Bloghopping for some redesign ideas (of course my original understanding of blogging being under the tutelage of Walt, Rachelle, and Mark) I wanted to see what the design community is up to. Turns out that as I have let my career go away from graphic design to information architecture, to defining products and gathering requirements (whatever the hell I’m doing right now) designers have been making progress. And I am trying to rekindle some design magic. So between learning about the wicked worn look, finding out that there is a way to have some true typographic headlines using ever-improving variants of sIFR, learning that any blog brand that can be shortened using an X is cool (DxF), It’s time to get to work.

After goofing around in Blogger a bit I successfully syndicated the content of this glorious web effort. To make it work with my newsreader (NewsGator), I took the Atom feed created by Blogger and entered it into FeedBurner. Now I have this nice little XML Chicklet on my site for all of you who want to stay abreast of my infrequent Blog entries. This website is now a strung together set of cheap ASP solutions to that which is provided natively by MoveableType. I’m running on Blogger (Free), with commenting by Haloscan(Free), with feed by FeedBurner(Free), with website hosted by Catalog.com($35 per year…close enough to Free).

The one thing I may pay for is a small donation to Haloscan so that comments on my blog are actaully emailed to me. That way I won’t miss out when Walt says he can make my site do RSS, or when Mark says Happy Fathers Day.

The stories of bloggers getting fired because of their blogs are always entertaining. This firing of a Microsoft employee shows just how serious it is to take pictures of Mac G5’s on campus.

Thanks to Mark for pointing me towards this website put together by Jessica Helfand, William Drenttel and others. Dana, my roommate during my NY Internship, worked for their studio. I hereby pledge to read more design writings, and I’m now seeing why Walt is so in love with RSS Readers.

I should also be reading this design blog more frequently.

The web never ceases to amaze me. I was perusing my comments at Haloscan which I hardly ever do cause no one comments on my drivel, **sniff sniff**, when I found a very curious comment in my archive. He got a hit on “job post to multiple websites.” on ziprz.com because my resume says “All 3 applications involved complex data-driven templates and interactions to accomplish productivity tasks like distributing a job posting to multiple websites, scheduling and maintaining recruiting events, and building Powerpoint presentations online.”

Well, I sent an email tonight to Ross Grossman to see if he still had a need, and to let him know that my employer -TMP in fact does have a product that does this. I’m eagerly waiting to see if my humble little blog generates millions, ok hundreds of dollars in sales. Then I’m going to write a thesis on ‘Blogging from work as an essential revenue generating activity’. Stay tuned.

Friday was interesting…Tricia calls me in a panic that someone called her at home, saying that he wanted to talk to me. Come to find out it was a guy from Rochester that was surfing the web and found that a website he had asked to be taken down in the past was put back up. He was pissed that some of the work shown on the site was his and not the site owner’s (the site featured pictures of high-end carpentry and trim work). Well, he found the right guy.

When I was just out of school I did a cheapo website for a guy that did high-end carpentry. He had given me the images of his work, which I never even had a second thought about disputing. I did, however use stock photos for navigation. I always worried about some rights police calling me out on those stock photos. Little did I know that the guy gave me photos of work that he didn’t really do. So when I heard this guy’s story on the phone through his clenched teeth, and 3 legal notices that he read me, I had a sinking feeling…

I had put up this guy’s site a couple years ago in my online portfolio, under my student work. I didn’t ask the site owner’s permission because I slathered a huge yellow box onto every page that said “portfolio piece only, site not live”. Apparently the Google crawler that powers Yahoo is so good that it found the site hidden in my subdirectories. It showed up in search engines as though it were put up again. I took the site down in 5 minutes, no big deal. I did learn a thing or two though. 1. Permissions from all parties on anything done on the web is a big deal. 2. This world is run by sue-happy people and the lawyers that fuel their habits. 3. It is so easy to get tracked down. Even if you don’t live in the same town where you first developed something.

I just have networking so on my mind. The Chicago UPA meeting last night was interesting. I walked into a crowd of Usability people and learned about the history of the UPA, of which we are starting a Chicago Chapter. I might event join the organization.

I’m struck by networking right now both from a personal quest, and because we’re working on a project at TMP that is closely related. I’m not a networker. I don’t know how to “work a crowd” in a professional/meaningful way. I walk into a room of strangers – of people whose sole interest similar to mine is what we do for a living. I figured I’d be the guy who would go and just sit in a chair and eat the sucky finger food that was to serve as my dinner.

But, something happened. “Jerry” from GM Locomotive came up to me and started a chat on usability in trains. So, now I know a train guy. Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw Brain Joosse from Technotribe. I knew Brian because a coworker referred me to him after my dotcom bombed. Brian interviewed me to freelance with his little virtual multimedia – web company. Come to find out he is living the dream of working from home in a virtual company. I could have talked to him for a few hours. But this is the essence of networking. I don’t even need to read a book that I’ve been meaning to get to written by a client of our dotbomb.

And isn’t a blog a great form of networking? Uh, yeah. In a totally non-threatening way, you can read someone’s history of thought, and who they know, and what they like, and what they link to. Anyone of these things can spark a connection with someone much more naturally than any message board, or even real personal contact. Personal contact is flawed in that you can’t review someone’s history based on what they are talking about at the moment. Think of how many Starbuck clerks would actually offer a mutually beneficial relationship, if only you knew that once they had lived in Western New York, and rooted for the Bills. Read others’ blogs. It’s Blogworking baby!

Is it possible that my blog can live up the the hype of this graphic? Mark, interactionartdirecdesignboy in the TMP NY office designed this beauty. I don’t think I’ll have a problem meeting the challenge. As a matter of fact, I’m inspired.

OK, instead of reading the dissertation I just wrote on web accessiblity, rife with amazing insight, and groundbreaking ideas, you are reading a simple expletive. F THIS! websites that timeout suck! Blogger, you suck for timing out when I hit the post button. You suck for being as sucky as an IBM 386, that gives you the blue screen when you go to save your term paper. C’mon web people. The days of timing out and deleting data are over. You can’t expect people to contribute quality thought to the web if your input method SUCKS! If I had more time on my hands I’d develop the equivalent to “F’d Company” that would be “F’d Words”. It would be a warehouse of all of the Ebay ads that I have lost, the blogs that I have lost, the blood sweat and tears that I have lost. FYou Blogger! The days of copying and pasting my text out of my web text input fields are over.

Colophon: The text in this message was carefully crafted in the Blogger Text Input area, copied to my Windows 2000 clipboard and pasted into my blog window after receiving a timeout error.

Welcome back to me! I finally have removed the shackles of Yahoo Geocities. I’ve spent my 2 month hiatus from MP (Magnetic Poetry) searching for a new hosting service that will allow me ftp access to my own friggin’ website. Catalog.com is the winner! $35/year. That’s it! And I’ve got my snazzy new domain name ziprz.com. No more www.geocities.com/ziprz for me. Why did it take me, a self-proclaimed User Experience Guru (on my business card), so long to realize what every other real designer that graduated after me already knew. Geocities is for sissies and first year Marketing MBA’s who need to “Learn Web Design”. Shame on me for letting myself suck so bad. I’m going to spend less time learning the in’s and outs of my chosen design discipline, and learning how to be a dad, and I’m going to spend far more time figuring out how to have the most impressive personal website around. You just wait world! This site is best if used within 2 weeks of the date on the label.