two points are worth keeping in mind. I often separate navigation as an entirely separate design process. Findability is everything on the Web and that’s not just search engine optimization, but how people find what you want them to on your site.
by Bud Parr on April 01, 2008 | permanent link
Our client Min Jin Lee reports this on her blog: The U.S. paperback of Free Food for Millionaires will be released on April 9th. It has a new cover designed by the talented art director Anne Twomey of Grand Central, and copies should be at bookstores near you presently. There’s a new essay in VOGUE this month (April 2008) titled “Weighing In” in its Up Front column.
