adrian holovaty

September 30, 2002, 6:17 PM ET

There will be a quiz

Three links of interest to Web developers:

• youngpup.net: How to Create Pop-Up Windows. "Forget everything you know about creating pop-up windows. Most importantly, forget you ever knew that the javascript pseudo-protocol ever existed. Do you hear me??"
• A List Apart: CSS Design: Taming Lists. Innovative ways to use style sheets.
• css-discuss: CSS signatures. CSS guru Eric Meyer introduces a new technique that makes it simple for users to change the design of a specific site, using user stylesheets. Craig Saila explains it well. I've implemented the technique on this site (body id="www-holovaty-com").

Comments (7) / Permalink

September 30, 2002, 12:49 PM ET

Lumping unrelated content together at sunspot.net

"Israeli tanks end siege of Arafat's office" was the lead story on sunspot.net this morning.

A serious story, wouldn't you think? One that doesn't have much to do with entertainment? One that isn't related in any way to, say, Barbra Streisand?

Wrong.

Sunspot.net implies the two are related. A sidebar titled "Also see" lists a related article -- and a 140x120 image of Barbra. Here's a screenshot:

So, wait. If I'm interested in the siege of Arafat's office, I should also check out the photo of Barbra? Ah, yes. Of course. Always knew there was more to her than meets the eye.

But, in all seriousness, this illustrates a common problem on news sites: lumping unrelated content together and using vague phrases like "Also see" to imply the pieces of content are related. A better way to do this, in Sunspot.net's case, would be to embed the "Related Articles" box in the content area to give an obvious visual clue that both pieces of content are related. Then replace the "Also see" label with "Also on Sunspot.net" to clarify the content in that sidebar has nothing to do with the article.

Comments (6) / Permalink

September 28, 2002, 11:40 PM ET

CSS in the real world: ajc.com's 'News Break'

At work, I'm slowly converting page templates to use CSS instead of messy spacer GIFs, nested tables, and FONT tags. (Our news producers work directly in HTML code, so it's especially important for the code to be clean.) The first victim: The "News Break" section on ajc.com's home page.

Before:

<table width=105 cellpadding=1 cellspacing=0 border=0 bgcolor="336699">
<tr valign=top><td width=105 align=center>
<font face=arial,helvetica size=-1 color=white><b>News Break</b></font></td></tr>
<tr valign=top><td>
<table cellpadding=5 cellspacing=0 border=0>
<tr valign=top bgcolor=white>
<td><a href="/ajc/living/movies/0902/24barber.html"><img src="/ajc/home/images/barbershop0925.jpg" width=100 height=81 border=0></a></font><br>
<font size=1 face=arial,helvetica color=black>Ice Cube</font><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/spg.gif" width=80 height=2><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/redarrow.gif" width=6 height=5> <a href="/ajc/living/movies/0902/24barber.html"> <font face=arial,helvetica size=2>
Jackson wants 'Barbershop' jokes cut.</a></font><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/spg.gif" width=80 height=4><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/redarrow.gif" width=6 height=5> <a href="/ajc/living/0902/25bodrov.html"> <font face=arial,helvetica size=2>
Russian actor missing in avalanche.</a>
</font><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/redarrow.gif" width=6 height=5> <a href="/ajc/sports/0902/25stewart.html"> <font face=arial,helvetica size=2>
Tony Stewart cleared of Bristol accusation.</a>
</font><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/redarrow.gif" width=6 height=5> <a href="/ajc/news/0902/24gator.html"> <font face=arial,helvetica size=2>
Gator bites off Fla. man's arm.</a></font><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/redarrow.gif" width=6 height=5> <a href="/ajc/business/market/0902/24wallstreet.html"> <font face=arial,helvetica size=2>
Dow hits four-year low.</a></font><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/redarrow.gif" width=6 height=5> <a href="/ajc/sports/0902/24webster.html"> <font face=arial,helvetica size=2>
Steeler great Mike Webster dead.</a> </font><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/redarrow.gif" width=6 height=5> <a href="/ajc/living/music/0902/24abba.html"> <font face=arial,helvetica size=2>
10 reasons why Abba is still popular.</a><font size=1 face=arial,helvetica color=#cc0000"> POLL</font><br>
<hr width=75% noshade size=1>
<font size=1 face=arial,helvetica color=#cc0000">EMMYS</font><br>
<img src="/ajc/images/redarrow.gif" width=6 height=5> <a href="/ajc/living/tv/0902/23emmys.html"> <font face=arial,helvetica size=2>
Photo galleries from the awards.</a><br>
</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

After:

<div id="newsbreak">
<h3>News Break</h3>

<p><a href="/ajc/sports/braves/0902/28braves.html"><img src="/ajc/home/images/minitiger0929.jpg" width="100" height="89" border="0" alt=""></a></p>

<ul>

<li><a href="/ajc/sports/0902/29ryder.html">Tiger leads U.S. rally at Ryder Cup</a></li>

<li><a href="/ajc/sports/0902/27suspended.html">UGA, Tech, GSU players suspended</a></li>

<li><a href="/ajc/news/0902/29major.html">Former Prime Minister John Major admits 4-year affair</a></li>

<li><a href="/ajc/sports/0902/29huggins.html">Cincinnati coach Huggins suffers heart attack</a></li>

<li><a href="/ajc/business/0902/28adnext.html">And now, TV ads in the bathroom</a></li>

<li><a href="/ajc/news/0902/28videomom.html">Mom taped hitting child faces 2nd arrest</a></li>

</ul>
</div>

Which code would you rather work in when there are four breaking news stories on the wire simultaneously and millions of readers are flooding your site, expecting up-to-the-minute updates?

Style sheets let online news producers focus on news. If you manage a news site, do yourself a favor and separate content from presentation.

Comments (14) / Permalink

September 28, 2002, 9:26 PM ET

New feature: Blogroll on home page

I've finally added a blogroll to this site -- that is, a collection of links to other sites that are similar to this one. Thanks to blo.gs, I'm able to display the last-updated time of each blog and rank them in descending order by that value. The list is updated automatically on the 45-minute mark, 24 hours a day, and it appears only on the home page in order to reduce clutter.

God knows this will be a huge time saver for me, considering how often I check these blogs throughout the day. I hope it'll help you, too.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to add all my favorite blogs, because not all of them ping blo.gs or weblogs.com when they're updated. (Pinging is a way of alerting a central server when your blog has changed. The server keeps a record of blogs' last-updated times and provides this information to anyone who wants it.) If you operate a weblog and don't offer this functionality, I encourage you to check it out. No programming needed; just go to the blo.gs ping form page and submit your information into that quick-and-easy form each time you update. Of course, the process can be automated as well.

On a more technical note: Because the blogroll is a list of items, it's coded as such; it uses the unordered-list tag, UL. Therefore it's accessible and semantically correct. Also, I've made the timestamps into label elements so users of modern graphical browsers can click on them. (See yesterday's entry.)

Comments (10) / Permalink

September 27, 2002, 11:51 AM ET

Making forms more usable (?)

I've used labels on my form elements throughout Holovaty.com for some time now, as brought to my attention by Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Accessibility series. In short, a form label is an explanatory piece of text next to a form field -- such as "Name:" or "Web site:" in this site's comment system, or the "Open external links in new window" option on this page. HTML provides a way for Web designers to specify which label goes with which form field. As a user-interface bonus, in newer browsers, clicking on a form element's label will automatically give focus to the form element. (For example, clicking on "Name:" in my comment system will put a blinking cursor in the associated field even though you didn't click in the field directly.)

I bring this up because I've made an experimental tweak in my CSS that might increase the usability of this site just a tad. I've put the following line in my style sheet:

label { cursor: pointer; }

That line of code will turn your mouse cursor into the familiar "pointer" whenever it's above a label, which results in the perception of a larger clickable area. That, in turn, results in a more effective user interface, according to Fitts' Law.

But this new feature remains experimental because it might backfire. Users might think the pointing hand designates a link and therefore might shy away from it or get confused when they click on it and the page doesn't change. I plan to do some informal usability testing, and I'm curious to hear comments on this matter.

A Google search reveals this technique has been done before, but I haven't seen many sites use it. Is it more harm than good?

Comments (14) / Permalink

September 26, 2002, 12:45 PM ET

'Smart' URLs are navigation tools

"User-Centered URL Design" examines good and bad URL schemes, suggesting Web addresses are "not just a handy way to address network resources. They're also valuable communication tools." It's an interesting counterpoint to an IBM article I pointed out 10 days ago, which proclaimed: "Only techie people glean information about the structure of a site by examining the words between all those forward slashes." I suppose the truth is somewhere in between -- but if a feature helps at least a few people, why not include it?

(Also see the two classics "Cool URIs don't change" and "URL as UI".)

Comments (7) / Permalink

September 26, 2002, 12:41 PM ET

Yahoo offers RSS feeds of business info

ResearchBuzz reports Yahoo is offering RSS feeds of its finance information. It's still in beta, but it's a great service that offers URL-based feed customization. For example, to get business news about Coca-Cola, whose ticker is KO, you'd point your RSS reader at:

http://rss.finance.yahoo.com/rss/get?ticker=KO

With this development, and the recent Google News relaunch, I can't help but think that news sites really need to get their acts together.

Comments (8) / Permalink

September 26, 2002, 12:01 AM ET

Short thoughts on providencephoenix.com and brownsvilleherald.com

I've taken on an ultra-cool contracting job doing some programming and database design, so intensive site reviews will be a bit less frequent. That said, I'll continue to point out good and bad things about various news sites I come across. For instance:

The Providence Phoenix in Providence, Rhode Island, has a relatively clean, usable site. I love the clear navigation choices on the left. They don't try to invent wacky section titles such as "Periscope". But what's up with the "Read reviews from" section at the bottom of the music page? One glance at that solid mass o' numbers makes my eyes hurt. I doubt many people use it. (And same goes for the gray table with randomly assorted links at the bottom of many pages sitewide -- as in this example.)

The Herald in Brownsville, Texas, has some nice, big photos on its home page and story pages. But most of those images (for instance, this one) include the photographer's credit as part of the image, breaking one of the cardinal rules of Web design: Avoid Using Images To Display Plain Text. When I skimmed over the code, they appeared to have ALT text -- but after a closer look I found that each photo had an identical id="A customer walks by casa de cambio stores on International Blvd near the Gateway Bridge Monday afternoon in Brownsville."

(Hey, whaddya know, photos on the individual story pages all have that exact same "description," too.)

A simple mishap like this is permissible on non-professional sites, such as personal sites, but it's entirely unacceptable on a site that aims to maintain journalistic standards. An incorrect ALT attribute is a typo; in this case, giving every photo the same "...Monday afternoon in Brownsville" text is comparable to giving each photo in a print newspaper the same caption.

Comments (4) / Permalink

September 25, 2002, 12:46 PM ET

Wednesday's recommended links, and thoughts on Google News

A new Digital Web Magazine column, Fluid Thinking, has this outstanding advice for Web designers: "Think fluid. The WWW isn't a fixed medium. It's unpredictable. It will do unexpected things to your site, and the best you can do is go with the flow."

Editor and Publisher is the latest media outlet to cover Google News. I've been thinking about Google News a lot lately. Building on my ideas last week, here are a few other things I'd like to see:

• Separate design from presentation, and let users design the site themselves using a style sheet, as AllTheWeb already does.
• Syndicate headlines with RSS. Offer not only general categories, like Entertainment or Sports, but search-term-specific RSS feeds, as I offer on Holovaty.com. Put targeted ads into those RSS feeds -- I'd bet people would actually like them.
• Offer an e-mail service, like the New York Times' News Tracker alerts. For example, I would really appreciate an e-mail any time a news article included the word "beatles". Or send the e-mails out on the hour.
• Put together photo galleries. People love photo galleries. Clearly Google has the technology to grab news images; why not put 'em together?
• Offer an opinions section. I'd be interested in seeing what pundits from around the world were saying about certain things. And include bloggers in the mix.

Comments (5) / Permalink

September 24, 2002, 1:17 PM ET

Tuesday's recommended links

I finally installed mouse gestures, and I was addicted within minutes. No -- seconds. Make it a point to download the Mozilla browser and improve your Web productivity tenfold.

Boxes and Arrows has posted part two of its three-part series comparing Web design with the design of retail stores. (See my previous entry.)

The New York Times (username: cyberpunk21, password: cyberpunk21) reports on Google News. The article concludes: "in general, Google's automated editors appeared to match the work of human competitors." That's a slap in the face of the journalism professor who taught me "editors can never be replaced by computers. That's why we get paid the big bucks." Then again, as some have pointed out, Google News still relies heavily on human editorial judgment -- that of the individual news sites it indexes.

Drop me a line if you have any tips on installing Linux. I'm taking the plunge soon.

Comments (6) / Permalink

September 23, 2002, 9:24 PM ET

Emulate really old browsers

No site review tonight; I'm busy converting and backing up all my guitar/piano recordings from the past three years.

But in the meantime, check out dejavu.org's browser emulator. It lets you see what any Web page would look like in vintage browsers such as NCSA Mosaic and Mosaic Netscape 0.9 -- all while duplicating the original browsers' interfaces quite faithfully. Fascinating. (Thanks to Stuart for the link.)

Comments (4) / Permalink

September 23, 2002, 12:18 PM ET

Monday's recommended links

IBM has an article on XHTML 2.0.

Two weeks ago, the Web site of the Recording Industry Association of America was hacked a few times. Now we know how they did it. The Register reports it was discovered that the site's robots.txt file (a file that gives robots instructions on which pages to ignore) pointed to the site's administration page, which wasn't password-protected. The lesson here: Never put anything in your robots.txt file that you don't want public, as I've said before. (Link from dive into mark)

And the big news of the day is that the new-and-improved Google News is now accessible to all users. Previously, it had been available only to selected users. (I was one of the lucky ones and reported this last week.) Everybody's talking about it: usability experts, webmasters, journalists and even Holovaty.com readers. For more, see the Reuters story and News.com story. Also, the ResourceShelf has more on what exactly is new about the site.

In the News.com story, a Google product manager who developed the site is dead-on about why this is an important innovation:

[T]his changes news reading habits because (usually) you pick a source and pick the story that interests you. With this service, you pick the story that interests you and then pick the news source.

Comments (5) / Permalink

September 23, 2002, 12:09 AM ET

Holovaty.com site improvements

Today I've made a few changes under the hood of my content-management system, with the intention of making this site faster and easier to use:

• All pages are now automatically compressed using gzip. That means my server compresses the content and your browser decompresses it behind the scenes, leading to faster download times for you and less bandwidth use on my end. Most modern browsers support this type of compression; of course, the ones that don't can still access this site. (Evidently gzip can reduce download time by up to 50 percent, although I'm on a broadband connection and honestly can't tell, because it was fast already. Anyone out there feel a difference?)
• I've implemented what I call smart anchoring, which is basically an artificially intelligent means of linking blog entries to one another. It works like this: If a blog entry links to a previous entry that happens to be on the same page (e.g. if both entries are on the current home page), the link will be a simple in-page link that jumps you down to the linked entry automatically, instead of reloading the entry in a new page. Otherwise, the link will take you to a new page. For example, this link points to the previous blog entry. If you're viewing this entry from my home page or the September 2002 archive page and both entries are on that page together, it'll jump you down the page. Otherwise, it'll take you to the permalinked version of that page. I've never seen this feature on any other site, so I'm quite pleased with it.
• You now have the option to toggle search-term highlighting. I've had search-term highlighting in place here for a while, but I've added a checkbox on the search results page that lets you toggle it. It uses client-side scripting, so it won't appear if your browser doesn't support the JavaScript functionality it uses. (I'm a firm believer in showing users only what their browser can support; it's annoying to click something only to be insulted with a "Your browser doesn't support this" pop-up.)
• Finally, the search engine accepts quoted strings. So now you can search for "user registration" instead of just user registration. (The former would find only blog entries with the words "user registration" next to each other in that order, while the latter would find any blog entry with both those words, regardless of order.)

Comments (3) / Permalink

September 20, 2002, 12:59 PM ET

Friday's recommended links

More on the CNN.com redesign I mentioned yesterday: There's now a Flash movie explaining the site's new features (and a non-Flash version), along with a feedback page. Now that I've had some more time to look it over, I've decided the only significant technological advancement is their new treatment of breaking news. According to the redesign announcement, "When news breaks or develops, we will notify you with instant banners appearing not only on the home page, but across every page on the site." A very smart innovation -- and one that can easily be adopted on any Apache site using simple server-side includes.

A new bookmarklet, GraphicsInfo, will create an index of all the images on a Web page -- including background images, images in form elements, etc. -- with a slew of useful information about each image. Only works in certain browsers, though. (Link from webgraphics)

Fontscape, mentioned on quite a few blogs recently, is a Yahoo-like font directory that helps "find the ideal typeface for your application." It's urgent that you check this site out immediately.

Editor and Publisher has five questions for Rob Curley, who's in charge at ljworld.com in Lawrence, Kansas, and is one of the most exciting people I've had the pleasure of knowing.

Comments (5) / Permalink

September 19, 2002, 12:37 PM ET

Thursday's recommended links

Happy 20th birthday, smiley.

A new Sensible Internet Design Letter from Small Initiatives is out. It takes us on a search for "the right weblog architecture," listing some blogging best practices.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports CNN.com has redesigned. (And here's CNN's official release.) I glanced at the site, and, although the home page hasn't changed, the story pages have new-looking left and horizontal navigation with pretty rollovers. "Oooh, style sheets?" I thought. No. Clunky JavaScript. Haven't they discovered CSS rollovers?

Comments (2) / Permalink

September 19, 2002, 12:09 PM ET

Google News smarter than ever

The geniuses at Google have debuted a much-improved Google News site. It's still in beta, according to the about page, but it's nothing short of an incredible technological feat already. Get this:

The headlines that appear on our homepage are selected entirely by a mathematical algorithm, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the web. There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping the headlines and no individual decides which stories get top placement.

Some kinks still need to be worked out -- since when is the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman an authority on Bush's dealings with Saddam Hussein? -- but I really forsee this concept taking off when they fix a few things. Some suggestions:

• Don't link to duplicate wire stories. Right now, many of the story links are the same Associated Press or Reuters stories, repurposed on different sites.
• Create a "hierarchy of trust" that defines which news organizations are more accountable than others -- or let users specify their own hierarchies. This would eliminate the American-Statesman oddity mentioned above.
• In the long term, dynamically generate a full-blown news article for each story that has more than one source, by combining information from several news sources to create one "definitive" piece.

I suspect many in the journalism world will be quick to criticize. Some -- likely those with backgrounds in editing -- will decry the lack of human judgment in the site's story selection. Others will hasten to remove their sites from the search engine's indexing, claiming Google's deep links will cut the number of users who access their sites' home pages directly -- with Google, in effect, removing the middleman (news sites) between users and the individual news stories they want to read.

But deep inside, operators of news Web sites will panic. If you listen closely, you just might start hearing the screams.

UPDATE, 3:30 p.m. EST: It appears the site is only being released to some users, because others have told me they still see the old page (as cached here). Upon further inspection, I'm only able to access the new Google News site in Mozilla on my PC -- but NOT in IE, Netscape 6, or Opera on the very same PC, which still bring up the old site. Similarly, I'm not able to access the new site in IE, Netscape 6, Opera or Mozilla on my Mac. Here's a screenshot of the new site, in case your browser still brings up the old one.

UPDATE, 6:30 p.m. EST: Aaron Swartz of the Google Weblog tells me one of his users reported the new Google News showed up only in IE/Mac. And on my home PC, there's no sign of the new site -- no matter which browser I use. Clearly this is still in the testing phase, so only a few, seemingly random, users will see the new page.

Comments (35) / Permalink

September 18, 2002, 8:38 PM ET

Site review: newstimes.com

A few thoughts on The News-Times Online Edition, a news site covering western Connecticut, U.S.A.:

• The left rail is absolutely jam-packed with navigation choices, which left me overwhelmed and, well, scared. (How could I possibly ever have the time to visit every one of those sections?) It's a good thing to have lots of content, but it's not smart to bombard users with every navigation link imaginable. It would be better to drill this list down to 10 or 15 "core" sections and build up those section pages. As an aside, what's the difference between "NEWS" and "SECTIONS"?
• Also, some of the links wrap to a second line with no visual clue tying the two lines together. For instance, I clicked on "E-News," thinking it was some sort of tech news page. Instead, it turned out to be a community events page. Bewildered, I moved my mouse back over "E-News" and discovered that I had actually clicked "Community E-News," which had wrapped over two lines (Community / E-News) and, hence, appeared to be two separate links. It'd be much easier to distinguish the links if they were bulleted or graphically separated (as on edinburghnews.com, which I reviewed recently).
• And one more quibble about the left rail: The purple "WHERE TO GO" image is utterly unnecessary. I really wish I had those 1,613 bytes back.
• Speaking of circular purple images, the one on the right atop every page is also unnecessary. It repeats five navigation categories from the left rail. I suspect it was put in as a shortcut to the most popular sections on the site; that in itself suggests the left rail is inefficient and should be reexamined. Also, on that purple circle, it's hard to tell which word your mouse is over, because they're so small and close together with no means of distinguishing the moused-over word.
• The "your town news" box in the upper right of each page is a good idea, though I suspect many people don't see it because of banner blindness. Here's a peculiarity, though: If I choose a town, say Brookfield, and click "go," the resulting page doesn't identify itself as a Brookfield news page -- not to mention the "your town news" box resets itself to the first option in the list (Danbury). Therefore it's easy to forget exactly what you're looking at.
• Date formats such as "2002-09-03" are database-friendly but not user-friendly. This format is used throughout the site. It's particularly confusing because, in the example I've given, it's not revealed whether "09" is the month or the date. (Different people use different date schemes.)
• The "Add to Favorites" link at the bottom of each story won't work for everybody. That's because it uses IE-only code; in Netscape, Opera, etc., nothing happens when you click the link. The site would be better off only displaying that link to users who had the appropriate browser. Here's the HTML and JavaScript code to accomplish this:
  
  <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (window.external) document.write('<a href="javascript:window.external.AddFavorite(window.location, \'\')">Add to Favorites</a>')
-->
</script>
  
  (Everything between the <!-- and --> should be on one line.) This snippet of code will output an "Add to Favorites" link in Internet Explorer and display nothing in other browsers. (NOTE: It's not good practice to use proprietary code -- that is, pieces of code that utilize browser-specific functions -- so it would be best to avoid this feature entirely. I only present it here for people who are dead-set on using this IE-only feature.)
• Finally, in the "Things I Thought I'd Never I'd Say In A Site Review" department, there is a Smurf. Yes, at the bottom of the home page lurks a friendly, red-capped blue cartoon figure who, when clicked, will give you your "exciting new Smurf Name." I'm not sure what this has to do with usability, news Web design or journalism, but I can tell you this: From now on, I answer only to "Litigious."

Comments (8) / Permalink

September 18, 2002, 12:20 AM ET

Design lessons from the retail industry

"Inconspicuous Consumption" is a new Boxes and Arrows article that draws parallels between Web design and the design of retail stores. The first in a three-part series, it offers two "lessons" from the retail world, which has several more decades' worth of evolution under its belt. Some comments on both tips, and their relevance to news Web sites:

The first lesson, "A morphing medium," suggests Web sites should prepare for constant change in consumer needs but retain a clear focus all the while. This advice is particularly relevant to news sites, which have worn many hats and followed many trends in their short history -- from the shovelware approach (which failed) to the portal site approach (which failed) to the large-scale projects approach (which is practically failing). Take a look at sites that haven't failed, and you'll see they've retained a clear focus and built upon it. This is an important thing to keep in mind: Maintaining a core goal is, in itself, a core goal.

The second lesson, "Make 'em walk for what they want," isn't as helpful. In fact, I'd say it's downright harmful. The article points out how supermarkets put the essentials -- milk, bread, etc. -- in the back of the store so that shoppers are forced to walk past things they might not have noticed otherwise. This, of course, leads to impulsive purchases of non-essentials such as The National Enquirer.

The implication is that Web sites should "[direct] visitors past non-essential content on the path to 'must-have' content" in order to help boost traffic to those lesser-visited sections. But this strategy, however valuable to the food industry, is severely detrimental on the Web. (In fact, I'm quite surprised that Boxes and Arrows, which strives to promote good information design, would endorse a technique that encourages "slight detour"s in accessing content.) On news sites especially, getting in users' way will only annoy them -- because any other site is a simple click away. A better solution is to have a narrow-enough focus so that you're almost always able to insert an array of links to "related content."

Comments (3) / Permalink

September 17, 2002, 12:51 PM ET

Tuesday's recommended links

Online Journalism Award finalists were announced Monday.

Ah, an article on how to Make Text on the Web Look Sharper using Photoshop. Of course, images of text on the Web should be used sparingly.

Scott Andrew explains a nice CSS trick that puts a box around text and makes a horizontal line stick out the middle of it. It's really much nicer than my explanation.

Comments (5) / Permalink

September 16, 2002, 12:53 PM ET

Monday's recommended links

"Seven tricks that Web users don't know" from IBM developerWorks presents presents "Web site features that typical non-technical users aren't familiar with," such as the convention that a site's logo links to its home page. Although this article is from June 2001, it's still an informative read. (Link from Digital-Web)

The Polaroid effect aims to solve the problem of losing one's place while scrolling in a long Web page. The author's solution is to set off new text (that is, the next screen reached after scrolling) in a different background color for a split second, in order to give users a visual landmark of where they left off and where to begin reading. This is an interesting concept. Come to think of it, I often highlight text with my mouse before scrolling in order to keep my place in a long document; why shouldn't there be a built-in browser feature that does this for me? (Link from WebWord, which has some good discussion)

A Bob Greene/chicagotribune.com follow-up: All traces of the columnist who resigned Saturday have been removed from the site, as far as I can tell. His archive page is gone, he's no longer listed on the columnists page, and a search for his name yields only the resignation announcements. They cleaned it all up. I do think they should have left his columnist page up for a few days longer, with a note explaining why his columns will no longer appear, for the sake of those who've bookmarked it directly and haven't heard the news. (See my previous blog entry.)

Comments (3) / Permalink

September 16, 2002, 12:28 AM ET

Presenting important messages 'to our readers'

American syndicated columnist Bob Greene has resigned from the Chicago Tribune "after acknowledging he engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with a teenage girl," an Associated Press article reports.

According to the AP article, the Chicago Tribune printed an editor's note on the front page of Sunday's print edition explaining the resignation. Naturally, I was curious to see how chicagotribune.com treated the editor's note.

On the site's home page this evening, the only mention of the resignation -- which, again, merited a front-page message from the editor in the print edition -- was a vague link labeled "To our readers" located at the very bottom of the "Other top headlines:" section. Nothing more. Blink your eyes, and you'll miss it.

I'd like to point out a few ways this could have been done better. First, the message could have been set off from the "other top headlines." It gets lost in that bland text list, and besides, it's not really a traditional news headline -- it's an announcement. It deserves special treatment. More people would see it if it were in the "Columnists" list on the right side of the page. Who's to say the people who read Greene's columns regularly also regularly view the top headlines?

Second, the headline tease could have been worded much more clearly. "To our readers" establishes this as an announcement of some sort, but the helpfulness stops there. Is it an announcement about a site redesign? Or are they enacting a new, more intrusive user-registration policy, perhaps? And isn't every piece of content on a news site directed to the readers, anyway? Something like "Editor's note: Columnist Bob Greene resigns" would be immensely more helpful; people who cared would click, and disinterested folk wouldn't have to waste their time. Many users probably skimmed over the current headline.

Third, the Bob Greene archive page (registration required -- or use name: cyberpunk21, password: cyberpunk21) says nothing about the resignation. On this page, the e-mail link still works, the "about" page remains, and Bob still smiles. It's as if nothing ever happened. What of all the people who have bookmarked this page directly? How will they find out the unfortunate news?

In fairness, I didn't check chicagotribune.com until this evening; perhaps there was a more pronounced message earlier in the day. Also, in the site's credit, it is a weekend, and most staff members are probably not at the office. Still, a situation like this demands better action at a news site. Unlike a print newspaper, putting an announcement on the front page doesn't guarantee most people will read it. The non-linear nature of the Web doesn't only liberate us -- it obligates us to cover our bases in more ways than ever before.

UPDATE, Aug. 16, 12:53 PM EDT: All traces of Greene have been removed from the site, as far as I can tell. His archive page is gone, he's no longer listed on the columnists page, and a search for his name yields only the resignation announcements. They cleaned it all up. I do think they should have left his columnist page up for a few days longer, with a note explaining why his columns will no longer appear, for the sake of those who've bookmarked it directly and haven't heard the news.

Comments (5) / Permalink

September 13, 2002, 6:01 PM ET

The Florida terrorism threat, from three perspectives

Some rather big news in the U.S. this morning -- at least, in my neck of the woods -- was the detainment of three students on a Florida highway who were suspected to be involved in terrorist activity.

I was interested in this story and, as I often do, decided to visit a few local news sites of the area in question. In theory, news sites in Florida should do a better job of covering Florida news than more national sites such as The New York Times or CNN.

The coverage itself was somewhat impressive, but I was struck by several examples of poor usability.

Tampa Tribune

As of this posting, there is no mention of this story in the Tampa Tribune's list of top news items. The only home-page mention of this story is deep on the page, under "News from AP," which I assume is an automated feed.

However, I spotted a "Breaking News" link in the left navigation and was taken to Tampa Bay Online, which did indeed feature the terrorism threat story in its lead position.

The problems:

• As someone who does not use the Tampa Tribune site regularly, I assumed the site would display its latest breaking news up front and center; this is the convention most major news sites follow. Thus, when I didn't see the terrorism story up front and center, I assumed the Tampa Tribune was slacking in its coverage. Of course, that's not an impression news sites should want to make. I was a second away from leaving the site entirely when...
• ...I noticed a link to a separate "Breaking News" section. When I clicked it, I was taken to a completely different site -- tbo.com. It was disorienting, especially because the site had a different look, and the navigational options had changed. I had to spend a few seconds figuring out what had just took place. (I happen to know the Tampa Tribune is associated with tbo.com because I follow the online journalism industry, but this isn't something non-journalism-dorks would know, or particularly care about. Think of how jarring this might be to them.) This is a fundamental problem with content-sharing that nobody, really, has solved. Two better ways to do it: Give both sites the same "look and feel" and navigation, or reproduce all content on both tbo.com and tampatribune.com so users don't have to flip-flop between the two.

Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

The Sun-Sentinel featured the story prominently on its home page. It had a main story, a sound clip and a related story.

The problems:

• The audio link had this text: "Eunice Stone, the witness who reported the three men to police." It was next to a traditional sound clip icon, which was a helpful hint that this link somehow led to audio. But there was no explanation of whether the link would bring up a new page or immediately pop-up an audio player. It also didn't specify which format this audio was in, which is an important consideration for me, because my browser supports Windows Media Player but doesn't have RealPlayer installed. I clicked on the link blindly and found out the hard way that this was a RealAudio file. It would have saved me some time and hassle if the site had given more details about what lurked behind this link.
• The other story, a sidebar, was written by someone listed as "Tribune staff reporter." On a news site called the Sun-Sentinel, you'd think writers would be "Sun-Sentinel staff reporters." In this case, though, the Sun-Sentinel borrowed some content from one of its sister papers, the Chicago Tribune, without explicitly explaining the arrangement. (Again, this partnership is something not many people would know, or particularly care about, except journalists.) Solving this tiny problem would be as easy as changing it to "Chicago Tribune staff reporter" -- that clears up any confusion. Or, as the Los Angeles Times does, they could print "From the Chicago Tribune" above the story.

Miami Herald

Miami.com featured the story in its lead position and had several links to additional content.

The problem:

• There's a link to "VIDEO: From our partners at NBC6.net", which is a nice example of cross-promotion, but the link points to the NBC6.net home page. I clicked the link and had to scan through the resulting page all over again to find what that video, which turned out to be behind yet another page. I felt as if I asked directions at a gas station and was told, "Oh, it's over in that general direction." There's no reason to make users take more steps than necessary. A better way to do it: Link directly to NBC6's story.

Comments (4) / Permalink

September 12, 2002, 12:24 PM ET

Thursday's recommended links

In Alphabet soup: A web designer's journey to standards and accessibility, Randal Rust details his "near-religious experience" of learning the standards-based way of designing for the Web. If only more designers of news sites followed this journey. A memorable quote: "Accessibility means that users of any kind, using any device, should have access to the essential information that is contained on your web site." (Link from Simon Willison)

Search interfaces explores four different ways to present Web search bars: standard, surfacing, qualifying and passive. A pretty site, with lots of examples. (Link from InfoDesign)

Don't Hide Your Multimedia Content! is Steve Outing's latest Editor and Publisher column. It offers some good tips on how to promote audio and video online: most importantly, "let the Web user know what they will get if they click on multimedia links." I wholeheartedly agree; a single-word link to "Multimedia" or "Video" is downright useless.

Mark Irons' Patterns for Personal Web Sites has a wealth of great tips on making quality personal sites, but most advice here applies to any site. It's well-written, succinct and very non-linear -- a productive way to spend an hour or so.

Comments (1) / Permalink

September 11, 2002, 9:50 PM ET

Site review: namibian.com.na

A few thoughts on namibian.com.na, which is an English-language news site covering Namibia, a southwest African country:

• Because of the left navigation frame, users will consistently see "http://www.namibian.com.na/" in their browser's location bar, no matter which page they visit on the site. This is a big no-no, mainly because it's difficult to bookmark an individual page or send an individual page's URL to a friend. It also could confuse some people; Internet users by now expect to see URLs change as they navigate through different pages.
• The home page has a somewhat confusing linking scheme. The lead story has a non-clickable headline and includes a link for "Full story," but the rest of the stories lack the "Full story" link and do have clickable headlines. Consistency would help; I found myself instinctively clicking on the main headline, to no avail.
• Each article page includes a complete, clear and obvious timestamp. (For example, "Wednesday, September 11, 2002 - Web posted at 14:08:59 GMT".) Not only does that eliminate The Case of the Mysterious Date, it also goes above and beyond by including the time zone. Outstanding. News site managers shouldn't assume their users know what time zone their sites are in. The Internet is global.
• A sidebar on the right of each story page has separate links to "Summary" and "Headlines." I think this could easily confuse users. It turns out there's basically no content difference between a summary page and a headlines page; the only difference is that a summary page has a short summary about each article, while a headlines page has a list of headlines and dates.
• Speaking of headlines pages, they'd be easier to scan (and faster loading) if the date weren't reproduced on each line. A better solution would be to print the date once, then print the headlines for that date, then print the next date, etc. Also, I question the usefulness of having "Printer-friendly" and "Send to a friend" on story index pages.
• The navigation categories in the left rail are organized alphabetically, which leads to strange phenomena such as "Archives" being above "Africa" and "Entertainment" being about "Environment." Although one would think alphabetizing categories would lead to higher usability, the opposite is true. (See this previous site review for more.)
• The URL namibian.com doesn't redirect to this site. Rather, it brings up a "buy this domain name" page. The folks at namibian.com.na should buy it, because some users might type in that URL (without the ".na").
• Printer-friendly versions of stories include some navigation and links to other headlines. It appears the printer-friendly versions are identical to normal versions except the left navigational frame appears in the latter. Users and their printers would appreciate the printer versions more if that non-content stuff were cut out. (For an example of a great printer-friendly system, see edinburghnews.com, which I reviewed last week.)

Comments (4) / Permalink

September 10, 2002, 12:50 PM ET

Tips for designing bare-bones pages

At ajc.com, I've been designing a bare-bones home page in case something terrible happens tomorrow (on the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. terror attacks) and our site is flooded with traffic. If there were ever a perfect case for using a CSS-based layout, this'd be it. A few pointers on making such a page:

• Separate all content from presentation using a style sheet. When millions of people are hitting your home page frequently, you don't want them to have to download lousy FONT tags and TABLEs over and over again. Don't embed formatting in the page. Rather, design it so users only have to download straight content. My opinion is: When it comes down to it, pretty background colors and fonts don't matter when there's a huge breaking news story -- but if you're intent on formatting content, use an external style sheet. That way, users will only have to download it once, saving bandwidth for your site and your users. (Subsequent page views will use the cached style sheet.)
• Use correct structural markup. For example, use HTML tags that give meaning to your document structure -- like H1/H2/H3 for headlines, UL for lists, P for paragraphs, etc. If you do this, your page will be accessible to PDAs and alternate Internet devices. And I'm betting that in the time of an emergency, many people will use whatever means they can (cellphones, PDAs, etc.) to get news from your Web site. Make it accessible to them. (More information on correct structure is available at Dan's Web tips, Web Design Group and HTMLSource.)
• Keep the page size low as possible. This tip goes without saying, but last Sept. 11 when I viewed the source of many news sites' stripped-down, supposedly "fast-loading" home pages, I wasn't too impressed. There's a difference between keeping the size of visible content low and keeping the size of code low. A few tips: Delete all newline characters (i.e., line breaks). Do this right before you upload, and save a local copy of the file for yourself with readable code. Trim unnecessary quotes from HTML attributes (unless you're using XHTML, in which case they're required). Don't close tags that don't need to be closed. (I hesitate to say this, because it goes completely against proper coding technique, but desperate times call for desperate measures if your site gets lots of traffic...) And strip out all unnecessary gunk, like META tags and JavaScript calls.

Any other tips? Leave a comment.

Comments (9) / Permalink

September 9, 2002, 11:57 PM ET

Site review: ocregister.com

A few thoughts on ocregister.com, the Web site of the Orange County Register in California, which, as the splash page will tell you, is "NEW":

• Yes, there's a splash page, and it's kind of jarring. When it comes to important site announcements, I favor the approach recently taken by digmo.com and washingtonpost.com -- that is, putting a small notice on the home page that links to more information. (An example of the polar opposite is the Philippines' Freeman Online, which is offering no content at all during its redesign. I can't think of a better way to lose users.) Fortunately, in ocregister.com's case, you only have to see the splash page once; subsequent visits to the home page bypass the splash welcome, as long as you have cookies enabled.
• Articles aren't dated. This is a huge oversight. A news article without a date is like a road map that doesn't designate which city it portrays. In the site's defense, breaking news stories on the home page are given a timestamp.
• The 113-by-70-pixel boxes on the right of the home page look a lot like advertising, and for that reason I think a lot of users will ignore them. (When I viewed the home page this evening, they were links to "Humor" and "Entertainment".) From my experience, Web designers, particularly those with a print graphic design background, just plain love making these sorts of things. I suppose they're kind of pretty, but in reality I believe straight text would reach more people. Proof: Jakob Nielsen, Stanford-Poynter EyeTracking Online News study, various industry studies.
• A red "MORE" icon is scattered across the home page, in a seemingly random fashion. The "NATION AND WORLD" header has it, as do "LOCAL" and "SPORTS", but it's missing on some of the other headers -- most notably "TOP NEWS" -- which do have "more" pages but lack a "MORE" icon for some reason. If you're going to use a navigational helper like this, make it consistent. Otherwise, it's confusing. For example, a user might assume there's no more top news, because other sections have the icon but "TOP NEWS" doesn't.
• The customer service page has a bunch of links randomly scattered in a table. That thing is very difficult to scan. If you're looking for something in particular, you pretty much have to read every link; there's no hierarchy to help.
• Web pages like this one are what immediately came to my mind when I read today's Editor and Publisher article that pointed out how many sites still "shovel" content from the print edition online. The page in question, an event listing, is just a static file. Stick that stuff in a database! It's easy to do.
• Featuring a "Browse days" link right under the search box on every page is a very smart idea. The same users who will want to perform article searches will likely find some use in browsing previous issues. It's great to display these together.
• The search engine does some strange things. Most notably, it identifies the content-type of each search result -- for example, "text/html". It doesn't do users much good to know that an article is "text/html"; most Web pages are, anyway.
• Also, the search result list displays a snippet of each article found, but, for all the searches I did, the snippet was exactly the same thing: a bunch of navigation stuff like "Jobs Cars Homes". It's obvious this is completely useless and unhelpful, not to mention it's a waste of bandwidth.
• Also, the search results do not explain what the numbers in the brackets mean. I assume they reflect how many of the search terms were matched in each particular entry, but there's no clear explanation. And a minor nitpick that's probably just a matter of their programmers making a quick change: Each entry displays Y-m-d h:i:s instead of the actual timestamp.

Comments (4) / Permalink

September 9, 2002, 1:18 PM ET

Extra BBC syndication feeds won't work

A gentleman from the BBC e-mailed me regarding the "hidden" BBC syndication feeds I found last week. (That news I "broke" was blogged all over the place.) It turns out those feeds weren't intended for the public, won't be available for much longer, and weren't being updated anyway. Here's a snippet of the e-mail:

NewsOnline's public RSS service was only intended to include the following feeds

[front_page]
[technology]
[uk]
[world]

Your list includes a number which we had decided not to offer but had neglected to clean up properly from our website. None of these 'extra' feeds have been updated since Aug 22nd and we will be removing these from our website in the near future.

That's a pity; the extra feeds were great. But there's an interesting lesson here: Anything you put online, regardless of whether its URL is public, is fair game. Anybody can type a URL in and try to guess at patterns and conventions -- that's what I did with the BBC feeds. Site managers, save yourself some trouble and keep sensitive stuff to yourself in the first place.

I think this is something news sites in particular should bear in mind, knowing how common it is for sites to put advanced versions of stories online -- like Scripps Howard foolishly did with its Ronald Reagan obituary, which is still available via the WayBack Machine. In creating or testing anything that's not intended for public view, it's best to use a non-public server.

Comments (1) / Permalink

September 9, 2002, 12:53 PM ET

Monday's recommended links

Editor and Publisher: As 2003 Nears, Where Is Online Newspaper Biz? In the gutter, according to an anonymous source quoted in the article: "Most media have stopped talking big talk and launching big projects and are making do, for the most part, with just slapping their print content online."

Jared Spool: Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines -- A practical alternative to following Web usability guidelines, such as "Always put your search box in the upper-right corner", blindly. (Link from Small Initiatives)

wannaBrowser lets you see what happens when you visit a site with a user-agent string of your choosing. (Your user-agent string is an internal description of the browser you're using; sites you visit sometimes will perform certain actions based on this information.) Some sites ban particular user-agent strings, such as those of harmful spam robots. For example, WebmasterWorld bans the user-agent string EmailSiphon, which searches Web pages for e-mail addresses. On wannaBrowser, you can see this for yourself by entering http://www.webmasterworld.com for the location and EmailSiphon for the user-agent. This is useful for testing, if you're setting up your server to ban particular user-agents (as discussed lately on WebmasterWorld).

Comments (1) / Permalink

September 6, 2002, 12:43 PM ET

Friday's recommended links

Online Journalism Review has an article about "Web shells" on news sites -- that is, packages of links to related data to put journalism in context. Seems kind of obvious to me, but not many sites do it.

Editor and Publisher reports the Belo media chain will offer qualified political candidates free Web space on Belo Interactive Web sites, along with free TV airtime. Very cool. I'm wondering, does it stop there? Will Web design services or templates be provided, or will candidates have to do it themselves?

Via I Want Media: According to a press release, The San Francisco Chronicle will begin offering their content in audio form. The night before work, you select the sections you'd like to read (er, hear) and specify your commute time. In the morning, your CD writer will have written an audio CD of the news, just in time for your commute. The feature expected to launch in November. (Also see the News.com story.) Bravo, experimentation. What I want to know is, who or what is going to provide the vocals? A glorified Doctor Sbaitso?

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman has thoughts on different types of external links: "The Web needs some kind of interface enhancement to distinguish between kinds of links, connote endorsement or lack thereof and help the reader determine which links are interesting."

Blogite is a new mailing list dedicated to discussion of weblogs -- blog features, bleeding-edge technologies, brainstorms and other technical talk. I highly recommend it. Although blogs are the topic, many of the technical ideas tossed around here apply to any site. (And face it. News sites are very similar to blogs.) Check out the archives for a sample of the discussion so far.

Comments (5) / Permalink

September 6, 2002, 12:22 AM ET

The horror of rewritten home-page URLs

I'm reading Jakob Nielsen's Homepage Usability, and one of the points Jakob stresses to death is the importance of clean, memorable home page URLs. A snippet from the book:

Once users locate a website, a simple homepage URL helps them quickly understand that they are in the right place, whereas complex URLs can make them wonder if they're indeed on the correct page...It is especially startling when users enter a simple URL and get to a site, only to have the URL they typed replaced by a long, scary-looking URL.

Although I think Jakob can be somewhat militant, I agree completely on this point. It's jarring and bookmark-unfriendly to have a URL change in front of your eyes. It's like having the carpet pulled out from under you.

I found a few news sites that do this and have listed them here. The URL I typed in is first, and the rewritten URL is second.

Redundancy Department

• suntimes.com -- suntimes.com/index/
• espn.com -- msn.espn.go.com/main.html
• seattletimes.com -- seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/
• nationalpost.com -- nationalpost.com/home/
• miami.com -- www.miami.com/mld/miami/ (And other RealCities sites)
• phoenix.bizjournals.com -- phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/ (And other bizjournals.com sites)
• philstar.com -- philstar.com/philstar/index.htm
• hollywoodreporter.com -- www.hollywoodreporter.com/hollywoodreporter/index.jsp
• bbj.hu -- www.bbj.hu/user/index.asp

Owned-By-Somebody-Else Department

• 7online.com -- abclocal.go.com/wabc/ (And other ABC TV Web sites)
• ajc.com -- www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/ (And other Cox sites)

"No, Please" Department

• anchoragepress.com -- www.anchoragepress.com/index.cfm?redirect=yes

Let's-Just-Give-'Em-An-IP-Address Department

• eldia.com -- 200.26.107.200/

Somewhat-Scary Department

• hammondstar.com -- www.zwire.com/site/news.asp?brd=1423
• bermudasun.org -- www.bermudasun.bm/cgi-local/home.pl

Especially-Long-And-Scary Department

• thestar.com -- [a reeeeally long URL]
• jpost.com -- [a reeeeally long URL]

Comments (9) / Permalink

September 5, 2002, 12:57 PM ET

Thursday's recommended links

MSNBC: Have Web pop-ups peaked? -- Personally, I prefer pop-ups to large, invasive ads in the middle of content. (At least pop-ups are in a separate window, which allows me to read articles in peace, and besides, Mozilla blocks them. Since I started using that Mozilla feature, I haven't seen a single pop-up.) In my mind, sites that use invasive, middle-of-the-page ads send a clear message: They don't care whether people actually read their content. I often wonder whether the people who implement invasive advertising actually use the Web on a regular basis. Do they find it easy to read news articles with huge, animated Toyota ads flickering within the content well?

Jay Small: Latest Sensible Internet Design newsletter -- "Are you sure you want it to look like that?"

Scientific American: XML and the Second-Generation Web -- A readable May 1999 article explaining the theory behind XML. (Link from InfoDesign)

Comments (13) / Permalink

September 5, 2002, 12:15 AM ET

Site review: edinburghnews.com

Edinburghnews.com is the Web site of the Edinburgh Evening News in Edinburgh, Scotland. A few comments:

• As news sites go, this site's design is outstanding. Color is used to guide the eye rather than irritate it. Font proportions reflect information architecture and set up a hierarchy. Photos are nice and big, but not too big. It all works together to form a distinct, credible-looking site. (I've pointed out before that there's a direct link between smart Web design and site credibility -- and credibility is something all news sites should strive for.) My only complaint is that fonts are set using pixels, which means users of the world's most popular Web browser (IE) won't be able to make the teeny text larger.
• Navigation is outstanding, too. Main inter-section navigation is in the left rail, and some sections, like Sport, break out subcategories a la washingtonpost.com. On a story page, the right rail contains a convenient list of other stories in that section, with the current story bolded. Makes everything nice and easy.
• The "scotsman.com network" drop-down menu in the upper-right of each page makes an innovative use of CSS code: In browsers that support it, the actual drop-down choices are color-coded. This makes the menu prettier and more usable; it's easier to scan the categories (News Sites, Classifieds, etc.) because they have a different background color. I'm sure they're not the first site to do this, but I've never seen this technique done before. Very cool. (A complaint, though: Using the drop-down requires JavaScript and has other problems, as detailed in point three in this previous site review.)
• The scrolling news ticker on the home page and some section index pages is unnecessary. How many people actually sit there and wait for the headlines to scroll? This is more gimmicky than useful. Web tickers died about four years ago.
• A beef with teaser blurbs on the home page and section fronts: It's somewhat annoying and jolting that the blurbs are clickable. I often like to cut and paste text, but that's made very difficult in this case. Also, although IE6 turns the cursor into a link-aware "pointy hand" when mousing over the blurb, my primary browser (Mozilla) just displays the normal text-editing cursor, leading me to believe this text was not a link. In other words, in my Mozilla browsing experience there was no obvious visual clue that clicking the text itself will make something happen. (If you squint your eyes just so, you can make out a slight background color change when your mouse hovers over the text, but it's so slight it's worthless.)
• On the home page and section fronts, headlines display in the status bar when you mouse over them. This is irritating, because users expect to see a URL in that area. (Perhaps the edinburghnews.com developers did this to cloak the site's ugly URLs?) And redisplaying the headline in that spot is about the least helpful thing you can do; if a user moves his or her mouse over a headline, what's the point of displaying that headline a second time?
• The printer-friendly pages have a cool feature -- again, one I haven't seen anywhere else. On stories with photos (like this example), there's a "show images" checkbox that allows you to toggle images on/off. What a smart idea. It gives ink-conscious users a chance to print only the content they want. (I know I, for one, have cut and pasted text into Notepad just to avoid printing images.) The best part is, it's smart enough only to include this feature on stories that have photos in the first place.
• The search engine is outstanding. From my experience, a good test of a search engine on a news site -- or blog, or any other regularly updating information site -- is to type in a few keywords from the very latest breaking story and see whether it shows up in the results. Unfortunately, search-engine indexing delay (the so-called "Google Gap") is the norm, but edinburghnews.com passes the test with flying colors. Each search result includes a snippet of the content, with matched terms highlighted -- an outstanding feature not implemented by many news sites, or Web sites, period. My only complaint is that "sort A-Z" and "newest first" are far apart and not easily noticed.

Comments (5) / Permalink

September 4, 2002, 1:04 PM ET

Wednesday's lunchtime links

TV Spy examines Cablevision's News 12 Interactive, which, the article claims, "is truly pushing local news forward".

According to E-Media Tidbits, The Digital Collection's archive of Sept. 11, 2001, news site screenshots has been relaunched. In my opinion, the Wayback Machine's September 11 Web Archive is a lot better, but both sites are interesting to browse.

In a new Digital-Web Magazine article, Zeldman argues that "the symptoms of disease and decay have already started to appear" in sites that don't use Web standards. News sites are a key part of this uninformed group. If you're wondering what the standards movement is all about, this piece is a must-read.

If you've got a second, e-mail me via my new contact page to introduce yourself. (Previously the "Contact" link took users to a strange page on my old site, which was somewhat jarring; now there's a better page that matches the rest of this site.) I'm always interested in suggestions, comments, tips and ideas, etc., and I'd love to chat with readers.

Comments (2) / Permalink

September 3, 2002, 12:27 PM ET

Tuesday's lunchtime links

CSS guru and standards evangelist Eric Meyer stresses the time and money benefit of Web standards in an interview with User Interface Engineering. (Link seen on Small Initiatives)

Editor and Publisher reports the Chicago Tribune will include a commemorative CD-ROM with its Sept. 11 papers. According to the article, the disc will include "all 600 Tribune stories related to the attacks that ran between Sept. 11 and Sept. 21 of last year, streaming-video interviews with 25 Tribune reporters who covered the story, and more than 300 photographs of related images, including many that never ran in the paper." Very nice; I hope they make this content available on the Web.

Comments (1) / Permalink

September 3, 2002, 12:05 PM ET

BBC News site offers syndication feeds

IMPORTANT UPDATE, June 24, 2003: Even more BBC RSS feeds have been released. See how to access them.

IMPORTANT UPDATE, Sept. 9: I've been told many of these feeds will not work for much longer. I've bolded the feeds that will remain working. (The rest of the original blog entry will remain untouched for posterity's sake.)

Via Danny O'Brien: The BBC News site is offering a beta version of official RSS feeds, which syndicate headlines and short descriptions of stories. (Here's the BBC's announcement, which says "XML and RSS feeds will be available over the coming months.") Other blogs named four of the feeds, but I did some digging and found a slew of others:

Regional feeds

• United Kingdom
• England
• Scotland
• Northern Ireland
• Wales
• World
• United States
• Europe
• Africa
• Asia-Pacific
• Middle East
• South Asia

Entertainment feeds

• Entertainment
• Music
• Film
• TV and radio
• Showbiz
• Arts
• Reviews

Education feeds

• Education
• Hot topics
• U.K. systems
• League tables
• Features

Business feeds

• Business
• Market data
• Your money
• E-commerce
• Economy
• Companies
• Business basics

Other feeds

• Front page
• Technology
• U.K. politics
• Political interviews
• Health
• Sci/tech
• Talking Point
• Programmes

This is a smart move on the BBC's part. It means increased traffic and increased visibility for news.bbc.co.uk, because users are able to syndicate BBC headlines to their own sites and read syndicated content via an RSS reader. (Here's more RSS info.) Yes, it was possible to manually create an RSS feed from that site before, but having an official feed is significantly less troublesome. It's always refreshing to witness a news site that has a clue, technologically.

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September 2, 2002, 6:48 PM ET

Site review: jamaica-gleaner.com

A few observations on jamaica-gleaner.com, the Web site of the Jamaica Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica:

• The site automatically rewrites the root URL to the current issue's index page. (For example, when I went to jamaica-gleaner.com, the URL automatically changed to jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20020902/.) I have a hunch they're doing this so they don't have to maintain a separate main index page; their issue index pages (such as "/gleaner/20020902") serve as archive pages, and they've basically programmed it so that a request for the home page goes to the latest index page in the archive. This isn't a good thing to do because it confuses users in several ways -- one, it will probably cause some users to think they've mistyped the URL and are in the wrong place, and two, it makes bookmarking the site's home page excessively difficult because when you bookmark the "home page" you're actually just bookmarking that day's permanent index page.
• On the home page, there's a "More Stories" section under "Lead Stories". It presents a bulleted list of five headlines. Problem is, these headlines are not clickable. To access one of those stories, a user must click "More Stories", find the story on that page, and click on it there. This page would be much more usable (and less frustrating) if those headlines were just linked to their articles in the first place.
• I bet not even a tenth of people who visit this site notice the date in the upper right corner. It's a classic example of banner blindness: Content near and above banner ads tends to be ignored.
• And speaking of classic examples of common usability problems, this site is yet another example of The Case of the Mysterious Date. (See my review of indian-express.com for more.) Because that date in the upper-right corner is so far removed from the content, it's anybody's guess whether it's the last-update date of the current page or just a server-generated "current date" stamp. The solution: Put the date within the content well in order to give users a visual clue that the date and content are related -- and include the words "Last updated" for good measure.
• Having separate navigational categories for Lead Stories and News is confusing.
• It's frustrating not being able to click the site's logo to get to the home page. This is a standard Web site convention by now; users expect it.
• This news story illustrates a common problem in separating content from presentation. Check out that page's title. If your browser's title bar is long enough to show it, you'll see italics tags (<i>, </i>) around part of the headline. Clearly, the site's content-management system puts the headline into the page's title, verbatim. That results in sloppy titles like this one whenever producers insert HTML formatting into the headline.
• Finally, the graphic/table on this page is so bad it's downright hilarious. The source line is the icing on the cake.

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